Martin North went on The Project and told people not to buy property until next year...

yes correct, conflict of interest.

 

The latest from both keen and North ... Pretty long interview

 

I give Keen more credit than most generic forecasters because he does have a PHD in economics but the way he predicts exactly what will happen in the UK, US, Canada and Australia in the next 5 years tells me he has his head up his butt. His predictions failed epically in 2012 he could at least show some humility today.

 

Steve Keen

Predicting crash for the last 6+ years
Sells books on crash( conflict of interest) does not sell book when he is not beatting down on economy.


HE got fired from University of Western Sydney

He got made partially redundant at current uni in UK.

He does not have a cent to his name and relays on donations to survive? Nothing to show for his so called knowledge or intellect.

Is this really a good economist .? Not in my book.

 

Fluffy icebergs it is then

 

Is there an established link between intellect and wealth?
Does an economist who understands how economic systems really work automatically make them a successful investor?
Can economic knowledge help someone to avoid life experiences which put people into a financially vulnerable position?

You say he relays (relies?) on donations to survive.. he has built an audience of people willing to pay to consume his economic content. Do you think you could build an audience of 950 people prepared to pay (on an ongoing basis) for content you have expertise in?

 

He is broke and is fired from his last two employers.

He has been systematically wrong in predicting Australian property collapse.

He has a huge vested interest in selling his doomsday books.

 

AFAIK he was made voluntarily redundant at UWS (along with other colleagues) & his work at KUL was reduced due to funding cuts. So which employers was he fired from?

Which economist can you point to who has consistently predicted the direction of asset prices & who has a accumulated vast wealth as a result of their economics driven investment prowess?

Which of his books did you read? Do you disagree with his general premise that private debt increasing (faster than the economy) is dangerous and will inevitably result in further financial crisis?

 

We will agree to disagree.
We are too far apart for either to see the others point of view.

 

Anyone who thinks credit and the recent restrictions mean little is a fool, it also tells me how active that were pre and post in regard to buying AND selling, it is dramatic.

Also the banks wont be rushing back to what they were doing just a short while ago, well not till it is all forgotten.

 

They would if they could tomorrow morning.
Their hands are tied.

As soon as cuffs are back to normal. It will take time.

 

They seem like fair questions asking you to backup the facts behind your publicly disparaging someone.

 

It only kept on working as long as you had good wage growth.
And even then it was pretty obvious that households were taking on to much debt.
You simply cannot have a healthy banking system where bigger and bigger loans are written out with neglible wage growth and rising cost of living expenses.
Sooner or later the economy will face a major shock .
There is only one thing worse than a greedy bank and thats one about to go belly up, or suddenly faced with a rush of everyone taking out their deposits.

 

He wasn't fired. He also predicted a bunch of other collapses in Europe. He also predicted USA's crash in 2006 (which albeit was a bit late, because it was kind of already happening in a lot of cities by then). In Australia's case, he jumped the gun, but the main mistake he made was putting a date on it. Never put a date on it. The market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

Really I think Australia's fixation on Steve Keen is a form of denial, and it isn't a very helpful one. "Steve Keen was wrong" is a popular epitaph in bubble debates. But the risk is it gives people almost a sort of psychological permission to tell themselves a crash can't happen to them, to laugh of the idea, which is of course ridiculous. It can leave people unwilling to prepare, because they think he's a chicken little. People are better off prepping for the worst. Remain optimistic, sure, but stop looking at Steve Keen being "wrong" as proof a crash can't happen at some point.

In Ireland we had a Steve Keen in Morgan Kelly. That media darling sort of guy who kept banging on and on and on about the crash, and people were happy to remind themselves he was "wrong" again and again (spoiler: he wasn't. To Morgan's credit he mostly avoided putting a date on it, too). I was definitely one of those people who thought he was a fruit loop. I used to think he was an unhelpful pessimist, and so did most people. When he kept insisting property prices would crash 50% he was practically laughed out of the room. Bernie Ahern basically called him a lunatic, "cribbing and moaning" from the sidelines. But Morgan was right in the end.

 

I have no idea why any economist would even try and predict what will happen.

Economies are systems with too many inputs that are controlled by different parties so there is no telling what can happen. You can model hundreds of different scenarios especially these days when we have pretty much every economy in the world interconnected somehow with many other economies... Sure some scenarios are probably more likely to happen but that's about it.

One thing is for sure to my mind, Booms and Busts are a certainty and are a result of how the system is setup and how it's meant to work

 

Well said, should have never given a date. Which is why I’m enjoying martins information of late, no dates,just info

 

For a lot of these doom forecasters to come true you generally need a multitude of things to go wrong at around the same time.
Ireland for example was looking at a soft landing , but during that process other things went wrong , some were outside their control and in other countries , but the contagion spread back to Ireland and it all went downhill from there.
A classis case today is the Turkish Lira , how quickly did that spread into other emerging markets and commodity currencies like the AUD .
Our nearest neighbor Indonesia with a pop of about 250 million suddenly had to raise interest rates by larger than expected increments .
Yet there is expected to be two more increases by the US fed this year.
At some point it will it will flow back to China as many countries cut back on consuption .

 

Is a weather forecast good if it doesn't tell us when it will rain?

So why not BOM just say its sunny until it rains?

 

Is the information reliable?

More than that, is the interpretation of the data accurate?

It is one thing to collect reliable statistics. Correctly interpreting the stats is a completely different skill.

A few years ago I worked as a data analyst and had to write monthly reports. Trust me when I say that you can be both misleading and 100% factual at the same time.

Without context, many facts don't tell us thing. For example, there has been a 4,000% increase in refinance rejections in the last month. Without qualifying data, this tells us nothing useful.

 

His info may or may not be correct, but as I usually do I like to read and listen to as much info as I can and make my own judgement call.
It’s the same with property chat, as many say brisbane is next to boom or rise in value overall, I’m not convinced it’s todays environment.