Steve Keen's Debtwatch

Alan Greenspan has been judged the econ­o­mist most respon­si­ble for caus­ing the Glob­al Finan­cial Cri­sis. He, and 2^ndand 3^rd place fin­ish­ers Mil­ton Fried­man and Lar­ry Sum­mers, have won the first–and hope­ful­ly last—Dyna­mite Prize in Eco­nom­ics.

In award­ing the Prize, Edward Full­brook, edi­tor of the Real World Eco­nom­ics Review, not­ed that “They have been judged to be the three econ­o­mists most respon­si­ble for the Glob­al Finan­cial Cri­sis. More fig­u­ra­tive­ly, they are the three econ­o­mists most respon­si­ble for blow­ing up the glob­al econ­o­my.”

I’ve been a fan of Gar­ry Trudeau’s Doones­bury car­toon since my stu­dent days (when, coin­ci­den­tal­ly, Trudeau was pro­fil­ing life as a uni­ver­si­ty stu­dent).

As any read­er of the strip knows, unlike most com­ic strips the char­ac­ters in Doones­bury age and move with the times. Today’s times are those of a finan­cial cri­sis, and once again I’m play­ing a role–though as ana­lyst and crit­ic rather than par­tic­i­pant. Dit­to also Trudeau, who has post­ed a love­ly lit­tle jibe in today’s Sun­day spread. For all those who are exas­per­at­ed with the spin doc­tors and debt spruik­ers who have grown fat while bring­ing the globe to the eco­nom­ic precipice, I rec­om­mend today’s Doones­bury car­toon (Sun­day Feb­ru­ary 21).

Many vis­i­tors to this site have com­ment­ed that, though the dis­cus­sions are very infor­ma­tive, they are also very dif­fi­cult to fol­low. A dis­cus­sion that begins under one post will recom­mence under anoth­er, and with over 200 posts and 16,000 com­ments so far, that makes fol­low­ing a com­plete thread of dis­cus­sion effec­tive­ly impos­si­ble. It was not­ed that a forum with struc­tured dis­cus­sion head­ings might be a bet­ter way to go. So we have estab­lished the Talk Finance Forum

http://www.talkfinance.net/

(Edit: Please note that there is a foot­note to this sto­ry)

I nor­mal­ly don’t com­ment on arti­cles about me, since I am aware that now that my views are part of the pub­lic debate, I have to take the good with the bad in cov­er­age. I would­n’t have writ­ten this either, were it not for the line “If only his pre­dic­tions were so reli­able” in Jes­si­ca Irvine’s piece in today’s SMH “Walk­ing on a wire stretched between stim­u­lus and debt”.

The Dyna­mite Prize for Economics–to be award­ed to the three econ­o­mists most respon­si­ble for the Glob­al Finan­cial Crisis–is going gang­busters with over 14,000 votes so far.

It may pick up even more thanks to some excel­lent work by Busi­ness Insider/Clusterstock, which has pro­duced a bril­liant graph­ic illus­trat­ing the prize.

It’s mag­nif­i­cent, and here it is below for your enjoyment–click on the “Go To The Short List of Nom­i­nees for the Dyna­mite Prize in Eco­nom­ics–>” link and that will take you to the graph­ic, or click here to go straight to the graph­ic.

As most Aus­tralian read­ers would know, I recent­ly lost half of a bet over Aus­tralian house prices when the Gov­ern­men­t’s “First Home Own­ers Boost”–which I pre­fer to call the First Home Ven­dors Boost–reignited Aus­trali­a’s house price bub­ble.

As a result, I’m walk­ing from Aus­trali­a’s Par­lia­ment House to Aus­trali­a’s high­est moun­tain, Mt Kosciousko–a dis­tance of 224km (140 miles). The walk will start at 2pm on Thurs­day April 15 from the entrance to Par­lia­ment House and–my legs willing–finish 8 days lat­er on the sum­mit of Mt Kosciousko (which is 2228 metres–or about 7000 feet–above sea lev­el).

Peter Switzer inter­viewed me on his cable TV show for Sky News last week.

You can watch the inter­view here. I would also rec­om­mend watch­ing the inter­view with John Hew­son (for inter­na­tion­al view­ers, John Hew­son was a pre­vi­ous leader of the Lib­er­al Par­ty of Aus­tralia, which despite its name is Aus­trali­a’s con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal par­ty), in which amongst oth­er things he not­ed that Cen­tral Bank inde­pen­dence, for which he had cam­paigned while a politi­cian, had not worked out as he had hoped, and had instead left unac­count­able econ­o­mists in charge of mon­e­tary pol­i­cy.

Vot­ing is now open for what has been renamed the Dyna­mite Prize in Eco­nom­ics.

The renam­ing was nec­es­sary because the own­ers of the Ig Nobel Prize object­ed to the similarity–which is under­stand­able. They also sug­gest­ed the Dyna­mite Prize as a use­ful alter­na­tive.

We are, after all, intend­ing to award the prize to the three econ­o­mists who did most to drop the GFC bomb on the glob­al econ­o­my, via their naive and utter­ly unre­al­is­tic the­o­ries of eco­nom­ics.

The selec­tion process pro­duced the fol­low­ing set of nom­i­nees:

• Fis­ch­er Black and Myron Scholes
• Eugene Fama
• Mil­ton Fried­man

I am giv­ing a talk on the blog today at Swin­burne Uni­ver­si­ty in Mel­bourne, and frankly I am not all that pre­pared on the main issue of inter­est to the organ­is­ers there, which is the edu­ca­tion­al impact of this blog (and blog­ging in gen­er­al) ver­sus oth­er forms of edu­ca­tion.

I just estab­lished this blog to get the Debt­watch report out ini­tial­ly, and it’s grown in both size and per­son­al­i­ty in ways that I nev­er envis­aged. It’s been very grat­i­fy­ing, but I haven’t real­ly had the time to reflect on they whys and hows of the process of blog­ging.

I’m giv­ing two talks at Swin­burne Uni­ver­si­ty of Tech­nol­o­gy on Thurs­day Feb­ru­ary 4th. The infor­ma­tion below is repro­duced from the fly­er for the event devel­oped by reg­u­lar blog con­trib­u­tor Matt Mitchell, who has arranged the talks:

12.00pm – 2.00pm: DebtWatch : Observations and reflections on the educative role of modern media

• Dr Keen will dis­cuss his expe­ri­ence using his Debt­watch­blog on which he posts reg­u­lar arti­cles for dis­cus­sion and the role of this media in both edu­cat­ing the pub­lic and stim­u­lat­ing debate among econ­o­mists, stu­dents and lay peo­ple around eco­nom­ic the­o­ry and prac­tice.