Steve Keen's Debtwatch

Sev­er­al cor­re­spon­dents have just told me that some of Greg Manki­w’s stu­dents at Har­vard are stag­ing a walk­out from his first year class. They’ve writ­ten an open let­ter to Mankiw to explain why:

An Open Letter to Greg Mankiw

I applaud them for this move. Manki­w’s var­i­ous eco­nom­ics texts are among the most sim­plis­tic of the many neo­clas­si­cal text­books that parade this flawed par­a­digm as a flaw­less jew­el of human rea­son­ing. I’m delight­ed that his stu­dents have tak­en the rebel­lion against this par­a­digm to one of its key pro­mul­ga­tors.

The last two days have seen the lat­est month­ly data on cred­it growth in Aus­tralia from the RBA, and the lat­est quar­ter­ly data on house prices from the ABS. Togeth­er they con­firm trends that I’ve iden­ti­fied on numer­ous occa­sions between the accel­er­a­tion of mort­gage debt and the change in house prices (see Hand of Gov report on the Aus­tralian Hous­ing Bub­ble, A much more neb­u­lous con­cep­tion, The Chop­ping Block, Updat­ed Cred­it Accel­er­a­tors, House Prices and the Cred­it Impulse, This Time Had Bet­ter Be Dif­fer­ent: House Prices and the Banks Part 1 & Part 2).

In the first half of this lec­ture, I dis­cuss the econ­o­mists who influ­enced Minsky–Marx, Fish­er, Schum­peter and Keynes–as a pre­lude to out­lin­ing Min­sky’s Finan­cial Insta­bil­i­ty Hypoth­e­sis. (PPT File: Debt­watch Sub­scribers; CfE­SI Mem­bers).

In the lec­ture I inad­ver­tent­ly slan­dered Eugene McCarthy while explain­ing the McCarthy­ist “Com­mu­nist Witch Hunt” days in the USA to my stu­dents. It would have been career sui­cide for Min­sky to acknowl­edge that he had read Marx by cit­ing him in an aca­d­e­m­ic paper. I meant Joe McCarthy of course.

Hav­ing out­lined Min­sky’s Finan­cial Insta­bil­i­ty Hypoth­e­sis, I explain the math­e­mat­i­cal mod­el I devel­oped of it, on the foun­da­tion of Richard Good­win’s “Growth Cycle” mod­el of cap­i­tal­ism.  (PPT File: Debt­watch Sub­scribers; CfE­SI Mem­bers)

I’ve just had a great inter­view with a new Rus­sia Today show, Cap­i­tal Account. The pro­gram’s pro­mo is:

At the the inter­sec­tion of mar­kets, pol­i­tics and the glob­al econ­o­my is Cap­i­tal Account with Lau­ren Lyster. Broad­cast­ing live out of RT Amer­i­ca’s stu­dios in Wash­ing­ton DC, Cap­i­tal Account brings you in-depth analy­sis and dis­cus­sion of the most impor­tant finan­cial and eco­nom­ic news from a per­spec­tive you won’t find in the main­stream media.

From my expe­ri­ence in this inter­view, the pro­gram lives up to its pro­mo. For those of you with cable in the USA, Cap­i­tal Account airs week­days at 4:30pm (East­ern) on Rus­sia Today.

(guest blog) by Joe Mcivor

Moral Major­i­ty?

Back in May of this year, Austin Mack­ell wrote in The Guardian that the Arab Spring rev­o­lu­tions rep­re­sent­ed “a rebel­lion not just against local dic­ta­tors, but against the glob­al neolib­er­al pro­gramme they were imple­ment­ing with such gus­to in their coun­tries”. He cit­ed Egypt in par­tic­u­lar as an exam­ple of a nation which had tak­en IMF loans and then prompt­ly imple­ment­ed their rec­om­men­da­tions of sub­stan­tial pri­vati­sa­tion and cut­ting of ser­vices, with the usu­al dis­as­trous results for the well-being of the pop­u­la­tion. He went on to write that peo­ple in the West had so far “failed to see the peo­ple of the region as nat­ur­al allies in a com­mon strug­gle”.

This is a slight­ly longer video of the Sat­ur­day ral­ly of Occu­py Sydney–its last pub­lic event before it was shut down. It includes the Wel­come to Coun­try, the 3 MCs, and a state­ment of Occu­py Syd­ney’s objec­tives, as well as my talk–which begins 10 min­utes in to this video.

I was dis­gust­ed to learn this morn­ing that Syd­ney had joined Mel­bourne in being one of the very few cities around the world to evict the Occu­py pro­test­ers. I’m glad at least that I got a chance to speak at yes­ter­day’s ral­ly, before the police action at 5am this morn­ing.

I had hoped that Syd­ney would dis­play more sense than Mel­bourne had, but unfor­tu­nate­ly I was wrong. Aus­tralians are often quick to crit­i­cize Amer­i­can soci­ety, but at times like these one has to respect the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence:

As not­ed in the pre­vi­ous post, I’ve been invit­ed to speak at the Occu­py Syd­ney ral­ly tomor­row (from 12pm). I attend­ed last week’s ral­ly as an observ­er, when I would say about 2,000 peo­ple were in atten­dance. Below are some of the pho­tos I took of the event.

I am one of sev­er­al speak­ers tomor­row at Occu­py Syd­ney (there are a num­ber of web­sites on this top­ic; Occu­py Syd­ney; Occu­py Aus­tralia). Accord­ing to the organ­is­ers:

The event will begin at 12.00pm and will begin with a wel­come to coun­try from an indige­nous rep­re­sen­ta­tive fol­lowed by some intro­duc­tions etc from the three MC’s and then the speak­ers (in no par­tic­u­lar order). There will be five speak­ers includ­ing your­self speak­ing for ten min­utes each… There will then be two speak­ers with five min­utes each.