Steve Keen's Debtwatch

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).

 March 15–16 2012: The Inter­Con­ti­nen­tal Hotel, Syd­ney

Eco­nom­ic lead­er­ship of the world is pass­ing from West to East. It may be an order­ly tran­si­tion… or there may be cur­ren­cy wars… resource wars… and a peri­od of great volatil­i­ty in the finan­cial mar­kets. How­ev­er it plays out, this WILL affect the Aus­tralian econ­o­my, your invest­ments, retire­ment sav­ings, and asset wealth in 2012…

If you’re becom­ing more con­cerned about your future finan­cial secu­ri­ty, clear your cal­en­dar for AFTER AMERICA – Port Phillip Publishing’s inau­gur­al invest­ment con­fer­ence.

CLICK HERE to find out more…

You’ll learn all about:

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.