My comment is below For Joseph Stiglitz, the ECB is wrong The main player in the fight against the debt crisis in the eurozone, the ECB is grounded in “a philosophy that has failed,” accuses Joseph Stiglitz. Interviewed by the Czech daily Hospodářské noviny, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics criticises the “ideological” independence of central banks, which “have mastered the financial crisis much less successfully” than banks led by governments. For “instead of being answerable to the citizens, they answered to the markets.” The ECB should from now on focus not solely on inflation but also on policies for employment, growth and financial stability. Joseph Stiglitz does not foresee economic recovery in the coming years, as it is being undermined by, among other things, the austerity plans drawn up to control European states’ sovereign debts. What has to be built now is “an institutional framework that will create stability and responsibility.” According to the Nobel Prizewinner, Europe can learn from India, where the central bank is “independent and professional, but at the same time accountable to government.” http://www.presseurop.eu/en/content/article/1017241-everything-possible-even... The take away, for me, is that quite likely the primary difference, as noted by Stiglitz is that government operated banking tends to operate as a public utility, aka as a contributor to the economic commons. Transferring this into the advocacy of Ellen Brown toward state run banking, the primary positive is that the State Bank of North Dakota (population being below 700,000) is that that system has an ethos which supports the culture of the commons. I doubt that this is at all directly transferable when banking lacks such an ethos/culture. That is it would be extremely improbable that the same effects would occur in such places as New York or Washington DC for only two examples. In Washington DC at the US Treasury, it is clearly a situation where Goldman Sachs and the vampire squid horde have taken over the context of governance to serve private interests. This also make the re-regulation of the banking sector as a commons, including closing down structurally dangerous institutions and re-establishing a perp parade is important, and unlikely under the current corporate capture. The principle of the commons is the important piece, not a state which has a population less than most major cities in the US. And it make the state run banking gambit a false option except where states have a similarly low population level. It is the privatization of the monetary process is the core problem, and a state run banking system in most other places would be basically inseparable from the culture of greed where it is well established. It becomes very much like a logical fallacy, but then Brown is an attorney who specialized in preparing briefs. Tadit