German financial journalist Lars Schall talked for “Die Metallwoche” with former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury / Economist / Journalist Dr. Paul Craig Roberts. In particular, they’ve took a look at the geopolitics of finance and trade; the 100th Anniversary of the US Federal Reserve; phony statistics and the offshoring mania in the US; the rigging of the gold price and its function re QE; and last but not least the future alignment of Germany.
By Lars Schall
The audio interview as well as a transcript of it was published at the financial web site „Die Metallwoche“ here.
The distinguished US American economist Dr. Paul Craig Roberts has had careers in scholarship and academia, journalism, public service, and business. Today he is the founder of The Institute for Political Economy and a regular commentator on world events (http://www.paulcraigroberts.org).
Dr. Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S.), the University of Virginia (Ph.D.), the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University, where he was a member of Merton College. He has been associate editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism, in 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists in the United States. During his time of public service he was Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury in the early 1980s. In January 1982 he resigned to become the first occupant of the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University. He held this position until 1993. He was a Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996 and a Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
During the 21st century, Roberts wrote extensively about the effects of the Bush (and later Obama) administrations related to the War on Terror, which he says have destroyed the US Constitution’s protections of Americans’ civil liberties, and he has taken positions very different from former Republican allies, opposing both the War on Drugs and the War on Terror.
Chris Floyd (“Empire Burlesque“) wrote about Dr. Roberts:
“I must say there are few people out there today speaking truth about power with the unblinking, unvarnished ferocity of Roberts. (And as I’ve noted here before, it is speaking truth about power — not the old cliché of ‘speaking truth to power’ — that we so desperately need. There’s no point in speaking truth to power — power already knows the truth of its monstrous crimes, and it doesn’t give a damn.) Time and again, I’ve started to write a post about some outrage only to find that Roberts has already been there, laying into the issue with a flaming brand.“
Dr. Roberts has testified before congressional committees on 30 occasions on issues of economic policy. He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship, including the Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Law and Economics, Studies in Banking and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Public Finance Quarterly. He has written or co-written more than eight books , among them: “How the Economy Was Lost: The War of the Worlds,“ published in January, 2010 by CounterPunch/AK Press, and the highly recommended “The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West,” published in February 2013 by Atwell Publishing.
In 1987 the French government inducted Roberts into the Legion of Honor. He is listed in Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in the World.
