Category Archives: Debtwatch

By Sal­va­tore Babones

Sal­va­tore Babones (@sbabones) is a senior lec­tur­er in soci­ol­o­gy & social pol­i­cy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Syd­ney and an asso­ciate fel­low at the Insti­tute for Pol­i­cy Stud­ies (IPS).  You can find more of his com­men­tary on the US econ­o­my at http://salvatorebabones.com.

The Amer­i­can econ­o­my has done well over the past forty years.  Amer­i­ca’s nation­al income per per­son has almost exact­ly dou­bled since 1970.^[1]  The Unit­ed States has been the rich­est major coun­try in the world for over 100 years now, and it remains the rich­est major coun­try in the world today.^[2]  The Amer­i­can econ­o­my in 2010 gen­er­at­ed $47,436 for every man, woman, and child liv­ing in the coun­try.^[3]  On cur­rent pro­jec­tions, this fig­ure will rise by a fur­ther $1000 per year for the next sev­er­al years.^[4]

Nicole Foss, the sys­tems ana­lyst and biol­o­gist behind the blog Auto­mat­ic Earth, is speak­ing tomor­row at A Com­pass for Tur­bu­lent Times, organ­ised by Ceres.

I’m on the bill too, which I’m told will pro­ceed rough­ly as fol­lows:

9–11 Nicole (inc Qs)
11–30 Morn­ing tea
11.30 — 12.30 Steve (inc Qs) — focus on aust con­text
12.30 — 1.30pm Lunch
1–30 — 2pm Oppor­tu­ni­ty for fur­ther Qs to both
2pm — 3.30 — Work­shop ses­sion — small­er groups come up with
hypo­thet­i­cal scenarios/strategies (30mins) to put back to Nicole/Steve
for response / dis­cus­sion (1hr).

 March 15–16 2012: The Inter­Con­ti­nen­tal Hotel, Syd­ney

Eco­nom­ic lead­er­ship of the world is pass­ing from West to East. It may be an order­ly tran­si­tion… or there may be cur­ren­cy wars… resource wars… and a peri­od of great volatil­i­ty in the finan­cial mar­kets. How­ev­er it plays out, this WILL affect the Aus­tralian econ­o­my, your invest­ments, retire­ment sav­ings, and asset wealth in 2012…

If you’re becom­ing more con­cerned about your future finan­cial secu­ri­ty, clear your cal­en­dar for AFTER AMERICA – Port Phillip Publishing’s inau­gur­al invest­ment con­fer­ence.

CLICK HERE to find out more…

You’ll learn all about:

Click here for this post in PDF: Debt­watch mem­bers; CfE­SI mem­bers
Click here for the data in this post: Debt­watch mem­bers; CfE­SI mem­bers

The most recent ABS data implies that unem­ploy­ment is falling, and that those who saw the econ­o­my as either sta­ble or boom­ing were right. Both the sea­son­al­ly adjust­ed and the trend esti­mates fell, and the sea­son­al­ly adjust­ed unem­ploy­ment is now 0.2% below the peak it reached in August 2011 of 5.3%. This looks good—though not as good as con­ven­tion­al Neo­clas­si­cal fore­cast­ers were expect­ing a year ago: in the 2011-12 bud­get, the Trea­sury, using its TRYM mod­el, pre­dict­ed a smooth fall in unem­ploy­ment from 5% in June 2010 to 4.75% in June 2011 and 4.5% in June 2012.

Busi­ness Review Week­ly has just pub­lished a pro­file on me and my debt-based macro­eco­nom­ics, on pages 24–25 of the cur­rent issue (Feb­ru­ary 16–22 2012):

Keen to be heard

The author Nick Gard­ner has done a very good job of explain­ing why the change in pri­vate debt mat­ters. I’d have to con­cede that his brief expla­na­tion using the actu­al GDP and change in debt fig­ures for the USA is a lot clear­er than most of my chart-laden posts.

Click here for this post in PDF: Debt­watch Mem­bers; CfE­SI Mem­bers
Click here for the eco­nom­ic data in this post: Debt­watch Mem­bers; CfE­SI Mem­bers
Click here for the house price index data in this post: Debt­watch Mem­bers; CfE­SI Mem­bers

The RBA’s deci­sion not to reduce rates this month caught most pun­dits by surprise—including me. Giv­en the inter­na­tion­al and local data, I thought they’d err on the side of cau­tion and cut rates.

You can’t go past the Google team for an intel­li­gent and engag­ing audi­ence. I spoke there 2 years ago to an audi­ence of about 100, and a sim­i­lar sized group turned up yes­ter­day. There were some quite chal­leng­ing ques­tions on my views about the cur­rent state of the world econ­o­my, so the talk went well over the allot­ted hour

Below is the video of the talk; the sound qual­i­ty is a bit poor (I rec­om­mend using ear­phones to lis­ten to it), but there is also an audio record­ing below that may be eas­i­er to under­stand. If there are enough com­plaints(!), we’ll blend the sep­a­rate­ly record­ed audio with the video.

John T. Har­vey is Pro­fes­sor of Eco­nom­ics at Texas Chris­t­ian Uni­ver­si­ty and a lead­ing non-neo­clas­si­cal econ­o­mist. He is doing his bit to raise aware­ness of alter­na­tive approach­es to eco­nom­ics via a blog that is pub­lished by Forbes Mag­a­zine. John explains his moti­va­tion for estab­lish­ing this blog as fol­lows:

Click here for this post in PDF: Debt­watch Mem­bers; CfE­SI Mem­bers
Click here for the data in this post: Debt­watch Mem­bers; CfE­SI Mem­bers

The ABS house price data for Decem­ber 2011 has just been released, and it shows that house prices fell 4.8% in nom­i­nal terms between Decem­ber 2010 and Decem­ber 2011. The usu­al sus­pects are already try­ing to see this as mark­ing the bot­tom, while “just the facts, ma’am” report­ing sim­ply empha­sis­es the scale of the down­turn. A cou­ple of media out­lets have asked my views on the next cal­en­dar year, so here they are–along with some his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive on the house price bub­ble.

I would like to take this oppor­tu­ni­ty to intro­duce myself to the Debt­watch and CfE­SI com­mu­ni­ty. My name is David Law­son, and I will be com­ing on board as the Direc­tor of the Cen­tre for Eco­nom­ic Sta­bil­i­ty Incor­po­rat­ed (CfE­SI) as of the 1st of Feb­ru­ary. I have been an active com­mit­tee mem­ber of CfE­SI since its estab­lish­ment in March 2010.

The key objec­tive of this posi­tion is to free up Steve’s time so that he can focus on his research. As one of my pri­ma­ry func­tions, I will take over com­mu­ni­ca­tions with the Debt­watch blog and CfE­SI web­site. Mat­ters that require a research input will of course still be dealt with direct­ly by Steve him­self.