FORECASTS

Along with Tim Colebatch, Professors Julian Disney and John Freebairn, I spoke at a symposium at Melbourne University on tax reform on 2 August 2005. The symposium was hosted by the Honorable Brian Howe, Director of the Centre for Public Policy.

The video therefrom forecasts and explains why the world is slowly descending towards another economic depression. (Hat-tip to Foreground Media for providing subtitles to address an issue with the sound).

My aim was to suggest that economists have been unable to abolish the economic depressions about which Russian economist Nikolai Kondratieff had studied the periods. These had characteristic upgrowth trending to a peak, followed by a trend decline into the next depression. I was emboldened to come to this conclusion by economists considering all the intermediate recessions to be “the natural business cycle“. To me, this is merely an excuse for not having been concerned about the extent to which we allow publicly-generated national economic rents to be privatised by a select few as real wealth-creation suffers.

In 2001 in the British Journal Geophilos published my forecast of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis in “The Coming Kondratieff Crash: Rent-seeking, income distribution & the business cycle“.

Geophilos

Geophilos back cover

.

In December 2018, I called the mid-term recession in the current 18-year real estate cycle (i.e. from 2008 to 2026). It proved to be nominated “The COVID-19 Recession”. The piece was published on Prosper Australia’s website and cross-posted by MacroBusiness. So Covid caused it, eh? What an extremely rapid response! The enormously sharp decline in real estate sales activity in 2018 apparently had nothing to do with it.

OK, so let’s see to what a failed neoclassical economics and the mainstream media ascribe the 2027 bubble-burst and the ensuing financial collapse?