Steve Keen’s Debt Watch

This invitation came about thanks to Full Circle (http://fullcircle.eu/), which tries to promote open-minded debate in Brussels on a wide range of issues. I've been very critical of the Eu's economic policies in the past, so it was great to be able to speak within the Commission to an audience of about 50 people there, about half of whom were economists. The debate after my talk was excellent, and I hope the audio is OK on this recording.

This was a very good panel discussion, prompted both by the private debt data for Australia, and Stan Grant's review of and commentary on my book "Can we avoid another financial crisis?", which notes that Australia is one of the countries that I expect to have a debt crisis in the next 1-2 years. The video is not available to viewers outside Australia, so I'm making it available here. If it later is available via an ABC channel, I'll happily delete it from here. The discussion starts 6...

I had prepared a set of slides on "Can we avoid another financial crisis?", but with an audience exclusively of economics students at Sheffield University today, and pressed for time, I "went rogue", and challenged the limited nature of the "education" they get in economics today. Gee it felt good! I've endured seeing rubbish portrayed as reason in economics for 45 years now, and I've hardly been silent about it of course. But I really cut loose tonight. 46 years ago, I was doing what...

Ricardo's theory of trade is in many ways the foundation of conventional economic thinking: output and welfare can be increased by removing barriers to markets reaching equilibrium prices. In this case, the barriers are restraints on international trade, and output and welfare are increased by each country specialising in the good(s) in which it has a comparative advantage. The key fallacy in the argument is the belief that machinery can be switched from one industry to another without...

This talk was a pleasure to give, because for once I was talking to an audience who completely understand Complex Systems (unlike the vast majority of economists), but in the case of "EASY"--the "Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems Research Group"(http://www.sussex.ac.uk/easy/)--they apply this methodology to analysing the brain and consciousness. I outline Minsky (downloadable from https://sourceforge.net/projects/minsky/), the system dynamics platform I designed for economics to enable...

As I note in the opening, money and monetary policy shape our lives and politics, but almost everything that is convntionally believed about it, especially by mainstream economists, is wrong. I show how the Federal Reserve Governors & Federal Open Market Committee clearly believe in the "money multiplier" model, which is a logical fallacy. They are trying to manage a system they don't understand.

Economic theories of all persuasions have ignored the role of energy in production ever since Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations was published, yet at the same time have attempted to answer the question of where the physical surplus of outputs over inputs (or the increase in utility caused by production) has come from. This lecture gives an overview of the basics of the relationship between energy and useful work, and argues that the economic theory of value has to start from acknowledging the...

Cambridge University is one of many leading universities where economics students get no exposure to non-mainstream approaches to economics in their curriculum. The students have therefore organised their own Society for Economic Pluralism, and they asked me to speak on "Can we avoid another financial crisis?". I also covered alternative approaches to economic modelling to the mainstream DSGE approach, including: applying Neural Networks to Macroeconomics, which one of my best PhD students...

This lecture for my first year ("Level 4") students at Kingston covers Neoclassical modeling from its microeconomic beginnings to the evolution of macroeconomics in response to the Great Depression, Hicks's Neoclassical IS-LM general equilibrium model of Depressions versus "normal times", and ultimately the development of Real Business Cycle models. The next lecture covers the development of DSGE models and the crisis in modelling when these models completely failed to anticipate the Great...

I tidy up the predator-prey model developed in the previous video, demonstrate some (overdue!) new features of Minsky such as search and replace, spot a couple of bugs, and make some justifiably disparaging remarks about a recent crop of Neoclassical papers that described critics of DSGE models as "dilettantes".