This is a facetious way of letting you all know that, as of about 5 minutes ago, there are now 1,000 users (plus yours truly) subcribed to this blog.
The average daily unique readership count is currently 5,500, which I believe implies roughly 3-5 times that many readers on a monthly basis.
I also know from feedback from journalists and other correspondents that the comments made here are read and appreciated by a very wide audience. My posts might be the fulcrum, but the contributions from you all keep the wheels well and truly spinning. I’ve also learnt a lot from what has been posted here.
Charles Mackay’s observation that people go mad in crowds, and return to their sanity one by one, surely applies in this bubble. It’s very good to know that the crowd of those who have regained their senses–or never lost them in the first place–numbers at least a thousand.
Finally, thank you one and all for the tone that has been maintained in the discussions here. Most of us know how disagreements can get out of hand on the Internet, without the benefit of body language to take the edge of words that are sometimes said in jest but interpreted as in anger. It’s been remarkable that with a total now of 4,736 comments over one and a half years, that this blog has been an exemplar of civilised debate.
All the best, Steve
March 22nd, 2009 at 8:31 pm
Thank you Steve for your informative site. It makes me feel at ease to know others think along the same lines as i do.
I travelled overseas for nealy ten years and when i got back in 2002 i noticed something that i found hard disturbing.
People were talking about real estate and making money on houses as if it were a sport. It was the topic of conversation amongst friends. Headlines all over the front page of Sunday newspapers describing how new price records had been recorded.
I walked by an auction in Bondi (Sydney) with a huge crowd their to witness people bidding up a very small corner block for what i considered to be an absolutely ridiculous price. It was just like a spectator sport.
The government at the time was telling us how great it was that real estate was making us all wealthy.
I couldn’t believe how society had changed in relation to home ownership.
All i could think of is how will future generations be able to afford to put a roof over their heads?
It’s thanks to people like you we are now seeing things for what they really are.
Baldbadger
March 22nd, 2009 at 8:35 pm
Thank you Steve for all your hard work. I have been reading your blog since I saw you tell Kerry O’Brian I think it was, that for Australians to survive the approaching trouble they had to get out of debt. This is my first comment though. Your articles are very informative, and I have learnt a tremendous amount from you and from others whose work you recommend. I’m also introducing as many as I can to your site. I now roll my eyes when I hear economists talk about the economy “returning to trend”, and I’m mighty glad I sold up and bought some land when I did. Thank you for the service you provide.
Az
March 22nd, 2009 at 9:28 pm
I also want to thank you Steve. I find this site compulsive, and have learnt so much.
As you say the ‘tone’ has been maintained, and the civility of questions and replies is great! The discussions between the regulars and those who ‘jump in’ now and again, as well as those who contribute for the first time are invaluable in the sharing of information.
And thank you for your answers that must take up much of your valuable time.
March 22nd, 2009 at 11:00 pm
Congratulations Steve! A job well done.
As you said, Australia has the same debt disease as the US and UK, and for that reason it’s only a matter of time we will have the same suffering.
The mainstream economic commentators are still looking at the seemingly serene small Aussie pond and extolling its good ‘fundamentals’ while completely oblivious to the coming tsunami from the outside world.
Regarding the FHOG, some of these FHOG buyers are buying precisely because they know they are losing their jobs. They just want to get a foothold into the housing market before unemployment cause them to be un-eligible for loans. Some of these people think it is a matter of ’strategy’ to handle their financial situation in the event of unemployment.
Indeed, sub-prime is right here in Australia.
March 22nd, 2009 at 11:04 pm
I’ve been following the site via RSS for some time and often read the comments. I agree that the quality and civility of the comments is very high, which is a pleasant change from many sites.
Steve’s posts, at all levels of complexity of wonkery, are much appreciated. I especially found the Cavaliers of Credit post eye-opening. I had to read it three times, the last time very carefully, to really “get it”. That also made a pleasant change for me, who usually skims internet content too quickly.
Thanks for all the work!
March 22nd, 2009 at 11:14 pm
Hi, I just joined 5 mins ago.
Am I 1002 ?
March 22nd, 2009 at 11:31 pm
Well earned and most worthy. Yours is a critical voice of reason amongst a cacophony of sycophants, which makes it an absolute “must read”.
To the next 1,000…
March 23rd, 2009 at 12:08 am
Newby here. Attracted not just by the interesting posts, but by the great discussion in the comments. Let’s say there is a depression, how different an experience it is to be compared with the isolation from ideas that must surely have accompanied the last one for all but a very few.
March 23rd, 2009 at 1:19 am
Congratulations Steve. I first saw you on Lateline and then looked you up. I love your site even if some of the graphs do hurt my head
Keep up the fantastic work!
March 23rd, 2009 at 1:22 am
Maybe all the lurkers should post one line to commemorate this great milestone?
March 23rd, 2009 at 1:29 am
Great stuff Steve!! (And others) It’s great to have a source of “alternative” information & views.
March 23rd, 2009 at 2:12 am
Congrats Steve,
Note, you also have 413 people (including me) subscribed to your RSS feed at Google Reader who see all your posts and I dare say a few more on other RSS feed readers.
–Q
March 23rd, 2009 at 2:15 am
Good on ya Steve.
Your heart is in the right place – for the ordinary Joe (or Josephine ) Soap. I’m sure you realise by now you will not get an invitation to be the next economist for Macquarie Bank!
I tuned in to your wavelength on the Debunking Economics site a few years ago and you made sense. Having studied economics over 20 years ago I always felt there was something unstable/implausible about the foundations of
economic theory as conventionally described.
The economic theories of supply and demand; static analysis; the rational economic man/woman;the self-equilibrating economy; etc has been used (sometimes wittingly but mostly unwittingly) to transfer wealth to a small and powerful elite and lumber the rest with high expectaions and loads of debt.
Keep up the good work.
March 23rd, 2009 at 4:41 am
This site has helped me understand that i am not insane – and hopefully on the right track.
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:53 am
That’s interesting Quarrel,
I’m a newbie when it comes to RSS feeds–don’t use them myself and though I’m aware of the Wordpress link on my site, not sure how make use of it.
Decades ago I knew almost everything you could know about computers, but the industry has moved well past my knowledge level these days.
How do you find out the number of RSS subscribers?
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:55 am
Congratulations, You have the best content I only read half the time….because of having to click through from the RSS feed. Can you please, please restore the full text feed that your used to have?
March 23rd, 2009 at 6:12 am
Thanks for that steve g,
That was a default Wordpress setting in the latest version. I wasn’t aware of the change as a result. Full text is now restored.
March 23rd, 2009 at 7:31 am
yippee!
March 23rd, 2009 at 7:52 am
Thanks Steve,
I came across your paper “Deeper in Debt, Australia’s addiction to borrowed money” back in 2007 and I have been an avid reader of you’re site and supporter of your views.
You have certainly saved me money, at the time I was researching the market to buy my first house, when i stumbled across the paper by accident. And I’m not taken in by the grant!
I have also saved in the current financial crisis by moving much of my savings to cash early last year.
Its great to see so many new readers and contributers.
Keep it up all!
March 23rd, 2009 at 10:15 am
Steve,
Quarrel has not got back to you yet, so I’ll give you a quick rundown on RSS starting with Google Reader, but keep in mind that Google Reader is not the best RSS Reader to use. RSS just allows you to stay up to date with content from multiple sites all in one place (inside the RSS Reader). To use Google Reader:-
1) Register and signin to the site https://www.google.com/reader
2) Go to your site and then hover your mouse over the RSS feed of interest and click the right mouse button and select “Copy Shortcut”.
3) Go back to the Google Reader and click on the “Add a subscription” button in the top left hand corner and paste your feed there, then your blog articles will appear on the right in full.
4) In the top right hand corner click on “show details” and you will see a chart. Above the chart you will see the number of Google Reader Subscribers, which at the moment is still showing as 413.
The only problem with Google Reader and most other RSS Readers is you still have to manually visit the Google Reader URL or in other cases startup an RSS Reader application on your PC to check your RSS feeds, which is no good if your a very busy person like yourself.
The best solution is to use Klipfolio ( http://downloads.klipfolio.com/downloads/klipfolio-personal-dashboard ). The great thing about this RSS Reader is it is “set and forget”. Once you set it up, it sits in your system tray in the bottom right hand corner of your computer and alerts you whenever there is new news items. After downloading it and installing it:-
1) Click on “Add->Add and RSS Feed” in the title bar
2) In the “Feed Viewer” that just opened click on the right mouse button and select “Manage Feeds”.
3) Using the “Feeds” tab paste the desired feed into the RSS Reader.
4) Under the “Options” tab set the Refresh frequency or leave it at the default value of “Every two hours”.
5) Click on the “Alerts” tab and select Alert me when: “New items are added” and “Any item changes” and then click close.
You are now ready to go. If you are at your computer when the new news item is added, you will see a pop-up. If you are not, then when you return to your computer, you will see the Klipfolio System Tray icon flashing. When this happens, just click on it to pop up the reader and hover over the news items to read a summary. Click the news items of interest to read the whole article and comment.
Steve, you have provided a great service to me and others. The least we can do is to help you as you have helped us. Please do not hesitate to ask for help again if you need it. We are all in this together!
March 23rd, 2009 at 11:10 am
Congratulations Dr Keen, well done! I have been a follower since your radio interview on ABC radio, unbelieveable! I quickly did my ‘homework’ and voila! ‘common sense’ (to me).
Thank you for the alternative voice on economic affairs in oz and I firmly believe “they” are coming around to “it” and ALL will have a EUREKA moment soon. I pray that some lessons will be learnt by all Australians, once and for all (about debt). Please keep going!
March 23rd, 2009 at 12:21 pm
Congratulations Steve. You can be justifiably proud of this achievement, and more to come no doubt.
We don’t know the extent to which your work will be accepted into mainstream policy making. But the very fact that you are undeniably right ought to have some impact one would think. In the meantime , like others before me, I would like to thank you sincerely for the hard work you have put in and your thoughts which you continue to share with us all here.
March 23rd, 2009 at 4:10 pm
Hi Steve,
I have been following your site for some time now and enjoy the way way you present your ideas. My partner works at a Sydney uni. so I have an idea of what your work load might be, so thank you for putting aside time to help people like me read up and try and make an informed decisions (renting and saving for the future).
Keep up the great work.
Moz
PS For the last 10 years I thought things were just not right debt wise and now I see why.
March 23rd, 2009 at 4:38 pm
Hi Steve,
Thanks for your excellent blog and for bringing these issues to the normal punter.
As exazonk says, “the graphs sometimes hurt my head” but I too love your site
bring on 2001 members!
March 23rd, 2009 at 4:58 pm
Steve,
For most of this decade I’ve been completely perplexed as to various investment valuations, and as to how little value people were placing upon money. With no real analysis tools to disentangle my thoughts and what was going on – I could only come up with the simplistic thought that money (which I now think of as liquidity/credit) was being treated as confetti.
I’ve had many “aha” moments since finding your site and I thank you for providing so much useful information and insightful models with which to grapple with current events.
March 23rd, 2009 at 6:07 pm
Steve, I want to join the chorus of congrats and thanks. I too first “heard” of you with the CPD paper – you delivered (big time) with the emperical evidence of what I had felt in my gut for a long time. It wasn’t just the housing bubble. I can recall back in the mid 90s when my accountant wife had her first job in a small, local computer manufacturer and retailer, and they introduced the old “4 years interest free” to compete – we were talking about the bringing forward of consumption, and that some day there had to be an “adjustment”. You know it’s run it’s course when Myer introduces it – to compete – and openly expresses concerns about how much spending has been brought forward!
Anyway, sincerest thanks for your efforts in bringing the debt bubble to the attention of Aussies. I don’t know whether you will ever receive the thanks from the public, or the academic recognition, that you deserve – a lot of brilliant and deserved people are not recognised in their lifetime – but there is no doubt that your academic field and your country is the richer for your hard work.
March 23rd, 2009 at 9:11 pm
“An nescis, quantilla sapientia mundus regatur”.
to loosley para phrase
“dont you know then, how little, wisdom rules the world”
thank you steve and all for all your insight and wisdom.
March 23rd, 2009 at 9:42 pm
Greetings Steve, thanks for the great site, I’m also a newbie but have been following you via this site for some time.
I am a retired Risk Manager from the Agricultural sector, mainly in grains and forex. When I started my career I read alot about Beniot Mandelbrots work in the 1960s in the US cotton market. His way of thinking that markets were often irrational and the need to look past psychology and at the math, has truely been what I owe my success to. In fact I would dare say that his work has benefited thousands of grain growers across Australia for more than 30 years. As it became the basis of my risk management methodology and local market making here in Australia. Keep up the great work and always remember that the all truth passes throught three stages, first it is ridiculed, then violently opposed and then finally accepted as being self evident. If you ever want to dismiss the widely held myth that most modern economists have about “efficient market theory”, just send them a copy of Mandelbrots book “the (mis) behaviour of markets”. Its hard to agrue with a someone who came up with Choas theory and fractals. Sorry if any spelling mistakes here my eye sight is not what it once was.
March 23rd, 2009 at 9:44 pm
Hey Steve,
just wanted to say as a non expert in economics, I found your site great from the Australian perspective. So much of what is available on the web primarily relates to USA or Europe – and its great to find comment pertaining to the Australian context.
Keep up the good work!
March 23rd, 2009 at 9:54 pm
Your eyesight might be problematic DrewRiskManager,
But your insight was and is spot on.
However converting economists to Mandlebrot’s reasoning has been an unsuccessful endeavour. In fact, Mandlebrot did first work out chaos using the data from cotton trading, as you note, but completely failed to gain any traction with economists who were looking for equilibrium in the data (where none existed of course), and gave up and moved over to geometry and geography. The Mandlebrot Plot emanated from that work, as did the application of chaos theory to geometry in the concept of the fractal dimension.
A revised economics would certainly include Benoit’s wisdom as part of it, but it will I expect await the retirement and/or death of most of today’s (neoclassical) economists, who really are a lost cause.
March 23rd, 2009 at 10:05 pm
Is there any way to tell where your readers are from?
I would expect the number of readers to increase as people look for those who know the truth!
March 23rd, 2009 at 10:37 pm
Yes its a pity Steve not more people take the time to look at this great mans (Mandelbrot)work in economics. His concepts certainly help in the often very irrational grain and other commodity markets of the world.
Thank you for the reply. I must find those glasses of mine before making comments next time.
Keep up the great work..
March 23rd, 2009 at 11:41 pm
Hi Steve,
Thank you very much for the very valuable site. I’m spreading the word hard at work. Quite a few with property are now looking into it. I think one guy may have changed his mind about buying an “investment” (is this an oxymoron or what) property.
Best of luck for the future.
March 24th, 2009 at 12:52 am
Congratulations. Before too long you’ll have 10,000. The site is testament to the power of a partisan position driven by real intellectual rigor. The posts are always superbly written and I find them compulsive.
You’ve done the community a real service by stating just how overvalued real estate is today. Hopefully many prospective young home buyers will be spared much pain as a result of the messages you’ve provided through your blog site and the print and electronic media.
March 24th, 2009 at 2:18 am
Thank you, Steve, for your excellent blog and your longterm commitment to a serious and undogmatic analysis of economics.
On another note: let’s have a dose of cheer in the midst of the doom and gloom that has engulfed so many societies as a result of the casino capitalism that reigned, often by stealth, for the last few decades.
Surely, in time, the current crisis will be overcome and we can all relax a bit. Until then, however, we must all strive to expose what went wrong in the financial centres of the ‘madoffs’. In doing so we will contribute to the construction of a more just and sustainable global economic system, for the common good of our world community. It will be for the benefit of us all.
Please read more on my blog at:
http://globalinsights.wordpress.com/
March 24th, 2009 at 8:03 am
Steve, I think my predictions are coming true, see the brainchart I posted here earlier:
http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/nn240/carseller_02/brainchart.jpg
Then CHFNOK 6,01, now 5,58, it’s blowing up again, and there will not be debt deflation, and deflation, simply because there will be a new bubble, and resumption of old bubbles instead.
March 30th, 2009 at 10:48 pm
I enjoy the site.
Letting 1001 flowers bloom is a bit worrying though. 1001 schools of thought content?
Does this mean we’re going to be topped if The Party does not agree?