William Greider is an American journalist and author who writes primarily about economics.
His most recent (2009) book is Come Home, America: The Rise and Fall (And Redeeming Promise) Of Our Country. Before that he published The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy, which explores the basis and history of the corporation and how people can influence further development of it. He is national affairs correspondent for The Nation, a liberal political weekly. Prior to his work at The Nation, he wrote for Rolling Stone magazine during the 1980s and 1990s, and worked as an on-air correspondent for Frontline on PBS.
Greider also wrote a major book on globalization -- One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism (1997) -- which described the underlying vulnerabilities and inequities of the global economy. The credibility of this work was heavily criticized by economist Paul Krugman, who claimed that Greider ignored the fallacies of composition that run rampant in the work, misinterpreted facts (some of which were incorrect), and misled readers with false assumptions - all possibly due to his lack of consultation with economists. In his latest, Come Home, America (2009), Greider claims that Krugman has changed his views over the last decade to move closer to Greider's.
Greider's most powerful and far-reaching work is Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country (1987), which chronicles the history of the Federal Reserve, and especially from 1979 to 1987 under the chairmanship of Paul Volcker, during the presidencies of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.
A former reporter and editor at the Washington Post, Greider is credited with coining the term "Nader's Raiders" in a Post article dated November 13, 1968. During an October 1, 2008 broadcast interview on the impending passage of the "Wall Street bailout" despite widespread public opposition. Greider observed:
(T)his is a very revealing moment in American democracy. We’re seeing the real deformities and power alignments that govern issues like this, particularly the financial system. (A)ll of the power centers in politics and finance and business are discredited by these events. (W)e had this moment Monday (September 29, 2008) when, for complicated political reasons, a majority in the House rose up and said no. (O)f course...the broad public...regards this bailout as a swindle and backwards. (The public wonders 'w)hy are you giving all this money to the people who caused this crisis and taking the money from the public assets of the victims?'"
On January 29, 2009, in an interview with Amy Goodman on "Democracy Now!", Greider commented regarding the United States' financial system's financial crisis:
I’ve been writing for some months, the system is not just broken and not just injured; it is collapsed. And as long as the government continues to play putting Humpty Dumpty back together again, I think it will fail. That’s not an ideological statement. It’s just—I think it’s the reality.**
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