I’m giving a talk on subprimes to the “Monty Pelican Society”: Date: Wednesday April 2nd Venue: Sydney Mechanics School of Arts, 280 Pitt St, Sydney NSW 2000 (near Town Hall) Time: 6.30pm-8pm For more information, contact Troy Henderson (troyh@search.org.au), or just rock up on the night.

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At Last, the 1975 Show? My main topic this month is a comparison of the economic events of today to those of 1973-75, but the most recent Case-Shiller data on US house prices simply has to be “the Chart of the Month”. Last *month* the index dropped by 2.3 percent–implying an annual rate of decline [...]

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Helen Dalley of Sky Business News interviewed me and Tim Mulholland, of Melamed and Associates, a Chicago-based consulting firm, about the Subprime crisis. If you’d like to see the video, click on this link: http://www.skynews.com.au/video/video.aspx?id=43 Then use the selection panel to choose the third story–with the heading “Sunday Biz”, and the description “Sky News Reporter [...]

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Why Now?        There has been no shortage of commentators and players willing to vouch that this is the worst financial crisis they have ever seen. Equally, there has been no shortage of bailout moves by the Federal Reserve–remedies that put “the Greenspan Put” to shame in their magnitude.        And yet the market meltdown [...]

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The Canberra talk will now start at 7.30pm. The venue remains the same: ANU Emeritus Faculty Fellows Lane Cottage; building 3T. For more information, contact the Nature and Society Forum at office@natsoc.org.au.

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There has been a change of venue for the Per Capita lunch talk. The details now are: 12pm-2pm, Friday March 14 Deeper in Debt Talk, over Lunch hosted by Per Capita Reservations: info@percapita.org.au – $50 per person ($35 concession). Location: Boardroom of Boston Consulting Group Level 52, 101 Collins Street.

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A speaking tour of Melbourne, Adelaide and Canberra has been arranged for me by a number of groups. I’ll be speaking on Australia (and the OECD’s) debt bubble–the phenomena, analysis of how they came about, and what we might expect when they burst. The details are: Melbourne 7pm, Thursday March 13th Deeper in Debt Talk, [...]

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The current turmoil on the Stock Market—and especially the sudden collapse of many once high-flyers—has taken a lot of people by surprise. One person who, were he alive today, wouldn’t be the least bit surprised, is Hyman Minsky, who predicted that events like this would be a regular feature of a deregulated financial system. He [...]

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The revelation in the minutes of the RBA’s February meeting that debate focused, not on whether there should be a rise, but on whether it should be 0.25 or 0.5 per cent, shows that the RBA wagers that the threats to the Australian economy are upside ones–tighter labor markets and higher inflation–rather than downside ones–a [...]

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