Author Archives: Steve Keen

Click here for this post in PDF: Debt­watch Mem­bers; CfE­SI Mem­bers
Click here for the eco­nom­ic data in this post: Debt­watch Mem­bers; CfE­SI Mem­bers
Click here for the house price index data in this post: Debt­watch Mem­bers; CfE­SI Mem­bers

The RBA’s deci­sion not to reduce rates this month caught most pun­dits by surprise—including me. Giv­en the inter­na­tion­al and local data, I thought they’d err on the side of cau­tion and cut rates.

You can’t go past the Google team for an intel­li­gent and engag­ing audi­ence. I spoke there 2 years ago to an audi­ence of about 100, and a sim­i­lar sized group turned up yes­ter­day. There were some quite chal­leng­ing ques­tions on my views about the cur­rent state of the world econ­o­my, so the talk went well over the allot­ted hour

Below is the video of the talk; the sound qual­i­ty is a bit poor (I rec­om­mend using ear­phones to lis­ten to it), but there is also an audio record­ing below that may be eas­i­er to under­stand. If there are enough com­plaints(!), we’ll blend the sep­a­rate­ly record­ed audio with the video.

John T. Har­vey is Pro­fes­sor of Eco­nom­ics at Texas Chris­t­ian Uni­ver­si­ty and a lead­ing non-neo­clas­si­cal econ­o­mist. He is doing his bit to raise aware­ness of alter­na­tive approach­es to eco­nom­ics via a blog that is pub­lished by Forbes Mag­a­zine. John explains his moti­va­tion for estab­lish­ing this blog as fol­lows:

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

The ABS house price data for Decem­ber 2011 has just been released, and it shows that house prices fell 4.8% in nom­i­nal terms between Decem­ber 2010 and Decem­ber 2011. The usu­al sus­pects are already try­ing to see this as mark­ing the bot­tom, while “just the facts, ma’am” report­ing sim­ply empha­sis­es the scale of the down­turn. A cou­ple of media out­lets have asked my views on the next cal­en­dar year, so here they are–along with some his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive on the house price bub­ble.

I would like to take this oppor­tu­ni­ty to intro­duce myself to the Debt­watch and CfE­SI com­mu­ni­ty. My name is David Law­son, and I will be com­ing on board as the Direc­tor of the Cen­tre for Eco­nom­ic Sta­bil­i­ty Incor­po­rat­ed (CfE­SI) as of the 1st of Feb­ru­ary. I have been an active com­mit­tee mem­ber of CfE­SI since its estab­lish­ment in March 2010.

The key objec­tive of this posi­tion is to free up Steve’s time so that he can focus on his research. As one of my pri­ma­ry func­tions, I will take over com­mu­ni­ca­tions with the Debt­watch blog and CfE­SI web­site. Mat­ters that require a research input will of course still be dealt with direct­ly by Steve him­self.

Syd­ney, Buenos Aires, Wash­ing­ton, Tra­verse City, New York, Lon­don… Spot the odd one out.

Tra­verse City is in Michi­gan, and for the sec­ond time in two years I found myself divert­ing from my usu­al cap­i­tal city trav­els to spend a few days near Lake Michi­gan at a “Local Future” con­fer­ence orga­nized by Aaron Wiss­ner. It’s an unusu­al con­fer­ence, with a com­mu­ni­ty focus, par­tic­i­pants from many walks of life but pre­dom­i­nant­ly con­cerned cit­i­zens rather than cor­po­rate rep­re­sen­ta­tives, and a diverse range of top­ics blend­ing ecol­o­gy, eco­nom­ics and gov­er­nance. The videos from the 2011 con­fer­ence, enti­tled “Vision-Action-Lead­er­ship”, have just been post­ed on Youtube, and they include a two-part inter­view of me by Aaron where he asked me to explain mon­ey with­out resort­ing to either Pow­er­point slides or equa­tions.

I’ve just received a copy of  “Eco­nom­ics Europe”, the  newslet­ter Bloomberg pro­duced for the World Eco­nom­ic Forum at Davos,  in which my com­men­tary on “The Future of Eco­nom­ics” was pub­lished in the Wednes­day 01.25.12 edi­tion (it’s on page 5).

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

The “Glob­al Finan­cial Cri­sis”, which began in late 2007, marked a turn­ing point in the nature of mar­ket economies. Their per­for­mance from at least the mid-1960s had been under-writ­ten by a faster growth of pri­vate debt than of GDP: this was the “Age of Lever­age”. In late 2007, the growth rate of pri­vate debt fell, and since then we have been in the Age of Delever­ag­ing.

I was approached by Bloomberg to write an 800-word fea­ture on “The Future of Eco­nom­ics” for the World Eco­nom­ic Forum, which starts today in Davos. Here is the  Bloomberg newslet­ter, with my com­men­tary on page 5.

For its entire his­to­ry, macro­eco­nom­ics has been dom­i­nat­ed by math­e­mat­i­cal mod­els that ignore the exis­tence of mon­ey, debt and bank­ing, and that per­ceive the econ­o­my’s move­ment through time as tran­si­tions from one state of equi­lib­ri­um to anoth­er.

Neil Wil­son is a UK-based  finance and infor­ma­tion sys­tems pro­fes­sion­al who blogs at 3Spoken.co.uk, and who is an active par­tic­i­pant in mon­e­tary debates. He has just pub­lished a post where he takes my “God­ley table” mod­el­ing approach and rejigs it to make it con­sis­tent with dou­ble-entry book­keep­ing stan­dards.

I am no accountant–I nev­er stud­ied account­ing at uni­ver­si­ty (I did an Arts/Law degree as an under­grad­u­ate, major­ing in Eco­nom­ics with minors in Maths & Psy­chol­o­gy), and have nev­er had to devel­op the skills subsequently–so I am hap­py to take advice from some­one like Neil about how to con­form to prop­er dou­ble-entry stan­dards.