About Steve Keen

I am Professor of Economics and Head of Economics, History and Politics at Kingston University London, and a long time critic of conventional economic thought. As well as attacking mainstream thought in Debunking Economics, I am also developing an alternative dynamic approach to economic modelling. The key issue I am tackling here is the prospect for a debt-deflation on the back of the enormous private debts accumulated globally, and our very low rate of inflation.

Canada’s Debt Bubble

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Below is the talk I gave to the Cana­di­an Cen­tre for Pol­i­cy Alter­na­tives on the Debt Bub­ble and its impli­ca­tions for Cana­da. I cov­er my Min­skian analy­sis of the Depres­sion in gen­er­al, and con­clude with data on the Cana­di­an econ­o­my. The mort­gage accel­er­a­tion data in par­tic­u­lar implies that the Cana­di­an house price bubble–which is not as big as those in Aus­tralia, the USA or the UK–is close to being over.


This is the screen record­ing of the talk–better for read­ing the slides them­selves.

I’ll edit the post tomor­rrow to add links to the Pow­er­point slides and an audio recording–I can’t access the servers right now to upload them.

Max Keiser interview

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Max Keis­er, recent­ly crowned the most dan­ger­ous per­son in the finan­cial media, inter­viewed me for Episode 307 of the Kaiser Report.

Next Fri­day at 4.30PM, I’ll be live in the Wash­ing­ton stu­dio with two oth­ers who should be on that list, Lau­ren Lyster and Demetri Kofi­nas of The Cap­i­tal Account.

Hablando en plata, Baby!

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Move over Arnie. Google tells me that “Hablan­do en pla­ta” trans­lates as “Talk in Sil­ver”. OK, so it does­n’t have the ring of “Has­ta La Vista, Baby!”, let alone the dra­mat­ic impact, but it’s now become part of my pid­gin-Span­ish ver­nac­u­lar.

Why? Watch this video–and pay close atten­tion at about the 1 minute 15 sec­ond mark.

Amaz­ing­ly, this has had over 400,000 views: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09YSNOsVebM.

Upcoming talks in Toronto

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I’m cur­rent­ly at the Fields Insti­tute in Toron­to, work­ing with math­e­mati­cians here to devel­op my mon­e­tary mod­els. I am tak­ing part in some “no maths barred” sem­i­nars every Tues­day:

http://www.fields.utoronto.ca/programs/scientific/11–12/nonlineareconomics/

But I will also give two rather more acces­si­ble talks while here. The first is on the pri­vate debt bub­ble and its impli­ca­tions for Cana­da:

Advanced Political Economy — Lecture 3

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Below is Lec­ture 3 from Steve’s Advanced Polit­i­cal Econ­o­my class at the Uni­ver­si­ty of West­ern Syd­ney. The class offers an in depth cri­tique of the fail­ures of neo­clas­si­cal the­o­ries, as well as detail­ing my approach to a new eco­nom­ics.

Lec­ture 3 — Neo­clas­si­cal Pro­duc­tion Fal­lac­i­es

Eight Elementary Errors of Economics

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Geoff Davies

The Glob­al Finan­cial Cri­sis, the extreme inequal­i­ty of wealth world-wide, the mate­ri­al­ism of mod­ern life and the dire state of the plan­et are not acci­dents, nor just unavoid­able con­se­quences of the nature of things.  They are the result of the mod­ern prac­tice of eco­nom­ics, which makes ele­men­tary errors of account­ing, evi­dence, per­cep­tion and the­o­ry.

Many of these errors have been not­ed for decades, but only by a dis­sent­ing fringe of econ­o­mists and informed oth­ers.  Their mes­sage is drowned out by the relent­less rep­e­ti­tion of the main­stream free-mar­ket mantra.  Though many peo­ple are uncom­fort­able with econ­o­mists‘ pro­nounce­ments, and some are aware of some of the errors, few seem to realise how many and how basic are the errors, or how far-reach­ing are the con­se­quences.  Here are some of the main errors, spelt out in sim­ple terms.

Cars vs. homes

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Micheal Pas­coe wrote a great arti­cle yes­ter­day enti­tled; Throw­ing mon­ey at hous­ing is no cure for fear. He did a poet­ic job of con­trast­ing recent record car sales to the con­tin­u­ing stag­na­tion of the hous­ing mar­ket. Michael ref­er­enced ‘the warn­ing issued by the Reserve Bank two years ago about rely­ing on res­i­den­tial real estate for­ev­er ris­ing.’ To recap, Glenn Steven’s offi­cial state­ment was:

 “I think it is a mis­take to assume that a risk-less, guar­an­teed way to pros­per­i­ty is just to be lever­aged up into prop­er­ty”

Toronto Talk June 28

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Please join the Cana­di­an Cen­tre for Pol­i­cy Alter­na­tives’ Ontario team for an evening of wine, cheese and cut­ting-edge analy­sis about the risks in Cana­da and world­wide from the con­tin­ued expan­sion of debt – fea­tur­ing renowned Aus­tralian econ­o­mist Steve Keen.

The Con­tin­u­ing Debt Bub­ble: What It Could Mean for Cana­da
Thurs­day, June 28, 2012
7:00–9:00 pm
The Arts and Let­ters Club
14 Elm Street, Toron­to ON

Spon­sored by the Cana­di­an Cen­tre for Pol­i­cy Alter­na­tives’ Ontario office, the Pro­gres­sive Eco­nom­ics Forum, and Ryer­son University’s Depart­ment of Pol­i­tics and Pub­lic Admin­is­tra­tion.

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Talk to INET’s YSI Live 11am New York time today

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I’m giv­ing a talk on Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics, and the future of eco­nom­ics, to the INET Young Schol­ars Ini­tia­tive at 11am New York time today (5pm Cen­tral Euro­pean time). The Young schol­ars have kind­ly agreed to let me open this event up to read­ers of this blog. Below is a bit more infor­ma­tion about YSI from the organ­is­ers, and the login details for today’s talk.

The pur­pose of the Young Schol­ars Ini­tia­tive is to find ways to sup­port new eco­nom­ic thinkers at the ear­li­est stages of their career tra­jec­to­ry, from grad­u­ate stu­dents to new junior fac­ul­ty through to new­ly tenured fac­ul­ty. So far a social media plat­form and a face­book group have been formed in an attempt to vir­tu­al­ly recre­ate the ener­gy and momen­tum gen­er­at­ed at INET’s Berlin con­fer­ence this April.