Hand of Gov report on the Australian Housing Bubble

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Late last year, the research and bro­ker­age firm CLSA com­mis­sioned me to write a report on the Aus­tralian hous­ing mar­ket. CLSA was found­ed 25 years ago  by jour­nal­ists who were dis­sat­is­fied with the qual­i­ty of exist­ing jour­nal­ism in finance–which then, like today, was often more pub­lic rela­tions than inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism. The com­pa­ny ded­i­cat­ed itself to inde­pen­dent research, and that tra­di­tion has been main­tained through own­er­ship changes that now see it oper­at­ing as a sub­sidiary of Cred­it Lyon­nais SA.

I became aware of CLSA’s exis­tence via the work of its bank­ing research team in Aus­tralia, who pub­lished some very frank assess­ments of the Aus­tralian banks that stood out against the run of flat­ter pat­ter that dom­i­nates their cov­er­age in the Aus­tralian media (a recent instance of this inde­pen­dence is this inter­view of CLSA ana­lyst Bri­an John­son on ABC Late­line Busi­ness). With this pri­or knowl­edge of CLSA’s inde­pen­dence, I hap­pi­ly accept­ed their com­mis­sion to write up my analy­sis of the Aus­tralian hous­ing mar­ket. The report, titled “Hand of Gov: The hous­ing bubble–fact or fic­tion?” was only avail­able to some of CLSA’s clients. Now that the hous­ing sta­tis­tics are mak­ing this a very hot top­ic once more, CLSA have giv­en me per­mis­sion to post this report on my blog.

If you’d like a copy, click on this link or the image below. As noted in “Debtwatch: Still free, but…”, downloads are now only available to paying subscribers to Debtwatch–with payments starting at US$2 per year. Associates, Fellows or Partners of CfESI can download it from the CfESI website, where you’ll find it on the Research Page. Be sure to login to CfESI first.

The data in the report is up to date to Sep­tem­ber last year. If there’s suf­fi­cient interest–which I’ll gauge by the num­ber of downloads–then I will pro­duce an updat­ed report, which will also con­tain addi­tion­al infor­ma­tion on the new met­ric I’ve devel­oped recent­ly, the Mort­gage Cred­it Accel­er­a­tor.

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About Steve Keen

I am Professor of Economics and Head of Economics, History and Politics at Kingston University London, and a long time critic of conventional economic thought. As well as attacking mainstream thought in Debunking Economics, I am also developing an alternative dynamic approach to economic modelling. The key issue I am tackling here is the prospect for a debt-deflation on the back of the enormous private debts accumulated globally, and our very low rate of inflation.