Nobel laureate Stiglitz predicts Obama win, recession

Joseph Stiglitz, who won the 2001 Nobel prize for economics, said on Tuesday that the United States faces a long recession and predicted that Democrat Barack Obama will win November’s presidential elections.

“The next president of the United States will be Barack Obama,” Stiglitz told the Italian daily La Stampa in an interview.

“In a situation like this, there’s no way the Americans will return the party of the outgoing president to the White House.”

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He added: “In the markets, we’ll see the Dow Jones index fall more steeply than we can imagine today. We will have other dramatic failures of financial institutions. The American economy is headed into a long recession.”

In such an economic situation, “I think there is little doubt how the November elections will turn out,” said Stiglitz, a former vice president of the World Bank and adviser to ex-US president Bill Clinton.

“We are in the midst of the worst crisis of the last century, and until we’ve reached the bottom we cannot climb back up,” he said.