Steve Keen's Debtwatch

The Kin­dle ver­sion of the sec­ond edi­tion of Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics has just been released. This ver­sion dif­fers slight­ly from the print ver­sion, in that the graph­ics that are avail­able in a sep­a­rate book­let are inte­grat­ed with the text for eas­i­er ref­er­ence on an eBook device. To pur­chase it, click on one of the links below:

Ama­zon USA

Ama­zon UK

Ama­zon Ger­many

Ama­zon France

I was an invit­ed speak­er at the Uni­ver­si­ty’s ECON2011 con­fer­ence. In my lec­ture I explained why neo­clas­si­cal DSGE mod­els are inher­ent­ly inca­pable of mod­el­ing the macro­econ­o­my, out­lined my mod­el of Min­sky’s “Finan­cial Insta­bil­i­ty Hypoth­e­sis”, and demon­strat­ed how to build a basic mod­el of a cred­it econ­o­my using QED.

The video con­cludes with a lengthy “Q&A” ses­sion where the ques­tions are main­ly in Span­ish, but my answers, of course, are in Eng­lish.

The Kin­dle ver­sion of the 2nd edi­tion of Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics will be avail­able in the next few days. So if you’d like to pur­chase the Kin­dle ver­sion of Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics II, and you can’t find it on Ama­zon, check back in a cou­ple of days and it should be there.

Update: the program was delayed by events in Egypt. It will now go to air on Thursday November 24th, and be repeated 3 times–see the News element in the side bar for times.

I was inter­viewed by BBC HARDtalk when in Lon­don last week. Though the inter­view was moti­vat­ed by the launch of Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics II last month, the inter­view focused almost entire­ly on the issue of a mod­ern debt jubilee.

HARDtalk is well-named: the ques­tions are from a “Dev­il’s Advo­cate” per­spec­tive, the ques­tion­er sets the agen­da, and it’s rather HARD to put a per­spec­tive based on a non-stan­dard analy­sis in such a sit­u­a­tion.

Rus­sia Today’s “Cap­i­tal Account” pro­gram is less than a month old, and already it’s mak­ing a mark with a pio­neer­ing approach to eco­nom­ic and finan­cial tele­vi­sion. There is a stag­ger­ing dif­fer­ence between their cov­er­age and the super­fi­cial­i­ty of eco­nom­ic cov­er­age on oth­er pro­grams in Amer­i­ca, where enter­tain­ment seems the be the empha­sis rather than analy­sis. And yet Cap­i­tal Account is enter­tain­ing as well as infor­ma­tive.

I was lucky enough to be able to drop in to the stu­dio on my cur­rent trip and record the inter­view below with the host Lau­ren Lyster. Be sure to put Cap­i­tal Account on your favorites.

When this year’s bud­get was deliv­ered, Trea­sury fore­cast that the unem­ploy­ment pic­ture for the next few years was pos­i­tive:

Aus­trali­a’s medi­um-term prospects remain strong, with the econ­o­my expect­ed to grow at an above-trend rate over the next two years, unem­ploy­ment fore­cast to fall and the bud­get still on track to return to sur­plus in 2012–13.

While the high Aus­tralian dol­lar and lega­cy effects from the glob­al finan­cial cri­sis are weigh­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly heav­i­ly on some sec­tors, the over­all growth out­look is strong.

Sus­tained high prices for our min­er­al resources under­pin record invest­ment inten­tions in the min­ing sec­tor and strong fore­cast growth in com­mod­i­ty exports.

Pow­er­point file for this lec­ture: Debt­watch Sub­scribers; CfE­SI sub­scribers

This lec­ture con­cludes my 11 lec­ture course on behav­ioral eco­nom­ics & finance and endoge­nous mon­ey. In it I give an overview of the Depres­sion we are now in, and com­pare it to that of the 1930s. I also cov­er the fail­ure of neo­clas­si­cal econ­o­mists to see this cri­sis com­ing: the remark­able thing was not that I and a hand­ful of oth­ers saw this cri­sis com­ing, but that so many neo­clas­si­cal econ­o­mists had no idea it was approach­ing. I explain why they failed to see it (by ignor­ing pri­vate debt and believ­ing in a fan­ta­sy of eco­nom­ic equi­lib­ri­um), dis­cuss the empir­i­cal dimen­sions of this cri­sis in com­par­i­son with the Great Depres­sion, and present my explic­it­ly mon­e­tary macro­eco­nom­ic mod­el.

A read­er just alert­ed me to this hilar­i­ous spoof of Manki­w’s “Ten Prin­ci­ples of Eco­nom­ics” from ear­ly 2007:

I’d give Mankiw a hard­er time than this guy does–and the open­ing joke would need to be updat­ed (for the post-eco­nom­ic cri­sis world) that macro­econ­o­mists have pre­dict­ed 9 of the last 3 booms–but it’s still a very good laugh.

The come­di­an is Yoram Bau­man, The Standup Econ­o­mist. I might check his web­site out after this.

I’ve just been sent fur­ther details of my itin­er­ary while in Dublin:

I will be trav­el­ling for the next two and a half weeks, with the fol­low­ing activ­i­ties planned:

• Argenti­na, Novem­ber 7–9. Con­tact: Alber­to Muller; amulle AT infovia.com.ar.

1. Mon­day 7, meet­ing with econ­o­mists at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Buenos Aires; time and place to be deter­mined.
2. Tues­day 8, at 7 pm, a sem­i­nar on the inter­na­tion­al cri­sis with the Insti­tu­to Argenti­no para el Desar­rol­lo Económi­co (IADE), at the Cen­tro Cul­tur­al de la Coop­eración,  on Aveni­da Cor­ri­entes; with a non simul­ta­ne­ous trans­la­tion into Span­ish by Pro­fes­sor Michel Teubal.