Steve Keen’s Debt Watch

Minsky's view that capitalism is fundamentally unstable can be derived from a simple, dynamic view of capitalism: without bankruptcy or government intervention, a pure free market capitalist economy will collapse into a private debt black hole. The political implications of this are (a) that capitalism needs debt write-offs to survive, and (b) that government money creation is needed to avoid economic collapse. This is a huge political shift from today's politics where the rights of...

Talk to undergraduate students at Cartanega University in Colombia last week comparies the insistence on equilibrium modelling by economists to the bad habit of smoking.

This is the talk I gave at the FT/Alphaville conference in London, covering why we crashed in 2008, and why permanent private-debt-induced stagnation is likely to be the rule from now on.

My talk at the European Parliament to the conference "Peripheral debts: Causes, consequences and solutions: 2 July 2015". I argue that progressive politicians need a complete alternative to Neoliberal economics, which is basically a First Year Economics textbook re-written as a political manifesto.

My 10 minute plenary talk to the Rethinking Economics Weekend in London. I compare the "clever but mad" Ptolemaic model of the universe to Neoclassical DSGE models, and argue that we need a new, genuinely dynamic economics. I also show that my Minsky model can be expressed as three incontrovertibly true identities, and the interaction of them can be shown to generate both a Great Moderation and a Great Recession, using modern complex systems methods

In a (for me!) brief presentation with 7 slides, I explain why rising private debt necessarily causes increased inequality, and leads to an economic crisis when the rate of growth of debt exceeds the rate of decline of wages as a share of national income. Crucially, the actual breakdown is preceded by an apparent period of tranquility--a "Great Moderation". This was a short talk to a public audience at ESCP Europe in Paris, which was presented in English and also translated into French by...

This talk gives a brief technical overview of nonlinear modeling, and explains my Goodwin-Minsky model in some detail, as well as discussing the importance of debt in macroeconomics.

This talk gives a brief technical overview of nonlinear modeling, and explains my Goodwin-Minsky model in some detail, as well as discussing the importance of debt in macroeconomics.

If there's one over-arching theme to Neoclassical finance and macroeconomics, it's that leverage doesn't matter. This is so empirically wrong it's almost funny.

When the economic history of our epoch is written, three key phenomena will feature: a period of tranquility giving way suddenly to crisis, rising inequality, and rising private debt. Using my model of Minsky's Financial Instability Hypothesis, I show that these three phenomena are all related. There is a direct link between rising debt, rising inequality, and the crisis itself. The key to reducing inequality and ending economic stagnation is to reduce private debt through "Quantitative...