I’ve just uploaded the first 8 lec­tures in my Behav­ioral Finance class for 2012. The first few lec­tures are very sim­i­lar to last year’s, but the con­tent changes sub­stan­tial­ly by about lec­ture 5 when I start to focus more on Schum­peter’s approach to endoge­nous mon­ey.

I don’t have time to write an out­line of the con­tent of these lec­tures here–maybe at the end of the year. For now, here are the videos.

Lecture 1: Individual Behavior

Lecture 2: Market Demand and Supply

Lecture 3: Finance Markets Theory

This is the pre­sen­ta­tion I gave today at the Amer­i­can Mon­e­tary Insti­tute 2012 annu­al con­fer­ence in Chica­go.

Pre­sen­ta­tions were also giv­en by Michael Kumhof of the IMF, who has incor­po­rat­ed endoge­nous mon­ey into a Neo­clas­si­cal DSGE frame­work (a world first), Kaoru Yam­aguchi with an endoge­nous mon­ey ver­sion of his Ven­sim dynam­ic mod­el of an econ­o­my, and Michael Hud­son pre­sent­ing a paper based on “The Bub­ble and Beyond” and a joint paper he’s work­ing on with Dirk Beze­mer and me.

If you are inter­est­ed in more dis­cus­sions about this and sim­i­lar sub­jects, check out my site, Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics here. SK

I’m off to the USA on Thurs­day for two con­fer­ences:

• The Amer­i­can Mon­e­tary Insti­tute con­fer­ence in Chica­go on Sept. 20–23; and
• The Post Key­ne­sian con­fer­ence at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mis­souri Kansas City on Sep­tem­ber 27–29

The lat­ter will re-unite the par­tic­i­pants at the Fields Insti­tute MMT-MCT sem­i­nar held in Toron­to  on July 3rd this year: myself, Stephanie Kel­ton, Scott Full­wiler, Michael Hud­son, Steve Keen, Matheus Gras­sel­li and Nathan Cedric Tankus.

I start­ed this post sim­ply because Nathan has been at me for ages to post the pho­tos, and then I real­ized that, though I had put the videos up on Youtube, I had­n’t made a spe­cif­ic post here.

I men­tioned Wynne God­ley’s pre­scient obser­va­tions about the Euro back in 1992 in a debate on the Mind Your Busi­ness pro­gram on Ire­land’s RTE Radio 1 about half an hour ago. God­ley’s remarks–no doubt seen as extrem­ist when he uttered them–have proven to be utter­ly prophet­ic:

As recent­ly as May 2011, the Aus­tralian Bud­get State­ment fore­cast only a grad­ual decline in iron ore prices. “The terms of trade are fore­cast to increase 19¼ per cent in 2010-11, under­pinned by strong increas­es in the prices of Australia’s key non-rur­al com­mod­i­ty exports, before declin­ing grad­u­al­ly over 2011-12 and 2012–13 as increas­ing glob­al com­mod­i­ty sup­ply starts to match growth in demand,” it said.

As is not news to any­one today, the decline in Australia’s terms of trade in the first three months of finan­cial year 2012–13 has been any­thing but grad­ual: it has fall­en five times as much in three months as Trea­sury expect­ed to hap­pen over the entire year.

I’m being inter­viewed about the Fed­er­al Reserve’s QE3 announce­ment today on BBC Radio:

6.15AM GMT on BBC Radio 4 BBC Busi­ness Dai­ly LIVE
8.32AM GMT on BBC World Ser­vice

If you’re not in the UK, you can lis­ten online:

BBC Radio 4 LIVE

BBC World Ser­vice

This is prob­a­bly the most detailed sem­i­nar I have giv­en on my views on mon­e­tary macro­eco­nom­ics. I begin with the data that, back in Decem­ber 2005, led me to expect that a huge eco­nom­ic cri­sis was immi­nent: the ratio of pri­vate debt to GDP. Then I explain why this ratio mat­ters, in con­trast to the argu­ments that Neo­clas­si­cal econ­o­mists put that only the dis­tri­b­u­tion of debt mat­ters. This takes me through the empir­i­cal data, the the­o­ries of Schum­peter and Min­sky, and the math­e­mat­ics need­ed to prove that “aggre­gate demand equals income plus the change in debt” is cor­rect, and that this does not involve dou­ble-count­ing.

The Syd­ney Morn­ing Her­ald has a deal for aca­d­e­mics and stu­dents right now that lets aca­d­e­mics pur­chase a year’s sub­scrip­tion for $60 for dig­i­tal and print (deliv­ered on cam­pus) and $40 for dig­i­tal alone.

I think that’s excel­lent val­ue, and I’ve signed up (to the digital–no sense wast­ing the trees). I’d urge oth­er aca­d­e­mics and stu­dents to do like­wise, for sev­er­al rea­sons:

• The val­ue alone. $60 for a year’news­pa­pers is cheap! I’m also pay­ing  $8 a week for the New York Times (dig­i­tal only). That is at the lev­el where I might con­sid­er de-sub­scrib­ing, and putting up with their lim­it of ten free reads a week;

The “From Alpha to Omega” pod­cast record­ed the fol­low­ing inter­view with me about the “Mod­ern Debt Jubilee”. We dis­cuss a lot more than just that–starting with why peo­ple who are inter­est­ed in Hyman Min­sky’s work should NOT read Sta­bi­liz­ing an Unsta­ble Econ­o­my, but should instead start with either John May­nard Keynes or Can “It” Hap­pen Again?

Amer­i­cans aren’t known for irony or sur­re­al­ism, but one of the endur­ing­ly sur­re­al and iron­ic pop songs is The Eagles’“Hotel Cal­i­for­nia”. Writ­ten as a satire of Amer­i­can excess, its lyrics bear an uncan­ny resem­blance to the trap the nations of Europe now find them­selves in – espe­cial­ly its final stan­za:

Last thing I remem­ber, I was
Run­ning for the door
I had to find the pas­sage back
To the place I was before
“Relax,” said the night man,
“We are pro­grammed to receive.
You can check-out any time you like,
But you can nev­er leave!”

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