Steve Keen’s Debt Watch

This is the first third of a workshop on alternatives to Neoclassical economics that I gave in Malaysia on October 15 2016, after giving the keynote speech at the Symposium on Islamic Economics & Finance Education. I cover: (1) the recent change in the attitude of mainstream economists to their own models [Minutes 0-12] (2) building macroeconomic models from macroeconomic identities [12-30] (3) Can equity-based lending prevent crises? [[30-38] (4) Some questions INCLUDING "What is a...

I have observed and appreciated Olivier Blanchard’s intellectual journey over the last decade. It began in August 2008, with what must be regarded as one of the worst-timed papers in the history of economics. In a survey of macroeconomics entitled “The State of Macro”, he concluded, one year after the financial crisis began, that “The state of Macro is good” (Blanchard, 2008). However, Blanchard did not remain locked into that position, and he had the rare intellectual courage to...

Some papers that are remarkably critical of mainstream economics have been published recently, not by the usual suspects like myself, but by prominent mainstream economists: ex-Minneapolis Fed Chairman Narayana Kocherlokata, ex-IMF Chief Economist Olivier Blanchard, and current World Bank Chief Economist Paul Romer. I discuss these papers in a tongue-in-cheek introduction to another key problems of unrealism in economics--the absence of any role for energy in both Post Keynesian and...

Steven Sackur and I discuss why (mainstream) economists shouldn't be trusted, Brexit, the Euro, and overall the need to reform economics a decade after the Global Financial Crisis.

In my last post on my Debtwatch blog, I finished by saying that the Physiocrats were the only School of economics to properly consider the role of energy in production. They ascribed it solely to agriculture exploiting the free energy of the Sun, and specifically to land, which absorbed this free energy and stored it in agricultural products. As Richard Cantillon put it in 1730: The Land is the Source or Matter from whence all Wealth is produced. The Labour of man is the Form...

This interview, which was just recorded today, will go to air tomorrow. The broadcast details are: BBC News Channel: 02.30 BST, 04.30 BST and 20.30 BST Tuesday 16th August 2016, and 00.30 BST Wednesday 17th August 2016 And from the 04.30 TX it will then be available within the UK on BBC iPlayer for one year. BBC World News Channel: 03.30 GMT; 08.30 GMT; 14.30 GMT and 19.30 GMT Tuesday 16th August 2016 It will also go out at numerous timeslots on Friday on the BBC World Service....

This is a talk I gave to the Northern Ireland Big Ideas Event organised by NICVA: the "Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action" (http://www.nicva.org/event/big-ideas-festival-of-economics). Unfortunately I ran out of time to finish my presentation on why a "Modern Debt Jubilee" is needed to escape from the current economic state of credit stagnation, but I covered why it is this--and not "secular stagnation" that explains the prevalence of low rates of economic growth globally.

For decades, mainstream economists have reacted to criticism of their methodology mainly by dismissing it, rather than engaging with it. And the customary form that dismissal has taken is to argue that critics and purveyors of alternative approaches to economics simply aren’t capable of understanding the mathematics the mainstream uses. The latest instalment of this slant on non-mainstream economic theory appeared in Noah Smith’s column in Bloomberg View: “Economics Without Math...

Australia and South Korea were the only OECD nations to avoid a recession at the time of the Global Financial Crisis in 2008. I argue that they and several other countries--including China and Canada--face a recession in the near future, because the way they avoided the GFC was by continuing to borrow their way to prosperity.

This was my keynote speech at the French Association for Political Economy (AFEP) annual conference in Mulhouse, France (the other keynote was given–in French–by my good friend Marc Lavoie, who is now based at the University de Paris 13). In this presentation, I: Disparage the “secular stagnation” explanation that Larry Summers has regurgitated for the tepid level of economic growth today. As did Hansen in the 1930s, Summers ponders “why growth would remain anaemic in the absence...