Business Review Weekly has just published a profile on me and my debt-based macroeconomics, on pages 24-25 of the current issue (February 16-22 2012):
The author Nick Gardner has done a very good job of explaining why the change in private debt matters. I’d have to concede that his brief explanation using the actual GDP and change in debt figures for the USA is a lot clearer than most of my chart-laden posts.
That doesn’t surprise me. When he was the Business Editor of the Sunday Telegraph, Nick wrote some of the best articles on Australia’s economy and finance sector in the mainstream media. Now he is freelancing, blogging at NickGarnerMedia, and tweeting as @nickgardner27.
He also interviewed some of Australia’s most successful new business owners for his book How I made my first million. Please read Nick’s story in the BRW, and also check out his blog and book.
A report by Dursche Bank published today says Austrain House prices are overvalued by 39%
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-most-overpriced-housing-markets-in-the-developed-world-2012-2#australias-home-prices-are-overvalued-by-39-15
Title: It’s Time for That Trench Coat and Sunglasses
“Yet in his home country, this renegade economist is regarded as something of a quack.”
Time for that black Armani trench coat and RayBan sunglasses, Steve?
How do economists prove their answers?
Answer: By seasonally adjusting the questions.
How do you make truffles from turds?
Answer. By seasonally adjusting the recipe.
@Alainton
February 16, 2012 at 8:04 pm | #
A report by Dursche Bank published today says Austrain House prices are overvalued by 39%
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-most-overpriced-housing-markets-in-the-developed-world-2012-2#australias-home-prices-are-overvalued-by-39-15
I cannot see Austria in the list!!
I’d need to practice my kung fu too…
Title: A Response to Steve
We may need kung fu when the neo-classicals can no longer be reasoned with.
If only Keynes, Schumpeter and Fisher (post-1932) had known Kung Fu, we might have been spared the neoclassical revival in the first place!
Nick Gardner concludes the article with a summary of what Steve ‘got wrong’.
Unemployment rate? ! ?
Does Nick believe the ABS definition to be the most accurate one available?
This apparent shortfall is a great shame as it makes the article less useful as an independent introduction to Steve’s debt theory than it otherwise would be.
In saying this I’m observing that, in reviewing an unfamiliar theory (or theorist), the average person will take as much or more account of the implied veracity of the theory (or theorist) as they do of the actual facts and logic being presented. The latter is seen and weighed in accord with the perspective of the former.
Title: A Response to Steve, Reloaded
“If only Keynes, Schumpeter and Fisher (post-1932) had known Kung Fu, we might have been spared the neoclassical revival in the first place!”
100% agree.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12u1nA7bXzc
Nick was obliged to come up with those three entries by the BRW editor Greg, and I actually nominated that one for him. I agree that the ABS definition is suss, but it’s also true that I expected that level to be breached even by that definition, and it wasn’t. Of course, the Rudd stimulus and the FHVB were obvious additional events that weren’t in my original call (i.e., I didn’t say that “even if the government runs the biggest stimulus in history and reintroduces the First Home Vendors Grant, unemployment will still exceed 10% on the ABS measure), but those nuances are passed over in public debate.
I regard the Roy Morgan measure as more valid–clearly–than the ABS, and that’s running at 10% now of course, but it could fall as much as 2% when school leavers start to get jobs. That would put it at 8.5% (roughly), still below the level I thought we’d hit.
Hi Steve
Fair enough. i can handle you not being perfect.
The shame is though that people who don’t want to know the critical thing that you are right about will rush to obscure it behind the peripheral thing that you are partly wrong about.
I had the use for that independent article all mapped out until I got to that last part. Such is life. Will just have to wait now for the obvious to become even more bleedingly so.
No go ahead with using it Greg. Anyone who would use that as a reason not to consider what I’m arguing would be impossible to convince anyway.
I was thinking of using it as a succinct reference article to background some of your graphs within the court case I previously told you about. We’ve done three weeks of evidence now and have another 2 to go.
My experience to date is that Barristers expend much of their effort making real meanings less rather than more clear. I’m quite horrified at how they can reduce and marginalise essential meaning whilst expanding contingencies into dominant focus. The system is expanding upon pure momentum at present, not intelligence.