Maurice Allais, who has died in his native Paris at the age of 99, won the Nobel Prize for Economic S
ciences in 1988 and was considered one of the most visionary economists of the latter half of the 20th century. He once described Wall Street as “a veritable casino” and had long warned against the kind of banking and stock market practices that would lead to the financial crises of 1998 and 2008.
In his later years, Allais warned of what he considered the dangers of globalisation and was highly critical of the World Trade Organisation, writing that “globalisation profits only the multinationals” and arguing that a degree of national protectionism was often justified.