Financial Self-Defense During a Deleveraging Cycle
By Paul Vallejo
It is always useful to read outside-of-the-box thinkers. It is a well known maxim in the investing world that “you cannot make money off of what everyone knows,” as market prices have already reacted to what everyone knows. This makes the field of personal finance something particularly dangerous to be overly reliant on widely held “expert” advice.
On Monday 30 July at 7am Sydney time and 10PM GMT on Sunday Steve will be partaking in an online conference with Union Solidarity International (USi). USi is an organisation supported by major UK and Irish trade unions that aims to build grassroots international union solidarity using the latest technology. Please visit their website for more information on the event.
As noted in an earlier blog post (A Galilean Gesture: Eating with Dr. Steve Keen), one of the attendees at the talk Jim Stanford and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives organized for me in Toronto was the blogger Genevieve Tran, whose cause is improving financial literacy. She persuaded me to take one day off from the Fields Institute while to visit Toronto’s Centre Island–a combined park and nature reserve just a kilometre or so offshore. As we wandered among the ducks and geese (but completely failed to connect with the peacocks), she grilled me about strange species of which I am undeniably one–the Tyranosaurus Economist. Here’s her take on the conversation (you can read more of Genevieve’s take on money, the universe, and everything at her blog Money Big and Small).
The Euro is the national currency of a country that does not exist. Though there is a continent of Europe, as there is of America, there has never been a country of the United States of Europe, and there probably never will be.
The Euro is therefore not a currency as is the American dollar, and yet it is forced to masquerade as one—badly—by the Maastricht Treaty, in which the countries of Europe abandoned the right to produce their own genuine national currencies.
By David Lawson
Yesterday’s talk by RBA Governor Glenn Stevens at the Anika Foundation Luncheon, The Lucky Country, has been well spread across the press today. While Glenn Stevens has an undeniable obligation to uphold confidence in the financial system as part of the overall economy, credit to him for acknowledging the sceptics when he said:
The so-called ‘market
monetarists’ – that is, a growing pack of neoclassical economists who are advocating that central banks should try to generate inflation – are not as strange a breed as many think. Recently we compared classic deflationary monetarism with contemporary QE policies and found that they were based on the same underlying theoretical framework. We also found that the high priest of classical monetarism himself, Milton Friedman, strongly advocated inflationary monetary policies for both Japan after 1991 and the US after the stock market crash of 1929. So, it is by no means surprising that when one monetarist policy fails (I refer to QE), another will quickly be cooked up by Friedman devotees.
Peter Switzer interviewed me last night on his Sky News program. We discuss the Euro, why default is preferable to rescheduling, fiscal austerity versus deficit funding, Nobel Prize Winner Prescott saying that the Great Depression was an extended holiday, Australian property, what is a house price crash (comparing Japan and the USA to Australia), how does Australia’s housing market really differ from the USA’s, what really makes house prices rise, stock market performance in the next decade, the Credit Accelerator and the ups and downs of a down-trending market, the pain in Spain, and what it might lead to.
During the Great Depression and the war years monetary policy in Britain had proved largely ineffective. In the meantime it was shown that government spending could cure economic depressions and return the economy to full or even super-full employment. After the war most political parties in Britain were thus interested in using fiscal policy to generate full employment rather than rely on the vagaries of monetary policy. (This, it should be said, is the polar opposite of our rather more desperate situation today).
URPE–The Union for Radical Political Economics–is holding a Summer School for the Occupy movement, and as part of that invited papers that explained the crisis in 1000 words or less (so that they can be printed on one double-sided sheet). Here’s my effort in somewhat less than 1,000 words (though with 2 figures). In the interests of URPE’s objective in this exercise, here’s the PDF of this blog post for general download.
By Philip Pilkington, a writer and journalist based in Dublin, Ireland. You can follow him on Twitter at @pilkingtonphil
In the first part of this piece we looked at the Thatcher government’s monetarist experiment in the early 1980s. It did not end well. So we must ask: did the Thatcher government and the monetarists believe in what they were doing or were they cynically using monetarist policy as a device to destroy large parts of British industry in order to destroy the trade union movement?
