(WASHINGTON POST)  Jim Tankersley — Over the past year, Joseph Stiglitz has ramped up what is a rare campaign for an economist, particularly a Nobel laureate. He is pressuring policymakers, on the campaign trail and inside the Federal Reserve, to combat America’s widening income inequality, which he has long called a massive economic concern.

Stiglitz and his team of researchers at the Roosevelt Institute (where he is the chief economist) produced a report earlier this year that Democratic candidates for president, including party frontrunner Hillary Rodham Clinton, have borrowed liberally from in their own policy plans. Today, he’s releasing anew paper aimed at monetary policy makers, arguing that “the Fed has played a central role in the creation of inequality” and laying out several proposals to fix that — including delaying the interest-rate increase that most analysts had expected to come next month (at least before the recent global market turmoil broke out).

On Thursday, Stiglitz will take his message to a conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo, held by a group called the “Fed Up” campaign, in the shadow of an annual monetary policy conference that draws top monetary thinkers from around the world. He previewed that message in a phone interview with Wonkblog, which has been edited for length.

Source: A Nobel winner explains the big reason why the Fed should keep rates low – The Washington Post