I was approached by Bloomberg to write an 800-word feature on “The Future of Economics” for the World Economic Forum, which starts today in Davos. I haven’t heard back as to whether they actually ran it in their newsletter, but hopefully the Davos participants had the following item in their breakfast reading this morning For its [...]

Preamble The fundamental cause of the economic and financial crisis that began in late 2007 was lending by the finance sector that primarily financed speculation rather than investment. The private debt bubble this caused is unprecedented, probably in human history and certainly in the last century (see Figure 1). Its unwinding now is the primary cause [...]

Every year, The Age publishes a survey of economists’ opinions on the year ahead. Most of these are “market economists” rather than academics—working for banks, insurance companies and the like. Three academics are surveyed—myself, Jacob Marsden of Monash and Neville Norman of the University of Melbourne—and one economist working for a trade union, Brad Crofts of the AWU. Peter Martin [...]

Partial Mortgage Jubilee Plan from US Fed Economic Reform Australia has just alerted me to a proposal for a partial mortgage debt forgiveness proposal put forward by economists from the US Federal Reserve in January 2009. ERA reproduced this post from WhoWhatWhy, which in turn referred to a Boston Fed publication Communities & Banking and the [...]