This is just a heads up to the 12,675 reg­is­tered users on this site that you are about to receive an email from me ask­ing for your res­i­den­tal address.

This is intend­ed just for the frac­tion of indi­vid­u­als who have reg­is­tered at or upgrad­ed to a mem­ber­ship lev­el that enti­tles them to an eBook or hard­copy ver­sion of the sec­ond edi­tion of Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics, which will be launched and avail­able on Octo­ber 4th (in the UK–its avail­abil­i­ty in oth­er coun­tries depends on ship­ping times). How­ev­er there is no way for me to select just that sub­set for emails from with­in Word­Press (if any Word­Press guru knows oth­er­wise, please tell me how!), so all of you will receive the request (assum­ing that the plu­g­in works as adver­tised).

I’ll be in New York very briefly (while en route to the launch for Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics II in Lon­don), on Fri­day Sep­tem­ber 23rd.

A blog mem­ber, Robert K, has kind­ly vol­un­teered to coor­di­nate a talk, if there are suf­fi­cient peo­ple inter­est­ed in attend­ing.

If you’ll be in New York that day and you’d like to attend a talk by me–probably a rehearsal of the talk I’ll give when launch­ing Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics II, but I’m open to oth­er sug­gest­ed top­ics as well–then please let Robert know via his email, which in spam-lim­it­ing form is:

amy­daykahn “AT” comcast.net

Debt­watch has been oper­at­ing since March 2007, and in that time it has grown from a sim­ple means to get my month­ly newslet­ter out into a major alter­na­tive eco­nom­ics web­site.

The work­load to main­tain the site has become enor­mous: I have to write posts, admin­is­ter this site, par­tic­i­pate in its active dis­cus­sions (and keep them civ­il), all on top of my “day job” as a Pro­fes­sor of Eco­nom­ics and Finance at the Uni­ver­si­ty of West­ern Syd­ney. And I have to con­tin­ue devel­op­ing the research that made Debt­watch pos­si­ble in the first place: my efforts since 1997 to turn Min­sky’s Finan­cial Insta­bil­i­ty Hypoth­e­sis into a ful­ly fledged macro­eco­nom­ic mod­el, as an alter­na­tive to the var­i­ous delu­sion­al Neo­clas­si­cal mod­els that have dom­i­nat­ed eco­nom­ics ever since John Hicks penned his utter­ly mis­lead­ing car­i­ca­ture of Key­nes’s Gen­er­al The­o­ry back in 1936.

I like the Easel theme I’m cur­rent­ly using here, devel­oped by Frumph, but I want to intro­duce adver­tis­ing here now, and for that the s2Member theme I’m using for CfE­SI is supe­ri­or. So the appear­ance is about to change. My apolo­gies to those who like the cur­rent lay­out.

I was high­ly crit­i­cal of Paul Krug­man’s recent aca­d­e­m­ic paper on the finan­cial cri­sis, because it argued, on neo­clas­si­cal a pri­ori grounds, that:

Ignor­ing the for­eign com­po­nent, or look­ing at the world as a whole, the over­all lev­el of debt makes no dif­fer­ence to aggre­gate net worth — one per­son­’s lia­bil­i­ty is anoth­er per­son­’s asset. (p. 3)

Giv­en that crit­i­cism, I feel oblig­ed to point out that in his recent com­ment on Rick Per­ry’s nom­i­na­tion for the Pres­i­den­cy, “The Texas Unmir­a­cle”, Krug­man makes a very sen­si­ble obser­va­tion about the impor­tance of “the over­all lev­el of debt” that con­tra­dicts the assump­tion he made in that paper. Observ­ing that Tex­as­’s alleged­ly bet­ter per­for­mance on employ­ment growth is due main­ly to “cheap labor”, Krug­man com­ments that:

The USA’s West­ern Eco­nom­ic Asso­ci­a­tion Inter­na­tion­al holds a Pacif­ic Rim con­fer­ence every two years, and this year the host was the Queens­land Uni­ver­si­ty of Tech­nol­o­gy in Bris­bane, Aus­tralia.

I spoke in two ses­sions on what Amer­i­cans call “The Great Reces­sion” and Aus­tralians calls the “GFC”–the Glob­al Finan­cial Cri­sis. The first ses­sion had two oth­er papers of inter­est to read­ers of this blog: a paper on house prices by Jakob Mad­sen, one of the “Beze­mer Twelve” who pre­dict­ed and warned of the impend­ing cri­sis, and anoth­er on the dan­gers inher­ent in Aus­trali­a’s high lev­el of for­eign debt by QUT’s Mark McGov­ern.

As usu­al, I’ll be putting an argu­ment that is con­trary to pop­u­lar opin­ion on the need for more com­pe­ti­tion I the bank­ing sec­tor. So to clar­i­fy the issue, here’s a quick poll: who thinks that Aus­tralia does­n’t have enough debt?

Nobody? OK, now let’s dis­cuss the “need” for more com­pe­ti­tion in the bank­ing sec­tor.

The rag­ing debate is miss­ing the point–Hockey and the Coali­tion are right to go after the banks, but they’ve made a mis­take in sug­gest­ing that the sec­tor’s ills would be cured by more com­pe­ti­tion. In fact, we allowed too much com­pe­ti­tion in the 1980s, and again in the 1990s. The out­come, both times, was too much debt—firstly for busi­ness­es, and then for house­holds. That’s the sec­tor’s real prob­lem, and adding a third dose of com­pe­ti­tion won’t fix it.

My recent post “What Bernanke does­n’t under­stand about defla­tion” has hit a chord, with a num­ber of sites around the world repro­duc­ing it—including John Mauld­in’s Out­side the Box col­umn. But it has raised a cou­ple of queries in peo­ple’s minds too:

1. Does my def­i­n­i­tion that “aggre­gate demand equals GDP plus the change in debt” involve dou­ble-count­ing?
2. My fig­ures for the USA are dif­fi­cult to rec­on­cile with the pub­lished US Flow of Funds data.

The blog now has over 5000 mem­bers, and about 40 of them crowd­ed into a small room in the Flat­Iron dis­trict of New York to hear me give a talk on debt-defla­tion. Since I had the lux­u­ry of more time than you get at an aca­d­e­m­ic con­fer­ence, and an engag­ing and intel­li­gent audi­ence, I gave a lot more detail on my mod­el­ling approach. The ques­tions were also superb, and would have con­tin­ued for much longer if I had­n’t called quits at an oppor­tune point (the whole caboo­dle of pre­sen­ta­tion and dis­cus­sion is almost 70 min­utes long). My answers come through loud and clear on this video; I just hope that the ques­tions them­selves can be heard by bet­ter ears than mine!