Steve Keen's Debtwatch

Debt­watch has been oper­at­ing since March 2007, and in that time it has grown from a sim­ple means to get my month­ly newslet­ter out into a major alter­na­tive eco­nom­ics web­site.

The work­load to main­tain the site has become enor­mous: I have to write posts, admin­is­ter this site, par­tic­i­pate in its active dis­cus­sions (and keep them civ­il), all on top of my “day job” as a Pro­fes­sor of Eco­nom­ics and Finance at the Uni­ver­si­ty of West­ern Syd­ney. And I have to con­tin­ue devel­op­ing the research that made Debt­watch pos­si­ble in the first place: my efforts since 1997 to turn Min­sky’s Finan­cial Insta­bil­i­ty Hypoth­e­sis into a ful­ly fledged macro­eco­nom­ic mod­el, as an alter­na­tive to the var­i­ous delu­sion­al Neo­clas­si­cal mod­els that have dom­i­nat­ed eco­nom­ics ever since John Hicks penned his utter­ly mis­lead­ing car­i­ca­ture of Key­nes’s Gen­er­al The­o­ry back in 1936.

I like the Easel theme I’m cur­rent­ly using here, devel­oped by Frumph, but I want to intro­duce adver­tis­ing here now, and for that the s2Member theme I’m using for CfE­SI is supe­ri­or. So the appear­ance is about to change. My apolo­gies to those who like the cur­rent lay­out.

Lecture 5: Market Behavior–Stock Markets II. (Slides: CfESI Subscribers  Part 1; Part 2; Debtwatch Subscribers Part 1 Part 2)

The Frac­tal Mar­kets Hypoth­e­sis and the Inef­fi­cient Mar­kets Hypoth­e­sis are two of sev­er­al attempts to pro­vide a real­is­tic the­o­ry of how finance mar­kets actu­al­ly behave. In this first half of the lec­ture, I explain what frac­tals aew, and dis­cuss their basic char­ac­ter­is­tics.

In the sec­ond half of the lec­ture, I out­line the Frac­tal Mar­kets Hypoth­e­sis and the Inef­fi­cient Mar­kets Hypoth­e­sis (IEH). The IEH sug­gests pre­cise­ly the oppo­site invest­ment strat­e­gy to the EMH on how to max­i­mize returns on the stock mar­ket: invest in low volatil­i­ty, high Book to Mar­ket stocks.

The videos can be watched by any­one; Pow­er­point files can be down­loaded by mem­bers of the Cen­ter for Eco­nom­ic Sta­bil­i­ty

As not­ed in Announc­ing the Cen­ter for Eco­nom­ic Sta­bil­i­ty AGM, the first Annu­al Gen­er­al Meet­ing of the Cen­tre for Eco­nom­ic Sta­bil­i­ty Incor­po­rat­ed will be held on Wednes­day Sep­tem­ber 7th at 6–9pm at the Syd­ney Mechan­ics School of Arts, 280 Pitt Street Syd­ney, Aus­tralia, from 6–9pm.

I need to have some idea of num­bers for cater­ing and room book­ing pur­pos­es. I know that most of the 12,000 sub­scribers to and 60,000+ month­ly read­ers of this blog don’t live in Syd­ney or sur­rounds, but I would appre­ci­ate it if as many as are able to attend do so, and help get CfE­SI rolling.

Click here for this post in PDF

Click here for the data in this post

As I’ve not­ed in ear­li­er posts, the con­cept of the Cred­it Accel­er­a­tor is still a work in progress. A major objec­tive is to be able to use month­ly data and remove the noise that gen­er­ates, but for now I’m work­ing with the change in the change in debt over a year, divid­ed by GDP at the mid­point of that year. In order to be able to still use the lat­est month­ly debt data from Aus­tralia (and quar­ter­ly from the USA), I’ve revised the for­mu­la to “freeze” the last avail­able val­ue of GDP six months in advance of the last data for debt. This gives an accu­rate mea­sure of the change in the change in debt, but divides it by a GDP fig­ure that will lat­er need revi­sion.

Click here for this post in PDF

Real­i­ty came to Real­i­ty TV in Aus­tralia last week, when 3 of the 4 prop­er­ties in the much-hyped “Flip that House” pro­gram The Block failed to sell at their nation­al­ly tele­vised auc­tion. A 400 per­son live audi­ence, watched by over 3 mil­lion TV view­ers, could­n’t entice more than one per­son to part with mon­ey rather than eye­balls. As the SMH observed:

What­ev­er the lure of a celebri­ty house, the would-be buy­ers in Fitzroy Town Hall were just as jit­tery as the would-be buy­ers at any oth­er auc­tion in recent weeks. (“Auc­tion fail­ure shocks The Block”, SMH August 22)

That was the title of an “Intel­li­gence Squared” debate I took part in last month–on the affir­ma­tive side. It was broad­cast on ABC TV’s Big Ideas pro­gram last week. The title is a play on a favourite say­ing of Aus­tralian politi­cians back in the coun­try’s “White Aus­tralia” days, and the immi­gra­tion surge it caused iron­i­cal­ly led to Aus­tralia becom­ing one of the world’s most mul­ti-cul­tur­al nations. You can watch it on the Big Ideas Web­site:

http://www.abc.net.au/tv/bigideas/stories/2011/08/23/3299095.htm

Or on YouTube, below:

If you’d pre­fer to lis­ten rather than watch, here is the audio, down­loaded from the ABC Radio Pro­gram Big Ideas:

The CAPM and EMH stick to the neo­clas­si­cal script of believ­ing that the econ­o­my and finance mar­kets are sta­ble, at or near equi­lib­ri­um, and on this basis argue that “you can’t beat the mar­ket”. But there is an alter­na­tive view, far more aligned with the actu­al data, that says that mar­kets are chaot­ic, far from equi­lib­ri­um sys­tems, and for that rea­son it’s very hard to beat the mar­ket.

Eugene Fama was an enthu­si­as­tic pro­mot­er of CAPM and the Effi­cient Mar­kets Hypoth­e­sis, argu­ing that despite their absurd assump­tions, the data sup­port­ed the the­o­ries. But was this a fluke, the result of the nar­row data range he used–from 1950 till 1966?

The Finance News Net­work has just released an inter­view with me on the cur­rent finan­cial tur­moil. Click the link below to watch it (or read the tran­script):

Steve Keen pre­dicts a decade of volatil­i­ty

FNN is about to estab­lish a paid sub­scrip­tion ser­vice, so short­ly inter­views such as this will only be avail­able to sub­scribers.

On a sim­i­lar note, I urge read­ers of this blog to sup­port CfE­SI, the Cen­ter for Eco­nom­ic Sta­bil­i­ty Incor­po­rat­ed (www.cfesi.org) by sign­ing up to one of the three lev­els of mem­ber­ship (see the table below for details).

The Cen­ter for Eco­nom­ic Sta­bil­i­ty Incor­po­rat­ed was first formed in March 2010, with the ini­tial aim of sup­port­ing the Keen Walk to Kosciuszko (which took place in April 2010). That ven­ture was extreme­ly suc­cess­ful, but it took place at a time when–certainly in Australia–there was opti­mism that the  eco­nom­ic and finan­cial cri­sis that began in 2007/08 was over.

One year lat­er, that opti­mism is evap­o­rat­ing around the world, in the face of per­sis­tent bad news. Eco­nom­ic growth in Amer­i­ca, Europe and Aus­tralia is ane­mic, unem­ploy­ment is ris­ing, and stock mar­kets have gone from a sus­tained ral­ly back into near Bear Mar­ket ter­ri­to­ry.