Category Archives: Debtwatch

I’ve just had a great inter­view with a new Rus­sia Today show, Cap­i­tal Account. The pro­gram’s pro­mo is:

At the the inter­sec­tion of mar­kets, pol­i­tics and the glob­al econ­o­my is Cap­i­tal Account with Lau­ren Lyster. Broad­cast­ing live out of RT Amer­i­ca’s stu­dios in Wash­ing­ton DC, Cap­i­tal Account brings you in-depth analy­sis and dis­cus­sion of the most impor­tant finan­cial and eco­nom­ic news from a per­spec­tive you won’t find in the main­stream media.

From my expe­ri­ence in this inter­view, the pro­gram lives up to its pro­mo. For those of you with cable in the USA, Cap­i­tal Account airs week­days at 4:30pm (East­ern) on Rus­sia Today.

(guest blog) by Joe Mcivor

Moral Major­i­ty?

Back in May of this year, Austin Mack­ell wrote in The Guardian that the Arab Spring rev­o­lu­tions rep­re­sent­ed “a rebel­lion not just against local dic­ta­tors, but against the glob­al neolib­er­al pro­gramme they were imple­ment­ing with such gus­to in their coun­tries”. He cit­ed Egypt in par­tic­u­lar as an exam­ple of a nation which had tak­en IMF loans and then prompt­ly imple­ment­ed their rec­om­men­da­tions of sub­stan­tial pri­vati­sa­tion and cut­ting of ser­vices, with the usu­al dis­as­trous results for the well-being of the pop­u­la­tion. He went on to write that peo­ple in the West had so far “failed to see the peo­ple of the region as nat­ur­al allies in a com­mon strug­gle”.

This is a slight­ly longer video of the Sat­ur­day ral­ly of Occu­py Sydney–its last pub­lic event before it was shut down. It includes the Wel­come to Coun­try, the 3 MCs, and a state­ment of Occu­py Syd­ney’s objec­tives, as well as my talk–which begins 10 min­utes in to this video.

I was dis­gust­ed to learn this morn­ing that Syd­ney had joined Mel­bourne in being one of the very few cities around the world to evict the Occu­py pro­test­ers. I’m glad at least that I got a chance to speak at yes­ter­day’s ral­ly, before the police action at 5am this morn­ing.

I had hoped that Syd­ney would dis­play more sense than Mel­bourne had, but unfor­tu­nate­ly I was wrong. Aus­tralians are often quick to crit­i­cize Amer­i­can soci­ety, but at times like these one has to respect the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence:

As not­ed in the pre­vi­ous post, I’ve been invit­ed to speak at the Occu­py Syd­ney ral­ly tomor­row (from 12pm). I attend­ed last week’s ral­ly as an observ­er, when I would say about 2,000 peo­ple were in atten­dance. Below are some of the pho­tos I took of the event.

I am one of sev­er­al speak­ers tomor­row at Occu­py Syd­ney (there are a num­ber of web­sites on this top­ic; Occu­py Syd­ney; Occu­py Aus­tralia). Accord­ing to the organ­is­ers:

The event will begin at 12.00pm and will begin with a wel­come to coun­try from an indige­nous rep­re­sen­ta­tive fol­lowed by some intro­duc­tions etc from the three MC’s and then the speak­ers (in no par­tic­u­lar order). There will be five speak­ers includ­ing your­self speak­ing for ten min­utes each… There will then be two speak­ers with five min­utes each.

In this lec­ture I con­tin­ue the devel­op­ment of the QED mod­el of a pure cred­it econ­o­my began in the last lec­ture, includ­ing mod­el­ling pro­duc­tion and devel­op­ing a pric­ing equa­tion to pro­duce a com­bined mon­e­tary-phys­i­cal mod­el. (see NOTE below if you can’t see this video in your brows­er)

Pow­er­point Slides (QED Files Free down­load; Debt­Watch Mem­bers: Part 1 Part 2; CfE­SI mem­bers: Part 1 Part 2)

That is the title of a fea­ture in the Cana­di­an news­pa­per The Globe and Mail that a cor­re­spon­dent has just brought to my atten­tion. It’s not an earth-shat­ter­ing arti­cle, as my cor­re­spon­dent observed, but it is remark­able to see arti­cles like this turn­ing up in the main­stream media. The author Tra Basen observes at one point:

While the pro­test­ers occu­py­ing Wall Street are not car­ry­ing signs denounc­ing ratio­nal-expec­ta­tions and effi­cient-mar­ket mod­el­ling, per­haps they should be.

Eco­nom­ics has met the ene­my, and it is eco­nom­ics

One of my close research col­leagues Trond Andresen has writ­ten the fol­low­ing sys­tems engi­neer­ing analy­sis of how a par­al­lel non-debt-based mon­e­tary sys­tem might func­tion in an econ­o­my suf­fer­ing a debt-induced cri­sis in its main mon­e­tary sys­tems. I thought his analy­sis could be of inter­est to read­ers of this blog.

(This is a revised and expand­ed ver­sion of a paper pre­sent­ed and in the pro­ceed­ings of the 9th Soci­ety of Het­ero­dox Econ­o­mists Con­fer­ence, Decem­ber 6 and 7 2010, UNSW, Syd­ney.

An ear­li­er and short­er ver­sion appeared in Coun­ter­punch June 25 ? 27, 2010.)