Steve Keen's Debtwatch

The Amer­i­can Mon­e­tary Insti­tute has  invit­ed me to speak at their 2010 Mon­e­tary Reform Con­fer­ence, at the Uni­ver­si­ty Cen­ter in down­town Chica­go, between  Sep­tem­ber 30th and Octo­ber 3rd. I have agreed, though since this is in the mid­dle of a teach­ing peri­od for me it will be a “light­ning trip” to the USA–leaving Syd­ney on Wednes­day 29th and leav­ing Chica­go on Mon­day 4th.

I’ll give a pre­sen­ta­tion cov­er­ing the sta­tis­tics on the debt-dri­ven process that led to the eco­nom­ic cri­sis, an expla­na­tion of how mon­ey is cre­at­ed in a pure cred­it econ­o­my (based on my “Rov­ing Cav­a­liers of Cred­it” post on this blog), and a mod­el of debt-defla­tion as cov­ered in my recent talk in New York.

The blog now has over 5000 mem­bers, and about 40 of them crowd­ed into a small room in the Flat­Iron dis­trict of New York to hear me give a talk on debt-defla­tion. Since I had the lux­u­ry of more time than you get at an aca­d­e­m­ic con­fer­ence, and an engag­ing and intel­li­gent audi­ence, I gave a lot more detail on my mod­el­ling approach. The ques­tions were also superb, and would have con­tin­ued for much longer if I had­n’t called quits at an oppor­tune point (the whole caboo­dle of pre­sen­ta­tion and dis­cus­sion is almost 70 min­utes long). My answers come through loud and clear on this video; I just hope that the ques­tions them­selves can be heard by bet­ter ears than mine!

This is a “reme­di­al” post: I have just post­ed “Are We It Yet?” to this site, but for some rea­son it was post­ed after the “Naked Cap­i­tal­ism” post below.

If you’ve already read the paper I gave at the Min­sky con­fer­ence, then you’ve read what’s pub­lished there; the main rea­sons for putting it here in blog form were to make it more acces­si­ble, and to post a video of the talk I gave at the Levy. I’ve also repro­duced this below.

| Open Play­er in New Win­dow

I met with Yves Smith of Naked Cap­i­tal­ism on the week­end, at a superb Japan­ese restau­rant that only New York locals could find (and I’ll keep its loca­tion qui­et for their benefit–too much pub­lic­i­ty could spoil a spec­tac­u­lar thing). Yves was kind enough to post details of my lat­est aca­d­e­m­ic paper at her site in a post she enti­tled “Steve Keen’s scary Min­sky mod­el”.

Yves found the mod­el scary, not because it revealed any­thing about the econ­o­my that she did­n’t already know, but because it so eas­i­ly repro­duced the Ponzi fea­tures of the econ­o­my she knows so well.

If you’ve down­loaded and read the paper and pre­sen­ta­tion I post­ed in my pre­vi­ous entry, then there’s noth­ing new for you to read in the body of this post; the main addi­tion is the video below of my talk.

| Open Play­er in New Win­dow

That in part gives you rather too good a view of the back of the heads of Randy Wray and Dim­it­ry Papadim­itri­ou, both of whom sat down in front of the cam­era after my talk began, but the slides are still eas­i­ly vis­i­ble.

This is just a very quick post to make my paper at the Levy Insti­tute avail­able. Lat­er I’ll add a post of the paper itself and a video of the pre­sen­ta­tion.

One of the unex­pect­ed things I’ve learnt in Boston is that the Glob­al Finan­cial Cri­sis is not called the Glob­al Finan­cial Cri­sis in America–and there­fore the TLA of the GFC has no mean­ing here.

Instead, in Amer­i­ca this might be The Cri­sis That Has No Name (TCTHNN), because they don’t call it any­thing at all: it’s just how the econ­o­my is right now.

Aus­tralians, it seems, are the ones who invent­ed the moniker GFC as a way of describ­ing what they think they don’t have to under­stand. Over here, where it is actu­al­ly hap­pen­ing, it is just the day to day real­i­ty that must be con­tend­ed with.

A blog mem­ber has arranged for me to give a talk dur­ing my trip to NY.  I will cov­er the caus­es of the glob­al finan­cial cri­sis, the pol­i­cy response thus far, and the out­look for the world econ­o­my, with a focus on the US and Aus­tralia.

LOCATION: ‘In Good Com­pa­ny’ work­places, 4th floor of 16 West 23rd Street in Man­hat­tan.  Google Maps link.

DATE & TIME: Wednes­day 7th July, from 6–9pm

AVAILABILITY: the space has capac­i­ty for 20 peo­ple, so please con­firm your atten­dance ASAP so spaces can be offered to oth­ers who may be inter­est­ed in attend­ing.

Unex­pect­ed and won­der­ful things can hap­pen when you stick your neck out, as I have done over Aus­trali­a’s pri­vate debt bub­ble. The “tall pop­py” syn­drome can still cut you down, but you also find that peo­ple are will­ing to assist in ways that you’d nev­er think of your­self.

One of those has just occurred with respect to the Keen Walk to Kosciuszko, where out of the blue Noel Almei­da has pre­pared a com­mem­o­ra­tive envelope–the sales of which will raise mon­ey for Swags for Home­less. Here is a sam­ple:

Noel has made a mere 23 for sale, and he describes the prod­uct in the fol­low­ing way:

Jere­my Grantham pricked, if not the hous­ing bub­ble itself, then at least the bub­ble that prop­er­ty mar­ket spruik­ers live in, with the quip that:

“Bub­bles have quite a few things in com­mon but hous­ing bub­bles have a spec­tac­u­lar thing in com­mon, and that is every one of them is con­sid­ered unique and dif­fer­ent.” (Hous­ing mar­ket a ‘time bomb’, says invest­ment leg­end: The Aus­tralian June 16, 2010)