Steve Keen's Debtwatch

By Thomas Palley

Last Fri­day 3^rd August, Dr. Matheus Gras­sel­li from the Fields Insti­tute in Toron­to Cana­da presents an in depth talk on the math­e­mat­i­cal foun­da­tions of the Keen-Min­sky Mod­el on finan­cial insta­bil­i­ty. Steve spent 6 weeks with Matheus at the Fields Insti­tute over June and July, with an inten­sive research agen­da to progress the math­e­mat­i­cal log­ic behind Min­sky.  The event was held at UWS. Unfor­tu­nate­ly the audi­ence ques­tions are dif­fi­cult to hear with micro­phone set­up that was used, and there is a small break in the footage at 12 min­utes and 18 sec­onds in.

Click here to view Matheus’s research paper.

On this day 5 years ago, the glob­al eco­nom­ic cri­sis began. The trig­ger was the deci­sion by BNP to sus­pend redemp­tions from funds that were linked to the US hous­ing mar­ket. Those of us who had been expect­ing a debt-defla­tion­ary cri­sis
and warn­ing about it
for some time (see also here and here) could nev­er have picked the trig­ger itself—that would have been prophe­cy, not prediction—but very rapid­ly it was clear that this was it.

(Click here for this post in PDF)

Fig­ure 1

The site “Home­Loan­Find­er” has pub­lished an amus­ing set of pro­files of com­men­ta­tors on the Aus­tralian prop­er­ty mar­ket, includ­ing yours tru­ly. As well as pro­vid­ing some cute car­i­ca­tures, it gives con­tact details for us all.

By Thomas I. Pal­ley

Steve did an inter­view with the Finance News Net­work that was released yes­ter­day. Lelde Smits hosts the inter­view and asks why Steve Keen refus­es to back down.

Below is the video from the online con­fer­ence with Union Sol­i­dar­i­ty Inter­na­tion­al (USi) held on Mon­day 30th July. USi is an organ­i­sa­tion sup­port­ed by major UK and Irish trade unions that aims to build grass­roots inter­na­tion­al union sol­i­dar­i­ty using the lat­est tech­nol­o­gy.

Accord­ing to the ABS series, house prices rose 0.5% in nom­i­nal terms in the June quar­ter, and were flat in real terms.

Thomas I. Pal­ley

Senior Eco­nom­ic Pol­i­cy Advi­sor, AFL-CIO

The Fed­er­al Reserve has now open­ly adopt­ed a two per­cent infla­tion tar­get, with both Chair­man Bernanke and the Fed­er­al Open Mar­ket Com­mit­tee pub­licly com­mit­ting to hold­ing infla­tion at that lev­el. Though not a prob­lem today, this two per­cent tar­get rep­re­sents a pol­i­cy trap that will under­cut the pos­si­bil­i­ty of future wage increas­es despite on-going pro­duc­tiv­i­ty growth.  That promis­es to aggra­vate exist­ing prob­lems of income inequal­i­ty and demand short­age.

Finan­cial Self-Defense Dur­ing a Delever­ag­ing Cycle

By Paul Valle­jo

It is always use­ful to read out­side-of-the-box thinkers. It is a well known max­im in the invest­ing world that “you can­not make mon­ey off of what every­one knows,” as mar­ket prices have already react­ed to what every­one knows.  This makes the field of per­son­al finance some­thing par­tic­u­lar­ly dan­ger­ous to be over­ly reliant on wide­ly held “expert” advice.