BOOKS: Boom and bust that need never have happened

Joseph Stiglitz's account of Clinton-era market madness is insightful, but he has his own axe to grind, suggests Frank Kane.

His credentials are impeccable: Nobel prizewinner, top economic adviser to former President Bill Clinton, chief economist at the World Bank. Between these duties, Joseph Stiglitz found the time to become a darling of the global left, with his book Globalization and its Discontents, which allowed those throwing rocks at the police in Genoa and Seattle to claim a fig-leaf of intellectual legitimacy.

Now, in The Roaring Nineties, Stiglitz gives his account of the tumultuous decade in which stock markets grew at unprecedented rates, spawning a new generation of multi-millionaires and billionaires, and which ended when the dot.com bubble burst in 1999.