Tag Archives: Debtwatch

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...

One thing my 28 years as a card-carrying econ­o­mist have taught me is that con­ven­tional eco­nomic the­ory is the best guide to what is likely to hap­pen in the economy. Read what­ever it advises or pre­dicts, and then advise or expect the oppo­site. You (almost) can’t go wrong. Click here to read the rest of this post.

There was a time when most educated people knew that the Earth was the center of the universe. There was a sophisticated “Geocentric” model, known as the “Ptolemaic system”, that predicted to very high accuracy the observed movement of all the objects in the Heavens, as they purportedly orbited the Earth on perfect crystalline spheres. 500 years ago, anyone who proposed an alternative model—in which the Sun was the center and the Earth was just another planet orbiting it—was derided as a...