Steve Keen's Debtwatch

I lec­ture on Behav­ioral Finance at the Uni­ver­si­ty of West­ern Syd­ney this semes­ter, and will record all my lec­tures and post them on my YouTube Chan­nel Prof­Steve­Keen. In this first lec­ture (after the usu­al pre­lim­i­nar­ies of explain­ing assess­ment and the like to my 85 third year stu­dents), I cov­er the Neo­clas­si­cal the­o­ry of con­sumer behav­ior.

As I note to my stu­dents, the con­cept I teach here–Revealed Preference–was taught in 1st year 40 years ago, when I was an fresh­er under­grad­u­ate. But the tuition of Neo­clas­si­cal eco­nom­ics has been so dumb­ed down over the years that my 3rd year stu­dents had­n’t heard of it before. I expect it’s reserved as pun­ish­ment for those who under­take an Hon­ors degree these days!

In a Nutshell: I have a hunch that the RBA will follow its conventional “neoclassical” models and raise rates tomorrow, even though the economy is locked in “two speed” mode, and the global economy is racked by uncertainty. This would be a mistake: given unprecedented private debt levels and deleveraging by households and businesses, a rate rise would accelerate the economy’s decline into recession.

Click here for this post in PDF

(My apolo­gies for the pre­vi­ous post–I did­n’t check the YouTube link**, which was to an ear­li­er video.)

I gave the pre­sen­ta­tion below to a Grif­fith Uni­ver­si­ty sym­po­sium on Finance the­o­ry “after” the GFC/Great Reces­sion.

Speak­ers only had 20 min­utes, and if you think I nor­mal­ly speak fast, brace your­self for the speed of this pre­sen­ta­tion. I sug­gest you keep the mouse near the “pause” but­ton in case you want to spend more time read­ing some of the text–which is also here of course in the Pow­er­point File.

I’m tak­ing part in an Intel­li­gence Squared Aus­tralia debate on pop­u­la­tion enti­tled “If we keep pop­u­lat­ing we will per­ish” on Tues­day July 26th at the City Recital Hall in Angel Place, Syd­ney.

The speak­ers are, on the affir­ma­tive, myself, Dick Smith, and Sen­a­tor Laris­sa Waters (Greens, QLD). The neg­a­tive case will be put by Tan­veer Ahmed, Frank Bren­nan and Wayne Goss.

If you’d like to take part, tick­ets are $32 per per­son or $22 per stu­dent or pen­sion­er, and can be pur­chased from this link.

I’ve done numer­ous inter­views on Al Jazeera’s news and busi­ness pro­grams over the last 5 years; this is the first one I’ve been sent a clip of–and I’ll try to keep get­ting them now that the Prof­Steve­Keen YouTube Chan­nel is up and run­ning.

The top­ic was the role of the Cred­it Rat­ing Agen­cies and their role in the cri­sis. Though the inter­views are short new pieces and don’t leave time to get into top­ics in any great detail, the fact that Al Jazeera cov­ers top­ics like this in some crit­i­cal detail puts it sev­er­al steps ahead of the media pack, espe­cial­ly in the US and Aus­tralia.

That tran­scen­den­tal truth occurred to me while writ­ing the sec­ond edi­tion of Debunk­ing Economics–which will be pub­lished in Sep­tem­ber. In this video, I point out the most egre­gious instance of this, the “Son­nen­schein-Man­tel-Debreu” (SMD) con­di­tions. This refers to research by lead­ing neo­clas­si­cal econ­o­mists on whether the so-called “Law of Demand” that can be proven for an indi­vid­u­al’s demand curve applies to a mar­ket demand curve.

The “Law of Demand” is the propo­si­tion that, if a com­mod­i­ty’s price falls, the demand for it will rise. That sounds like a rea­son­able state­ment at first glance–and it will often be true in the real world. But it is an arti­cle of faith for econ­o­mists that this is always true.

One of the bonus­es of my recent trip to Madrid for the SASE con­fer­ence was being able to drop in to see Max Keis­er and Sta­cy Her­bert in Paris. We record­ed two inter­views, one for The Keis­er Report and anoth­er much longer inter­view for On The Edge.

Max and I cov­er a wide range of top­ics in this 23 minute inter­view: the cri­sis itself, shad­ow bank­ing, the inter­play of Glob­al Warm­ing, Peak Oil and Chi­na with the Great Reces­sion,  my new book, Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics II (which is com­ing out in Sep­tem­ber)… And we had a lot of fun in the process.

Hi every­one.

This is a request for feed­back, rather than infor­ma­tion or analy­sis from me: if you want­ed to see where the Aus­tralian prop­er­ty mar­ket is frag­ile now, where would you go?

Obvi­ous places to check in gen­er­al are Perth and Gold Coast, but I’d like some more specifics (sub­urbs and, if pos­si­ble, streets) that only local knowl­edge can pro­vide.

In the Aus­tralian con­text, fore­clo­sures won’t pro­vide the data–as a sub­scriber recent­ly point­ed out, there are only about 400 mort­gagee sales list­ed coun­try­wide on realestate.com.au. But there are about 4,000 “moti­vat­ed ven­dors” out there, which is often a sign that ven­dors are under lender pres­sure to sell. Oth­er use­ful indi­ca­tors are areas where there have been sub­stan­tial price drops.

My focus is and will remain on explain­ing how the cri­sis came about, but in the mid­dle of the cri­sis, gov­ern­ment poli­cies have the poten­tial to either lessen the cri­sis or make it more extreme. Two of the best com­men­ta­tors on sen­si­ble poli­cies to lessen the cri­sis are Yanis Varo­ufakis and Richard Koo.

Yanis (togeth­er with Stu­art Hol­land) has authored the “Mod­est Pro­pos­al” to over­come the Euro­pean cri­sis (the lat­est ver­sion is here in PDF: “The Mod­est Pro­pos­al”). Richard Koo recounts the Japan­ese expe­ri­ence with the burst­ing of its Bub­ble Econ­o­my and the many pol­i­cy twists and turns after­wards in the Holy Grail of Macro­eco­nom­ics: Lessons from Japan’s Great Reces­sion.

A num­ber of blog mem­bers argued that my lead/lag analy­sis of the Cred­it Accel­er­a­tor and eco­nom­ic and finan­cial vari­ables (unem­ploy­ment, share and house price indices) appeared erro­neous.

I am the first to admit that–though my math­e­mat­i­cal mod­el­ling is strong–my sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis is not up to the same lev­el. I long ago react­ed adverse­ly to the prac­tice of econo­met­rics in eco­nom­ics, large­ly on the same grounds that led Ed Leam­er to pub­lish his famous paper “Let’s Take the Con out of Econo­met­rics” (AER, March 1983), omit­ted vari­able bias, etc.