Steve Keen's Debtwatch

Part 1: The USA

The most recent “unex­pect­ed­ly good” growth fig­ures for the USA appear to indi­cate that what will still be the worst down­turn since the Great Depres­sion is final­ly over.

How­ev­er this is not your usu­al down­turn. Not only is it acknowl­edged as the most severe since the Great Depres­sion, it has also evoked the most remark­able gov­ern­ment eco­nom­ic stim­u­lus ever seen. It would be bizarre if this had not had an effect on the data.

Whether a recov­ery is tru­ly under­way in the pri­vate sec­tor there­fore depends on how the econ­o­my is like­ly to per­form after the stim­u­lus is with­drawn.

If I was asked to nom­i­nate the wis­est apho­rism of all time, Mark Twain’s “His­to­ry doesn’t repeat, but it sure does rhyme” would def­i­nite­ly be one of my top two can­di­dates.

On song, today Wall Street is replay­ing the 1930s, but to a slight­ly dif­fer­ent meter. With the 80^th anniver­sary of  the Great Crash of 1929 falling on Octo­ber 29^th of this year, Wall Street is cel­e­brat­ing in char­ac­ter­is­tic style–with a eupho­ria-led bub­ble that now appears to be crash­ing up against eco­nom­ic real­i­ty.

Ken­neth David­son has been one of the most con­sis­tent voic­es for sen­si­ble eco­nom­ic analy­sis in the Aus­tralian media for decades now (anoth­er I’d give a sim­i­lar acco­lade to is Bri­an Toohey), and he’s writ­ten a bril­liant piece in The Age and The Syd­ney Morn­ing Her­ald on the specual­tive bub­ble that is the Aus­tralian dol­lar.

David­son lays out the caus­es and prob­a­ble effects superbly in the length of a news­pa­per fea­ture. The caus­es are that:

• The bailout funds in the USA and UK in par­tic­u­lar have cashed up finan­cial insti­tu­tions that don’t want to lend any more to mort­gages (and have long ago for­got­ten how to lend to fund pro­duc­tive enter­pris­es), so they’re look­ing for short term hot mon­ey gains;

As I’ve not­ed here ear­li­er, the blog newsfrom1930 per­forms a very valu­able “real­i­ty check” for today by each day pub­lish­ing a sum­ma­ry of the Wall Street Jour­nal from the same day in 1930. The over­whelm­ing flavour of reports from that time is that the Depres­sion was over and recov­ery was immi­nent. Plus la change…

This week it’s offer­ing anoth­er service–publishing sum­maries of news reports from one year ear­li­er: 1929. The rea­son, of course, is that we are approach­ing the 80th anniver­sary of “Black Tues­day”: the day in 1929 when the Dow Jones fell for more than 10 per­cent for a sec­ond day in a row, bring­ing to an emphat­ic end the bull mar­ket of 1929 and ush­er­ing in the Great Depres­sion.

Thanks to all those Debt­watch read­ers who made dona­tions to assist with the costs of bring­ing Michael to Aus­tralia for this speak­ing tour. Rough­ly A$800 has been raised–I’ve allowed $10 for every dona­tion made since I put that mes­sage up to go to Michael’s expens­es, and there have been 81 dona­tions (many of more than $10, some of less) since then.

Paul Krug­man some­times intro­duces his more com­pli­cat­ed posts on his blog as being “wonk­ish”. This post is wonk­ish in spades–though in the linked papers rather than the con­tent here.

I’ve just fin­ished the first rea­son­able descrip­tion of my mul­ti-sec­toral mon­e­tary mod­el of pro­duc­tion, which I’ll be pre­sent­ing at the Paul Wool­ley Cen­tre for Cap­i­tal Mar­ket Dys­func­tion­al­i­ty con­fer­ence lat­er this month.

There’s lots more to add before the mod­el is com­plete, but this is a work­ing first draft. Lat­er addi­tions will include a ten­den­cy to equalise prof­it rates across sec­tors and fixed cap­i­tal, as well as fiat mon­ey cre­ation in addi­tion to pure cred­it mon­ey as in this mod­el.

In the spir­it of “we all need a laugh”, this list of jokes is doing the rounds in the USA:

The RBA has put rates up now on the belief that the finan­cial cri­sis is behind us, and it has to return to its estab­lished role of con­trol­ling infla­tion.

That this deci­sion was like­ly was flagged by the speech by Antho­ny Richards last week, which implied that the RBA, hav­ing ignored the house price bub­ble cre­at­ed by pri­vate cred­it growth in the pre­ced­ing two decades, was wor­ried about the renew­al of the bub­ble ini­ti­at­ed by the Gov­ern­men­t’s First Home Ven­dors Boost (I refuse to call it by its offi­cial name, since the mon­ey clear­ly went to the ven­dors, while the buy­ers copped only high­er prices).

One of the keynote speak­ers at the 38th Aus­tralian Con­fer­ence of Econ­o­mists in Ade­laide last week was Edward Lazear, who was Chair­man of the US Pres­i­den­t’s Coun­cil of Eco­nom­ic Advis­ers from 2006-09.

In oth­er words, he was in one of the world’s eco­nom­ic hot­seats right when the “Great Mod­er­a­tion” (see also Ger­ard Bak­er’s UK Times arti­cle in ear­ly 2007) gave way to the Glob­al Finan­cial Cri­sis.

2010 is shap­ing up as the year that the bulls and bears of the world’s last unpopped asset mar­ket bubble—Australia’s prop­er­ty market—will col­lide head on. The gap between those pre­dict­ing yet anoth­er bub­ble, and those pre­dict­ing its ulti­mate demise, has closed.

The bulls as always, empha­sise the “fundamentals”—population-fuelled demand out­strip­ping lag­gard­ly supply—and that “Aus­tralia is dif­fer­ent”.

The bears, as always, empha­sise lever­age— that the true fun­da­men­tal behind asset prices is peo­ple’s will­ing­ness to go into debt to buy them, in the belief that they can flog them for a lever­aged prof­it to the next Greater Fool. And on the “We’re dif­fer­ent because we have kan­ga­roos” the­o­ry, the bears con­tend that Aussies are just as sus­cep­ti­ble to a well dis­guised Ponzi Scheme as any­body else on the plan­et.