A quick quiz: which four coun­tries do you think have done the most to reform their economies over the last sev­en years?

OK, who said Greece, Por­tu­gal, Ire­land and Spain?

No one?

Actu­al­ly, some­one did: the OECD.

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The con­trast today between Europe—the sub­ject of my first few posts on Forbes—and the USA could not be more extreme. The cri­sis, when it began in 2007/08, was seen ini­tial­ly as a pure­ly Amer­i­can phenomenon—and by some, proof that the dereg­u­lat­ed Amer­i­can(and more gen­er­al­ly, the Anglo-Sax­on) mod­el of cap­i­tal­ism had failed, while Europe’s more col­lec­tivist ver­sion was still going strong.

One of the most vol­u­ble putting that argu­ment was then French Pres­i­dent Nico­las Sarkozy, who assert­ed that the cri­sis proved that the Amer­i­can dereg­u­lat­ed ver­sion of finance was kaput:

“A page has been turned,” he said, on the “Anglo Sax­on” finan­cial mod­el.

Paul Krug­man has pub­lished a trio of blog posts on the issue of debt in the last week: “Debt Is Mon­ey We Owe To Our­selves” (Feb­ru­ary 6^th at 7.30am), “Debt: A Thought Exper­i­ment” (same day at 5.30pm), and final­ly “Nobody Under­stands Debt” (Feb­ru­ary 9^th in an Op Ed).

There is one tru­ly remark­able thing about all three arti­cles: not one of them con­tains the word “Bank”.

Now you may think it’s ridicu­lous that an econ­o­mist could dis­cuss the macro­eco­nom­ics of debt, not once but three times, and nev­er even con­sid­er the role of banks. But Krug­man would tell you whyyou don’t need to con­sid­er banks when talk­ing about debt, and call you a “Bank­ing Mys­tic” if you per­sist­ed.

I was inter­viewed twice on the BBC yes­ter­day about Yanis Varo­ufakis and Syriza­’s attempts to resolve its debt cri­sis with the EU–once on the BBC News Chan­nel and once on BBC World News. The video clips are below. Click here to see Yanis’s “mod­est pro­pos­al” for resolv­ing the cri­sis.

BBC News Channel

BBC World News

The Rene­gade Econ­o­mist Ross Ashcroft has pub­lished a pithy and pow­er­ful Guardian video on the like­li­hood of anoth­er eco­nom­ic crash:

Another economic crash is coming. How did this happen? – video

As you may know, I am now Head of the School of Eco­nom­ics, His­to­ry and Pol­i­tics at Kingston Uni­ver­si­ty Lon­don. I took on the posi­tion for two rea­sons: because Kingston was already a cen­tre for plu­ral­ist eco­nom­ics; and because as Head of School I could main­tain and strength­en its plu­ral­ist approach. I’d like you to con­sid­er join­ing me here, and if you plan on doing a Mas­ters in Eco­nom­ics in the 2015–16 aca­d­e­m­ic year, then now is the time to apply.

Kingston offers a range of Eco­nom­ics MA degrees from het­ero­dox, plu­ral­is­tic and applied per­spec­tives, full time and part time. Our degree units are:

The lat­est in my reg­u­lar con­ver­sa­tions with Simon Rose of Share Radio. This time, to quote their blurb:

Steve keen on why the Greek finance min­is­ter is fan­tas­tic, QE will not work, con­ven­tion­al econ­o­mists have no idea how the real world works.

I first met Yanis Varo­ufakis when he was a senior lec­tur­er (the 3^rdstep in the 5‑tiered Aus­tralian sys­tem, equiv­a­lent to a Pro­fes­sor in the USA) at Syd­ney Uni­ver­si­ty in the late 1980s, and I was a tutor (the 1^st step) at the Uni­ver­si­ty of New South Wales. We’ve been friends ever since, and now he has become glob­al­ly promi­nent as the Finance Min­is­ter of the most trou­bled and high pro­file econ­o­my on the plan­et, Greece.

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About 40 years ago, one of Mag­gie Thatcher’s chief advi­sors remarked that he wouldn’t be sat­is­fied when the Con­ser­v­a­tive Par­ty was in gov­ern­ment: he would only be hap­py when there were two con­ser­v­a­tive par­ties vying for office.

He got his wish of course.

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The polls were right: Greece did elect Syriza, the left-wing coali­tion par­ty (its name is actu­al­ly a Greek acronym for “Coali­tion of the Rad­i­cal Left”), bring­ing to pow­er the first staunch­ly anti-aus­ter­i­ty par­ty in the EU, and the first ele­ment in their pol­i­cy doc­u­ment is to “Write-off the greater part of pub­lic debt”.

That is like­ly to lead to some frac­tious nego­ti­a­tions with the EU, and pos­si­bly even a messy exit from the Euro. Before that hap­pens, there will be some messy com­men­tary in the media as well, and I ful­ly expect most com­men­ta­tors to take a line like that in my title.