Michelle Haimoff reviews last night’s talk at the Y between Charlie Rose and economist Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, on ThePanelist.com:

When Rose asked him about the current economic situation, Sachs said, “We’ll wait a few years and we’ll get out of this mess.” Although he doesn’t see it as approaching the severity of the Great Depression, he described the mess as “intentional” and pointed fingers at Alan Greenspan, The Fed (who “didn’t pull the punch bowl away as the party got started”), and an unpopular and weak administration that is “financing a war that nobody supports.” He argued that the behavior was not prudent and that imprudent behavior blows up eventually.

In response to how much the US bubble is affecting the rest of the world, Sachs explained that the weak dollar means we’ll buy less from other countries and that the balance sheets of the banks of these countries might be in trouble. “I think we’ll have a recession. The rest of he world will have a slowdown but a modest one.” He said. “It isn’t true anymore that when we sneeze the rest of the world gets pneumonia.” Later he added that “[the US is] still the biggest economy in the world,” but no longer the sole superpower that everybody fears and admires, the reasons being that we’re making a lot of mistakes and the rest of the world is catching up.

Update: Dan Brown, teacher and author of the memoir, The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle, was also in attendance and “came away from the event torn with alternating currents of outrage and hope.” Read his report on the Huffington Post.

Related: American Popular Culture of the Depression Era, Fareed Zakaria on Foreign Affairs and Congressman Charles Rangel in Conversation with Jeff Greenfield