Cheap shot.

• Position: 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...