Tag Archives: Debtwatch

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...

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...

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...

The Pri­vate Debt Project (this web­site will become active as of Decem­ber 2015) invites pro­pos­als for arti­cles, papers, and research notes related to the study of pri­vate debt and its rela­tion­ship to eco­nomic growth and finan­cial sta­bil­ity. The Project will pro­vide hon­o­rar­ium for all pub­lished work. In cases involv­ing papers with orig­i­nal research, it will also con­sider small research grants to help cover the cost of the research. Com­mis­sioned arti­cles, papers, and...

The Friends Prov­i­dent Foun­da­tion has just estab­lished a Fel­low­ship for UK jour­nal­ism to pro­duce a “a sig­nif­i­cant work of long form jour­nal­ism in any medium on the theme of build­ing resilient economies.” I’ve copied the full press release below. For fur­ther details, click on this link. The full press release is copied below. Jour­nal­ist Fel­low­ship 2016 The Foundation’s trustees have cre­ated a jour­nal­ist fel­low­ship to build a bet­ter under­stand­ing of eco­nom­ics in...

Becom­ing an Econ­o­mist is the intro­duc­tory course on eco­nom­ics for under­grad­u­ates at Kingston Uni­ver­sity. This is the first of 11 lec­tures in the sub­ject; I’ll post the oth­ers as I write them over the next few months. This lec­ture dis­cusses why econ­o­mists dis­agree with each other, and draws analo­gies with astron­omy at the time when Galileo dis­cov­ered craters on the Moon, and moons orbit­ing Jupiter and Saturn. [embedded content] This is the Pow­er­point file for the...

One of the peo­ple I miss talk­ing with in Aus­tralia is radio jour­nal­ist and tech and inter­net expert Phil Dob­bie. For­tu­nately there’s Skype, and we reg­u­larly now chat mat­ters eco­nomic on his inter­net radio show Balls Radio. Here’s the lat­est com­plete pro­gram, includ­ing our dis­cus­sion of why inter­est rates are so low and are not going to move up until the level of pri­vate debt falls dramatically–which is unlikely to happen. [embedded content]

One of the very enjoyable aspects of being in London is speaking regularly with Simon Rose on the business-oriented internet radio Share Radio. I know I can talk under wet cement; I think Simon could manage to talk after it had set solid. We have a great time bantering about topics economics, and I hope it's of interest to the audience as well. Here's the latest installment, with some earlier ones available here. [embedded content] This blog has been verified by Rise:...

For seven years now, the rate The Fed sets to deter­mine the price banks pay to bor­row from it and from each other has been zero, or so close to zero that the dif­fer­ence is imma­te­r­ial. This is, his­tor­i­cally speak­ing, not nor­mal, and The Fed has a des­per­ate desire to return to what is nor­mal, which is rate a few per cent above the rate of infla­tion (see Fig­ure 1). Click here to read the rest of this post.

This is the brief talk I gave at a conference celebrating 25 years of the Critical Realist seminar series at Cambridge University. Critical realists argue against the use of mathematics in economics; I argue here that it's the abuse of mathematics by Neoclassical economists--who practice what I have dubbed "Mythematics" rather than Mathematics--and that some phenomena are uncovered by mathematical logic that can't be discovered by verbal logic alone. I give the example of my own model of...