Steve Keen's Debtwatch

Click here for this post in PDF: Debt­watch mem­bers; CfE­SI mem­bers
Click here for the data in this post: Debt­watch mem­bers; CfE­SI mem­bers

The most recent ABS data implies that unem­ploy­ment is falling, and that those who saw the econ­o­my as either sta­ble or boom­ing were right. Both the sea­son­al­ly adjust­ed and the trend esti­mates fell, and the sea­son­al­ly adjust­ed unem­ploy­ment is now 0.2% below the peak it reached in August 2011 of 5.3%. This looks good—though not as good as con­ven­tion­al Neo­clas­si­cal fore­cast­ers were expect­ing a year ago: in the 2011-12 bud­get, the Trea­sury, using its TRYM mod­el, pre­dict­ed a smooth fall in unem­ploy­ment from 5% in June 2010 to 4.75% in June 2011 and 4.5% in June 2012.

Busi­ness Review Week­ly has just pub­lished a pro­file on me and my debt-based macro­eco­nom­ics, on pages 24–25 of the cur­rent issue (Feb­ru­ary 16–22 2012):

Keen to be heard

The author Nick Gard­ner has done a very good job of explain­ing why the change in pri­vate debt mat­ters. I’d have to con­cede that his brief expla­na­tion using the actu­al GDP and change in debt fig­ures for the USA is a lot clear­er than most of my chart-laden posts.

Click here for this post in PDF: Debt­watch Mem­bers; CfE­SI Mem­bers
Click here for the eco­nom­ic data in this post: Debt­watch Mem­bers; CfE­SI Mem­bers
Click here for the house price index data in this post: Debt­watch Mem­bers; CfE­SI Mem­bers

The RBA’s deci­sion not to reduce rates this month caught most pun­dits by surprise—including me. Giv­en the inter­na­tion­al and local data, I thought they’d err on the side of cau­tion and cut rates.

You can’t go past the Google team for an intel­li­gent and engag­ing audi­ence. I spoke there 2 years ago to an audi­ence of about 100, and a sim­i­lar sized group turned up yes­ter­day. There were some quite chal­leng­ing ques­tions on my views about the cur­rent state of the world econ­o­my, so the talk went well over the allot­ted hour

Below is the video of the talk; the sound qual­i­ty is a bit poor (I rec­om­mend using ear­phones to lis­ten to it), but there is also an audio record­ing below that may be eas­i­er to under­stand. If there are enough com­plaints(!), we’ll blend the sep­a­rate­ly record­ed audio with the video.

John T. Har­vey is Pro­fes­sor of Eco­nom­ics at Texas Chris­t­ian Uni­ver­si­ty and a lead­ing non-neo­clas­si­cal econ­o­mist. He is doing his bit to raise aware­ness of alter­na­tive approach­es to eco­nom­ics via a blog that is pub­lished by Forbes Mag­a­zine. John explains his moti­va­tion for estab­lish­ing this blog as fol­lows:

Click here for this post in PDF: Debt­watch Mem­bers; CfE­SI Mem­bers
Click here for the data in this post: Debt­watch Mem­bers; CfE­SI Mem­bers

The ABS house price data for Decem­ber 2011 has just been released, and it shows that house prices fell 4.8% in nom­i­nal terms between Decem­ber 2010 and Decem­ber 2011. The usu­al sus­pects are already try­ing to see this as mark­ing the bot­tom, while “just the facts, ma’am” report­ing sim­ply empha­sis­es the scale of the down­turn. A cou­ple of media out­lets have asked my views on the next cal­en­dar year, so here they are–along with some his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive on the house price bub­ble.

I would like to take this oppor­tu­ni­ty to intro­duce myself to the Debt­watch and CfE­SI com­mu­ni­ty. My name is David Law­son, and I will be com­ing on board as the Direc­tor of the Cen­tre for Eco­nom­ic Sta­bil­i­ty Incor­po­rat­ed (CfE­SI) as of the 1st of Feb­ru­ary. I have been an active com­mit­tee mem­ber of CfE­SI since its estab­lish­ment in March 2010.

The key objec­tive of this posi­tion is to free up Steve’s time so that he can focus on his research. As one of my pri­ma­ry func­tions, I will take over com­mu­ni­ca­tions with the Debt­watch blog and CfE­SI web­site. Mat­ters that require a research input will of course still be dealt with direct­ly by Steve him­self.

Syd­ney, Buenos Aires, Wash­ing­ton, Tra­verse City, New York, Lon­don… Spot the odd one out.

Tra­verse City is in Michi­gan, and for the sec­ond time in two years I found myself divert­ing from my usu­al cap­i­tal city trav­els to spend a few days near Lake Michi­gan at a “Local Future” con­fer­ence orga­nized by Aaron Wiss­ner. It’s an unusu­al con­fer­ence, with a com­mu­ni­ty focus, par­tic­i­pants from many walks of life but pre­dom­i­nant­ly con­cerned cit­i­zens rather than cor­po­rate rep­re­sen­ta­tives, and a diverse range of top­ics blend­ing ecol­o­gy, eco­nom­ics and gov­er­nance. The videos from the 2011 con­fer­ence, enti­tled “Vision-Action-Lead­er­ship”, have just been post­ed on Youtube, and they include a two-part inter­view of me by Aaron where he asked me to explain mon­ey with­out resort­ing to either Pow­er­point slides or equa­tions.

I’ve just received a copy of  “Eco­nom­ics Europe”, the  newslet­ter Bloomberg pro­duced for the World Eco­nom­ic Forum at Davos,  in which my com­men­tary on “The Future of Eco­nom­ics” was pub­lished in the Wednes­day 01.25.12 edi­tion (it’s on page 5).

Click here for this post in PDF: Debt­watch mem­bers; CfE­SI mem­bers
Click here for the data in this post: Debt­watch mem­bers; CfE­SI mem­bers

The “Glob­al Finan­cial Cri­sis”, which began in late 2007, marked a turn­ing point in the nature of mar­ket economies. Their per­for­mance from at least the mid-1960s had been under-writ­ten by a faster growth of pri­vate debt than of GDP: this was the “Age of Lever­age”. In late 2007, the growth rate of pri­vate debt fell, and since then we have been in the Age of Delever­ag­ing.