Changing your password

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A num­ber of new mem­bers have asked how to change their pass­word after log­ging on to the site. The process is rel­a­tive­ly sim­ple, but it’s easy to miss the menu since it’s so sub­tle.

When you log in, a menu with two items in it–your blog name and the word “Dashboard”–appear at the top of the page, on the same line as the Search win­dow but at the left hand end of the screen:

Click on your name and this drop down will appear:

Choose “Edit My Pro­file” and you get this man­age­ment screen:

Debunking II Launch Correction–University College London

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A blog mem­ber has point­ed out that the Gus­tave Tuck the­atre is actu­al­ly in Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don, not the LSE.

The sec­ond edi­tion of Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics will be launched at the Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don on Octo­ber 4th, from 6–8pm.

The address is Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don, Gow­er St, WC1E 6BT Lon­don. Two map ref­er­ences are:

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=embed&hl=en&geocode=&q=WILKINS+BUILDING@51.524699,-0.13366&ie=UTF8&ll=51.524699,-0.13366&z=16

and

http://streetmap.co.uk/map.srf?x=529573&y=182293&z=0&sv=51.524699,-0.13366&st=7&mapp=map.srf

Debunking Economics II Launch, UCL October 4th

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The sec­ond edi­tion of Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics will be launched at the Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don on Octo­ber 4th, from 6–8pm.

The address is Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don, Gow­er St, WC1E 6BT Lon­don:

The venue is the Gus­tave Tuck lec­ture the­atre in the Wilkins Build­ing (nav­i­ga­tion instruc­tions here).

If you are going to attend, please post a com­ment here. At a lat­er stage, I may be able to link to a book­ings page (atten­dance is free–this will just be to keep track of num­bers), but for now this is the best way to let the organ­is­ers know how many peo­ple to expect.

Debtwatch: Still free, but…

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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.

Behavioral Finance Lecture 05: Fractal & Inefficient Markets

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

Will you attend the CfESI AGM?

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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.

Updated Credit Accelerators

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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.

The Chopping Block?

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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)

If we keep populating, we will perish

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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: