Steve Keen's Debtwatch

I’m read­ing and enjoy­ing some “chick-lit” at the moment–or as a review­er on Ama­zon called it, “the per­fect blend of chick-lit and bitch-lit”–entitled “How To Un-Mar­ry a Mil­lion­aire”.

Per­son­al dis­clo­sure time: the book is the first nov­el by my good friend, script-writer and film pro­duc­er Bil­lie Mor­ton. I’ve been mean­ing to read it for a while now, and it’s cur­rent­ly sup­ply­ing wel­come relief from the tedi­um of read­ing ECB min­utes as I draft my next Busi­ness Spec­ta­tor col­umn.

Please cir­cu­late wide­ly – the dead­line for appli­ca­tions is 22 Sep­tem­ber! A short term lec­tur­ing posi­tion has just been adver­tised at Kingston Uni­ver­si­ty, where I am now Head of Eco­nom­ics, Pol­i­tics and His­to­ry. This is a fixed-term post to 30 June 2015. Though the peri­od is brief, it is an oppor­tu­ni­ty to work in our very het­ero­dox-friend­ly depart­ment.

The adver­tise­ment is here:

http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AJN000/lec­tur­er-in-eco­nom­ic­s/

To apply, click here: https://ig24.i‑grasp.com/fe/tpl_kingstonuniversity01.asp?newms=jj&id=86495&aid=14193

Details on Kingston’s Polit­i­cal Econ­o­my Research group can be found here: http://fass.kingston.ac.uk/research/perg/

For more details, please get in touch with me via  steve.keen AT kingston.ac.uk.

The glob­al finan­cial cri­sis took the vast major­i­ty of the eco­nom­ics pro­fes­sion by sur­prise. Though there were indi­vid­ual main­stream econ­o­mists — such as Robert Shiller and Joseph Stiglitz — who claim to have warned of the cri­sis, no main­stream eco­nom­ic mod­el fore­saw any­thing like what even­tu­at­ed in 2007. In fact, main­stream mod­el pre­dic­tions led to politi­cians being advised to expect tran­quil eco­nom­ic con­di­tions ahead. The OECD’s advice in its June 2007 Eco­nom­ic Out­look was typ­i­cal:

If you know any UK sec­ondary school stu­dent who is con­sid­er­ing doing eco­nom­ics at Uni­ver­si­ty, please refer them to this blog post.

This Thurs­day, you’ll find out your A‑Level results. What­ev­er they are, if you are con­sid­er­ing doing an eco­nom­ics degree, then I want you to con­sid­er doing it at Kingston Uni­ver­si­ty.

At first glance, that’s some­thing you would­n’t do if you had a choice, because Kingston rates well down the list in the Guardian League Table. Why choose Kingston—which is at the bot­tom of the Guardian’s list—if, for exam­ple, your A‑level results would get you into Oxford, which is at the top?

Hey, great news! Australia’s unem­ploy­ment rate fell by 0.4 per cent last month! Did you hear?

You didn’t? That’s fun­ny. I was sure Joe would tell you.

What do you mean, it rose by 0.4 per cent? Oh, you’re talk­ing about the ABS fig­ure! Yeah, that’s bad, but if you look at what hap­pened to the Roy Mor­gan unem­ploy­ment rate, the news is real­ly good: it’s fall­en from 10.6 per cent to 10.2 per cent! If this keeps up, pret­ty soon unem­ploy­ment in Aus­tralia will be below 10 per cent!

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.

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.

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 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.

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”.