Interview: a decade of volatility

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The Finance News Net­work has just released an inter­view with me on the cur­rent finan­cial tur­moil. Click the link below to watch it (or read the tran­script):

Steve Keen pre­dicts a decade of volatil­i­ty

FNN is about to estab­lish a paid sub­scrip­tion ser­vice, so short­ly inter­views such as this will only be avail­able to sub­scribers.

On a sim­i­lar note, I urge read­ers of this blog to sup­port CfE­SI, the Cen­ter for Eco­nom­ic Sta­bil­i­ty Incor­po­rat­ed (www.cfesi.org) by sign­ing up to one of the three lev­els of mem­ber­ship (see the table below for details).

CfE­SI needs sub­scribers to raise funds to sup­port the devel­op­ment of the real­is­tic, empir­i­cal approach to eco­nom­ics that I have cham­pi­oned on this blog. The major­i­ty of econ­o­mists are adher­ents to the neo­clas­si­cal school of thought, and since neo­clas­si­cal econ­o­mists dom­i­nate deci­sions about which research projects get fund­ed, non-neo­clas­si­cal research like mine receives very lit­tle fund­ing from research fund­ing bod­ies. This sit­u­a­tion per­sists despite this school’s extra­or­di­nary empir­i­cal fail­ure to realise that a major eco­nom­ic cri­sis was about to break out in 2007.

I have pro­vid­ed my analy­sis here for free because my main objec­tive is not to make mon­ey, but to help devel­op a real­is­tic the­o­ry of eco­nom­ics to replace the delu­sion­ary the­o­ry that played a large role in lead­ing us into this cri­sis. But devel­op­ing a real­is­tic the­o­ry takes time, and the capac­i­ty to hire peo­ple with skills (such as com­put­er pro­gram­ming) that I don’t have. So CfE­SI has been formed to pro­vide a non-prof­it insti­tute through which, hope­ful­ly, such funds can be raised by pub­lic sub­scrip­tion.

The fees we have set for mem­ber­ship start at a very low A$13 per year. This could still raise a sub­stan­tial sum if the many mem­bers of this blog–and its many more readers–signed up.

This blog now has 12,150 sub­scribers. Some are undoubt­ed­ly would-be spam­mers, whose attempts have been blocked by Akismet. For exam­ple, I’d haz­ard a guess that the user whose email name starts with “sexdating4u” isn’t here for the eco­nom­ic analy­sis. But at least 10,000 have signed up for the non-ortho­dox eco­nom­ic analy­sis that this site pro­vides.

There are also rough­ly 50,000 unique read­ers every month (not sur­pris­ing­ly, August is well on the way to set­ting a new record, with 55,000 so far and eight days still to go). Vis­i­tors also come from all over the globe: the major­i­ty are now from the USA, fol­lowed close­ly by Aus­tralia and then the UK. I’m told that the site has quite a fol­low­ing amongst hedge fund man­agers (and again, I’d haz­ard a guess that sign­ing up to CfE­SI would still leave the aver­age hedge fund man­ag­er with some spare pock­et mon­ey).

I would hope that it’s expect­ing too much to think that some­thing of the order of $250,000 p.a. could be raised annu­al­ly from Debt­watch’s read­er­ship base . But for that to hap­pen, you have to decide to sign up. So far, only a hand­ful have done so.

If we do raise fund­ing of that order, the first project we will sup­port is the devel­op­ment of a mon­e­tary macro­eco­nom­ic mod­el­ing pro­gram, to be called “Min­sky”.

Devel­op­ment has already start­ed cour­tesy of a grant of $128,000 from INET–the Insti­tute for New Eco­nom­ic Think­ing that George Soros fund­ed with a dona­tion of $5 mil­lion per year for five years, specif­i­cal­ly to help fund non-ortho­dox research into eco­nom­ics that con­ven­tion­al fund­ing bod­ies nor­mal­ly ignore. That grant will let us devel­op ver­sion 1.0 of Min­sky, and make it avail­able for free to econ­o­mists and stu­dents. But much more could be done than will be pos­si­ble with such a small grant. Con­tin­u­ing fund­ing from our mem­ber­ship base would pro­vide some of those devel­op­ment funds.

So please click here to go to the mem­ber­ship page and sign up.