The Our Finance Blogs site (http://ourfinanceblogs.com/forum/) is hosting an online debate on “Property 2009: Crash, Boom or Stagnate?!”. I will be one of the protagonists in the debate. If you’d like to take part, go to:
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http://ourfinanceblogs.com/forum/index.php?topic=7.msg9#msg9
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The podcasts should now be functional. The problem was simple but obscure: my server runs Linux, which is case sensitive, and the file names were all in lowercase, but specified with initial capitals in the XML and HTML files.
I’ve successfully downloaded and played them from the HTML. I would appreciate someone trying the subcribe/iTunes update and seeing whether they are now correct there too.
George negus is interviewing me and Peter Schiff on Dateline tonight. The topic is the attempted rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and what that may mean for the global economy and Australia in particular.
Dateline goes to air tonight (Wednesday) at 8.30pm. It is also accessible on the web, the day after the program goes to air.
In other news, the podcasts are currently not functional, but I hope to fix them up tomorrow.
Well Stu Cameron has been on the ball, but clearly I’ve stuffed up linking the files on my site! Several readers have told me that the podcasts 3–6 can’t be accessed.
At some stage they will be available, but I have a rush of work on right now so please wait until I put up a new post with properly tested links. My apologies for the confusion in the meantime.
http://www.debtdeflation.com/podcast/debtwatch.xml
And you can also access the audio files from:
http://www.debtdeflation.com/podcast/
The topics of these three podcasts (Numbers 4, 5 and 6) are:
Late last year on SBS News, when Stan Grant asked me which way the RBA would move rates in 2008, I replied “Up, and then down”, Stan quipped “Spoken like a true economist–an even handed answer!”–to which I replied “More down than up”.
I expected the intial rate rises because of the RBA’s focus on the rate of inflation, and a subsequent fall, not because inflation would be heading down, but because the economy would be–and the RBA rate would be forced to follow it
Last month closed with some far from comforting news about the state of the US housing market (sales and prices still falling), US financial institutions (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in need of rescue), Australian banks (NAB’s 90% write-down of its US CDO portfolio). Then ABS figures showed that retail sales had fallen “unexpectedly” by one percent in June. The recent rally in stock markets came to a sudden end, and after a brief period of renewed confidence, the question “how much worse can “It” get?” is once again doing the rounds.
My answer is: a lot worse. The empirical grounds for this assessment are:
Senator Nick Sherry, as Minister for Superannuation and Corporate Law, has released a Green Paper Financial Services and Credit Reform: Improving, Simplifying and Standardising Financial Services and Credit Regulation (June 2008)
This is a very apt time for such an enquiry. It is now over a decade since the Wallis Committee supported further deregulation of the financial system, and the consequences of that deregulation are now evident. I doubt that a complete reversal of policy is politically feasible now, but this inquiry may set the high water mark in the belief that the less regulated financial markets are, the better.
I recently made a submission to the Senate Economics Committee on the RBA (Enhanced Independence) Bill, where I argued against the Bill–as did all four public submissions.
After making that submission (which I’ll post here shortly) I thought I’d check out my submission to the Wallis Committee–since I argued that the RBA and the regulatory authorities in general, while they may appear to have succeeded in controlling inflation, have presided over the biggest speculative bubble in world history.
The securitisation of loans was a major part of this bubble, which of course, no-one could have foreseen… or at least that’s the line from conventional economists.
As a 65 year old winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Joseph Stiglitz is not someone that mainstream economists can dismiss as either a crank or senile–the usual reactions to anyone who opposes conventional thought in economic theory or policy.
So when he comes out and says that inflation targetting is foolish and dangerous, his views are worth taking note of. Here is Stiglitz’s commentary on inflation targetting, published earlier this month.
RBA Assistant Governor Guy Debelle and I spoke at a conference on Subprimes in Adelaide last month. One aspect of my analysis that Guy queried was my emphasis upon the Debt to GDP ratio. He noted that this appeared suspect, because it was comparing a stock (the outstanding level of debt) to a flow (annual GDP).
It’s a valid point to make. The engineer-turned-economist Mickal Kalecki once caustically observed that “economics is the science of confusing stocks with flows”, and I’m a stickler myself for not making that mistake. So making a song and dance about a stock to flow comparison like debt to GDP has to be justified by a sound argument.
