Steve Keen's Debtwatch

One of the peo­ple I miss talk­ing with in Aus­tralia is radio jour­nal­ist and tech and inter­net expert Phil Dob­bie. For­tu­nate­ly there’s Skype, and we reg­u­lar­ly now chat mat­ters eco­nom­ic on his inter­net radio show Balls Radio. Here’s the lat­est com­plete pro­gram, includ­ing our dis­cus­sion of why inter­est rates are so low and are not going to move up until the lev­el of pri­vate debt falls dramatically–which is unlike­ly to hap­pen.

One of the very enjoy­able aspects of being in Lon­don is speak­ing reg­u­lar­ly with Simon Rose on the busi­ness-ori­ent­ed inter­net radio Share Radio. I know I can talk under wet cement; I think Simon could man­age to talk after it had set sol­id. We have a great time ban­ter­ing about top­ics eco­nom­ics, and I hope it’s of inter­est to the audi­ence as well. Here’s the lat­est install­ment, with some ear­li­er ones avail­able here.

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For sev­en years now, the rate The Fed sets to deter­mine the price banks pay to bor­row from it and from each oth­er has been zero, or so close to zero that the dif­fer­ence is imma­te­r­i­al. This is, his­tor­i­cal­ly speak­ing, not nor­mal, and The Fed has a des­per­ate desire to return to what is nor­mal, which is rate a few per cent above the rate of infla­tion (see Fig­ure 1).

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This is the brief talk I gave at a con­fer­ence cel­e­brat­ing 25 years of the Crit­i­cal Real­ist sem­i­nar series at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty. Crit­i­cal real­ists argue against the use of math­e­mat­ics in eco­nom­ics; I argue here that it’s the abuse of math­e­mat­ics by Neo­clas­si­cal economists–who prac­tice what I have dubbed “Mythe­mat­ics” rather than Mathematics–and that some phe­nom­e­na are uncov­ered by math­e­mat­i­cal log­ic that can’t be dis­cov­ered by ver­bal log­ic alone. I give the exam­ple of my own mod­el of Min­sky’s Finan­cial Insta­bil­i­ty Hypoth­e­sis, which revealed the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a “Great Mod­er­a­tion” pre­ced­ing a “Great Reces­sion” before either event had hap­pened.

One thing my 28 years as a card-car­ry­ing econ­o­mist have taught me is that con­ven­tion­al eco­nom­ic the­o­ry is the best guide to what is like­ly to hap­pen in the econ­o­my.

Read what­ev­er it advis­es or pre­dicts, and then advise or expect the oppo­site. You (almost) can’t go wrong.

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There was a time when most edu­cat­ed peo­ple knew that the Earth was the cen­ter of the uni­verse. There was a sophis­ti­cat­ed “Geo­cen­tric” mod­el, known as the “Ptole­ma­ic sys­tem”, that pre­dict­ed to very high accu­ra­cy the observed move­ment of all the objects in the Heav­ens, as they pur­port­ed­ly orbit­ed the Earth on per­fect crys­talline spheres. 500 years ago, any­one who pro­posed an alter­na­tive model—in which the Sun was the cen­ter and the Earth was just anoth­er plan­et orbit­ing it—was derid­ed as a heretic and a mad­man.

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This is a talk I gave to under­grad­u­ate stu­dents at Car­tane­ga Uni­ver­si­ty in Colom­bia last week, com­par­ing the insis­tence on equi­lib­ri­um mod­el­ling by econ­o­mists to the bad habit of smok­ing.

In this post I con­sid­er the econ­o­my in gen­er­al: I’ll cov­er asset mar­kets in par­tic­u­lar in the next col­umn, but you’ll need to under­stand today’s post to com­pre­hend the stock and prop­er­ty mar­ket dynam­ics at play. Hav­ing said that, the Shang­hai Index fell anoth­er 7.5% on Tues­day, after los­ing 8.5% on Mon­day, and is now down over 45% from its peak—so I’ll try to write the stock-mar­ket-spe­cif­ic post by tomor­row. In this post I’ll show, very sim­ply, why a slow­down in the rate of growth of pri­vate debt will cause a cri­sis, if both the lev­el and the rate of change of debt are high at the time of the slow­down.

I’ve just tak­en part in a live stu­dio debate about Chi­na’s crash on France 24. Much to my amaze­ment, the seg­ment is already up on their website–I’ve bare­ly had time to walk home from their Lon­don stu­dio. Please click on the links to watch (it’s in Flash for­mat so I can’t embed it here):

Part 1
Part 2

PS French 24 pro­duc­ers & staff: I’m impressed!

As I not­ed in last week’s post “Is This The Great Crash Of Chi­na?”, the pre­vi­ous crash of China’s stock mar­ket in 2007 lacked the two essen­tial pre-req­ui­sites for a gen­uine cri­sis: pri­vate debt was only about 100% of GDP, and it had been rel­a­tive­ly con­stant for the pre­vi­ous decade. This bust how­ev­er is the real deal, because unlike the 2007-08 crash, the essen­tial ingre­di­ents of exces­sive pri­vate debt and exces­sive growth in that debt are well and tru­ly in place.

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