Michael Hudson Public Talk Sydney Friday October 23

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The renowned het­ero­dox finan­cial econ­o­mist and eco­nom­ic his­to­ri­an Dr. Michael Hud­son will be vis­it­ing Aus­tralia in Octo­ber.

Michael is anoth­er of the hand­ful of econ­o­mists who pre­dict­ed the Glob­al Finan­cial Cri­sis, and he has since worked inten­sive­ly with the gov­ern­ments of Ice­land and Latvia to attempt to pull them out of the eco­nom­ic quag­mire. He shares my expec­ta­tions that the “green shoots” being spied by more con­ven­tion­al thinkers will with­er under the weight of the pri­vate debt that cre­at­ed this cri­sis in the first place (and whose exis­tence has been ignored in all the res­cue plans to date).

Debt­watch is sup­port­ing a talk to be giv­en by Michael on the finan­cial cri­sis on Octo­ber 23rd at Cus­toms House (the event will prob­a­bly be from 6–8pm, but we’re still final­is­ing arrange­ments).

Michael is an excel­lent speak­er who holds no punch­es, and I can guar­an­tee that it will be a stim­u­lat­ing event. He has exten­sive knowl­edge of finan­cial crises back to antiq­ui­ty, and argues that we may have to revis­it what we once thought was the Bib­li­cal prac­tice of “Debt Jubilees” to over­come our mod­ern dilem­ma.

So it will be a great night, but there is a problem–funding. In this “free mar­ket sys­tem”, while bankers still pay them­selves mul­ti-mil­lion dol­lar salaries, it is dif­fi­cult to get finan­cial sup­port for con­trar­i­an thinkers. So I’m try­ing to help by mak­ing a per­son­al dona­tion of $100 to Michael’s expens­es, and by encour­ag­ing blog mem­bers to also chip in via the Pay­Pal Dona­tion wid­get on this site.

I have ded­i­cat­ed the first three options on the wid­get to fund­ing Michael’s tour, with amounts respec­tive­ly of A$2, 5 and 10. It’s easy to use, and has so far raised about A$5,000 to sup­port my own research (I’ll pub­lish more on how I’m using these funds short­ly). Just click on the wid­get to the right of this post, choose one of the options, and pro­ceed from there.

You can donate whether or not you have a Pay­Pal account of your own–it’s very easy and quite secure.

The event itself will be free, but there is lim­it­ed seat­ing (rough­ly 150 seats), and donors will receive pref­er­ence over oth­ers should that be nec­es­sary.

There are now over 2,000 sub­scribers to Debt­watch, so if just ten per­cent of mem­bers make the medi­an dona­tion, we’ll raise about A$1,000 towards Michael’s trav­el and accom­mo­da­tion expens­es.

If this exer­cise works–if it rais­es A$1,000 or more for Michael’s speech–then I will repeat the exer­cise for Paul Ormerod, the author of The Death of Eco­nom­ics, But­ter­fly Eco­nom­ics, and Why Things Fail, who will be in Syd­ney in Novem­ber.

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