Note to Subscribers: I have been on study leave in Europe for the last month, and get back to Sydney late on Monday February 4th. I will be available for comment from the morning of Tuesday February 5th.
Chart of the Month: Who’s having a housing bubble then?
A SMH article claimed that 17 out of 19 economists surveyed expected the RBA to increase rates in response to the January CPI figure:
I’m currently in Norway, and was invited to talk on the global debt crisis to a local discussion group. They videotaped the talk, and put it up on Google Video. The link is:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1375113008927627575
There is also a copy on my site–with the opening trivia about how I met my Norwegian host and fellow researcher Trond Andresen deleted:
http://www.debtdeflation.com/podcast/SteveKeenDebtTalkNorway20080131.mov
I give an overview of the debt situation, using the graphs that I customarily put into the Debtwatch Report, as well as explaining Hyman Minsky’s “Financial Instability Hypothesis”, which I regard as the only economic theory that can explain the current state of financial markets and the global economy.
I’ve been researching in Europe and too busy to maintain the blog for a while, for which I apologise. Hopefully I’ll get back to it when I return to Sydney next week. In the meantime, I had the following Soros article recommended to me, and it’s an excellent commentary on the credit crisis:
Soros on “The worst market crisis in 60 years”
The Debtwatch Podcast is now operational. To hear the first interview, download it, and/or subscribe to the monthly feed via Itunes or similar software, please click on the link below:
To subscribe directly, simply copy and paste the link below into your podcast software:
 http://www.debtdeflation.com/podcast/debtwatch.xml
Thanks again to Cameron Media Technology for providing this service.
By the kind auspices of Stuart Cameron of Cameron Media Technology Pty Ltd, Debtwatch is now going “pod”. Each month’s report will be accompanied by an interview, which will be available for download and subscription via Itunes (etc.).
 The first podcast, which discusses the “Experience can be misleading” election special report, can be accessed here. Shortly we’ll also have the XML link to enable subscription to the podcast via Itunes and the like.
Thanks again to Stuart for providing his professional skills to make this podcast possible.
A major issue in this election campaign has been experience. Both parties accept that experience as an economic manager matters, and Howard and Costello regard it as their one trump card.But experience can be misleading if it teaches a rote set of behaviours, and then circumstances suddenly change. The colonisation of Australia almost failed because farmers used their experience in England and Ireland to guide their farming practices in Sydney. The colony only survived because ultimately it adapted its farming practices to this new land (and because it received some help from Indonesia) .
Today’s blog was published as a feature “A lose-lose election for home buyers” by The Age Business. Click here to download this post as a PDF file (with charts).
Both Liberal and Labor housing policies will make Australia’s debt and housing affordability crises worse. The only difference between the two is how much damage they will do.Both parties have promised tax-advantaged savings systems that will enable First Home Buyers to accumulate larger deposits. This will undoubtedly help them compete with other buyers in the housing market, but a lack of competition amongst buyers isn’t the problem.
Tables like the ones below take my breath away when I see them for the first time–because the story they tell is worse than any I would have dared make up. As I noted in the interview with Kerry O’Brien on the 7.30 Report, real wages have increased since 1990, and since Australia’s last election in late 2004. However, mortgage debt has increased by far more.
I provided a number of comparisons of real wages, mortgage payments, interest rates and the like in my interview on the 7.30 Report this evening. I’ll post a table containing those data by tomorrow morning.
If you’re a new visitor and would like to receive my Debtwatch Report, which Kerry mentioned in tonight’s interview, please click here to send me an email about it. Or you could sign up for the blog, after which I will add you to the subscribers list (there have been some hassles reported by some users on this front by the way, so if that happens to you, please follow the First Rule of computers–“If at first you don’t succeed, give up”–and send me an email instead).
I’m one of the presenters at this conference at UTS today. The conference website has a link to all the papers (including mine). As usual, I’ve done an “all singing, all dancing” Powerpoint presentation that has a few additional details to it.
The Paul Woolley Centre is a very useful development, given the bias in academic finance towards the proposition that finance markets are actually hyper-functional (“efficient” in the jargon, defined in a way that correponds to “prophetic” in ordinary English).
Paul Woolley is giving a public lecture tonight “Is the Financial Sector Dysfunctional”, at 6.15pm in University Hall at UTS–in the Science Building, 745 Harris Street Ultimo (diagonally opposite the ABC building). All are welcome.
