Steve Keen's Debtwatch

As usu­al, the lat­est set of data from the ABS on the econ­o­my was “unex­pect­ed­ly worse” than (neo­clas­si­cal) econ­o­mists had been expect­ing. The con­sen­sus was for a 0.2% increase over the month of March, from 5.2 to 5.4 per­cent. In fact, it leapt by two and a half times as much, to 5.7%.

This was right in line with what I was expect­ing from a non-ortho­dox, “Hyman Min­sky” point of view. As I have argued in numer­ous blogs, aggre­gate demand is the sum of GDP plus the change in debt. Now that our econ­o­my is utter­ly debt-depen­dent, the debt-financed asset-price bub­bles have burst, and debt de-lever­ag­ing has begun in earnest, the econ­o­my will tank and unem­ploy­ment will explode as debt-financed spend­ing evap­o­rates.

I’ve just been sent this link to a hilar­i­ous face-off between Max Keis­er and an Eco­nom­ics Pro­fes­sor. Max calls the Wall Street spec­u­la­tors “finan­cial ter­ror­ists”, calls for decap­i­ta­tion as in days of olde…

The most fun I got out of this was watch­ing the Pro­fes­sor’s dis­com­fort, and his attempts to under­stand the cri­sis in terms of neo­clas­si­cal eco­nom­ic the­o­ry: mar­kets  are ratio­nal  and mere­ly respond to pol­i­cy, bonus­es are fine, the cri­sis is all due to bad mon­e­tary pol­i­cy…

There’s an inter­est­ing sto­ry in the New York Mag­a­zine by Michael Osin­s­ki–the author of the main soft­ware pack­age used to cre­ate the CMOs and CDOs that have helped crip­ple the finan­cial sys­tem.

Osin­ski’s sto­ry is worth a read in its own right. But what I found curi­ous about it was that he appears unaware of a flaw that exist­ed in those prod­ucts from the outset–the pre­sump­tion that the stan­dard math­e­mat­ics of risk and return could be applied to finan­cial assets. He does­n’t even men­tion this top­ic, but state­ments like the fol­low­ing imply that his soft­ware used a stan­dard prob­a­bil­i­ty dis­tri­b­u­tion to cal­cu­late risk and return for a giv­en bond:

I’m still hav­ing dif­fi­cul­ties get­ting my pod­casts up and run­ning at the moment, so in lieu here is a link to the ABC Radio Nation­al Big Ideas record­ing of an Evatt Foun­da­tion forum on the Glob­al Finan­cial Cri­sis.

Speak­ers were Bernie Fras­er, ex-Gov­er­nor of the Reserve Bank of Aus­tralia, myself, and Gar­ry Weiss, a cor­po­rate lawyer (this is also the speak­ing order).

The whole of the most recent Real World Eco­nom­ics Review (for­mer­ly known as the Post-Autis­tic Eco­nom­ics Review) is devot­ed to the ques­tion of “How should the col­lapse of the world finan­cial sys­tem affect eco­nom­ics?”.

My paper, which led vol­ume 49, is repro­duced below. If you’d like to read the entire vol­ume, click here for the online ver­sion and here for the PDF. You can also go here for back issues, and to sub­scribe for free.

The most impor­tant thing that glob­al finan­cial cri­sis has done for eco­nom­ic the­o­ry is to show that neo­clas­si­cal eco­nom­ics is not mere­ly wrong, but dan­ger­ous.

This is a face­tious way of let­ting you all know that, as of about 5 min­utes ago, there are now 1,000 users (plus yours tru­ly) sub­cribed to this blog.

The aver­age dai­ly unique read­er­ship count is cur­rent­ly 5,500, which I believe implies rough­ly 3–5 times that many read­ers on a month­ly basis.

I also know from feed­back from jour­nal­ists and oth­er cor­re­spon­dents that the com­ments made here are read and appre­ci­at­ed by a very wide audi­ence. My posts might be the ful­crum, but the con­tri­bu­tions from you all keep the wheels well and tru­ly spin­ning. I’ve also learnt a lot from what has been post­ed here.

The First Home Own­ers Boost (as it is offi­cial­ly known) has cer­tain­ly giv­en the Gov­ern­ment bang for its buck. By spend­ing rough­ly $200 mil­lion of its own mon­ey to date, it has added about $3 bil­lion to the hous­ing mar­ket. But the addi­tion­al $2.8 bil­lion has come from increased mort­gage debt tak­en on by those most vul­ner­a­ble to a seri­ous eco­nom­ic down­turn, at a time when the lat­est “unex­pect­ed” increase in unem­ploy­ment indi­cates that, like it or not, the glob­al down­turn is com­ing our way.

James Gal­braith has writ­ten a very good analy­sis of the cri­sis and why the poli­cies being fol­lowed in the USA (and, by impli­ca­tion, here) will not work.

I repro­duce some extracts here to give you a flavour of the arti­cle, but I rec­om­mend a read of the full paper in the Wash­ing­ton Monthly–thanks to blog mem­ber War­ren Raft­shol for bring­ing it to my atten­tion. The empha­sis added to some points is mine.