Steve Keen's Debtwatch

I was inter­viewed by Gor­don Long for the Finan­cial Repres­sion web­site last week. The video is below; a brief sum­ma­ry of our dis­cus­sion is post­ed on the Finan­cial Repres­sion web­site and repro­duced below.

PROF. STEVE KEEN TALKS

FINANCIAL REPRESSION

THE ART OF GETTING AN EDUCATION IN ECONOMICS

Pro­fes­sor Steve Keen has found that top flight uni­ver­si­ties are dom­i­nat­ed by very nar­row, doc­tri­naire teach­ing. This styl­ized view has result­ed in crit­ics of this view only get­ting jobs in low rank­ing uni­ver­si­ty. With pride Steve Keen puts his lat­est uni­ver­si­ty in that camp. “If you want a good edu­ca­tion in Eco­nom­ics, you don’t go to a good uni­ver­si­ty. The wider range of thought and diverse ana­lyt­ics is found at the low­er rank­ing uni­ver­si­ty. Kingston Uni­ver­si­ty is one of those clas­sic uni­ver­si­ty!”

I was inter­viewed by Lelde Smits for the Finance News Net­work on my recent trip back to Syd­ney. Below is the begin­ning of the tran­script; you can read the rest by click­ing on this link. Or click below to watch the inter­view with Lelde.

Tran­script of Finance News Net­work inter­view with Kingston Uni­ver­si­ty Head of Eco­nom­ics, Pol­i­tics and His­to­ry, Dr Steve Keen

Lelde Smits: Hel­lo, I’m Lelde Smits for the Finance News Net­work and join­ing me from London’s Kingston Uni­ver­si­ty is Head of Eco­nom­ics, Pol­i­tics and His­to­ry, Dr Steve Keen. Steve, wel­come back to Syd­ney and to FNN.

In the oth­er­wise for­get­table movie Cock­tail, when Tom Cruise’s char­ac­ter Bri­an Flana­gan abrupt­ly splits with his date Bon­nie, she pleads with him not to let their rela­tion­ship end bad­ly. He replies “every­thing ends bad­ly: oth­er­wise it wouldn’t end.”

The tur­moil in for­eign exchange mar­kets caused by Switzerland’s abrupt end­ing of its Euro peg may be such a bad moment for the Euro—and it comes fig­u­ra­tive­ly moments before anoth­er like­ly bad moment, the elec­tions in Greece on Jan­u­ary 25^th that will in all like­li­hood bring the anti-aus­ter­i­ty par­ty Syriza to pow­er. Will the Euro, like Flanagan’s rela­tion­ship in Cock­tail, end badly—and abruptly—soon?

The British elec­tion cam­paign has begun, and Prime Min­is­ter David Cameron is run­ning with the slo­gan that his Con­ser­v­a­tive Par­ty will deliv­er “A Britain liv­ing with­in its means” by run­ning a sur­plus on day-to-day gov­ern­ment spend­ing by 2017/18. It is, as the UK Tele­graph not­ed, hard­ly an inspir­ing slo­gan. But it is one that res­onates with vot­ers, because it sounds like the way they would like to man­age their own house­holds. And a house­hold budget—whether you bal­ance yours or not—is some­thing we can all under­stand. If a house­hold spends less than it earns, it can save mon­ey, or pay down its debt, or both. So it has to be good if a coun­try does the same thing, right?

Some months ago, Jesse Colum­bo approached me about writ­ing an online col­umn for Forbes Mag­a­zine. That seemed a bet­ter fit for me than the Aus­tralian-ori­ent­ed Busi­ness Spec­ta­tor, where I have been blog­ging for the last few years, so I decid­ed to make the move. I’ll soon post my first col­umn at this loca­tion. I’ll fol­low the same approach with this blog as before, which is to post a teas­er to a sto­ry here and then link through to the Forbes arti­cle. I’ll also con­tin­ue to post videos and inter­views direct­ly here, as I do now.

I’m now doing a reg­u­lar spot with Simon Rose on Share Radio, a new inter­net radio sta­tion ded­i­cat­ed to eco­nom­ic and finan­cial issues.

Simon Rose, Share Radio’s evening host.

To lis­ten to our lat­est conversation–covering Greece, aus­ter­i­ty, and why run­ning a sus­tained gov­ern­ment sur­plus is a great way to cause a future eco­nom­ic cri­sis, click on the play but­ton below.

I gave talks to stu­dents in Berlin and Ham­burg last week at the invi­ta­tion of of Rethink­ing Eco­nom­ics groups at Berlin Free Uni­ver­si­ty and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ham­burg. Both groups asked me to cov­er some of the cri­tiques of main­stream eco­nom­ics that I pro­vide in Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics, as well as cov­er­ing the mon­e­tary approach to Post Key­ne­sian eco­nom­ics that has been the focus of most of my more recent pub­lic lec­tures.

Bra­vo to Les Edi­tions de l’Atelier, the pub­lish­ers of L’Im­pos­ture Economique (the French trans­la­tion of Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics), who have achieved the seem­ing­ly impos­si­ble: L’Im­pos­ture Economique entered the Top Ten out of all books on Ama­zon France yes­ter­day (Decem­ber 4th 2014). It was the top-sell­ing non-fic­tion book, out­rank­ing even Piket­ty’s Cap­i­tal (as I write, L’Im­pos­ture is #12 in books while Cap­i­tal is #53).

I don’t expect it to last at that rank­ing, but I did­n’t expect it to achieve that posi­tion in the first place, so it feels great to see it there. Con­grat­u­la­tions again to Les Edi­tions de l’Atelier, and to Gael Giraud who took the ini­tia­tive in arrang­ing its trans­la­tion into French.

The Guardian’s senior eco­nom­ics com­men­ta­tor Aditya Chakrabort­ty has pro­duced an excel­lent BBC Radio 4 pro­gram on the fail­ure of aca­d­e­m­ic eco­nom­ics to reform itself after the Crash of 2007: Teach­ing Eco­nom­ics After the Crash. The first inter­view is with Kingston Uni­ver­si­ty’s own Devrim Yil­maz. It also includes me, George Soros, Andy Hal­dane, Ha-Joon Chang, the stu­dents who began the Post Crash Eco­nom­ics Soci­ety at Man­ches­ter Uni­ver­si­ty, Diane Coyle (who played a large role in devel­op­ing the CORE cur­ricu­lum, of which I’m very crit­i­cal), Philip Mirows­ki (who describes CORE as “lip­stick on a pig”), Rob John­son of INET, and many more. It’s well worth a lis­ten (it opens with about 20 sec­onds of a pro­mo for a lat­er pro­gram on a par­a­lympian):