Steve Keen's Debtwatch

Three Busi­ness Spec­ta­tor read­ers con­tact­ed me direct­ly about one top­ic last week – bank mon­ey cre­ation, and how bank reserves work. Fol­low­ing an old jour­nal­ism adage that three direct enquiries about a top­ic from the pub­lic means that everybody’s inter­est­ed in it, I’m div­ing into wonkdom to answer their queries in detail here. Ignore this post if the adage isn’t true for you, but if it is and you haven’t yet had your morn­ing Java, now’s the time for that stroll to the barista.

To read the rest of this post, click here

This is the sec­ond of two con­tributed pieces by Paul Ormerod, the author of Pos­i­tive Link­ing and, as I not­ed in my last post, in my opin­ion the most effec­tive devel­op­er of mul­ti-agent mod­els of the econ­o­my.

 Did Econ­o­mists Go Mad? Net­works and the Eco­nom­ic Cri­sis

The con­duct of eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy mak­ing over the ten to fif­teen years pri­or to the finan­cial cri­sis of 2008–9 exem­pli­fies the fun­da­men­tal prob­lems of the con­ven­tion­al mind­set of eco­nom­ics. At the time, it seemed as though clever pol­i­cy mak­ers devis­ing clever rules and reg­u­la­tions to set the right incen­tives, to which eco­nom­i­cal­ly ratio­nal agents would respond appro­pri­ate­ly, had indeed solved key prob­lems of macro­eco­nom­ic man­age­ment. Eco­nom­ic growth in the West was strong and steady, and both unem­ploy­ment and infla­tion every­where remained low.

Aus­tralia and the Uni­ver­si­ty of West­ern Syd­ney have been very good to me for the last 20 years. I have been able to devel­op a unique mon­e­tary dynam­ic approach to eco­nom­ics “under the radar” out here, with the sup­port of four con­sec­u­tive Heads of School who have favored a plu­ral­ist approach to eco­nom­ics.

But it may be time for a change. Did you see the blog post I put up just this week about need­ing an Aus­tralian Indus­try Part­ner for an appli­ca­tion to the Aus­tralian Research Coun­cil for a Link­age Grant?:

Aus­tralian Indus­try Part­ner need­ed

This is the first of two guest pieces by Paul Ormerod, the author of “Pos­i­tive Link­ing” (Ama­zon USA; Ama­zon UK) and sev­er­al oth­er impor­tant books on non-equi­lib­ri­um eco­nom­ics.

Paul and I have been research col­leagues and friends for over a decade now, and I regard him as the fore­most expo­nent of mul­ti-agent and net­work eco­nom­ics today. As reg­u­lar read­ers will know, I pre­fer a “tops down” approach to eco­nom­ics over the mul­ti-agent approach, main­ly because the phe­nom­e­non of emer­gence is a sig­nif­i­cant con­cep­tu­al bar­ri­er between the “macro” sys­tems we wish to describe and the “micro” behav­iour of the indi­vid­ual enti­ties that com­prise the sys­tem. Paul has a flair for being able to devel­op mod­els that pen­e­trate that bar­ri­er suc­cess­ful­ly. I par­tic­u­lar­ly like the mod­el in this paper on com­pe­ti­tion and mar­ket struc­ture, and I use it in my own lec­tures as an exam­ple of how com­pe­ti­tion should be mod­elled by econ­o­mists, in con­trast to the Neo­clas­si­cal myths of per­fect & imper­fect com­pe­ti­tion and oli­gop­oly.

As some read­ers will know, I am devel­op­ing a dynam­ic macro­eco­nom­ic mod­el­ing tool–code-named “Minsky”–with the help of an INET Grant. The grant of US$128,000 has allowed me to hire Dr Rus­sell Stan­dish to devel­op the pro­gram. Rus­sell is a long-time research col­lab­o­ra­tor of mine who was the Direc­tor of UNSW’s High Per­for­mance Com­put­ing Cen­tre before it was dis­con­tin­ued. He is now a vis­it­ing Pro­fes­sor of Math­e­mat­ics at UNSW and a free­lance pro­gram­mer spe­cial­is­ing in high-per­for­mance numer­i­cal pro­gram­ming.

This grant has pur­chased rough­ly 1,000 hours of Rus­sel­l’s time, and with about half that grant expend­ed, we now have a func­tion­al if very ear­ly pro­to­type of the pro­gram which can be down­loaded from here on our Source­forge site.

When­ev­er I fear that my well of inspi­ra­tion for this blog might run dry, my neo­clas­si­cal mates rush to the res­cue with some price­less pearl of wis­dom that sim­ply demands a rejoin­der. They are the Abbotts to my Costel­lo (and I’m not talk­ing Aus­tralian pol­i­tics here – though the Tony and Julia show reached tru­ly great heights with Gillard’s recent bril­liant ora­to­ry on misog­y­ny).

Today’s help­ing hand was a com­ment from French econ­o­mist Olivi­er Blan­chard. He qual­i­fies as a ser­i­al offend­er on the com­ic state­ments front, since when wear­ing the hat of found­ing edi­tor of the Amer­i­can Eco­nom­ic Review: Macro­eco­nom­ics, he uttered the now immor­tal line that “the state of macro [eco­nom­ic the­o­ry] is good” – one year and six days after the finan­cial cri­sis began.

He was the chief econ­o­mist for the IMF pri­or to that gig, and he sub­se­quent­ly returned to the IMF, where he now has the curi­ous title of “eco­nom­ic coun­sel­lor” (now there’s anoth­er poten­tial gag, but I digress).
While deliv­er­ing the bale­ful news in the lat­est IMF World Eco­nom­ic Out­look that the glob­al econ­o­my is slow­ing, Olivi­er not­ed that:

“In most coun­tries, fis­cal con­sol­i­da­tion is pro­ceed­ing accord­ing to plan.”

“Accord­ing to plan?” Well, yes, if the plan is to inspire the rise of fas­cist dic­ta­tor­ships in south­ern Europe, I sup­pose you could say that.

The site has had a cas­cade of prob­lems, com­menc­ing with us exceed­ing the server’s size lim­its, and end­ing with our ISP shut­ting the site down because they inter­pret­ed our attempts to move giga­bytes of mate­r­i­al off-line as sus­pi­cious!

We were final­ly allowed back up today, and are now mov­ing the site to a dif­fer­ent ISP.

There may be some fur­ther dis­rup­tions in this process, but it will be worth it.

I am sor­ry that the site has been down for so long, but with no sup­port staff to look after these things and no time to do it myself (let alone exper­tise!), I have had to wait until vol­un­teers were able to sort out the prob­lems.

By Philip Soos

The Con­ver­sa­tion

Few Aus­tralian hous­ing poli­cies are more con­tentious than neg­a­tive gear­ing.

Despite the pub­lic­i­ty it has received and its pop­u­lar­i­ty with gov­ern­ment and prop­er­ty investors, lit­tle analy­sis of neg­a­tive gear­ing can be found with­in easy reach, with much of it acces­si­ble only in aca­d­e­m­ic jour­nals. Only an occa­sion­al frag­ment is found in the main­stream media.

I had hoped to post this on the day of my pre­sen­ta­tion to UMKC, but the site fell over that day and it has tak­en vol­un­teers sev­er­al days to sort out the prob­lems. I had to buy addi­tion­al stor­age space on the serv­er, and large sys­tem logs had to be delet­ed. These are some of the issues that have moti­vat­ed the devel­op­ment of Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics as a sub­scrip­tion site: with pro­fes­sion­al staff sup­port, this prob­lem would nev­er have occurred; with­out them, and with me being too busy to do the work myself, it’s result­ed in the site being down for about 4 days.

Irv­ing Fish­er (1867–1947) was a neo­clas­si­cal econ­o­mist. I say “was” not mere­ly because he is dead, but also because he emphat­i­cal­ly reject­ed the neo­clas­si­cal approach after his “Near Death Expe­ri­ence” dur­ing the Great Depres­sion.

Fish­er was worth over $US100 mil­lion in today’s mon­ey when The Great Crash began. Unlike most econ­o­mists, he was also an inven­tor, and he invent­ed a pre­de­ces­sor of the Rolodex – the iPad of its day. He sold his inven­tion to the pre­de­ces­sor of Unisys in return for shares and a seat on the board – and like so many oth­ers back then, lev­ered his wealth by buy­ing shares on mar­gin.