Guardian – I stumbled out into the autumn sunshine, figures ricocheting around my head, still trying to absorb what I had heard. I felt as if I had just attended a funeral: a funeral at which all of us got buried. I cannot claim to have understood everything in the lecture: Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu theory and the 41-line differential equation were approximately 15.8 metres over my head. But the points I grasped were clear enough. We’re stuffed: stuffed to a degree that scarcely anyone yet appreciates.
Professor Steve Keen was one of the few economists to predict the financial crisis. While the OECD and the US Federal Reserve foresaw a “great moderation”, unprecedented stability and steadily rising wealth, he warned that a crash was bound to happen. Now he warns that the same factors that caused the crash show that what we’ve heard so far is merely the first rumble of the storm.
