Thanks to all those Debtwatch readers who made donations to assist with the costs of bringing Michael to Australia for this speaking tour. Roughly A$800 has been raised–I’ve allowed $10 for every donation made since I put that message up to go to Michael’s expenses, and there have been 81 donations (many of more than $10, some of less) since then.
I’ll be speaking at the Australian Museum’s regular monthly talk this coming Tuesday evening on the topic of “The Next Great Depression?”. In a nutshell, the details are:
Title: Museum Australia Monthly Talk
Location: Australian Museum (entry via William Street)
Start Time: 18:30
Date: 2009-08-25
End Time: 20:00
Bookings and prepayment are essential: call 02 9320 6225 to book.
The cost is $20 for members of the Australian Museum and $30 for non-members. The event begins with light refreshments, followed by a one-hour talk, and then an open question time.
I’m speaking at the Australian Shareholders Association Investor Hour next Tuesday (August 18) at 12pm with the topic “The Market Crash: Origins and Prospects”.
I’ll take a long view of the financial data–going back to 1890–and explain the booms and crashes of stock markets as symptoms of debt bubbles and their bursting. From that point of view, this is the largest asset-price bubble in the last 120 years–and probably in all of history. The prognosis for the market is therefore grim, despite the current rally.
The Whitlam Institute is conducting a series of talks on the financial crisis. The third of these will be held this coming Thursday (July 23rd) at the Riverside Theatre complex in Parramatta (on the corner of Church and Market Streets). The keynote paper is being given by Professor John Quiggin, with myself and Guy Debelle, the Assistant Governor (Financial Markets) of the RBA as discussants.
Professor Quiggin will present his paper “After the Crisis” for about 30–40 minutes, after which there will be a 20 minute question and answer session with the audience.
In this event to celebrate the publication of Political Economy Now!–the history of the Political Economy struggle at Sydney University–Evan Jones, Frank Stilwell and Steve Keen will discuss the struggles inside the university economics departments and their significance, not only for teaching, but for the world economy itself.
Political Economy Now! by Gavan Butler, Evan Jones and Frank Stilwell is the story of one of the most substantial and enduring conflicts in the history of Australian universities. Beginning in the late 1960s, it pitted those committed to the teaching of mainstream economics at the University of Sydney against the proponents of an alternative program in political economy. It explores issues such as
I’ll be speaking at Politics in the Pub on Friday May 29, along with Jacob Saulwick from the SMH. The Location is the Gaelic Club, Level 1 (Tel. 9212 1587) 64 Devonshire Street Surry Hills–just 50 metres or so from the Chalmers Street exit from Central Station.
The topic will be rather apposite to the most recent blog entry: “The Rudd-Swan Budget 2009 – Whose Interests Will It Serve?”
The event starts at 6pm and finishes at 7.45pm, after which anyone who wants to soldier on can join us for dinner at a nearby restaurant.
In May 1973, dissatisfaction over the teaching of economics at the University of Sydney went from a festering sore amongst the staff only to an outright revolt by a minority of the staff, and a majority of the students. In 1975, a new Department of Political Economy had its first intake into Economics I℗. Thirty four years later, it is still going. Professor Frank Stilwell, who has lived this dispute since 1970, is launching Political Economy Now!, a history of the dispute, next Tuesday at Sydney University’s Fisher Library (May 5th, 5.30pm, Level 5).
Title: “Crunchtime”: Bringing together the best policy minds to discuss Australia’s future
Location: Trades Hall Auditorium, 4 Goulburn St, Sydney NSW
Link out: Click here
Description: The best policy thinkers from Australia and abroad will come together for “Crunchtime” — Australia’s first progressive think-tank conference.
Tax, social policy, the global financial crisis and climate change will be pulled apart by impressive policy minds including Ann Pettifor from Advocacy International in the UK. Ann has written extensively on debt and finance, climate change and international development and was one of the authors of the UK national economic foundation’s Green New Deal.
Broadcast on March 11 2009 by ABC Radio National Big Ideas
A blog member has kindly produced a transcript of the off-the-cuff talk I gave at this forum. I’ve made minor corrections to the punctuation below, but the text is otherwise as delivered on the night without speaking notes–so there are some grammatical slips. For those who want to listen to this alone–without also listening to Bernie Fraser beforehand–here is a link to the MP3 of my talk.
As usual, the latest set of data from the ABS on the economy was “unexpectedly worse” than (neoclassical) economists had been expecting. The consensus was for a 0.2% increase over the month of March, from 5.2 to 5.4 percent. In fact, it leapt by two and a half times as much, to 5.7%.
This was right in line with what I was expecting from a non-orthodox, “Hyman Minsky” point of view. As I have argued in numerous blogs, aggregate demand is the sum of GDP plus the change in debt. Now that our economy is utterly debt-dependent, the debt-financed asset-price bubbles have burst, and debt de-leveraging has begun in earnest, the economy will tank and unemployment will explode as debt-financed spending evaporates.
