US POLITICS
Despite the achievements, Barack Obama’s legacy will remain controversial
The outgoing US president was too accommodating and conciliatory and missed the opportunity for real change, writes Lorenzo Fioramonti
As Barack Obama leaves the White House, it is an opportune time to assess the impact of his two-term presidency. Especially now that Donald Trump promises to take the US and the world down a different and, I believe, very dangerous path. When Obama was first elected in 2008, the world economy had been smashed by the global financial crisis. He had promised a U-turn with respect to the inconsiderate policies of the George Bush era, including the largest tax cuts for the wealthy ever implemented in US history. This is why many expected that the new president would seek help from those economists and experts that had predicted the crisis. Joseph Stiglitz, for instance, had been chief economic adviser to Bill Clinton and his knowledge of market irrationality, which won him a Nobel Prize, would have helped the government deal effectively with one of the greatest market failures of all time. Paul Krugman, another critic of the free market economy whose work had indicated the risks of a sy...
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