In this week’s episode of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Steve Keen, one of the few economists to correctly anticipate the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, as well as the subsequent deflationary forces that would frustrate and confound policymakers in the years afterward. The two discuss Keen’s latest work modeling the impact of climate on economic output, as well as debunking some of the most common misperceptions about money and credit held by Keynesian and Austrian theorists alike.

Demetri and Steve have known each other going back almost ten years. Dr. Keen was a frequent guest on Demetri’s old television program Capital Account, where he would come on to share his views on markets and the economy. For years, Steve had been warning policymakers and the media about the dangers of a build-up in private sector debt through mortgage refinancing and consumer credit. In the years after the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, Steve Keen was one of the prominent voices alongside folks like Richard Koo, Mark Zandi, and others, who were ringing the alarm bell, warning about the risk of a deflationary spiral. Many of the more prominent, Austrian-trained economists like Thomas Woods, Peter Schiff, and others, were pounding the table about the risk of hyperinflation. In retrospect, it was those economists warning about deflation like Steve Keen, who had it right. In today’s conversation, we explore the reasons why and examine if those conditions still hold to this present day.

You can gain access to this week’s overtime segment, as well as to the transcript of Demetri’s conversation with Steve Keen through the Hidden Forces Patreon Page. All subscribers also gain access to our overtime feed, which can be easily be added to your favorite podcast application.

Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas

Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou

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Professor Keen is a Distinguished Research Fellow at UCL, the author of Debunking Economics (2011) and Can We Avoid Another Financial Crisis? (2017), and one of the few economists to anticipate the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, for which he received the Revere Award from the Real World Economics Review.

His main research interests are developing the complex systems approach to macroeconomics and the economics of climate change. He has over 80 refereed publications on financial instability, money creation, logical and mathematical flaws in conventional and Marxian economic theory, the role of energy in production, and many other topics. He is ranked in the Richtopia list of the worlds’ 100 most influential economists.

He designed the Open Source system dynamics program Minsky, which is the first program to allow monetary economic models to be designed visually.

He has previously been Professor of Economics at Kingston University London and the University of Western Sydney, Australia.

He is active on Twitter as @ProfSteveKeen and is crowdfunding his non-mainstream research into economics via Patreon: see https://www.patreon.com/ProfSteveKeen.