Jane D'Arista is a research associate with the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), University of Massachusetts, Amherst where she also co-founded an Economists’ Committee for Financial Reform called SAFER, i.e. stable, accountable, efficient & fair reform.
She is also a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, "A nonpartisan think tank that seeks to broaden the public debate about strategies to achieve a prosperous and fair economy".
Jane served as a staff economist for the Banking and Commerce Committees of the U.S. House of Representatives, as a principal analyst in the international division of the Congressional Budget Office. Representing Americans for Financial Reform, she has given Congressional testimony at financial services hearings. She has lectured at the Boston University School of Law, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the University of Utah and the New School University and writes and lectures internationally.
Her publications include The Evolution of U.S. Finance: Federal Reserve Monetary Policy : 1915-1935, a two-volume history of U.S. monetary policy and financial regulation.
Here Jane talks with Paul Jay of the Real News in the first segment of a six part interview, and says now that the US dollar as the reserve currency of all international transactions...
"[H]as played out its ability to perform the function that was in place before, namely, the US was the banker to the world and was in effect doing the transactions that allowed the global trade and investment regime to work. Now that we are so much in debt, and that it began [...] with the Reagan administration and has run up precipitously over time, we are now at historic levels in terms of debt.
And the household sector in this country, which we shifted to when in the Clinton administration we took down the federal deficit, the household sector has played out. [U]nemployment is high. People are losing their houses. They cannot borrow money to continue to buy.
And the whole global system came to be based on the idea that the American consumer was the engine for the global economy, and it is no longer."
Real News Network - April 14, 2010
Can the US dollar collapse?
D'Arista: US dollar as world's reserve currency is great if you own a bank; not much good for Main St.
Full transcript here
