Broadcast on March 11 2009 by ABC Radio National Big Ideas
A blog member has kindly produced a transcript of the off-the-cuff talk I gave at this forum. I’ve made minor corrections to the punctuation below, but the text is otherwise as delivered on the night without speaking notes–so there are some grammatical slips. For those who want to listen to this alone–without also listening to Bernie Fraser beforehand–here is a link to the MP3 of my talk.
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.
“Lies, damned lies, and statistics” is part of a phrase attributed to Benjamin Disraeli and popularised in the United States by Mark Twain: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” The statement refers to the persuasive power of numbers, the use of statistics to bolster weak arguments, and the tendency of people to disparage statistics that do not support their positions. (Wikipedia)
Two recent speeches by the RBA supported the contention that Australian house prices are no longer overvalued, that mortgage repayment costs have returned to historic averages, that Australia is suffering a housing shortage, and therefore that the Australian housing market should not experience the catastrophic falls that are now commonplace across the OECD–and especially in the USA.
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.
