Tag Archives: Debtwatch

I began another post critical of Joe Stiglitz’s analysis with the caveat that I like Joe. I’ll add to that that I respect his intellect too, both because he’s very bright—you don’t win a Nobel Prize (even in Economics!) without being very bright—and because compared to some other winners, he is very capable of thinking beyond the limitations of the mainstream. But there are some mainstream concepts that are so deeply embedded in even highly intelligent, flexible thinkers like Joe, that they...

The great tragedy of the global economic malaise is that it is caused by a shortage of something that is essentially costless to produce: money. Click here to read the rest of this post.

I’m posting videos of lectures given by my Kingston colleagues to the introductory “Becoming an Economist” course, since the StudySpace software Kingston uses doesn’t support MP4 files. The first is Devrim Yilmaz’s lecture last week on “Data Collection and Presentation”. http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Devrim.mp4

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;...

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...

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...

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....

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.

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.

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.