Steve Keen's Debtwatch

Click here for this post in PDF

Fig­ure 1

In last week’s post I showed that there is a debt-financed, gov­ern­ment-spon­sored bub­ble in Aus­tralian house prices (click here and here for ear­li­er install­ments on the same top­ic). This week I’ll con­sid­er what the burst­ing of this bub­ble could mean for the banks that have financed it.

Betting the House

For two decades after the 1987 Stock Mar­ket Crash, banks have lived by the adage “as safe as hous­es”. Mort­gage lend­ing sur­passed busi­ness blend­ing in 1993, and ever since then it’s been on the up and up. Busi­ness lend­ing actu­al­ly fell dur­ing the 1990s reces­sion, and took off again only in 2006, when the Chi­na boom and the lever­aged-buy­out fren­zy began.

The Dis­cov­er­ies Need Dol­lars cam­paign to stop the rumoured cuts to research fund­ing will now have ral­lies in Syd­ney and Ade­laide as well as in Mel­bourne:

I’m attend­ing the Soci­ety for the Advance­ment of Socio-Eco­nom­ics (SASE) annu­al con­fer­ence in Madrid on June 23–25. Giv­en that I have to fly from Aus­tralia, I’m mak­ing this an extend­ed trip. I will spend 3 days in Lon­don (June 13–15), 3 in Paris (16–18), 3 in Barcelona (19–21) and 4 in Madrid (22–25).

As well as some tourism and meet­ing up with friends like Max Keis­er in Paris, I’m open to giv­ing a talk or three, if there is suf­fi­cient inter­est.

There are wide­spread reports that the polit­i­cal fetish with return­ing the Fed­er­al gov­ern­ment to a sur­plus will result in cuts to Aus­trali­a’s research fund­ing bud­get of close to half a bil­lion dol­lars:

Research cuts put lives at risk, say med­ical insti­tutes

Research cuts will cre­ate ‘brain drain’

These cuts are dri­ven by an obses­sion with run­ning a per­ma­nent bud­get sur­plus that is good pol­i­tics but bad eco­nom­ics. For Aus­tralia to con­sid­er achiev­ing this point­less goal by fur­ther under­min­ing its already pathet­ic lev­el of research fund­ing is even more insane.

Click here for this post in PDF

Before the US house price bub­ble burst, its banks and reg­u­la­tors claimed (a) that there was­n’t a bub­ble and (b) that, if house prices did fall, it would­n’t affect the sol­ven­cy of the banks.

The same claims are now being made about Aus­tralian house prices and Aus­tralian banks. On the for­mer point, Glenn Stevens recent­ly remarked that:

“There is quite often quot­ed very high ratios of price to income for Aus­tralia, but I think if you get the broad­est mea­sures coun­try-wide prices and coun­try-wide mea­sure of income, the ratio is about four and half and it has not moved much either way for ten years.

Reg­u­lar read­ers of this blog would know that I am a staunch crit­ic of what I pre­fer to call the “First Home Ven­dors Grant”, which is why I quick­ly sup­port­ed the pro­pos­al on GetUp’s sug­ges­tion box for a boy­cott cam­paign by first home buy­ers.

That sug­ges­tion has become a suc­cess in its own right even before Get­Up decides whether to pur­sue it or not, with the cam­paign being report­ed in the Fair­fax media: see Online cam­paign tar­gets high cost of hous­ing. Chris Zap­pone’s arti­cle head­lines The Age and the Syd­ney Morn­ing Her­ald’s home pages, and it had 364 com­ments as of 3.30pm today–a remark­able num­ber for a sin­gle sto­ry in less than six hours.

In just a few days, Pros­per Aus­tralia’s pro­pos­al that Get­Up should cam­paign for a First Home Buy­ers Strike has gone from last posi­tion in Getup’s sug­ges­tion box to first. At 7.15AM this morn­ing, it had 3,113 votes–almost 500 ahead of the next-ranked pro­pos­al.

In its essence, this pro­pos­al is aimed at remov­ing gov­ern­ment inter­fer­ence in the prop­er­ty mar­ket which pur­port­ed to improve home own­er­ship, but which in essence has made it worse by feed­ing the prop­er­ty price bub­ble.

The cam­paign group Get­Up has a “sug­ges­tion box” in which new cam­paign ideas can be sug­gest­ed, debat­ed, and if they receive suf­fi­cient votes, adopt­ed.

Pros­per Aus­tralia recent­ly sug­gest­ed a First Home Prop­er­ty Buy­ers Strike (click here for the Pros­per Aus­tralia press release), and after a week or so it is the 9th ranked cam­paign idea with 1700 votes.

I just logged on and vot­ed for it, with the fol­low­ing com­ment:

You will notice a strange lit­tle icon at the bot­tom of all my posts now:

This is just an image–the actu­al Flat­tr but­ton is at the end of the post

This is a link to a new web sys­tem called Flat­tr. It’s a way of enabling micro­pay­ments to be made via the web.

One of the great strengths of the web is the great abun­dance of free material—and this site is part of that. How­ev­er it’s also one of its great weak­ness­es, since it’s not free for web authors like myself to pro­vide this infor­ma­tion.

I was inter­viewed on the peren­ni­al top­ic of Aus­tralian house prices by Aus­tralian Bro­ker News. The seg­ment, “The Big Sto­ry: Is the bub­ble set to burst?”, includes two indus­try rep­re­sen­ta­tives as well as me. I enjoyed how the 5 minute sto­ry was put togeth­er, and I think you will too. Click below to watch the Aus­tralian Bro­ker News item.

As seen on Brokernews.com.au