Steve Keen's Debtwatch

Every year, The Age pub­lish­es a sur­vey of econ­o­mists’ opin­ions on the year ahead. Most of these are “mar­ket econ­o­mists” rather than academics—working for banks, insur­ance com­pa­nies and the like. Three aca­d­e­mics are surveyed—myself, Jacob Mars­den of Monash and Neville Nor­man of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Melbourne—and one econ­o­mist work­ing for a trade union, Brad Crofts of the AWU.

Peter Mar­tin does an overview of the results each year, as well as pro­vid­ing snip­pets of the answers giv­en to sup­ple­men­tary ques­tions. He made one slip-up this year when he sum­marised views on achiev­ing a sur­plus as:

Eco­nom­ic Reform Aus­tralia has just alert­ed me to a pro­pos­al for a par­tial mort­gage debt for­give­ness pro­pos­al put for­ward by econ­o­mists from the US Fed­er­al Reserve in Jan­u­ary 2009. ERA repro­duced this post from WhoWhat­Why, which in turn referred to a Boston Fed pub­li­ca­tion Com­mu­ni­ties & Bank­ing and the paper “A pro­pos­al to Help Dis­tressed Home­own­ers”.

The pro­pos­al includes the sug­ges­tion of a grant to home­own­ers who are both in neg­a­tive equi­ty and unem­ployed, where the grant would pay up to 25% of the repay­ment costs over a 2 year peri­od.

It’s always a plea­sure to talk with Max, and in this inter­view he drops a bomb­shell that I still have a hard time even con­tem­plat­ing: the claim that the UK’s pri­vate debt to GDP ratio is 950%, and the finance sec­tor alone has a debt ratio of 600% of GDP. Our dis­cus­sion starts at the 14 minute mark.

I still have to see the data for myself, and until then I’ll remain skep­ti­cal, but here’s a chart alleged­ly sourced from Mor­gan Stan­ley that makes that claim.

My two favourite finan­cial shows are The Keis­er Report and Cap­i­tal Account, and by sheer chance both inter­viewed me with­in 8 hours of each oth­er this week.

Max’s pro­gram will go up tomor­row. The inter­view with Lau­ren Lyster went out live at 4.30pm time on the 20th–which was 8.30am on the 21st here in Sydney–and yet already they’ve put the inter­view up on Youtube:

Bra­vo to Demetri and Lau­ren for pos­i­tive­ly Warp Speed agili­ty in both the tra­di­tion­al and social media.

There was move­ment at the sta­tion,
for the word had passed around
That the colt from old Regret had got away…
(“Ban­jo” Pat­ter­son, “The Man from Snowy Riv­er”)

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

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

As long-term read­ers of this blog will remem­ber, I chose Swags for Home­less as the char­i­ty to sup­port in my Walk to Kosciuszko in 2010. I was struck by the sheer prac­ti­cal­i­ty and inge­nu­ity of this char­i­ty. There are many groups try­ing to do some­thing for home­less peo­ple, but some initiatives–like home­less shel­ters, or pro­mot­ing social housing–take a long time to imple­ment and sim­ply can’t cater for the inflow of new home­less.

Swags got there in one step, with an inex­pen­sive, well-designed portable bed that gives a home­less per­son a good sleep, today, even though they are sleep­ing rough.

I have just had the fol­low­ing paper pub­lished in the freely acces­si­ble online jour­nal Eco­nom­ic Analy­sis and Pol­i­cy, which is pub­lished by the Queens­land branch of the Eco­nom­ic Soci­ety of Aus­tralia.The cita­tion is:

Keen, S. (2011). “Debunk­ing Macro­eco­nom­ics.” Eco­nom­ic Analy­sis & Pol­i­cy 41(3): 147–167.

I’ve been pub­lished in peer-reviewed jour­nals that are freely acces­si­ble online before of course—such as the Eco­nom­ics E‑journal paper “Solv­ing the Para­dox of Mon­e­tary Prof­its”. I think Eco­nom­ic Analy­sis and Pol­i­cy does a bet­ter job of blend­ing the old paper-style jour­nal with the new, with a home page that emu­lates the cov­er of a paper jour­nal while pro­vid­ing hot links to the papers from that page.

My pub­lish­ers Zed­books have just asked me to remove Debunk­ing II from Ama­zon’s pro­gram. Amongst sev­er­al rea­sons, the eBook is avail­able from oth­er sources which is not allowed in the Ama­zon bor­row­ing pro­gram.

So if you want to read the book, you’ll just have to get hold of it the old-fash­ioned way: at book­stores.

Ama­zon UK: Paper­back; Kin­dle

USA: Paper­back; Kin­dle

Ger­many Kin­dle

France Kin­dle

Book­Topia (Aus)

Abbey’s (Aus)

Mel­bourne Uni (Aus)

I’ve just enrolled the Kin­dle edi­tion of Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics: the naked emper­or dethroned? in Ama­zon’s KDPS­e­lect pro­gram. This makes it avail­able for free bor­row­ing by Ama­zon Prime mem­bers for one month from the Kin­dle Own­ers Lend­ing Library.

Mem­ber­ship of Kin­dle Prime isn’t free–the cost is $79 a year. This fea­ture is obvi­ous­ly an attempt to expand that scheme, which also offers free two-day ship­ping and instant access to stream­ing of movies (out of a library of about 2500 titles right now). The encour­age­ment to authors like myself is a roy­al­ties pool of $500K per month, where each author’s share depends on how many times your books are bor­rowed out of the total pool of eli­gi­ble books.

I’ve had it. Sit­ting in the lounge wait­ing for my flight to Bangkok, I was casu­al­ly read­ing a Syd­ney Morn­ing Her­ald sto­ry about Kevin Rudd,  when this hap­pened.

Anoth­er BSOD! This is the first on this machine‑a Dell XPS15z–but it the third machine in a row in which I’ve had this expe­ri­ence.

The first was a Dell Stu­dio 17 which I pur­chased two years ago, and which had so many BSOD crash­es in so many inop­por­tune moments that I final­ly nick­named it Mephis­to and went in search of an alter­natve (see “My Dog of a Dell”).