Steve Keen’s Debt Watch

This was my second talk to Positiva Pengar, Sweden's version of the UK's Positive Money. Since I'd given a prepared talk just a few weeks before, I did this one in a more extempore fashion, with a lot of it being a dialogue between myself and the organizer Jussi Ora. I used Minsky to lay out the accounting behind money creation--by both banks and governments--and made the general point that, since money is (aside from cash) the liabilities of the banking sector to the non-bank sector, to...

I cover why equilibrium has gone from a modelling compromise for 19th century Neoclassical economists into a near religious belief about the nature of economics amongst 21st century Neoclassicals, how genuine dynamic economic analysis can be derived directly from the structure of the economy, how energy can be incorporated into economic modelling, and why economics remains a pre-scientific discipline.

This video starts with the "green-room" chatter between myself and Oscar Brisset, who is Co-President of the Oxford Economics Society. The presentation proper starts about two minutes in. Oscar's sound feed is poor, because this was recorded on my PC, but mine is pretty clear. It's an intense one-hour lecture, covering material that should really be done over a dozen or so lectures, so if you'd like to follow up on it, please check this out on my Patreon page...

I dis­cuss a Mod­ern Debt Jubilee On Macro’n’Cheese today, and this is a quick expla­na­tion of how it could be done. Jubilees were com­mon in antiq­ui­ty. The Lord’s Prayer did not orig­i­nal­ly say “And for­give us our sins, as we have for­giv­en those who sin against us”, but “And for­give us our debts, as we also have for­giv­en our debtors”. But an old-fash­ioned Jubilee would reward those who gam­bled with bor­rowed mon­ey, and thus effec­tive­ly penalise those who did not. It...

This presentation to students in the EU-sponsored EPOG Masters program (see https://www.epog.eu/) covers the analysis of credit money, financial instability, Modern Monetary Theory, the role of energy in production, and how to model financial and complex systems in my Open Source system dynamics program Minsky (see https://sourceforge.net/projects/minsky/). There was a lively discussion of the way in which capitalism should be modelled--using discrete (NO!) or continuous time, etc.

This was a "brown bag" seminar arranged by Masters students at the University of Missouri Kansas City, the home of academic MMT, focusing mainly upon the dreadful Neoclassical economics of climate change, but also covering issues from MMT and macroeconomics.

As well as being a great researcher and writer, David was a friend to both myself and Michael. Michael can't take part in the memorial activities for David this Sunday, so we recorded this brief conversation about him and his work instead.