Cheap shot. (Off The News).

We admit it. Former World Bank Chief Economist and current Columbia University Professor Joe Stiglitz has always been a TIE favorite. We may often disagree with his policy prescriptions, but there is no denying that the provocative Nobel Prize winner never fails to excite with his unique courage to take on the establishment in intellectual hand-to-hand combat.

That is why we were a bit perplexed that someone so fundamentally honest as Joe would slip up in his recently published Globalization and Its Discontents (Norton). In the midst of a discussion of the IMF's new agenda, Stiglitz launches a broadside against former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and, in particular, former IMF official Stanley Fischer. Nothing wrong with that (policy broadsides are part of the game). But Stiglitz goes further, suggesting that Fischer (see accompanying Dornbusch obituary) rigged policy with the precise intent of "being richly rewarded" with later employment with Rubin as Vice Chairman at Citigroup.

Now TIE over the years has suspected an occasional policy operative of being capable of such activity, but the academically minded Stan Fischer is hardly one of them. "Decent" seems the most frequently used adjective when heating his name mentioned. Perhaps the greater point here is that the book offers a serious charge about intent with little or no supporting argument. Perhaps a better approach would have been that Fischer and his colleagues placed too much faith in the competence of large U.S. financial institutions--not a bad charge in the aftermath of the largest accounting scandals in American financial history.