Simon Johnson: Former Chief Economist, Whistle-blower and Blogger

Simon Johnson is a very interesting commentator in that he is an ‘insider’ in a major international economic institution, (he was Chief Economist of the IMF until August 2008) who has been unusually outspoken in his criticism of mainstream economic policy and the ‘bailout’ in particular.

In May 2009 article, he wrote the article ‘The Quiet Coup in Finance’, which can be found here:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/05/the-quiet-coup/7364/

In the article he compared the situation in the US to the sort of occasions that the IMF is called into other countries. He notes that the most common problem encountered by the IMF is that an ‘oligarchy’ has been running policy in its own interests, with the general.

To give a fuller bio on Johnson, to quote Wikipedia:

“Simon Johnson is a British American economist. He currently is the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Sloan School of Management at MIT.[1] He has held a wide variety of academic and policy-related positions, including Professor of Economics at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business.[2] From March 2007 through the end of August 2008, he was Chief Economist of theInternational Monetary Fund.”

Johnson went on to expand the theme of ‘The Quiet Coup’ into a book ’13 Bankers:The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown’ (March 2010)

Simon Johnson is a co-founder and regular contributor to the Blog site ‘Baseline Scenario’ at:

http://baselinescenario.com/

Bloomberg Radio Interview (September 29, 2010)

http://findarticles.com/p/news-articles/analyst-wire/mi_8077/is_20100929/imf-economist-simon-johnson-bloomberg/ai_n55434029/