Category Archives: Debtwatch

My Walk to Mt Kosciuszko is no longer a soli­tary affair: at last count, I will have a dozen com­pan­ions for the entire dis­tance, and anoth­er 16 join­ing me for at least one day.

One of those com­ing for the entire trip is the Com­men­tary Edi­tor from Busi­ness Spec­ta­tor, Rob Burgess. Rob will report from and on the Walk on a dai­ly basis, cov­er­ing it both as a news sto­ry, and as the basis for a dis­cus­sion of the wider issues fac­ing busi­ness and eco­nom­ics in the unchart­ed ter­rain of the sup­pos­ed­ly  ‘post-GFC’ world.

After exten­sive and much appre­ci­at­ed crit­i­cal feed­back on the draft designs, this blog entry show­cas­es the three T‑Shirt designs I’m pro­duc­ing for the Walk to Kosciuszko.

Each has the words “I was hope­less­ly wrong on house prices. Ask me how” as required by the bet. Each also has a graph­i­cal answer to the ques­tion:

• Tim­ing;
• Our Debt Bub­ble; and
• Gov­ern­ment manip­u­la­tion of the mar­ket in the form of the First Home Own­ers Grant.

Thanks for all the feed­back on the T‑Shirt designs for my forth­com­ing walk from Par­lia­ment House to Mt Kosciuszko. I must admit I was a bit sur­prised by how many peo­ple were opposed to the dis­tort­ed text, but I take the point (of course, there were some who were strong­ly in favour of it).

And I do also want to have some fun–it isn’t all sour grapes! As some­one who has done graph­ic design at var­i­ous stages in my life, I like the look of the “fit text to curve” text–it’s the T‑shirt I’d like to have in my col­lec­tion. So what I’ve decid­ed to do is to pro­duce at least 4 of the 5 T‑shirts shown below, two of which have text fit­ted to the curves, and three of which do not.

As is wide­ly known, I will be walk­ing from Aus­trali­a’s Par­lia­ment House to Mount Kosciousko–a dis­tance of 225km–as the result of los­ing part of a bet with a well-known “bull” on prop­er­ty in Aus­tralia, Rory Robert­son. I am oblig­ed to wear a T‑Shirt with the words “I was hope­less­ly wrong on house prices: ask me how” embla­zoned on it.

As I explain on www.keenwalk.com.au, I was ambushed with this bet in front of an audi­ence of 80–100 peo­ple at Par­lia­ment House. I have respond­ed in kind by turn­ing the walk into a protest about the man­ner in which keep­ing prop­er­ty prices high has come to dom­i­nate eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy in Australia–with what I pre­fer to call the First Home Ven­dors Boost being the most out­ra­geous exam­ple of that.

Sev­er­al mem­bers have point­ed out that I got the month wrong: the meet­ing to form the Asso­ci­a­tion will take place this com­ing Tuesday–which is March 9, not April 9 as I first post­ed here.

My apolo­gies for the con­fu­sion. In any case, it looks like quite a few peo­ple were able to see past my slip and we now have about 15 mem­bers signed up for din­ner this Tues­day at a rather nice venue in Syd­ney (I will stick to just let­ting peo­ple know where by return email). The cost for the din­ner will be $65 per per­son, and it will start at 7pm at a venue not too far from Syd­ney’s CBD.

Last month I gave a talk about the blog at Swin­burne Uni­ver­si­ty of Tech­nol­o­gy, at the invi­ta­tion of one of the blog’s most active mem­bers, Dr Matt Mitchell. Swin­burne’s video of the talk is below, and it neat­ly melds my talk and the pre­sen­ta­tion I gave:

| Open Play­er in New Win­dow

The vol­ume will appear too low when you hear Mat­t’s intro­duc­tion, but this is because the audio lev­el was set on my radio mic, which is much loud­er than the the­atre micro­phone. Turn the sound up to hear Mat­t’s open­ing, but be ready to turn it down when I start talk­ing.

This is main­ly of inter­est to Syd­ney mem­bers: I need to form an Asso­ci­a­tion, pri­mar­i­ly to admin­is­ter the funds that have been raised via dona­tions to this blog (and also www.keenwalk.com.au).

Dona­tions have totalled over A$10,000 so far, and while I had thought this raised no income lia­bil­i­ty for me, I have been informed that it could be regard­ed as income by tax­a­tion author­i­ties. Form­ing an Asso­ci­a­tion to man­age the funds will over­come this dif­fi­cul­ty.

Note: the first part of this post will main­ly be of inter­est just to Aus­tralian read­ers, but I con­clude with a numer­i­cal expla­na­tion of “Why Debt-Defla­tion Caus­es Depres­sions” that will be of inter­est to read­ers every­where.

Last week I took part in a debate enti­tled “The Great Res­i­den­tial Hous­ing Debate — the next Bub­ble or a legit­i­mate Boom?” at the annu­al con­fer­ence for Peren­ni­al Invest­ment Part­ners; I put the Bub­ble case and Chris Joye of Ris­mark Inter­na­tion­al pre­sent­ed the Boom case (here is my paper and my pre­sen­ta­tion). As is well-known, Aus­tralia is one of the few coun­tries in the OECD not to expe­ri­ence two quar­ters or more of falling GDP as a result of the GFC, and prob­a­bly the only coun­try that has not expe­ri­enced a fall in its prop­er­ty mar­ket.

Adam Schwab has fol­lowed up his many columns on Crikey with a book on the pil­lage of Aus­tralian com­pa­nies by Ponzi financiers and incom­pe­tent exec­u­tives. Some of the com­pa­nies mis­man­aged and in many cas­es fleeced by these once high-fly­ing exec­u­tives no longer exist–but the exec­u­tives are still “high fly­ers” since the crash of their cor­po­ra­tions did­n’t seem to affect their own per­son­al wealth.

The book, Pigs at the Trough, is launched today, and hav­ing read it I do com­mend it to Debt­watch read­ers. The pref­ace to the book, which gives a good feel­ing for both its sub­ject and its flavour, is repro­duced below.

Car­son Scott inter­viewed me for Sky News Busi­ness Chan­nel last week for the pro­gram On The Record. Rather than focus­ing on the news of the day, this pro­gram attempts to give the back­ground to peo­ple in pub­lic life.

As such there’s more of a focus on the rea­sons why I have tak­en the activist stand that I have on the econ­o­my than on my analy­sis of the econ­o­my itself. While some of this focus­es on my fam­i­ly and edu­ca­tion­al back­ground, it also gave me the oppor­tu­ni­ty to explain that my major moti­va­tion was the desire to rid eco­nom­ics of the pseu­do-sci­en­tif­ic Neo­clas­si­cal non­sense that dom­i­nat­ed eco­nom­ics since the ear­ly 1950s.