Several members have pointed out that I got the month wrong: the meeting to form the Association will take place this coming Tuesday–which is March 9, not April 9 as I first posted here.
My apologies for the confusion. In any case, it looks like quite a few people were able to see past my slip and we now have about 15 members signed up for dinner this Tuesday at a rather nice venue in Sydney (I will stick to just letting people know where by return email). The cost for the dinner will be $65 per person, and it will start at 7pm at a venue not too far from Sydney’s CBD.
Note: the first part of this post will mainly be of interest just to Australian readers, but I conclude with a numerical explanation of “Why Debt-Deflation Causes Depressions” that will be of interest to readers everywhere.
Last week I took part in a debate entitled “The Great Residential Housing Debate — the next Bubble or a legitimate Boom?” at the annual conference for Perennial Investment Partners; I put the Bubble case and Chris Joye of Rismark International presented the Boom case (here is my paper and my presentation). As is well-known, Australia is one of the few countries in the OECD not to experience two quarters or more of falling GDP as a result of the GFC, and probably the only country that has not experienced a fall in its property market.
The US Senate should not reappoint Ben Bernanke. As Obama’s reaction to the loss of Ted Kennedy’s seat showed, real change in policy only occurs after political scalps have been taken. An economic scalp of this scale might finally shake America from the unsustainable path that reckless and feckless Federal Reserve behavior set it on over 20 years ago.
Some may think this would be an unfair outcome for Bernanke. It is not. There are solid economic reasons why Bernanke should pay the ultimate political price.
Last weekend’s Sunday Telegraph pointed out a new record for Australia: our ratio of household debt to GDP is now higher than the USA’s. I’ve written the following commentary on this dubious “gold medal” (or is it really lead?) for the ABC’s The Drum.
In all the self-congratulations over how Australia has managed to sidestep the GFC, an inconvenient truth has been overlooked: the crisis was caused by too much debt, and Australian households have had a stronger and longer love affair with debt than even the Americans.
I first realised that the world faced a serious financial crisis in the very near future in December 2005, as I prepared an Expert Witness Report for the NSW Legal Aid Commission on the subject of predatory lending.
My brief was to talk about the impact of such contracts on third parties, since one ground to overturn a loan contract was that it had deleterious impacts on people who were not signatories to the contract itself. I was approached because the solicitor in the case had heard of my academic work on Hyman Minsky’s “Financial Instability Hypothesis”.
I haven’t yet had time to post Michael Hudson’s talk at Customs House–hopefully I’ll manage that this weekend–but in the meantime here is the talk I gave a couple of days earlier at Per Capita’s Policy Exchange 2009 Conference in Canberra on October 21st 2009. The good folk at SlowTV put this together, and this is the link to the video on their site.
Part 1: The USA
The most recent “unexpectedly good” growth figures for the USA appear to indicate that what will still be the worst downturn since the Great Depression is finally over.
However this is not your usual downturn. Not only is it acknowledged as the most severe since the Great Depression, it has also evoked the most remarkable government economic stimulus ever seen. It would be bizarre if this had not had an effect on the data.
Whether a recovery is truly underway in the private sector therefore depends on how the economy is likely to perform after the stimulus is withdrawn.
One of the keynote speakers at the 38th Australian Conference of Economists in Adelaide last week was Edward Lazear, who was Chairman of the US President’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2006-09.
In other words, he was in one of the world’s economic hotseats right when the “Great Moderation” (see also Gerard Baker’s UK Times article in early 2007) gave way to the Global Financial Crisis.
“The Marxian view is that capitalistic economies are inherently unstable and that excessive accumulation of capital will lead to increasingly severe economic crises. Growth theory, which has proved to be empirically successful, says this is not true.
The capitalistic economy is stable, and absent some change in technology or the rules of the economic game, the economy converges to a constant growth path with the standard of living doubling every 40 years.
In the 1930s, there was an important change in the rules of the economic game. This change lowered the steady-state market hours. The Keynesians had it all wrong.
