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How private debt and credit cause financial crises

Summary:
It should be obvious: financial crises are caused by the financial sector, and its primary product is debt, which is necessarily created when credit-money is created. And borrowers only commit to additional debt because they wish to spend, so there is an intimate link between private debt, credit, and demand. But it’s not obvious to ...

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It should be obvious: financial crises are caused by the financial sector, and its primary product is debt, which is necessarily created when credit-money is created. And borrowers only commit to additional debt because they wish to spend, so there is an intimate link between private debt, credit, and demand.



But it’s not obvious to economists, because they convinced themselves, as long ago as the early 1800s, that money didn’t matter: the economy was really a barter system, obscured by the veil of money.



I explain why debt and credit matter, and use them to show why the 2007 crisis occurred, and why several of the countries that avoided a crisis in 2007 are on the verge of one today.



Steve Keen
Steve Keen (born 28 March 1953) is an Australian-born, British-based economist and author. He considers himself a post-Keynesian, criticising neoclassical economics as inconsistent, unscientific and empirically unsupported. The major influences on Keen's thinking about economics include John Maynard Keynes, Karl Marx, Hyman Minsky, Piero Sraffa, Augusto Graziani, Joseph Alois Schumpeter, Thorstein Veblen, and François Quesnay.

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