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Tag Archives: Debtwatch

My Kingston Inaugural Lecture with slides and data

I’ve been Head of School at Kingston University London for over 18 months now, but these things do take time: last Wednesday I gave my inaugural Professorial lecture to an audience of about 200 people. My screen-recording video of the talk is below. Click here to download the Powerpoint slides; Minsky crisis model; Minsky Loanable Funds model; Minsky Endogenous Money model; Private Debt levels (6 countries); Private Credit growth (6 countries); USA Private Debt change & Unemployment;...

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Note To Joe Stiglitz: Banks Originate, Not Intermediate, And That’s Why Aggregate Demand Is Stuffed

I like Joe Stiglitz, both professionally and personally. His Globalization and its Discontents was virtually the only work by a Nobel Laureate economist that I cited favourably in my Debunking Economics, because he had the courage to challenge the professional orthodoxy on the “Washington Consensus”. Far more than most in the economics mainstream—like Ken Rogoff for example—Joe is capable of thinking outside its box. But Joe’s latest public contribution—“The Great Malaise Continues” on...

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The Power And The Impotence Of The ECB

I’ve attended two conferences in two days where both the power and the impotence of the European Central Bank (EBC) have been on vivid display. Its political power is considerable, both in form and in substance. At both seminars, the ECB speaker—ECB Board member Peter Praet at the first, and ECB President Mario Draghi at the second—spoke first, and then left. In form, the ECB has no need to defend its policies because it is unimpeachable in its execution of them. In substance, it does not...

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Lecture05 Why Economists Disagree: The common blindspot on the Environment

The posi­tion of the econ­omy in the envi­ron­ment is a shared blindspot in eco­nom­ics: no exist­ing school han­dles the topic well, and yet this is the key issue we need to under­stand. I explain the Laws of Thermodynamics–as well as I could in an intro­duc­tory class with­out using mathematics–and pro­vide some links to impor­tant top­ics that stu­dents wouldn’t nor­mally hear about in an eco­nom­ics degree. [embedded content] Click here for the Pow­er­point slides....

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Becoming An Economist Lecture 4: Post Keynesians

This lec­ture cov­ers the Post Key­ne­sian school of thought in eco­nom­ics, focus­ing mainly on its mod­ern empha­sis upon endoge­nous money, sec­toral bal­ances, and Minsky’s Finan­cial Insta­bil­ity Hypoth­e­sis. I also show how to do non-equilibrium mod­el­ing (using my Open Source mod­el­ing pro­gram Min­sky of course). [embedded content] Click here to down­load the Pow­er­point slides.

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The Unnatural Rate Of Interest (Ultra-Wonkish)

Paul Krugman’s lat­est col­umn—“Check Out Our Low, Low (Nat­ural) Rates” (which he didn’t flag as “Wonk­ish”, even though it is so in spades—noted that the “nat­ural real rate of inter­est” was falling, and that this jus­ti­fied the low inter­est rate set by the Fed­eral Reserve. And this made me think about Karl Marx. Click here to read the rest of this post.

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Economists Prove That Capitalism Is Unnecessary

Actu­ally they’ve done no such thing. But they do effec­tively assume that it’s unnec­es­sary all the time. This tran­scen­den­tal truth became appar­ent to me in the reac­tions I have had from main­stream econ­o­mists to a lec­ture I gave to my Kingston stu­dents this month (which is posted on my YouTube chan­nel and blog). Click here to read the rest of this post.

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Lecture 3 in Becoming an Economist at Kingston University

This lec­ture intro­duce the Aus­trian school of thought, which is closely related to the Neo­clas­si­cal mainstream–in that it shares its util­i­tar­ian the­ory of value, accepts basic sup­ply and demand analy­sis, and sees cap­i­tal­ism as gen­er­ally tend­ing towards equi­lib­rium. But it is also highly crit­i­cal of the main­stream for the absurd assump­tions about indi­vid­ual knowl­edge that it is will­ing to make to pre­serve its equilibrium-oriented math­e­mat­i­cal approach. It...

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Edinburgh University Talk: financial instability, endogenous money & government budgets

This talk covers all "the usual suspects" for me--the Neoclassical obsession with equilibrium, financial instability, the Loanable Funds myth and the reality of Endogenous Money, and the foolishness of governments trying to run a surplus as if they are households, when the better analogy is that they are banks and should run deficits to create part of the money supply the non-bank private sector needs.[embedded content] Click here to download the Powerpoint file (Minsky files are embedded...

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Lecture 2 in “Becoming an Economist” at Kingston University

Becom­ing an Econ­o­mist is the intro­duc­tory course on eco­nom­ics for under­grad­u­ates at Kingston Uni­ver­sity. This is the second of 11 lec­tures in the sub­ject; I’ll post the oth­ers as I write them over the next few months. This lec­ture dis­cusses why the Mainstream approach, starting from the fundamental question Walras posed "Can a system of free markets reach a set of prices that ensures that supply equals demand in all markets?" The answer was "No", but that didn't stop the...

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