Help create a graphic novel version of Debunking Economics

Flattr this!

Genevieve Tran, who blogs at Mon­ey Big and Small, is team­ing up with graph­ic artist Miguel Guer­ra and Suzy Dias, who do the car­toons on IDEAe­co­nom­ics and pro­duce the indi-com­ic Super Cor­po­rate Heroes, are team­ing up to pro­duce a graph­ic nov­el ver­sion of Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics.

Genevieve is putting togeth­er a video and has sent out the fol­low­ing call:

A request to world-wide friends: if you don’t remem­ber ever learn­ing about impor­tant things like how banks, debt or mon­ey work (=Eco­nom­ics, Finance!), in high school, could I ask you to sub­mit a video of your­self shrug­ging and shak­ing your head? It’s for a kick­starter video to learn about Eco­nom­ics in a non-hor­ri­ble way: thru com­ic books! Yes, I’ll give you a first copy!  Any video qual­i­ty. H.264, MPEG‑2, MPEG‑4, DV, and AIC for­mat.

The revolt of (part of) the top 1% of the top 1%

Flattr this!

What are your pre­con­cep­tions about the author of a book with the title The Next Eco­nom­ic Dis­as­ter: Why It’s Com­ing and How to Avoid It? Aca­d­e­m­ic? Left­ist? Anti-cap­i­tal­ist? Anti-banker cer­tain­ly?

Pre­pare to drop them all, because the author is none of the above. Tak­ing the last first, the major­i­ty of his career has been in bank­ing — and as a founder and CEO.

Click here to read the rest of this post.

Graph for Why the super rich are running scared of inequality

 

Are the students revolting, or is it economics?

Flattr this!

Main­stream econ­o­mists have long ignored the dynam­ics of pri­vate debt, mon­ey and banks to their detri­ment. Now more than ever, a real­is­tic and non-ortho­dox approach to eco­nom­ics is need­ed.

Last week I made my first over­seas trip on which I ticked the box ‘Aus­tralian res­i­dent depart­ing per­ma­nent­ly’. It’s giv­en me cause to reflect on my career as an aca­d­e­m­ic econ­o­mist (and part-time jour­nal­ist) in Aus­tralia.

The good, the bad and the ugly of the Murray inquiry

Flattr this!

The Murray inquiry's observations on financial advice, household debt and super are commendable, but its boneheaded proposal for the government to underwrite RMBS is a concern.

A gov­ern­ment report is always a Parson’s Egg, and I’ll start with the parts of this one that were excel­lent. These were its wari­ness about and obser­va­tions on super­an­nu­a­tion, finan­cial advice and house­hold debt.

A Royal Commission into the Commonwealth Bank

Flattr this!

The Com­mon­wealth Bank’s response to the Sen­ate inves­ti­ga­tion of ASIC blames incom­pe­tence and indi­vid­u­als for the scan­dals at Com­mon­wealth Finan­cial Plan­ning Lim­it­ed. Chief exec­u­tive Ian Narev: “Poor advice pro­vid­ed by some of our advis­ers between 2003 to 2012 caused finan­cial loss and dis­tress and I am tru­ly sor­ry for that.”

This is the pre­dictable ‘rot­ten apple’ defence to alle­ga­tions of impro­pri­ety. And it is sim­ply absurd to describe some of the alleged actions of those advis­ers not­ed by the Sen­ate Report — such as “forgery and dis­hon­est con­ceal­ment of mate­r­i­al facts” (Sen­ate Inquiry Exec­u­tive Sum­ma­ry, p. xvi­ii) — as mere­ly “poor advice”. If the bank can describe that as “poor advice”, then a bank rob­ber would be enti­tled to describe his pro­fes­sion as “mak­ing with­drawals”.

Abbott shoots his own supporters in the foot

Flattr this!

The Abbott gov­ern­ment has react­ed with pre­dictable dis­dain to attacks over its poli­cies on refugees, home­less, uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents, unem­ployed, and wel­fare recip­i­ents. And why shouldn’t it? These are com­plaints from peo­ple who nor­mal­ly wouldn’t vote for them any­way, while the poli­cies them­selves appeal not only to “bolt­ed on” Lib­er­al vot­ers, but also to dis­af­fect­ed Labor vot­ers. It’s good pol­i­tics, even if the bad press means a tem­po­rary hit in the opin­ion polls.

An open letter to Brussels

Flattr this!

The Euro­pean Sta­bil­i­ty and Growth Pact is based on the prin­ci­ple that sta­bil­i­ty and growth are enhanced when gov­ern­ment deficits are either min­imised or elim­i­nat­ed. I want you to dis­pas­sion­ate­ly con­sid­er an argu­ment that reach­es a dif­fer­ent con­clu­sion. It may sound like some­thing you have heard before from oth­ers and already dis­missed. But bear with me.

Why Europe’s austerity experiment is doomed to fail

Flattr this!

I’ve spent the past two weeks in Europe, with speak­ing engage­ments in Italy, Greece and Aus­tria. This was my first vis­it to Greece, and my first chance to get an admit­ted­ly super­fi­cial tourist’s view of what a coun­try with Great Depres­sion lev­els of unem­ploy­ment looks like.

It didn’t look like any­thing in par­tic­u­lar until the dri­ve from Athens, Greece’s cap­i­tal and largest city, to Thes­sa­loni­ki, its sec­ond largest. Then it struck me: the roads were near emp­ty — as the toll booth shown in Fig­ure 1 illus­trates. My host Nikos reck­ons he has done a mil­lion kilo­me­ters over the years on this 500km dri­ve, and he con­firmed that roads which were now vir­tu­al­ly emp­ty were once full of cars, and espe­cial­ly trucks — that mobile sign of a thriv­ing econ­o­my.

The dodgy dynamics of economics (1)

Flattr this!

This is the talk I gave at the Finance, Math­e­mat­ics and Phi­los­o­phy sem­i­nar orga­nized by the Depart­ment of Phi­los­o­phy and the Depart­ment of Physics at Sapien­za Uni­ver­si­ta de Roma. It was an extreme­ly good con­fer­ence, with the spe­cial bonus that I got to meet one of my heroes in non­lin­ear dynam­ics, Ping Chen.

PS Video below init­lal­ly linked only to the adver­tise­ment before my video. That is fixed now, and I only hope my bags also get found after going astray in Rome air­port.

I’ll fol­low up with my paper short­ly, once I have time to com­plete it.