Steve Keen's Debtwatch

Chi­na’s sec­ond stock mar­ket crash will be its first ful­ly fledged eco­nom­ic cri­sis

Chi­na has achieved a remark­able trans­for­ma­tion in the last 30 years—something that you can only ful­ly appre­ci­ate if, like me, you vis­it­ed Chi­na before that trans­for­ma­tion began. In 1981/82, I took a group of Aus­tralian jour­nal­ists on a tour of Chi­na on behalf of the Aus­tralia-Chi­na Coun­cil. The key pur­pose was to take part in a sem­i­nar with Chi­nese jour­nal­ists under the aus­pices of the “All-Chi­na Jour­nal­ists Asso­ci­a­tion”. Giv­en the unfor­tu­nate acronym by our Chi­nese hosts of SAPS—for the “Sino-Aus­tralian Press Seminar”—it was the first sem­i­nar between Chi­nese jour­nal­ists and those of any oth­er nation.

For the next two days, I’m tak­ing part in a pecu­liar­ly British insti­tu­tion (and I’m start­ing to real­ize just how many pecu­liar British insti­tu­tions there are) called “Clear­ing”. This is where Uni­ver­si­ties towards the bot­tom of the sta­tus peck­ing order here in the UK offer places to stu­dents who didn’t get good enough marks to get into Uni­ver­si­ties towards the top of the peck­ing order.

I’ve just put A$10,000 of my own mon­ey towards improv­ing Min­sky, the Open Source pro­gram I have designed to enable econ­o­mists to cre­ate dynam­ic and mon­e­tary mod­els of the econ­o­my. If you sup­port the work I’m doing to help eco­nom­ics escape its 19th cen­tu­ry equi­lib­ri­um fetish, please con­sid­er also mak­ing a dona­tion to Min­sky’s devel­op­ment via Dr Rus­sell Stan­dish’s Pay­Pal account (or via direct deb­it, using the account details you’ll find below):

The great poly­math and human­i­tar­i­an Hugh Stret­ton died this week­end. I can do no bet­ter than to repro­duce anoth­er great Aus­tralian’s trib­ute to him.

The fol­low­ing is from Geoff Har­court.

Hugh died last Sat­ur­day at the age of 91 after a long ill­ness. I had known him since 1958 when I first came to Ade­laide where he was the much-admired Pro­fes­sor of His­to­ry. In lat­er years we became firm friends, though I con­tin­ued to regard him with awe and admi­ra­tion. He was a giant intel­lect, eas­i­ly Australia’s most deep and pro­gres­sive thinker, and a remark­ably kind and humane man who lived up to his ideals in many prac­ti­cal ways.

Rene­gade Inc., the media group that pro­duced the Four Horse­men doc­u­men­tary about the finan­cial cri­sis, is run­ning a Kick­starter Cam­paign to raise US$45,000 to under­write its next doc­u­men­tary.

Click here to go to Kick­starter and donate.

The Four Horse­men doc­u­men­tary has been an inde­pen­dent media suc­cess, with over three mil­lion views on YouTube. It has also shown at more than three hun­dred Q and A ses­sions in sev­en­teen coun­tries. Ross and Megan Ashcroft, the prin­ci­pals of Rene­gade Inc., want to pro­duce a doc­u­men­tary for the post-crisis–or rather per­ma­nent crisis–world in which we now live. They also plan to fol­low this up with an inde­pen­dent media plat­form, to give the pub­lic some­thing oth­er than the super­fi­cial pap that dom­i­nates the media cov­er­age of eco­nom­ics, pol­i­tics and cul­ture today.

This is the talk I gave at the FT/Alphaville con­fer­ence in Lon­don last week. A num­ber of peo­ple asked me to send the PPT to them, and I got buried in oth­er work and the emails are long lost in my Gmail queue. So if you’d like to down­load the pre­sen­ta­tion file, please click here. My apolo­gies to those cor­re­spon­dents to whom I haven’t replied direct­ly.

To run the Min­sky mod­el, down­load Min­sky from here and install it.

After yes­ter­day’s remark­able vic­to­ry in the Ref­er­en­dum, I was inter­viewed on the BBC News Chan­nel. Some­one has post­ed a record­ing from the BBC News Chan­nel stream on YouTube.

The Greek ref­er­en­dum has deliv­ered a stun­ning vic­to­ry for Syriza and its anti-aus­ter­i­ty mes­sage. Despite the banks being closed as a result of the ECB lim­it­ing its pro­vi­sion of ban­knotes, and despite a unit­ed cho­rus of Euro­pean lead­ers warn­ing of dire con­se­quences if the No vote suc­ceed­ed, the Greeks have vot­ed No in over­whelm­ing num­bers. The final result looks like­ly to be a 62% No to 38% Yes rejec­tion of the Troika’s terms. Syriza now has over­whelm­ing sup­port from the Greek peo­ple to oppose the Troi­ka (a result that opin­ion polls got com­plete­ly wrong).

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I was inter­viewed on the BBC News Chan­nel on Tues­day about the Greek cri­sis (see below) and I will be part of a CNBC pan­el “Squawk Box Spe­cial – Greece Decides” dis­cussing the ref­er­en­dum results live as they roll in, from 8.30–9pm Lon­don time on Sun­day.

There is an adage in pol­i­tics that you should nev­er put any­thing to the vote unless you are sure of the out­come before­hand. On that front, the ref­er­en­dum Greeks will vote in this Sun­day is a mis­take, because the vote could go either way. If the major­i­ty votes No, as Syriza hopes, then it—hopefully—will strength­en its hand in future nego­ti­a­tions with the Troi­ka. But if the major­i­ty votes Yes, then Syriza will have to capit­u­late to the Troi­ka and accept its unbend­ing pol­i­cy of aus­ter­i­ty.

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