The renowned heterodox financial economist and economic historian Dr. Michael Hudson will be visiting Australia in October.
Michael is another of the handful of economists who predicted the Global Financial Crisis, and he has since worked intensively with the governments of Iceland and Latvia to attempt to pull them out of the economic quagmire. He shares my expectations that the “green shoots” being spied by more conventional thinkers will wither under the weight of the private debt that created this crisis in the first place (and whose existence has been ignored in all the rescue plans to date).
Debtwatch is supporting a talk to be given by Michael on the financial crisis on October 23rd at Customs House (the event will probably be from 6–8pm, but we’re still finalising arrangements).
Michael is an excellent speaker who holds no punches, and I can guarantee that it will be a stimulating event. He has extensive knowledge of financial crises back to antiquity, and argues that we may have to revisit what we once thought was the Biblical practice of “Debt Jubilees” to overcome our modern dilemma.
So it will be a great night, but there is a problem–funding. In this “free market system”, while bankers still pay themselves multi-million dollar salaries, it is difficult to get financial support for contrarian thinkers. So I’m trying to help by making a personal donation of $100 to Michael’s expenses, and by encouraging blog members to also chip in via the PayPal Donation widget on this site.
I have dedicated the first three options on the widget to funding Michael’s tour, with amounts respectively of A$2, 5 and 10. It’s easy to use, and has so far raised about A$5,000 to support my own research (I’ll publish more on how I’m using these funds shortly). Just click on the widget to the right of this post, choose one of the options, and proceed from there.
You can donate whether or not you have a PayPal account of your own–it’s very easy and quite secure.
The event itself will be free, but there is limited seating (roughly 150 seats), and donors will receive preference over others should that be necessary.
There are now over 2,000 subscribers to Debtwatch, so if just ten percent of members make the median donation, we’ll raise about A$1,000 towards Michael’s travel and accommodation expenses.
If this exercise works–if it raises A$1,000 or more for Michael’s speech–then I will repeat the exercise for Paul Ormerod, the author of The Death of Economics, Butterfly Economics, and Why Things Fail, who will be in Sydney in November.
