Search Results for: Keen

Paul Woolley Financial Market Dysfunctionality Conference

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I’m one of the pre­sen­ters at this con­fer­ence at UTS today. The con­fer­ence web­site has a link to all the papers (includ­ing mine). As usu­al, I’ve done an “all singing, all danc­ing” Pow­er­point pre­sen­ta­tion that has a few addi­tion­al details to it.

The Paul Wool­ley Cen­tre is a very use­ful devel­op­ment, giv­en the bias in aca­d­e­m­ic finance towards the propo­si­tion that finance mar­kets are actu­al­ly hyper-func­tion­al (“effi­cient” in the jar­gon, defined in a way that cor­re­ponds to “prophet­ic” in ordi­nary Eng­lish).

Paul Wool­ley is giv­ing a pub­lic lec­ture tonight “Is the Finan­cial Sec­tor Dys­func­tion­al”, at 6.15pm in Uni­ver­si­ty Hall at UTS–in the Sci­ence Build­ing, 745 Har­ris Street Ulti­mo (diag­o­nal­ly oppo­site the ABC build­ing). All are wel­come.

The Political Debt Cycle

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Both par­ties will make much of their eco­nom­ic man­age­ment cre­den­tials in this elec­tion cam­paign.

Many Aus­tralians, on the oth­er hand, seem con­vinced that the econ­o­my would do as well regard­less of which par­ty were in pow­er.

The aver­age punter has it right: luck, rather than skill, has deter­mined which gov­ern­ments in ret­ro­spect came up smelling like ros­es in the eco­nom­ic man­age­ment stakes, and which instead smelt like manure.

By far the biggest deter­mi­nant of polit­i­cal luck is what was hap­pen­ing to pri­vate debt while any giv­en gov­ern­ment was in pow­er. If debt was ris­ing, then the gov­ern­ment looked good; if it was falling, then the gov­ern­ment looked bad.

And Deeper in Debt… Launch next Tuesday 12pm

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Dear All,

Below is the press release from the Cen­tre for Pol­i­cy Devel­op­ment for the launch of my “mini-book” on debt. Please pass the news on, and I hope to meet some of you at the launch.

You load six­teen tons, and what do you get?

Anoth­er day old­er and deep­er in debt”
(Mer­le Travis, 1946)

Aus­tralia has been on a 45 year pri­vate debt binge that has now reached unsus­tain­able lev­els. It’s been going on so long that our entire sys­tem is becom­ing reliant on it: we almost can’t afford to stop bor­row­ing.

Policy

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I’ll use this page to post doc­u­ments that are inputs to pol­i­cy for­ma­tion.

Sub­mis­sion to the Sen­ate Inquiry into com­pe­ti­tion with­in the Aus­tralian bank­ing sec­tor

I will post my sub­mis­sion short­ly when cleared by the com­mit­tee

QED mod­el to illus­trate that bank prof­its rise as debt is cre­at­ed more quick­ly.

My Sub­mis­sion to the Wal­lis Com­mit­tee in 1996

Sup­ple­men­tary let­ter (after learn­ing from the Com­mit­tee at the Hear­ing that they were con­sid­er­ing allow­ing secu­ri­tised lend­ing).

Talk at Par­lia­men­tary Library Novem­ber 26th 2008 (to be added after the talk)

Submissions to Parliamentary Enquiry released

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As you may know, the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives Stand­ing Com­mit­tee on Eco­nom­ics, Finance and Pub­lic Admin­is­tra­tion has arranged an Inquiry into home loan lend­ing prac­tices and process­es, to which I have been invit­ed. The sub­mis­sions have just been released; click on the link to access them.

My sub­mis­sion is here for speedy ref­er­ence. Apolo­gies to all for the absence of posts recent­ly, but if can be allowed some Aussie ver­nac­u­lar here, I’ve been busier than a blue-arsed fly in recent weeks, and (now you’ll have to allow a very inept mix­ing of metaphors!) won’t get my head above water for some weeks yet.

Debtwatch gets a mention in Parliament

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It’s not yet the main top­ic of debate between Lib­er­al and Labor, but some of the argu­ments in Debt­watch have at least made their way into Hansard cour­tesy of a speech by Lau­rie Fer­gu­son. The full extract from the speech is shown below.

This makes a mock­ery of the claim by the Prime Min­is­ter that we have nev­er been bet­ter off. Whilst the Howard gov­ern­ment crows about the suc­cess in the econ­o­my, which was large­ly inher­it­ed from Labor and fuelled by the raw mate­ri­als demands of India and Chi­na, there is an alter­na­tive real­i­ty of an out-of-con­trol per­son­al debt spi­ral. Steve Keen from the Uni­ver­si­ty of West­ern Syd­ney writes:

PM on New Zealand Reserve Bank Policy Shift–transcript

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Will Bud­get tax cuts fuel inflation?  (click here for the MP3 file)
PM — Wednes­day, 9 May , 2007  18:14:52
Reporter: Stephen Long
MARK COLVIN: Now, will the tax cuts in the Bud­get cause infla­tion?

Some lead­ing econ­o­mists argue that the Reserve Bank could be forced to lift inter­est rates down the track because Gov­ern­ment spend­ing and tax cuts will increase con­sump­tion and prices.

But oth­ers dis­agree. They argue that debt lev­els are so high that many peo­ple will be hand­ing their tax cuts straight to the bank.

Debtwatch April 2007: Who’s having a housing crisis then?

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Who’s having a housing crisis then?

Glob­al eco­nom­ic atten­tion has been focused on the sub-prime lend­ing cri­sis in the Unit­ed States recent­ly, and many local ana­lysts have made sooth­ing nois­es to reas­sure Aus­tralians that “it could­n’t hap­pen here”.

The USA’s sub-prime mar­ket is indeed a pecu­liar­ly Amer­i­can phe­nom­e­non; but the lev­el of Aus­tralian house­hold debt (the sum of mort­gage debt and per­son­al debt) is every bit as extreme as the USA’s. And con­trary to pop­u­lar opin­ion, our debt binge dwarfs Amer­i­ca’s. As the chart below shows, Aus­trali­a’s house­hold debt to GDP ratio has been grow­ing more than three times as rapid­ly as the USA’s since 1990. The ratio has grown at an aver­age of just over 2% per annum in the USA; it has grown at over 6.8% per annum here.

Research

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This page lists and links to my aca­d­e­m­ic papers. If you would like to sup­port my research, please click on this link: Research Fund­ing.

Research Financial Instability and Endogenous Money.

A mon­e­tary Min­sky mod­el of the Great Mod­er­a­tion & the Great Reces­sion. This paper is forth­com­ing in the Jour­nal of Eco­nom­ic Behav­ior and Orga­ni­za­tion. The sim­u­la­tions there are  slight­ly mis­lead­ing since the ini­tial con­di­tions con­tained an incon­sis­ten­cy; these have since been cor­rect­ed to yield the same long term out­come but far less volatile ini­tial fluc­tu­a­tions. I’ll pub­lish the paper with these revised con­di­tions short­ly

Dynamics of endogenous money

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Most con­ven­tion­al and uncon­ven­tion­al com­men­ta­tors on mon­ey believe that mon­ey is destroyed when debt is repaid. I disagree–but explain­ing why takes some time. I received an email this morn­ing from a Eco­log­i­cal Eco­nom­ics dis­cus­sion list in the USA on this issue, and wrote the fol­low­ing expla­na­tion of my posi­tion. I thought that read­ers of this blog might find it instruc­tive.


On the mon­ey issue, this is one where I beg to dif­fer both with the response Josh put for­ward, and most of my fel­low econ­o­mists as well–non-orthodox and non-ortho­dox. I think it’s wrong to say that mon­ey is destroyed when debt is repaid–but to explain why, I need to both put for­ward a dynam­ic mod­el, and find an appro­pri­ate anal­o­gy.