Nouriel Roubi­ni is one of the world’s fore­most experts on the finan­cial sys­tem, and like me, was warn­ing of poten­tial crises while most oth­er com­men­ta­tors could only see ros­es bloom­ing. He is Pro­fes­sor of Eco­nom­ics at New York Uni­ver­si­ty’s Stern School of Busi­ness, and found­ed the RGE Mon­i­tor, a high­ly suc­cess­ful com­mer­cial intel­li­gence web­site. He has recent­ly estab­lished a new blog with a focus on Asia, and has kind­ly asked me to be one of the con­trib­u­tors.

Nor­mal­ly I will sim­ply cross-post my Debt­watch blog, but on occa­sions I’ll write spe­cial pur­pose entries there. Nouriel has also assem­bled an inter­est­ing team of non-ortho­dox com­men­ta­tors from the aca­d­e­m­ic and busi­ness sec­tors.

Sec­tion One on ” The future of the Aus­tralian econ­o­my” starts with the fol­low­ing pre­am­ble:

“The Aus­tralian Gov­ern­ment is com­mit­ted to mod­ernising our econ­o­my so that we can com­pete with the lead­ing nations in a world econ­o­my that is being trans­formed by glob­al­i­sa­tion, new tech­nolo­gies, and the rise of Chi­na and India. While we take full advan­tage of the min­ing boom, we must also build long term com­pet­i­tive strengths in the glob­al indus­tries of tomor­row — indus­tries that will pro­vide the high-pay­ing jobs of the future.

The Aus­tralia 2020 Sum­mit will exam­ine:

This blog entry first appeared as a fea­ture in the Dai­ly Tele­graph on Wednes­day April 9th 2008. If you’re a new­com­er to it cour­tesy of that fea­ture, and you want to look at this issue in more depth, there are links below to more detailed analy­sis.

The Dai­ly Tele­graph lived up to its nick­name of “The Dai­ly Ter­ror” last week, with a front­page attack on Reserve Bank of Aus­tralia Gov­er­nor Glenn Stevens enti­tled “Is he Aus­trali­a’s most use­less?”, and an edi­to­r­i­al that was no less provoca­tive: “RBA boss is los­ing inter­est”.

I’m giv­ing a talk on sub­primes to the “Mon­ty Pel­i­can Soci­ety”:

• Date: Wednes­day April 2nd
• Venue: Syd­ney Mechan­ics School of Arts, 280 Pitt St, Syd­ney NSW 2000 (near Town Hall)
• Time: 6.30pm-8pm
• For more infor­ma­tion, con­tact Troy Hen­der­son (troyh@search.org.au), or just rock up on the night.

At Last, the 1975 Show?

My main top­ic this month is a com­par­i­son of the eco­nom­ic events of today to those of 1973–75, but the most recent Case-Shiller data on US house prices sim­ply has to be “the Chart of the Month”. Last *month* the index dropped by 2.3 percent–implying an annu­al rate of decline in the realm of 25%! US house prices are down 13% from the peak in mid-2006, and in free-fall now.

Helen Dal­ley of Sky Busi­ness News inter­viewed me and Tim Mul­hol­land, of Melamed and Asso­ciates, a Chica­go-based con­sult­ing firm, about the Sub­prime cri­sis. If you’d like to see the video, click on this link:

http://www.skynews.com.au/video/video.aspx?id=43

Then use the selec­tion pan­el to choose the third story–with the head­ing “Sun­day Biz”, and the descrip­tion “Sky News Reporter Helen Dal­ley talked finance with Uni­ver­si­ty of West­ern Syd­ney Pro­fes­sor, Steve Keen”.

Why Now?

       There has been no short­age of com­men­ta­tors and play­ers will­ing to vouch that this is the worst finan­cial cri­sis they have ever seen. Equal­ly, there has been no short­age of bailout moves by the Fed­er­al Reserve–remedies that put “the Greenspan Put” to shame in their mag­ni­tude.
       And yet the mar­ket melt­down con­tin­ues, and the casu­al­ties con­tin­ue to mount, with Bear Stearns the latest–and sure­ly not the last.
       In all this, no one yet seems to have posed the ques­tion of “why now?”. Why is the cri­sis clear­ly more severe this time than ever before, and why are reme­dies that worked rel­a­tive­ly quick­ly in the past (remem­ber the fast turn­around of the mar­ket after Octo­ber 1987, and the rapid recov­ery from the res­cue of Long Term Cap­i­tal Man­age­ment?) failling today?
       The answer is, sim­ply, that the world has nev­er in its his­to­ry car­ried the lev­el of debt that it is car­ry­ing today. The reme­dies that worked when Amer­i­ca’s pri­vate debt to GDP ratio was a mere 150 per­cent (see Fig­ure 1) are inad­e­quate when that ratio is 275 per­cent.

The Can­ber­ra talk will now start at 7.30pm. The venue remains the same: ANU Emer­i­tus Fac­ul­ty Fel­lows Lane Cot­tage; build­ing 3T.

For more infor­ma­tion, con­tact the Nature and Soci­ety Forum at office@natsoc.org.au.