Steve Keen's Debtwatch

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.

On Mon­day 30 July at 7am Syd­ney time and 10PM GMT on Sun­day Steve will be par­tak­ing in an online con­fer­ence with Union Sol­i­dar­i­ty Inter­na­tion­al (USi). USi is an organ­i­sa­tion sup­port­ed by major UK and Irish trade unions that aims to build grass­roots inter­na­tion­al union sol­i­dar­i­ty using the lat­est tech­nol­o­gy.  Please vis­it their web­site for more infor­ma­tion on the event.

The Euro is the nation­al cur­ren­cy of a coun­try that does not exist. Though there is a con­ti­nent of Europe, as there is of Amer­i­ca, there has nev­er been a coun­try of the Unit­ed States of Europe, and there prob­a­bly nev­er will be.

The Euro is there­fore not a cur­ren­cy as is the Amer­i­can dol­lar, and yet it is forced to mas­quer­ade as one—badly—by the Maas­tricht Treaty, in which the coun­tries of Europe aban­doned the right to pro­duce their own gen­uine nation­al cur­ren­cies.

By David Law­son

Yesterday’s talk by RBA Gov­er­nor Glenn Stevens at the Ani­ka Foun­da­tion Lun­cheon, The Lucky Coun­try, has been well spread across the press today. While Glenn Stevens has an unde­ni­able oblig­a­tion to uphold con­fi­dence in the finan­cial sys­tem as part of the over­all econ­o­my, cred­it to him for acknowl­edg­ing the scep­tics when he said:

…we should wel­come the scep­tics. Per­haps some of their con­cerns are valid. The Reserve Bank gives a lot of thought to these issues; we cer­tain­ly do not dis­miss them. We should always be wary of the con­ven­tion­al wis­dom being too eas­i­ly accept­ed.  We should nev­er, ever, assume that ‘it couldn’t hap­pen here’.

By Philip Pilkington, a writer and journalist based in Dublin, Ireland. You can follow him on Twitter at @pilkingtonphil

Peter Switzer inter­viewed me last night on his Sky News pro­gram. We dis­cuss the Euro, why default is prefer­able to resched­ul­ing, fis­cal aus­ter­i­ty ver­sus deficit fund­ing, Nobel Prize Win­ner Prescott say­ing that the Great Depres­sion was an extend­ed hol­i­day, Aus­tralian prop­er­ty, what is a house price crash (com­par­ing Japan and the USA to Aus­tralia), how does Aus­trali­a’s hous­ing mar­ket real­ly dif­fer from the USA’s, what real­ly makes house prices rise, stock mar­ket per­for­mance in the next decade, the Cred­it Accel­er­a­tor and the ups and downs of a down-trend­ing mar­ket, the pain in Spain, and what it might lead to.

By Philip Pilkington, a writer and journalist based in Dublin, Ireland. You can follow him on Twitter at @pilkingtonphil

URPE–The Union for Rad­i­cal Polit­i­cal Economics–is hold­ing a Sum­mer School for the Occu­py move­ment, and as part of that invit­ed papers that explained the cri­sis in 1000 words or less (so that they can be print­ed on one dou­ble-sided sheet).  Here’s my effort in some­what less than 1,000 words (though with 2 fig­ures). In the inter­ests of URPE’s objec­tive in this exer­cise, here’s the PDF of this blog post for gen­er­al down­load.