Australia’s previous Liberal Party Prime Minister John Howard “came out swinging” last night in support of the policy agenda his government shared with the preceding Labor Party government of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating: “neoliberalism” (for non-Australian readers, the Australian Liberal Party is closer to the US Republican Party or the UK’s Tories than the US vision of the word “Liberal”, while the Australian Labor Party is akin to the US Democratic Party or the UK’s Labour Party).
In Five great reforms are an essential legacy, Howard defends “neoliberalism”, and argues that the financial crisis was actually the result of distortions to the financial system by well-meaning but ill-advised government tampering with the financial system:
There’s an interesting post on the Atlantic by Jim Manzi, Stimulus predictions: put up or shut up, that calls on economists who are making predictions about what Obama’s stimulus package will or won’t do to present their models on which these predictions are based.
In part, he says:
The Today Tonight segment has been delayed till this evening (Wednesday February 4th)–which is a pity in a way because I will also be speaking at a public forum tonight at Circular Quay organised by the Property Knowledge Forum: An excerpt from the promotional flyer:
ARE WE HEADING FOR A DEPRESSION?
When will the bottom hit? Are we in store for 40% drops in property or has the recovery already begun?
It had to happen: neoclassical economists are now advising that the anticipated recession will be much milder if only workers would accept wage cuts.
When I saw this crisis was imminent in December 2005, one major factor that motivated me to go public with my analysis was the certainty that, when the crisis hit, neoclassical economists would either blame it on wages being too high (”the abolition of Work Choices caused the Depression!”), or would suggest that wages should be cut to reduce the imbalance between the supply of and demand for labour.
This is an unplanned post that partly pre-empts what I’ll be writing in the February Debtwatch Report, where I will explain in full my theory of money creation in a pure credit economy. So this is somewhat out of sequence, and will undoubtedly be badly explained compared to what I put together for February.
I will also have to finish this in a later post–probably in the first couple of days of the New Year–because Sydney’s fireworks beckon, and we have to be on board the cruiser we’re watching them from at 7pm. But what is here is part of a long-promised explanation of my model of money creation. In a couple of days I’ll publish the punch line, which is a newly developed model of a Ponzi Scheme.
Several people have commented on the speech by Glenn Stevens (for international readers, Stevens is the Governor of Australia’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of Australia) yesterday in which he commented, inter alia, that:
“I do not know anyone who predicted this course of events. This should give us cause to reflect on how hard a job it is to make genuinely useful forecasts. What we have seen is truly a ‘tail’ outcome – the kind of outcome that the routine forecasting process never predicts. But it has occurred, it has implications, and so we must reflect on it.”
The Parliamentary Library arranged a debate between myself and Rory Robertson of the Macquarie Group on the financial crisis today. We had a good audience of about 70 Parliament House denizens. You can download the Powerpoint Slides slides for my presentation, and the Vissim model of Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis which was part of the presentation ( Right click and choose “Save As” since this is a text file; then install the viewer, which can load the file and let you run it (I’ve also loaded the EXE file of the viewer onto my site as another way of getting the program). You can make changes too, but they can’t be saved).
While most of my blog readers like my analysis, the same can’t be said for the economics profession in general, let alone the so called market economists–mainly but not exclusively Chief Economists for banks (I would be curious to find out what their own “internal press” looks like!). This page will record some of the negative press I’ve received as a result–and also comments, such as ex-PM John Howard’s recent comment, that argue this isn’t a major crisis.
It should prove an interesting litmus test over time. If I am wrong, then these commentators can bask in their own “I told you so” moments. And if not…
2nd Anniversary Issue…
Why Did I See it Coming and “They” Didn’t?
The financial crisis is widely accepted as having started in August 9 2007, with the BNP’s announcement that it was suspending redemptions from three of its funds that were heavily exposed to the US securitisation market (click here for the BNP August 9 2007 press release).
Just three months beforehand, the OECD released its 2007 World Economic Outlook, in which it commented that:
