In the oth­er­wise for­get­table movie Cock­tail, when Tom Cruise’s char­ac­ter Bri­an Flana­gan abrupt­ly splits with his date Bon­nie, she pleads with him not to let their rela­tion­ship end bad­ly. He replies “every­thing ends bad­ly: oth­er­wise it wouldn’t end.”

The tur­moil in for­eign exchange mar­kets caused by Switzerland’s abrupt end­ing of its Euro peg may be such a bad moment for the Euro—and it comes fig­u­ra­tive­ly moments before anoth­er like­ly bad moment, the elec­tions in Greece on Jan­u­ary 25^th that will in all like­li­hood bring the anti-aus­ter­i­ty par­ty Syriza to pow­er. Will the Euro, like Flanagan’s rela­tion­ship in Cock­tail, end badly—and abruptly—soon?

The British elec­tion cam­paign has begun, and Prime Min­is­ter David Cameron is run­ning with the slo­gan that his Con­ser­v­a­tive Par­ty will deliv­er “A Britain liv­ing with­in its means” by run­ning a sur­plus on day-to-day gov­ern­ment spend­ing by 2017/18. It is, as the UK Tele­graph not­ed, hard­ly an inspir­ing slo­gan. But it is one that res­onates with vot­ers, because it sounds like the way they would like to man­age their own house­holds. And a house­hold budget—whether you bal­ance yours or not—is some­thing we can all under­stand. If a house­hold spends less than it earns, it can save mon­ey, or pay down its debt, or both. So it has to be good if a coun­try does the same thing, right?

Some months ago, Jesse Colum­bo approached me about writ­ing an online col­umn for Forbes Mag­a­zine. That seemed a bet­ter fit for me than the Aus­tralian-ori­ent­ed Busi­ness Spec­ta­tor, where I have been blog­ging for the last few years, so I decid­ed to make the move. I’ll soon post my first col­umn at this loca­tion. I’ll fol­low the same approach with this blog as before, which is to post a teas­er to a sto­ry here and then link through to the Forbes arti­cle. I’ll also con­tin­ue to post videos and inter­views direct­ly here, as I do now.

I’m now doing a reg­u­lar spot with Simon Rose on Share Radio, a new inter­net radio sta­tion ded­i­cat­ed to eco­nom­ic and finan­cial issues.

Simon Rose, Share Radio’s evening host.

To lis­ten to our lat­est conversation–covering Greece, aus­ter­i­ty, and why run­ning a sus­tained gov­ern­ment sur­plus is a great way to cause a future eco­nom­ic cri­sis, click on the play but­ton below.

I gave talks to stu­dents in Berlin and Ham­burg last week at the invi­ta­tion of of Rethink­ing Eco­nom­ics groups at Berlin Free Uni­ver­si­ty and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ham­burg. Both groups asked me to cov­er some of the cri­tiques of main­stream eco­nom­ics that I pro­vide in Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics, as well as cov­er­ing the mon­e­tary approach to Post Key­ne­sian eco­nom­ics that has been the focus of most of my more recent pub­lic lec­tures.

Bra­vo to Les Edi­tions de l’Atelier, the pub­lish­ers of L’Im­pos­ture Economique (the French trans­la­tion of Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics), who have achieved the seem­ing­ly impos­si­ble: L’Im­pos­ture Economique entered the Top Ten out of all books on Ama­zon France yes­ter­day (Decem­ber 4th 2014). It was the top-sell­ing non-fic­tion book, out­rank­ing even Piket­ty’s Cap­i­tal (as I write, L’Im­pos­ture is #12 in books while Cap­i­tal is #53).

I don’t expect it to last at that rank­ing, but I did­n’t expect it to achieve that posi­tion in the first place, so it feels great to see it there. Con­grat­u­la­tions again to Les Edi­tions de l’Atelier, and to Gael Giraud who took the ini­tia­tive in arrang­ing its trans­la­tion into French.

The Guardian’s senior eco­nom­ics com­men­ta­tor Aditya Chakrabort­ty has pro­duced an excel­lent BBC Radio 4 pro­gram on the fail­ure of aca­d­e­m­ic eco­nom­ics to reform itself after the Crash of 2007: Teach­ing Eco­nom­ics After the Crash. The first inter­view is with Kingston Uni­ver­si­ty’s own Devrim Yil­maz. It also includes me, George Soros, Andy Hal­dane, Ha-Joon Chang, the stu­dents who began the Post Crash Eco­nom­ics Soci­ety at Man­ches­ter Uni­ver­si­ty, Diane Coyle (who played a large role in devel­op­ing the CORE cur­ricu­lum, of which I’m very crit­i­cal), Philip Mirows­ki (who describes CORE as “lip­stick on a pig”), Rob John­son of INET, and many more. It’s well worth a lis­ten (it opens with about 20 sec­onds of a pro­mo for a lat­er pro­gram on a par­a­lympian):

Reposted from the Rethinking Economics website

Stu­dents at Kingston Uni­ver­si­ty kicked off a cam­paign for a new approach to eco­nom­ics with the suc­cess­ful launch of new soci­ety Rethink­ing Eco­nom­ics Kingston this week.

Almost 100 peo­ple squeezed in to hear Pro­fes­sor Steve Keen – new­ly appoint­ed head of the School of Eco­nom­ics, Pol­i­tics and His­to­ry – launch the new soci­ety with a speech on what’s wrong with main­stream eco­nom­ics and how stu­dents should change it.

Pro­fes­sor Keen — author of Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics and well-known crit­ic of main­stream eco­nom­ics – described how the­o­ries taught in most eco­nom­ic class­es were unable to pre­dict, under­stand or even take on board the recent finan­cial cri­sis.

Taken at face value, David Cameron’s warning this week about risks in the global economy sounds like it might be wonderfully prescient. Here’s the country’s economic chauffeur, carefully checking his instrument gauges, and sure enough, sees the same signs today that should have given us warning of the crisis of 2007-08. Time to apply the brakes.

There’s only one prob­lem: the eco­nom­ic dash­board that Cameron relies upon did not warn of the cri­sis before it hap­pened. Instead, that dash­board advised Cameron and oth­er lead­ers around the world that every­thing was look­ing rosy, and that going full throt­tle was entire­ly safe.

The Crash Boom Pop! car­toon book ver­sion of Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics has just been cov­ered in the Wall Street Jour­nal:

Over­heard: Pow! Zap! Wham! Get Ready For Com­ic Book Eco­nom­ics

So Wall Street Jour­nal read­ers, if you’d like to pay back those main­stream econ­o­mists who forced you to suf­fer through class­es on the “Effi­cient Mar­kets Hypoth­e­sis”, or worse yet, assured you that the econ­o­my was fine in June 2007, head over to Kick­starter and fund a car­toon that will take the mick­ey out of them.

Click here to go to the Crash Boom Pop! Kick­starter page