steve keen Archives - the patient investor

July 9, 2016

Steve Keen: Australian mortgage debt levels are “outrageous”

Steve Keen has a number of detractors who knock him for his incorrect forecast of collapse of the Australian housing bubble. But he was wrong for the right reasons…. the Australian financial system, based on highly-levered mortgages, is a house of cards. It was only rescued post-GFC by massive stimulus in China, resulting in a mini-boom in the Australian Resources industry.

Steve is at the cutting edge of economic theory. He and Richard Koo (The Holy Grail of Macroecomomics) were at the forefront of identifying the role that debt plays in the Aggregate Demand equation. We should take heed of his warnings.

“Our models predicted it [the GFC] couldn’t happen. It did happen. We therefore shouldn’t trust our models.”

“…What drives house prices is acceleration in mortgage debt…..Australians avoided collapse of the bubble by continuing to lend but mortgage debt is now 1.1 times GDP which is outrageous.”

September 9, 2013

Why this is a bad time to win an election | Business Spectator

Prof. Steve Keen writes:

So what could the future hold for Prime Minister Abbott? Here I have a hunch that he’ll end up suffering a similar fate, not to the previous Liberal leader he admires – John Howard – but to ….. Malcolm Fraser.

Fraser, as noted, had the good fortune to take over from Whitlam after the bursting of the debt bubble was largely over, but the bad fortune that the revival in Australia’s bubble was considerably more anaemic than America’s. Abbott could well find himself experiencing a similar double-edged sword of fate. He will take over when the deleveraging that caused the GFC has come to a temporary halt, and demand will be rising in the US….. But this rise could peter out even more quickly than it did for Fraser, leading to anaemic economic performance that will be blamed on the politician rather than the times.

March 15, 2013

The Keen Model [technical]

I know Steve Keen has taken criticism for his projection that the Australian property market would collapse in 2008 but his reconciliation of MMT, where the sum of all sectoral balances must equal zero, with his Monetary Circuit Theory, where Effective Demand = GDP + change in Debt, is brilliant.

For those who struggle with the terminology:
Ex ante = before the event
Post ante = after the event
Endogenous money simply means banks expand and contract the money supply as customers borrow and repay loans. See Wikipedia for a more detailed explanation.

May 23, 2012

Keen to be heard | BRW

Nick Gardner: In 2008, private debt in the US grew $4.1 trillion but in 2010 shrunk $2.85 trillion as banks decreased their lending as a result of the housing crash. When subtracted from GDP, this fall in debt equated to a 38 per cent reduction in aggregate demand, leading directly to the “great recession” and unemployment hitting its highest level in almost 30 years. “This is what people find so confusing,” says Keen. “When you look at GDP numbers in the US, they’re not bad. At the beginning of 2008, US GDP was $14.25 trillion and today it has GDP of $14.75 trillion. That’s stagnant growth but doesn’t explain the enormous depths of the US downturn. It only begins to makes sense when you look at the fall in aggregate demand.”

via Keen to be heard.

November 27, 2011

Steve Keen on Hard Talk

Steve Keen on how we can safely deflate the debt bubble. There may be alternative, less radical measures that could be taken to help the de-leveraging process but his basic message is right: deleveraging could cause 10 years or more of pain if we do not take measures to address the problem.