Our latest SBTV guest is Professor Steve Keen who was credited as the first Australian economist to have warned of the 2008 financial crisis years before it happened. Steve Keen believes the global economy is stuck in a 'lost decade' type of credit stagnation which will continue into the 2020s if private debt levels are not reduced.
Discussed in this interview:02:28 Warnings from high private debt in 2008 were ignored09:28 How conventional economics failed us in forecasting financial crisis14:20 How credit confounds conventional economics15:46 Hymen Minsky's Financial Instability Hypothesis21:08 Does the government's escalating debt matter?24:41 What happened with the repo market in September 2019?30:32 Threat of Collaterallized Loan Obligations (CLOs)35:42 An ecological crisis is coming
Steve Keen is an Australian-born, British-based economist and author of the book Debunking Economics. He considers himself a post-Keynesian, criticising neoclassical economics as inconsistent, unscientific and empirically unsupported. Keen was formerly an associate professor of economics at University of Western Sydney, until he applied for voluntary redundancy in 2013, due to the closure of the economics program at the university. In autumn 2014 he became a professor and Head of the School of Economics, History and Politics at Kingston University in London. He is also a fellow at the Centre for Policy Development.