Steve Keen on MMT, Limits to Growth, and Climate Accounting

Aug 27, 2021

A casual observer of modern economies might be forgiven for feeling that life is pretty good. And they might reasonably credit neoclassical economic principles for facilitating what appears to have been a great leap forward in global prosperity. At the same time, we are occasionally confronted with news of looming global calamities, which are a product of the exact same policies that brought about this apparent prosperity: irreversible climate change, unprecedented global private credit, global asset bubbles to name just a few.

Our guest this week, Professor Steve Keen, has spent a lifetime demonstrating why neoclassical economics is fundamentally self-terminating because it fails to account for realities imposed by the physical world. He walks us through the root issues and describes an economic framework for sustainable growth and more even prosperity. In particular we discussed:

• The roots of the 2008 global financial crisis and how he predicted it in advance
• How the 1972 report “Limits to Growth” successfully forecast how the global economy would run headlong into resource boundary conditions
• Richard Vague’s findings that accelerating growth of private credit has presaged every major financial collapse in the past few centuries
• How the misguided work of two economists in the early 1990s has led to catastrophic policy and climate consequences
• The financialization of housing and its impact on home prices, demand for private credit, and a return to feudalism
• How to incorporate resource consumption and waste into modern economic models
• The character and potential positive impact of a modern debt jubilee

 

Professor Keen is not a man who minces words. Pour yourself an Irish coffee and settle in for a jarring ride.

This is “ReSolve’s Riffs” – live on YouTube every Friday afternoon to debate the most relevant investment topics of the day, hosted by Adam Butler, Mike Philbrick and Rodrigo Gordillo of ReSolve Global* and Richard Laterman of ReSolve Asset Management.

Thank you for watching and listening. See you next week.

*ReSolve Global refers to ReSolve Asset Management SEZC (Cayman) which is registered with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as a commodity trading advisor and commodity pool operator.

This registration is administered through the National Futures Association (“NFA”). Further, ReSolve Global is a registered person with the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority.