Debt­watch began in March 2007 as a way of dis­trib­ut­ing my month­ly newslet­ter on the eco­nom­ic cri­sis I expect­ed to soon erupt, and about which I had been warn­ing in media inter­views since Decem­ber 2005.

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Fig­ure 1: Excerpt from the 1st Debt­watch Report in Novem­ber 2006

From hum­ble begin­nings, the blog has grown like Top­sy to have over 12,500 sub­scribers, about 60,000 unique vis­i­tors, amost one mil­lion page views and six mil­lion hits per month.

Fig­ure 2: Debt­watch read­er­ship stats for 2011

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

Mort­gage debt is by far the largest com­po­nent of debt in Aus­tralia today—government debt, which is the focus of polit­i­cal debate, is triv­ial by com­par­i­son (a quick caveat though—finance sec­tor debt may be larg­er again than mort­gage debt, if this claim, sourced from Mor­gan Stan­ley, is accurate—since it shows Aus­trali­a’s aggre­gate pri­vate debt ratio as almost equal to the USA’s).

Fig­ure 1

Preamble

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The fun­da­men­tal cause of the eco­nom­ic and finan­cial cri­sis that began in late 2007 was lend­ing by the finance sec­tor that pri­mar­i­ly financed spec­u­la­tion rather than invest­ment. The pri­vate debt bub­ble this caused is unprece­dent­ed, prob­a­bly in human his­to­ry and cer­tain­ly in the last cen­tu­ry (see Fig­ure 1). Its unwind­ing now is the pri­ma­ry cause of the sus­tained slump in eco­nom­ic growth. The recent growth in sov­er­eign debt is a symp­tom of this under­ly­ing cri­sis, not the cause, and the cur­rent polit­i­cal obses­sion with reduc­ing sov­er­eign debt will exac­er­bate the root prob­lem of pri­vate sec­tor delever­ag­ing.

PDF For­mat: Debt­watch Sub­scribers; CfE­SI Sub­scribers

Data: Debt­watch Sub­scribers; CfE­SI Sub­scribers

As much as I crit­i­cize the US of A for its eco­nom­ic man­age­ment, I can’t fault its sta­tis­ti­cal agen­cies on the col­lec­tion and dis­sem­i­na­tion of data: data is read­i­ly avail­able and almost always in an eas­i­ly acces­si­ble for­mat. That, and the fact that it’s the world’s biggest econ­o­my, is why most of my analy­sis is of the US. Aus­trali­a’s ABS deserves sim­i­lar acco­lades for mak­ing data read­i­ly acces­si­ble and rel­a­tive­ly easy to locate.

Every year, The Age pub­lish­es a sur­vey of econ­o­mists’ opin­ions on the year ahead. Most of these are “mar­ket econ­o­mists” rather than academics—working for banks, insur­ance com­pa­nies and the like. Three aca­d­e­mics are surveyed—myself, Jacob Mars­den of Monash and Neville Nor­man of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Melbourne—and one econ­o­mist work­ing for a trade union, Brad Crofts of the AWU.

Peter Mar­tin does an overview of the results each year, as well as pro­vid­ing snip­pets of the answers giv­en to sup­ple­men­tary ques­tions. He made one slip-up this year when he sum­marised views on achiev­ing a sur­plus as:

Eco­nom­ic Reform Aus­tralia has just alert­ed me to a pro­pos­al for a par­tial mort­gage debt for­give­ness pro­pos­al put for­ward by econ­o­mists from the US Fed­er­al Reserve in Jan­u­ary 2009. ERA repro­duced this post from WhoWhat­Why, which in turn referred to a Boston Fed pub­li­ca­tion Com­mu­ni­ties & Bank­ing and the paper “A pro­pos­al to Help Dis­tressed Home­own­ers”.

The pro­pos­al includes the sug­ges­tion of a grant to home­own­ers who are both in neg­a­tive equi­ty and unem­ployed, where the grant would pay up to 25% of the repay­ment costs over a 2 year peri­od.

It’s always a plea­sure to talk with Max, and in this inter­view he drops a bomb­shell that I still have a hard time even con­tem­plat­ing: the claim that the UK’s pri­vate debt to GDP ratio is 950%, and the finance sec­tor alone has a debt ratio of 600% of GDP. Our dis­cus­sion starts at the 14 minute mark.

I still have to see the data for myself, and until then I’ll remain skep­ti­cal, but here’s a chart alleged­ly sourced from Mor­gan Stan­ley that makes that claim.

My two favourite finan­cial shows are The Keis­er Report and Cap­i­tal Account, and by sheer chance both inter­viewed me with­in 8 hours of each oth­er this week.

Max’s pro­gram will go up tomor­row. The inter­view with Lau­ren Lyster went out live at 4.30pm time on the 20th–which was 8.30am on the 21st here in Sydney–and yet already they’ve put the inter­view up on Youtube:

Bra­vo to Demetri and Lau­ren for pos­i­tive­ly Warp Speed agili­ty in both the tra­di­tion­al and social media.

There was move­ment at the sta­tion,
for the word had passed around
That the colt from old Regret had got away…
(“Ban­jo” Pat­ter­son, “The Man from Snowy Riv­er”)

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

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

As long-term read­ers of this blog will remem­ber, I chose Swags for Home­less as the char­i­ty to sup­port in my Walk to Kosciuszko in 2010. I was struck by the sheer prac­ti­cal­i­ty and inge­nu­ity of this char­i­ty. There are many groups try­ing to do some­thing for home­less peo­ple, but some initiatives–like home­less shel­ters, or pro­mot­ing social housing–take a long time to imple­ment and sim­ply can’t cater for the inflow of new home­less.

Swags got there in one step, with an inex­pen­sive, well-designed portable bed that gives a home­less per­son a good sleep, today, even though they are sleep­ing rough.