President-elect Barack Obama will need at least 18 months to turn around the US economy, even if he “does everything perfectly.” So says Columbia University Professor Joseph Stiglitz. Writing recently in the Washington Post, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, former Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank, and relentless Bush-basher said: “It won’t be easy. More than 1.2 million private- sector jobs have already been shed this year, and by the end of the year an estimated 1.15 million people will have exhausted their unemployment-insurance benefits.”

Stiglitz also offered some advise to Obama that he should also consider rolling back the outgoing President’s 2001 to 2003 tax cuts for the rich as well as taxing dividends and capital gains as ordinary income. The professor also added his view that, once installed in the Whitehouse, Obama should prohibit banks that take federal aid from using the money for dividends, bonuses and acquisitions.