Can We Avoid Another Financial Crisis? (The Future of Capitalism) 1st Edition

I agree with the following:"Anyone who paid serious attention to credit, as Keen did prior to 2008, could hardly have failed to notice that something was amiss. After all, credit was growing very rapidly in the United States, in Australia and across much of Europe. Keen’s own contribution at the time was to point out that it wouldn’t take a collapse of credit to cause a serious economic downturn – a mere slowdown in the rate of lending would do the job. This prediction was vindicated in 2008, when credit growth slowed sharply but remained positive, sending the U.S. economy into a tailspin.Keen is now calling for the dominant macroeconomic models to be jettisoned and replaced by ones that take account of credit. In his book, he develops a simple credit-based macro model." - Reuters"At first glance Steve Keen’s new book ‘Can We Avoid Another Financial Crisis’ seems too small-sized at 147 pages. But like a well-made atom-bomb, it is compactly designed for maximum reverberation to blow up its intended target.Explaining why today’s debt residue has turned the United States, Britain and southern Europe into zombie economies, Steve Keen shows how ignoring debt the blind spot of neoliberal economics – basically the old neoclassical just-pretend view of the world. Neoclassical’s glib mathiness is a gloss for its unscientific “don’t worry about debt” message. Blame for today’s U.S., British and southern European inability to achieve economic recovery thus rests on the economic mainstream and its refusal to recognize that debt matters.Mainstream models are unable to forecast or explain a depression. That is because depressions are essentially financial in character. The business cycle itself is a financial cycle – that is, a cycle of the buildup and collapse of debt.Keen’s “Minsky” model traces this to what he has called “endogenous money creation,” that is, bank credit mainly to buyers of real estate, companies and other assets. He recently suggested a more catchy moniker: “Bank Originated Money and Debt” (BOMD). That seems easier to remember.The concept is more accessible than the dry academic terminology usually coined. It is simple enough to show that the mathematics of compound interest lead the volume of debt to exceed the rate of GDP growth, thereby diverting more and more income to the financial sector as debt service. Keen traces this view back to Irving Fisher’s famous 1933 article on debt deflation – the residue from unpaid debt. Such payments to creditors leave less available to spend on goods and services.In explaining the mathematical dynamics underlying his “Minsky” model, Keen links financial dynamics to employment. If private debt grows faster than GDP, the debt/GDP ratio will rise. This stifles markets, and hence employment. Wages fall as a share of GDP...By being so compact, this book is able to concentrate attention on the easy-to-understand mathematical principles that underlie the “junk economics” mainstream. Keen explains why, mathematically, the Great Moderation leading up to the 2008 crash was not an anomaly, but is inherent in a basic principle: Economies can prolong the debt-financed boom and delay a crash simply by providing more and more credit, Australia-style. The effect is to make the ensuing crash worse, more long-lasting and more difficult to extricate. For this, he blames mainly Margaret Thatcher and Alan Greenspan as, in effect, bank lobbyists. But behind them is the whole edifice of neoliberal economic brainwashing...This book enables the non-mathematician to pierce the shell of mathiness in which today’s economic mainstream wraps its lobbying effort for the big banks and their product, debt. The needed escape from the debt deflation they have caused is a debt writedown......Keen’s book should be basic reading for placing debt at the center of today’s political debate and replacing mainstream “barter” economics with a more reality-based discipline." -Michael Hudson

Interesting read

Author-economist Steve Keen superbly condenses his key insights for the non-mathematical public. Above all, private debt matters and public debt does not. There are a few charts in the book. Perhaps the most stunning relates unemployment to the second derivative of private debt with respect to time. One word of caution: Keen uses "debt" for the total amount borrowed and "credit" for how fast debt is changing. The sober final chapter is extremely realistic in predicting a 2008 type crisis for about another third of the world's economy (8 to 15 more countries) followed by Japanese style stagnation for over half the world for decades (Japanese home prices have declined for more than two decades). But, heh, there is hope if there social consensus for massive government debts to fund something worthwhile like how World War II ended the Great Recession. Do you suppose we could unite on halting global warming, no matter how much money we have to print to do it? One can hope! The book is first rate. Please read it.

Well, FINALLY someone explains why mainstream economists don't understand how economies actually work! And it's breathlessly exciting to find someone who does.Short answer to title's question: No.Long Answer: Read this book. But basically, the economic gatekeepers don't understand their own system, so they can't see the disasters looming, even when the data is forecasting it.To those unfamiliar with Steve Keen, he works from the edgy Modern Monetary Theory (based on a book by the same name by Randall Wray). This theory is seen by many in mainstream economics as being subversive and 'fringe' but, like many 'established' theories that face criticism ("the earth is actually not the centre of the universe"), the mainstream response is attack-to-preserve-our-dominance, regardless of whether the challenging theory has validity.Since I do not believe that the earth is the center of the universe, and am thus a subversive, not to mention the obvious mismanagement/misinformation/misunderstandings regarding recent economic policies and meltdowns, I was interested in this challenging theory of economics and was not disappointed.It's accessible, easy to read and understand, well written and clear - even to non-economists / non-mathematicians / non-statisticians / non-money-policy-bean-counter-types - and especially interesting. Chilling, actually. I don't normally read these types of books, but it really hooked me and shed light on a subject that is usually shrouded in secrecy and confusion. It also made me realise that we - the nations of this world - are in deep muck from the hobbled economics theory that the world currently embraces. And it's probably going to sink us all before fixing the errors that it relies on.P.S. If you are a conventionally-trained economist, it's up to you to decide if you're going to knee-jerk reaction this or if you're interested to possibly learn something new and counter to the mainstream. It's hard to see the light when you've been trained in the darkness, but none of us should claim to be above learning something new.

A very good read. Informative and technical. However, only 4 stars for the simple paragraph where the author wrote “The first can be dismissed immediately: despite the ridiculous number of ‘gold bugs’ in the world who believe the myth that, in the past, gold was money (Graeber, 2011), there is not enough of any valuable commodities –let alone gold –to enable them to be used as money, and I know of no parallel currency system based on them.” Buy it and read it. You won’t be disappointed. MAGA Cheers.