By Philip Pilkington, a writer and journalist based in Dublin, Ireland. You can follow him on Twitter at @pilkingtonphil

By Philip Soos

The Con­ser­va­tion

One of the more inter­est­ing out­comes the 2011 Cen­sus pro­duced was the fig­ures con­cern­ing the hous­ing mar­ket. The rea­son for this inter­est is how the results con­trast­ed with the idea that Aus­tralia cur­rent­ly suf­fers from an acute hous­ing under­sup­ply or short­age. Tak­ing the lead in pro­mot­ing this idea is the Nation­al Hous­ing Sup­ply Coun­cil (NHSC), an organ­i­sa­tion formed by the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment in May 2008 to pro­vide an in-depth analy­sis of the hous­ing mar­ket. The NHSC is wide­ly con­sid­ered to be the peak body in this field.

I’ve just tak­en time-out from the pre-con­fer­ence social event at the Cen­tral Bank of Turkey annu­al con­fer­ence, and (as enjoy­able as that func­tion was) it’s lucky that I did: Mish Shed­lock has fol­lowed up on some crit­i­cisms of my “Mod­ern Debt Jubilee” pro­pos­al with a post on real solu­tions for the debt cri­sis. I will try to reply to Mish’s fol­low-up before I turn in for the night here in Cap­pado­cia.

Below is a video from the 2011 Inter­na­tion­al Con­fer­ence Vision, Action and Lead­er­ship, host­ed by Aaron Wiss­ner. The con­fer­ence used the Del­phi method was used to draw upon some com­mon­al­i­ties and dif­fer­ences around the inter­pre­ta­tion of the cur­rent finan­cial cri­sis from pan­el mem­bers, includ­ing Tom Gre­co, Steve Keen and Nic­hole Foss. This fin­ish­ing group inter­view shares an inter­est­ing per­spec­tive on the out­comes of this con­fer­enc­ing tech­nique.

By David Law­son

Click here for this data in Excel: Debt­watch; CfE­SI

An issue that is often over looked here in Aus­tralia is the ris­ing cost of edu­ca­tion. Uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents are lib­er­at­ed from the up-front cost of edu­ca­tion through the Aus­tralian Gov­ern­ments High­er Edu­ca­tion Loan Pro­gram (HELP). While in oth­er coun­tries like the Unit­ed States the stu­dent loans mar­ket is pri­va­tised, which has con­tributed to their high­ly priced ter­tiary edu­ca­tion sys­tem. Though, after look­ing over the num­bers here in Aus­tralia it seems that the pub­lic cred­it fund­ing through HELP could be hav­ing the same infla­tion­ary effect on edu­ca­tion.

Below is Steve’s recent inter­view on Cap­i­tal Account with Lau­ren Lyster that talks about the Debt Black Hole that economies around the world have unknow­ing­ly been sucked into. Steve dis­cuss­es the fun­da­men­tals of his unique analy­sis on using ris­ing debt lev­els to finance eco­nom­ic growth. A fan­tas­tic renewed per­spec­tive on the cur­rent finan­cial cri­sis!

Click here for this data in Excel: Debt­watch; CfE­SI
Click here for this post in PDF: Debt­watch; CfE­SI

Steve Keen, Uni­ver­si­ty of West­ern Syd­ney
Matheus Gras­sel­li, Fields Insti­tute, Toron­to

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trou­ble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” (Mark Twain)

Introduction

That the Euro has fall­en into cri­sis a mere decade after its intro­duc­tion is hard­ly sur­pris­ing. The intrin­sic prob­lems in its design were evi­dent to econ­o­mists as wide­ly sep­a­rat­ed intel­lec­tu­al­ly as Wynne God­ley and Mil­ton Fried­man. Writ­ing in 1992, God­ley observed that

Earth­shar­ing Aus­tralia, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Pros­per Aus­tralia and the Land Val­ue Research Group (LVRG), has put togeth­er the Spec­u­la­tive Vacan­cies in Mel­bourne: 2012 Report, authored by Philip Soos. The report is for­mu­lat­ed from water usage data pro­vid­ed by City West Water and Yarra Val­ley Water to esti­mate prop­er­ty vacan­cies in the Mel­bourne area.

Earth­shar­ing Aus­tralia has been pro­duc­ing the Spec­u­la­tive Vacan­cies report annu­al­ly since 2008. The report clas­si­fies a vacant prop­er­ty as real estate show­ing water con­sump­tion less 50 litres per day (50L/d) aver­aged over the six months peri­od, July-Decem­ber 2011.

I can scarce­ly believe what Brad Delong has dared to pub­lish on Project Syn­di­cate today:

We econ­o­mists who are steeped in eco­nom­ic and finan­cial his­to­ry – and aware of the his­to­ry of eco­nom­ic thought con­cern­ing finan­cial crises and their effects – have rea­son to be proud of our analy­ses over the past five years. We under­stood where we were head­ing, because we knew where we had been.

In par­tic­u­lar, we under­stood that the rapid run-up of house prices, cou­pled with the exten­sion of lever­age, posed macro­eco­nom­ic dan­gers. We rec­og­nized that large bub­ble-dri­ven loss­es in assets held by lever­aged finan­cial insti­tu­tions would cause a pan­icked flight to safe­ty, and that pre­vent­ing a deep depres­sion required active offi­cial inter­ven­tion as a lender of last resort.…