Mark Thoma has posted the transcript of speech Galbraith: Change of Direction.  Here is the link to the audio of the speech.  The audio has some annoying background noises, but is quite understandable.  If this noise is too annoying for you, you can read the transcript.  If the following teaser is not enough to get you to listen, then there is probably nothing I could have said to change your mind.

Yesterday we heard Professor Nouriel Roubini give a magisterial and very high speed tour of the world situation making it clear of course that the promised recovery has not occurred. But if Nouriel is Sir Isaiah Berlin’s fox, who knows many things, let me try this morning to be the hedgehog who knows one big thing, and that one big thing is that what we are experiencing is a single, unified, global crisis of the economy and of the financial system. It is not a cluster of distinct and separated events; a subprime crisis in the United States; a public debt crisis in Greece; a bank crisis in Iceland; a real estate bust in Ireland and Spain; nor are there distinct U.S. and European crises, nor can the financial be separated from the real, nor is Germany a country to which crisis has not yet come with the suggestion that there might be some separate way out. There is one crisis, only one crisis, a deeply interconnected crisis of the world system. This crisis has, I think, three deep sources going back not twenty years but forty years to the early 1970s and the end of what we sometimes call the “golden age,” the “glorious thirty” years in the immediate aftermath of the second World War.

For the sake of context, you might be interested in the WikiPedia definition of IG Metall.

IG Metall (German: Industriegewerkschaft Metall, “Industrial Union of Metalworkers'”) is the dominant metalworkers’ union in Germany. Analysts of German labor relations consider it a major trend-setter in national bargaining. As a metalworkers’ union, it represents workers in the motor vehicle industry. Significantly, IG Metall represents both blue- and white-collar workers.