Steve Keen's Debtwatch

Note: This was published as my last column on Business Spectator on April 6th, but it’s now gone missing after News Ltd merged BS with its own in-house stable and changed all the URLs. Given the election and Elizabeth Farrelly’s excellent thought piece in the Sydney Morning Herald “The great tragedy of Malcolm Turnbull”, I thought it was a good time to revive it.

One of the dis­ad­van­tages of grow­ing up is find­ing in your old age that peo­ple you nev­er took seri­ous­ly in your youth are now run­ning your coun­try.

CERN has just announced the dis­cov­ery of a new par­ti­cle, called the “FERIR”.

This is not a fun­da­men­tal par­ti­cle of mat­ter like the Hig­gs Boson, but an inven­tion of econ­o­mists. CERN in this instance stands not for the famous par­ti­cle accel­er­a­tor strad­dling the French and Swiss bor­ders, but for an eco­nom­ic research lab at MIT—whose ini­tials are coin­ci­den­tal­ly the same as those of its far more famous cousin.

Despite its rel­a­tive anonymi­ty, MIT’s CERN is far more impor­tant than its phys­i­cal name­sake. The lat­ter mere­ly informs us about the fun­da­men­tal nature of the uni­verse. MIT’s CERN, on the oth­er hand, shapes our lives today, because the dis­cov­er­ies it makes dra­mat­i­cal­ly affect eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy.

Using the dynam­ics of credit–which most oth­er econ­o­mists ignore–I explain why Japan, the USA and UK are among the “Walk­ing Dead of Debt” and why Chi­na, Cana­da, Aus­tralia and South Korea are on their way to join­ing the Debt Zom­bies. This pre­sen­ta­tion is based on work I’m doing for a new 25000 word book for Poli­ty Press enti­tled “Can we avoid anoth­er finan­cial cri­sis?”, which should be pub­lished lat­er this year.

The Lucas Cri­tique has ruled eco­nom­ics for the last 40 years, and led it into a dead-end as well. In this talk to the Eco­nom­ics for Every­one con­fer­ence run by the Post Crash Eco­nom­ics Soci­ety in Man­ches­ter, I argue that micro-found­ed mod­els fail because of the emer­gent prop­er­ties that char­ac­terise com­plex sys­tems. An alter­na­tive approach that tran­scends Lucas’s well-found­ed objec­tion to ad-hoc mod­el-build­ing is to build mod­els from strict­ly true macro­eco­nom­ic iden­ti­ties. I show that three sim­ple identities–the employ­ment rate, the wages share of income, and the pri­vate-debt-to-GDP ratio–are suf­fi­cient to build a sim­ple dynam­ic mod­el that gen­er­ates the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a finan­cial cri­sis. I also give a high-speed but I think com­pre­hen­si­ble tuto­r­i­al on using Min­sky, the Open Source mon­e­tary mod­el­ling pro­gram.

This is an invit­ed paper by the Pri­vate Debt Project, an ini­tia­tive of the phil­an­thropic orga­ni­za­tion the Governor’s Woods Foun­da­tion to raise aware­ness about the eco­nom­ic impor­tance and dan­gers of pri­vate debt.

The era of low growth known as Japan’s “Lost Decade” com­menced in 1990, and per­sists to this day.  While most authors acknowl­edge that the seeds for the Lost Decade were sown by exces­sive cred­it growth in the pre­ced­ing Bub­ble Econ­o­my years, only Richard Koo (Koo, 2009, Koo, 2011, Koo, 2003, Koo, 2014) and Richard Wern­er (Voutsi­nas and Wern­er, 2011, Wern­er, 2002) have sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly argued that insuf­fi­cient cred­it growth dur­ing the “Lost Decade” explains Japan’s now quar­ter-cen­tu­ry long slump. Yet these argu­ments tell us more about the dilem­mas fac­ing today’s world econ­o­my than many more com­mon­ly accept­ed expla­na­tions of the cur­rent slow­down.

For decades, some of the most impor­tant data about mar­ket economies was sim­ply unavail­able: the lev­el of pri­vate debt. You could get gov­ern­ment debt data eas­i­ly, but (with the out­stand­ing excep­tion of the USA—and also Aus­tralia) it was hard to come by.

That has been reme­died by the Bank of Inter­na­tion­al Set­tle­ments, which now pub­lish­es a quar­ter­ly series on debt—government & private—for over 40 coun­tries. This data lets me iden­ti­fy the sev­en coun­tries that, on my analy­sis, are most like­ly to suf­fer a debt cri­sis in the next 1–3 years. They are, in order of like­ly sever­i­ty: Chi­na, Aus­tralia, Swe­den, Hong Kong (though it might deserve first billing), Korea, Cana­da, and Nor­way.

The Coun­cil on Eco­nom­ic Poli­cies and the Bank of Eng­land are organ­is­ing a work­shop on this top­ic to be held at the Bank on Novem­ber 14–15 2016. A call for papers has just been put out, with a dead­line of June 30th.

Back­ground

Cli­mate change and oth­er envi­ron­men­tal chal­lenges are mov­ing up pol­i­cy agen­das world­wide. Nonethe­less, the poten­tial impli­ca­tions of envi­ron­men­tal risks and scarci­ties for cen­tral bank­ing as well as the link­ages between finan­cial reg­u­la­tion, mon­e­tary pol­i­cy and envi­ron­men­tal sus­tain­abil­i­ty remain large­ly unex­plored.

For the last 25 years, Aus­tralian politi­cians of both Lib­er­al and Labor hue have been able to brag that, under their stew­ard­ship, Aus­tralia has avoid­ed a reces­sion. Those brag­ging rights are about to come to an end. Dur­ing the life of the next Par­lia­ment — and prob­a­bly by 2017 — Aus­tralia will fall into a pro­longed reces­sion.

Click here to read the rest of this post, and here to down­load the Excel file show­ing the link between a slow­down in the rate of growth of debt and a reces­sion.

I was recent­ly informed that a Span­ish trans­la­tion of Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics is now avail­able via Ama­zon Spain, under the title “La Economía Desen­mas­cara­da”

There’s one review so far:

The main­stream eco­nom­ic idea that banks are just inter­me­di­aries between savers and investors is a fan­ta­sy, but giv­en that fan­ta­sy, their argu­ment that the lev­el and rate of change of pri­vate debt are not macro­eco­nom­i­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant (except at the “Zero Low­er Bound”) is cor­rect. But in the real world, the role of the lev­el and rate of change of pri­vate debt is cru­cial. I illus­trate this by build­ing a Min­sky mod­el of Loan­able Funds and con­vert­ing it to the real world of Endoge­nous Mon­ey. Then I explain how cred­it growth plays an essen­tial role in aggre­gate demand and income, and how this is con­sis­tent with the tru­ism that Expen­di­ture equals Income.