It's all good news....

Cheaper oil has initiated a historic wealth transfer effect of about $1 Tillion a year between net oil importers and oil exporters reversing decades of historical trend. The US alone gets $200 billion, and Europe and Asia (especially India and China) are even bigger beneficiaries of this massive wealth transfer by cheap oil.  This is what's called an economic stimulus - but from cheaper oil prices. The Middle East and Russia with constrained sovereign funds are the ones getting stuck with the bill.  Thank you cheap oil and carry on "drill baby drill!"  The crisis of 2008-9 is far from over. The policies of Neoliberal extremist ideology have created the worst inequity in human history and essentially a form of neo-feudalism.  What has been shown beyond doubt is the existential crisis of the economics profession. Not Stiglitz nor almost any other economist predicted the crisis. All their phony fake "scientific" "economic models" have failed because - as much as economists try to make it look differently - economics is at best a soft social science - not another form of physics.

Thousands of main stream economists have clearly sold out to the very powerful Neoliberal establishment and simply produce papers and models to suit power.  The economics profession has completely discredited itself and can't be trusted to produce accurate economic analysis. The profession is clearly operating under false assumptions and, for example, refuses to engage with psychologists and socialists to take into account actual human behavior rather than just postulating that everyone is rational all the time.  Stiglitz is the darling of the left just now but he is just as discredited as the rest and his views are a result of study in a field which has no basis in reason or rational thought.  Look for example at the Chicago School, when the crisis hit they said -- so what our work has nothing to do with predictions or accurate analysis of the economy - we just do theories and the crash of the economy is not our problem. Statements of this magnitude of self-aggrandizing baloney abound if the field of economics.  The issue of the total failure - in the most fundemantal ways - and refusal to accept their failure reaches the very core of Western thought and is corruptly eating away and the very foundations of Western economics.