Lars Schall is a free­lance finan­cial jour­nal­ist in the indus­tri­al heart­land of Ger­many, the Ruhr Area, who focus­es on oil, pre­cious met­als and the mon­e­tary sys­tem. Lars inter­viewed me sev­er­al weeks ago for his pod­cast; click here for the MP3 file, or lis­ten to the link below.

Steve Keen’s Debt­watch Pod­cast

Lars’s overview of the inter­view is avail­able here.

My paper “Insta­bil­i­ty in Finan­cial Mar­kets: Sources and Reme­dies” for the INET con­fer­ence “Par­a­digm Lost: Rethink­ing Eco­nom­ics and Pol­i­tics”, to be held in Berlin on April 12–14, is now avail­able via the INET web­site.

If you’d like to down­load it, you can get it either from my INET page, or from a link on the con­fer­ence pro­gram. For copy­right rea­sons I can’t repro­duce it here, but I can pro­vide a quick syn­op­sis and some excerpts, so here goes.

One of the many great ironies of Amer­i­can cul­ture is that a soci­ety which lauds cap­i­tal­ism is also home to the fan­ta­sy of the self­less Super­Hero: enti­ties rang­ing from an ordi­nary but wealthy human (Bat­man) to an extra­or­di­nary but poor Extra-Ter­res­tri­al (Super­man), who spend their days sav­ing us mere mor­tals, for no obvi­ous rec­om­pense.

Well bol­locks to all that! Meet “Super Cor­po­rate Heroes”—super­heroes who are more in line with the actu­al Amer­i­can Way. These super­heroes are employed by a For­tune 500 com­pa­ny, charge for their services—“if you wan­na get res­cued, you got­ta pay insurance”—and live lifestyles rang­ing from opu­lent to the top billers, to just above the bread­line for the only slight­ly super amongst them.

These are the first two lec­tures of my Advanced Polit­i­cal Econ­o­my class at the Uni­ver­si­ty of West­ern Syd­ney. The class offers an in depth cri­tique of the fail­ures of neo­clas­si­cal the­o­ries, as well as detail­ing my approach to a new eco­nom­ics. Click on the links to down­load the Pow­er­point slides for the lec­tures.

Lec­ture 01: Part 1 — Intro­duc­tion to subject/Failure of Neo­clas­si­cal Macro

APE2012Lecture01A

APE2012Lecture01B

APE2012Lecture01C

Lec­ture 02: Fail­ure of Neo­clas­si­cal Macro (Demand and Sup­ply)

APE2012Lecture02A

APE2012Lecture02B

I’m being inter­viewed by Paul Mason for the BBC Radio 4 pro­gram Analy­sis on April 3^rd, in front of an audi­ence at the Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics from 6.30–8pm. If you’d like to attend, you can book a place via this link (“Banks vs the Econ­o­my”). Book­ings are free but essen­tial, and will open on Mon­day March 26^th at 10pm. More details are avail­able for the pub­lic from events@lse.ac.uk; email pressoffice@lse.ac.uk for media enquiries.

The LSE asked me to write this entry for their blog British Pol­i­tics and Pol­i­cy at LSE. It’s repro­duced here (along with the data) for Debt­watch read­ers.

Come­di­an-activist Mark Thomas hosts The Man­i­festo on BBC Radio 4, in which he and his stu­dio audi­ence con­sid­er pro­pos­als for a Peo­ple’s Man­i­festo on top­ics rang­ing from the sub­lime to the ridicu­lous. Some­where in the mid­dle, there’s seri­ous stuff with a comedic twist, and in the lat­est pro­gram, my “Mod­ern Debt Jubilee” got a guernsey.

It did­n’t win the Shout, so a pro­pos­al to elim­i­nate tax avoid­ance got up instead, but it’s nice to see that the idea is get­ting into the pub­lic domain.

You can lis­ten to the whole show here (though the link will expire in 5 days), or click on the movie below.

RP Data has just released a dai­ly index of Aus­tralian house prices which is designed to be trade­able on the ASX. I expressed my scep­ti­cism about this prod­uct on PM last night (the audio is below; the tran­script is avail­able here).

Steve Keen’s Debt­watch Pod­cast

The many hedge funds that have been look­ing for a way to short the Aus­tralian prop­er­ty mar­ket now have a vehi­cle. Of course, I would sug­gest care­ful assess­ment of the counter-par­ty risk before tak­ing advan­tage of it!

Cap­i­tal Account is one of my two favorite finan­cial pro­grams (the oth­er is Max Keis­er’s The Kaiser Report). The show is as slick as any show on the major net­works, yet its pre­sen­ter Lau­ren Lyster and Exec­u­tive Pro­duc­er Demetri Kofi­nas are lit­er­al­ly “on the mon­ey” about the finan­cial system–in stark con­trast to the waf­fle that pass­es for analy­sis on CNN or FOX. If you want con­tent as well as glitz, watch Cap­i­tal Account.

Today, Lau­ren and Demetri raised the issue of the pos­si­ble polit­i­cal fall­out from the aus­ter­i­ty pro­grams being imposed on the periph­er­al coun­tries of Europe, under the nov­el head­ing of  “From Zom­bie Bank­ing to Zom­bie Gov­ern­ment”.

By Sal­va­tore Babones

Sal­va­tore Babones (@sbabones) is a senior lec­tur­er in soci­ol­o­gy & social pol­i­cy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Syd­ney and an asso­ciate fel­low at the Insti­tute for Pol­i­cy Stud­ies (IPS).  You can find more of his com­men­tary on the US econ­o­my at http://salvatorebabones.com.

The Amer­i­can econ­o­my has done well over the past forty years.  Amer­i­ca’s nation­al income per per­son has almost exact­ly dou­bled since 1970.^[1]  The Unit­ed States has been the rich­est major coun­try in the world for over 100 years now, and it remains the rich­est major coun­try in the world today.^[2]  The Amer­i­can econ­o­my in 2010 gen­er­at­ed $47,436 for every man, woman, and child liv­ing in the coun­try.^[3]  On cur­rent pro­jec­tions, this fig­ure will rise by a fur­ther $1000 per year for the next sev­er­al years.^[4]

Nicole Foss, the sys­tems ana­lyst and biol­o­gist behind the blog Auto­mat­ic Earth, is speak­ing tomor­row at A Com­pass for Tur­bu­lent Times, organ­ised by Ceres.

I’m on the bill too, which I’m told will pro­ceed rough­ly as fol­lows:

9–11 Nicole (inc Qs)
11–30 Morn­ing tea
11.30 — 12.30 Steve (inc Qs) — focus on aust con­text
12.30 — 1.30pm Lunch
1–30 — 2pm Oppor­tu­ni­ty for fur­ther Qs to both
2pm — 3.30 — Work­shop ses­sion — small­er groups come up with
hypo­thet­i­cal scenarios/strategies (30mins) to put back to Nicole/Steve
for response / dis­cus­sion (1hr).