Steve Keen's Debtwatch

I did an inter­view with Phil Dob­bie from BT Aus­tralia on the Aus­tralian econ­o­my this morn­ing. You can hear it on Phil’s pro­gram on BT, or on iTunes, or click below:

And one with Peter Schiff on the US econ­o­my and whether it will face infla­tion or defla­tion:

Steve Keen’s Debt­watch Pod­cast

Ordi­nar­i­ly I’d back these up with some data graphs, but I’m in even more of a hur­ry than usu­al this week, so I’ll just leave you with the audios.

I’ve just post­ed a new video to the Prof­Keen YouTube Chan­nel; watch it there or click below. Thanks again to Ben­ny Sut­ton for the superb pro­duc­tion!

I’m tak­ing part in the “Prop­er­ty Bub­ble Crash Debate” next Tues­day at the Wes­ley Cen­tre, 220 Pitt Street, Syd­ney, 12pm-2pm.

There are 4 speak­ers for the “No Bubble/No Crash” case”

• Tony Hayek (Blue Wealth Prop­er­ty)
• Aman­da Lynch (Real Estate Insti­tute of Aus­tralia)
• Shane Oliv­er (AMP Cap­i­tal Mar­kets)
• Harley Dale (Hous­ing Indus­try Asso­ci­a­tion)

And 3 for the “Bub­ble and Crash” case:

• David Col­ly­er (Pros­per Cam­paign)
• Steve Keen (Debt­watch)
• Kris Sayce (Mon­ey Morn­ing Pub­li­ca­tion)

Reces­sion Ses­sions is an album of eco­nom­ics-themed songs ded­i­cat­ed to the Great Reces­sion. It’s pio­neer­ing the genre of “finan­cial folk”, and rais­ing mon­ey for the Somerville Home­less Coali­tion, a home­less­ness activism group in Mass­a­chu­setts.

After all the seri­ous­ness on this blog, I’m glad to have some artis­tic com­men­tary on the Great Reces­sion. Often our trib­al mem­o­ries of events like this are stored in music rather than analysis–remember “Hey Bud­dy, Can You Spare a Dime?”:

They used to tell me I was build­ing a dream
And so I fol­lowed the mob
When there was earth to plow or guns to bear
I was always there right on the job

Some time back a YouTube Chan­nel “Prof­Steve­Keen” was estab­lished to col­late my video inter­views. It’s been inac­tive since then, but recent­ly Syd­ney writer/director and mul­ti­me­dia reporter Ben­ny Sutton–who has more than a decade’s expe­ri­ence in film­mak­ing and Aus­tralian broad­cast journalism–volunteered to pro­duce pro­fes­sion­al­ly record­ed, reg­u­lar “Vid­casts” on a range of top­ics.

The first two, on whether the US econ­o­my will expe­ri­ence a “Dou­ble Dip”, have now been post­ed to YouTube; you can watch them below, or via sub­scrib­ing to the YouTube Chan­nel.

Will there be a US “Double Dip”? Part One

We, the 141 econ­o­mists from the 40 coun­tries list­ed below, invite you to join the World Eco­nom­ics Asso­ci­a­tion which we are launch­ing today.

Two com­mit­ments list­ed in our Man­i­festo sum up the project.

1. To plu­ral­i­ty. The Asso­ci­a­tion will encour­age the free explo­ration of eco­nom­ic real­i­ty from any per­spec­tive that adds to the sum of our under­stand­ing. To this end, it advo­cates plu­ral­i­ty of thought, method and phi­los­o­phy.

2. To glob­al democ­ra­cy. The Asso­ci­a­tion will be demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly struc­tured so as not to allow its dom­i­na­tion by one coun­try or one con­ti­nent.

I will be speak­ing at the Inter­na­tion­al Sci­en­tif­ic Sym­po­sium for Devel­op­ment devot­ed to the 110th anniver­sary of Simon Kuznets in Kyev, The Ukraine, next week. Simon Kuznets, one of the few recip­i­ents of the faux Nobel Prize in Eco­nom­ics whose work I respect, was one of the pio­neers of empir­i­cal research in eco­nom­ics, a stu­dent of busi­ness cycles, and a crit­ic of sta­t­ic eco­nom­ic method­ol­o­gy.

My paper for this con­fer­ence is repro­duced below. It def­i­nite­ly deserves the label “wonkish”–in fact it’s cer­tain­ly the most wonk­ish thing I’ve ever post­ed here.

A dynam­ic mon­e­tary mul­ti-sec­toral mod­el of pro­duc­tion

Sur­prise surprise–now that house prices are falling, whether they are going to con­tin­ue falling has become the top­ic du jour. I have been asked to take part in two debates on this–one an online Webi­nar orga­nized by Busi­ness Spec­ta­tor, the oth­er a live lunchtime talk in Syd­ney organ­ised by The Mon­ey Insti­tute.

I’d enjoy hav­ing some Debt­watch read­ers involved in them both, so if you can make the webi­nar, or attend the debate, please do. Details are below (excerpt­ed from the pro­mo­tion­al mate­ri­als).

Fair­fax man­age­ment has recent­ly decid­ed to sack its in-house sub-edi­tors, and out-source the role to the com­pa­ny Page­Mas­ters:

Fair­fax to look at out­sourc­ing options

Fair­fax sets new out­sourc­ing dead­line

Fair­fax con­firms out­sourc­ing plans with 82 jobs to go

Fair­fax jour­nal­ists to dis­cuss strikes

In one way, this move is an under­stand­able response to the impact of the rise of the inter­net on adver­tis­ing sales rev­enue for news­pa­pers. But in anoth­er, it is a weird attempt to reduce costs by out­sourc­ing an essen­tial step in the process of pro­duc­ing a dai­ly newspaper–a bit like com­mit­ting Harakiri in order to lose weight.

Click here for this post in PDF

Aus­tralia is once again prov­ing itself to be the Land of the Twee­dles. Though Labor and Lib­er­al loud­ly pro­claim their dif­fer­ences, on the key eco­nom­ic issues, they’re (par­don the pun) car­bon-copies. Both agree that the Fed­er­al Bud­get should be returned to sur­plus. Both believe that the “Glob­al Finan­cial Cri­sis” (which Amer­i­cans and most of the rest of the OECD call “The Great Reces­sion”) is behind Aus­tralia, and the imper­a­tive now is to stop the growth in gov­ern­ment debt. And both would leave untouched spend­ing pro­grams that make us worse off by pro­mot­ing asset bub­bles rather than seri­ous invest­ment.