Steve Keen's Debtwatch

I will launch Sack the Econ­o­mists, by Geoff Davies, on Sun­day 4 May (3:30pm for a 4pm start) at Glee­books, 49 Glebe Point Road Glebe NSW 2037 Syd­ney.  The event is free, but an RSVP is required here or via phone at 02 9660 2333.  Fol­low­ing is an edited extract per­tain­ing to Thomas Piketty’s recent best-seller.  I hope to see Sydney-side read­ers of this blog at the launch.]

There is no end of com­men­tary about China’s real estate bub­ble, with an even split between those who believe it may pop at any moment, and oth­ers who argue it never will.

Back in the Olde Days, before the global finan­cial cri­sis, when I was one of a hand­ful rais­ing the alarm, some of the most stri­dent oppo­si­tion to my opin­ion about what this might mean for hous­ing in Aus­tralia came from Christo­pher Joye (who was then a Direc­tor at Ris­mark). We went head to head on many occa­sions, with me argu­ing that our prices were a debt-fuelled bub­ble, and Joye argu­ing that ris­ing house prices sim­ply reflected ris­ing house­hold incomes.

There are very few peo­ple who qual­ify as unfor­get­table in your life, and Ted Wilshire was one of those for me. A larger than life char­ac­ter in every sense of the word, Ted was best known as the Research Offi­cer for the Aus­tralian Metal Work­ers Union (AMWU) who penned the then-influential pam­phlets Aus­tralia Ripped Off and Aus­tralia Uprooted in the days prior to The Accord under the Hawke and Keat­ing Gov­ern­ments.

A cri­tique of a yet-to-be-published paper of mine (“Loan­able Funds, Endoge­nous Money and Aggre­gate Demand”, forth­com­ing in the Review of Key­ne­sian Eco­nom­ics later this year; the link is to a par­tial blog post of that paper) by non-mainstream econ­o­mist Tom Pal­ley reminds me of one of my favourite ripostes by a politi­cian, back in the days before spin doc­tors stopped them say­ing any­thing offen­sive — or indeed any­thing interesting.

My call a few weeks ago that the global finan­cial cri­sis is over was very much an Anglo-centric one, and a US-centric one in par­tic­u­lar (Clos­ing the door on the GFC, March 10).

What a dif­fer­ence three decades makes: my visit in 1981–82 coin­cided with the trial of the Gang of Four; now many sub-25 Chi­nese think that must be the name of a new boy band they yet haven’t heard of.

A cou­ple of weeks ago I took a swipe at Bank of Eng­land over a speech by its Gov­er­nor Mark Car­ney that was unre­al­is­tic about the dan­gers of a bloated finan­cial sec­tor (Godzilla is good for you? March 3). Today I’m doing the oppo­site: I’m doff­ing my cap to the researchers at Thread­nee­dle Street for a new paper “Money cre­ation in the mod­ern econ­omy,” which gives a truly real­is­tic expla­na­tion of how money is cre­ated, why this really mat­ters, and why vir­tu­ally every­thing that eco­nomic text­books say about money is wrong.

(At least for the Anglo zone; more on Europe and Emerg­ing Mar­kets in com­ing weeks).

The big­ger the finan­cial sec­tor gets, the more it can destroy. And Bank of Eng­land Gov­er­nor Mark Carney’s vision of British banks nine times the size of GDP is pos­i­tively terrifying…