Nominations for the Revere Award in Economics
The economics establishment has attempted to evade responsibility for the Global Financial Collapse by calling it an unpredictable, “Black Swan” event. But in fact some non-neoclassical economists foresaw the crisis and warned the public of its approach. The Revere Award aims to give these economists the professional and public recognition that they deserve, to encourage others to utilize their methods, and to increase the likelihood that, for the benefit of humankind, empirically responsible economists will be listened to in the future
You may nominate up to three candidates by leaving a comment below. They must be economists, and we are looking for the three who first and most cogently warned of the coming calamity. Subsequently a page with supporting comments with be put up for each economist nominated.
As with the Dynamite Prize, nominations and the submission of evidence will remain open for several weeks, after which time a short list will be announced and voting by PollDaddy will commence. Each voter will have three votes, and the Revere Award will be given to the three economists receiving the most votes.
24 February 2010
With a couple of exceptions, all submitted comments for nominations for the Revere Prize have been approved for posting below. However when it comes time to select the short-list for the ballot, the criteria initially stated above will be honoured. Please note below the two key words in bold:
They must be economists, and we are looking for the three who first and most cogently warned of the coming calamity.
These restrictions are in no way intended to deny that there were non-economists who saw the Global Financial Collapse coming and gave public warning. Similarly, insistence upon observing the definite article is not to deny that there have been economists whose theoretical work was or could have been used to anticipate the calamity that came to pass.
These criteria have been set partly to make it a coherent exercise, but more importantly because this prize has been established to give recognition to those economists who have demonstrated superior capability at applying economics in real-time to the real-world.
The recent events, with the parts played and not played by economists, have demonstrated that within the economics profession today the general level of competence at real-world economics is grievously less than what society requires. But one also needs to recognize that it is humanly natural that in the wake of their failure the profession’s dominant power echelons should feel resentment and jealousy toward those economists who foresaw the events and to be disinclined to assign blame and credit where they are due. Hence the establishment of the Dynamite and Revere Prizes.
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—— Ugarteche, Puyana and Madi ——
Gerson Lima / Maria Alejandra Madi
Edward Fullbrook and Jamie Morgan
————— Michael Hudson ————–
Maria Alejandra Madi / Jack Reardon
————- Edward Fullbrook ————-
—————— Steve Keen —————–
————— Richard Smith —————
————– Gustavo Marques————
– Victor Beker and Beniamino Moro –
————– Lars Pålsson Syll ————-
—————– Stuart Birks —————-
Edward Fullbrook and Jamie Morgan
———— Armando Ochangco ———-
Shimshon Bichler / Jonathan Nitzan
————— Mauro Gallegati ————–
————— Herman Daly —————-
————— Asad Zaman —————
—————– C. T. Kurien —————
————— Robert Locke —————-
Real-World Economics Review Blog 
Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR)
Dean Baker
In 2002 he “called” the Housing Bubble and spent much of the decade of the 00’s warning about it and its consequences. He argued forcefully that housing prices were OBVIOUSLY a bubble because of the divergence between rent increases and housing price increases even though, in a so-called “efficient” market, the price of an asset (a house) should be nothing more than the discounted cash flow of the income derived from that asset (rent).
Robert Shiller
In 1998 he warned about the STock Market bubble and published his book IRRATIONAL EXUBERENCE in 2000. In the second edition, he applied that same methodology to housing. He developed the Case-Shiller index which actually MEASURED the bubble and showed that unlike previous periods of housing price increases, there were NO EXAMPLES of housing price decreases in some parts of the country to offset housing price inflation elsewhere.
Revere Award in Economics should go to Paul Davidson for mainaining the survival of Post Keynesian economic theory and analysis though decades when thr name of Keynes, and even worse the ideas of Keynes about the fanancial system and unemployment, was denigrated by the Economics Estblishment.
I would like to start by nominating Hyman Minsky as the indivdual ho was, in a time of boom, smart enough to predict this and other crises, past and (if nothing gets done about it) also future.
Dr. Steve Keen of the University Of New South Wales, who managed to expose the fallacies of economics very cogently in his book “Debunking Economics” and for having pieced together the evidence from economists of old is, I am sure, also worthy of the prize.
My third and last nomination goes to George Soros, who although not an economist by academia is definitely an economist by profession (his publications, especially “the alchemy of finance” are also worth taking note of).
Errata Corrige: “ho” should read “who”.
Hyman Minsky. Nuff said. “The Minsky Moment” came and we are living in the aftermath. He wrote his “Financial Instability Hypothesis” back in the 1980s and died in 1996, largely obscure. But he’s back, in a big way. Saw it all coming long ago.
While agreeing with some of the names above, I’d nominate Michael Hudson and Henry C.K. Liu as well.
I nominate Steve Keen also. :)
Hyman Minsky and his intellectual heir Steve Keen. Both not only predicted the GFC but also provided theoretical (Minsky) and mathematical (Keen) explanations for why financial crises occur. Reinhart/Rogoff and Charles Kindleberger are also worthy nominees, but I’ll go in a different direction with Benoit Mandelbrot, who pre-emptively destroyed the EMH and use of the Gaussian copula to model markets way back in 1961. Mandelbrot is the source of much of N.N.Taleb’s thinking. He’s not an academic economist, but calls himself “a mathemetician, a physicist also, and an economist….”
http://www.bookrags.com/biography/benoit-b-mandelbrot/
I’ve put up my three, but worth a special mention is Irving Fisher, for Fisher’s Theory of Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions.
Click to access fisdeb33.pdf
Also, I agree with the nominations of Minsky. The collapse of securitised products in August 2007 was a classic “Minsky Moment”.
1. Dean Baker
2. Doug Henwood
Robert Prechter. Although he’s known mostly for his stock market analysis, he has also published a great deal about behavioral finance. He sounded the alarm about our credit-based monetary system’s potential to pile up bad debts and produce a deflationary bust, long before deflation was even on most economists’ radar screens. His insight that the Fed is impotent to manage the swings of boom and bust (and is more likely to aggravate than to temper them) should be seen as especially prophetic, coming as it did at the height of a period of Fed worship and belief in the healing powers of central bank monetary policy.
!) Hyman Minsky, of course
2) Steve Keen, who deserves a lot of credit
3) Doug Noland
The last is a writer for PrudentBear.com who described rather precisely the mechanism of the collapse, if not its exact timing. He was ringing the alarm bell from at least 2004 on.
A very obscure nominee: Bert Ely, who was writing about the risks posed by the GSEs for over a decade before their collapse, while clowns like Joseph Stiglitz and Peter Orszag were assuring us everything was fine. (http://www.pierrelemieux.org/stiglitzrisk.pdf)
I nominate Associate Professor Steve Keen of the University of Western Sydney.
Fred Foldvary, 1997:
“This knowledge has allowed for some prescient forecasts. The prize in that department goes to Prof. Fred Foldvary who wrote in 1997: ‘the next major bust, 18 years after the 1990 downturn, will be around 2008, if there is no major interruption such as a global war.’”
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2010/01/21/rewriting-the-fed-s-history.aspx
William Fleckenstein
Not sure of his qualifications as an economist but Peter Schiff loudly and resolutely informed me of the coming credit crunch (now GFC). While perhaps not the first to see it, he definately gave 100% commitment to letting people know what was happening (and still does).
Roger Bootle has been ahead of the game in the UK for some time and gave well documented warnings. Also agree with Steve Keen nomination, he is bravely/foolishly ahead of the pack, almost a lone voice in Australia, on issues such as household debt. Maybe prescient, time will tell.
Id also like to add another – Bill Fleckenstien’s articles in MSN Money first allerted me to a differeing long-term view of the global economy and what he termed “financial dark matter”
perhaps Fleckenstein and Schiff are populist commentators but they both opened my eyes to the real scenario.
I think George Soros deserves some credit. He saw the GFC coming. You also have to mention Nouriel Roubini.
1) Ludwig von Mises who wrote that keeping interests rates below the natural rate will result in malinvestments and subsequent crack up boom.
2) Richard Cantillon who demonstrated the folly of John Law’s Mississippi Co.
3) Ron Paul who called it and is doing something to stop the Fed from getting away with it.
Nouriel Roubini – for bravely positing the likelihood of bubble implosion for many years while suffering the slings and arrows of more credulous bubble-promoting peers.
Robert Schiller – for develing the index which popularised the visible bubble in housing which set up the conditions for GFC
Ludwig Von Mises – for developing the Austrian school of economics which offered an alternative view to the neo-classical, pro-monetization of debt bubble blowers at the Fed.
Bernard Connolly, who has been accurately predicting the potential for calamity for a decade. http://www.connollyglobal.com
Minsky and Hayek should share a spot. If only they had collaborated …
1. Marc Faber
2. Jim Rogers
3. Doug Noland
Karl Marx is the obvious choice surely.
1. Ludwig von Mises. He preceded Minsky in describing the nature of the boom-bust cycle and assigning responsibility for it to the expansion of bank credit.
2. Edward Gramlich, a Federal Reserve governor, told Alan Greenspan that making home mortgages available to low-income borrowers would lead to widespread loan defaults having extremely negative effects on the national economy. And he did this in 2000! Greenspan blew him off because – seriously – he was afraid of undermining the availability of subprime credit.
3. Robert Prechter. He forecast both the housing bubble and the threat to the global financial system very early on.
People shouldn’t be too impressed with those who were alert to problems in the 2004 time frame. That wasn’t long before the housing peak; even Krugman was paying attention by 2005. I wrote my first column warning about the eventual collapse of housing and its potential threat to the financial system in September 2002 and I was well after the likes of Gramlich and Prechter.
Steven Keen for reasons already mentioned by other nominators
Jim Grant – the man who looked askance at the credit bubble for basically the entire 3 decades in which it was building. His writings on the history of lending & borrowing and the coming and going of monetary regimes are a must read.
Thomson Hankey – the ideological sparring partner of Walter Bagehot (the patron saint of central banking), Hankey raised perhaps the first concerns of moral hazard arising from the central bank’s promise to provide liquidity in a crisis. (See “Walter Bagehot was Wrong”: http://www.nysun.com/opinion/walter-bagehot-was-wrong/80283/)
Bill Bonner – his book “Empire of Debt” prophetically warned of the asset bubbles and financial imbalances building on American balance sheets.
Bennet Sedacca – warned early in 2008 that the banking system was insolvent and would have to obtain new capital from “somewhere” (the answer ultimately was provided by Hank Paulson), and warned of the Fed’s “war on savers” in early 2009 (http://marketoracle.co.uk/Article8115.html)
Joseph Schumpeter – Kept alive the Kondratiev Cycle and warned of the trend toward corporatism in advanced capitalistic economies. What is the Greenspan Put but an attempt to frustrate the more unpalatable aspects of Schumpeter’s creative destruction?
1. Hyman Minsky – for his continuatyion of the Keynes\Kalecki models, and peculiarly his theory of the financial bubble
2. Luigi Maria Pasinetti – as a leading representative of Cambridge Keynesians, who identify a wrong wealth & income distribution a a cause of LR deflation
3, Giovanni Dosi: evolutionary economics is leading a RADICAL re-interpretation of behaviours, markets and fincnavial markets (herd behaviours, e.g.). And thay are leading, since decaes, the galaxy of anti-neoclassical or ETHERODOX economists.
1. Ludwig Von Mises, the man who figured out the whole boom bust cycle, the need for market based interest rates and the problem of malinvestment.
2. Murray Rothbard, the man who best explained the last great depression and showed the world how the next depression is coming.
3. If you want a living person, Edward Gramlich, the man that Greenspan ignored. He predicted the sub prime lending crisis well before most others.
Edward Gramlich, I just noticed, died in 2007. Please change line 3 to “If you want someone who was clearly predicting the current crisis, Edward Gramlich; the man that Greenspan ignored. He predicted the sub prime lending crisis well before most others.
1- Ludwig Von Mises — For his brilliant work understanding the outcome of monetarist fiat money and Keynesian goverment intervention on the business cycle.
Quoting him on Theory of Money and Credit
“There is need to realize the fact that the present state of the world
and especially the present state of monetary affairs are the necessary
consequences ofthe application of the doctrines that have got hold of
the minds of our contemporaries. The great inflations of our age are
not acts of God. They are man-made or, to say it bluntly, government-
made. They are the off-shoots of doctrines that ascribe to
governments the magic power of creating wealth out of nothing and
of making people happy by raising the ‘national income’.”
2- Friedrich von Hayek – For his work on Liberty, Markets and the effects of central planning.
3- Murray Rothbard – For his strong critique of the unethical government monopoly of money and the disastrous outcome of its issuance and distribution.
PLEASE INCLUDE Brooksley Born
formerly at Commodity Futures Trading Commission
See excellent documentary “The Warning” on PBS at
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/view/
I nominate Avinash Persaud, who won the Essay Award of the “Institute of International Finance” (of all institutions!) in 2000 with his piece: “Sending the herd off the cliff: The disturbing interaction between herding and market-sensitive risk management practices.” He warned loudly for years that the Basel II approach to banking regulation and reliance on rating agencies for regulatory purposes were dangerously wrong and recently, as chairman of the Warwick Coommission, promoted a radically different oversight philosphy, which would be much more apt to prevent the next crisis. He also ws one of the few prominent voices to make a big deal out of the capture of regulators by the financial industry.
I also nominate Frank Partnoy, former derivative trader, professor of law and finance, and author, amoung other books, of F.I.A.S.C.O. He predicted in his book and in testimony before Congress that unregulated derivatives would produce a terrible crisis.
1) Peter Schiff. Other bears wrote some articles or conducted obscure interviews which were shelved only to be found again after the bubble had burst and their views proven true. Contrast that to this man, who walked into the lion’s den of CNBC and declared on live TV that the entire system was a fraud and you needed to get your money out now. And he did it repeatedly from 2006-2008! Now that takes cojones.
2)Brooksley Born. Went up against near-universal opposition and the likes of Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan to oppose the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. Arguably, she did more than anyone else to try to save us from the coming GFC, but we as a nation were determined to destroy ourselves.
1. Peter Schiff
2. Bill Bonner
3. Cato the Younger
Fred Harrison, Phil Anderson, Fred Foldvary. See the article “The Great 18-Year Real Estate Cycle, in the February, 2010 issue of Globe Asia. http://www.globeasia.com/index.php?module=columnist&action=detail&id_selected=114
See “The Great Crash of 2008,” at http://www.masongaffney.org/.
And, off topic, if you’re interested in PREVENTING the next one, look for Mason Gaffney’s book, “After the Crash: Designing a Depression-Free Economy,” available at http://www.schalkenbach.org/. A related interview is at Dr. Gaffney’s website, above.
William K Black
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/black.htm
The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One (University of Texas Press 2005)
1. Steve Keen!
1. Mises & Hayek (Austrians) for proving that keeping the rate of interest below its market rate will cause a boom and subsequent bust. Hayek especially for showing how credit expansion (inflation) is not distributed evenly, but massively skews the structure of production.
2. Schumpeter, Minsky, Keen & Hudson (Post Keynesians) for focusing on private credit and refuting the Money Multiplier Model of Monetary Expansion.
3. Prechter (Socionomic Theory) for showing how endogenous fluctuating moods of herds will interpret news based on those moods, not necessarily the news itself.
4. Neil Howe and Bill Strauss (Generational Theory) for predicting that once the survivors of the GD were mostly retired, all of the financial safety valves would be turned off and we’d repeat the same mistakes of the 20’s.
The second two explain the “when” as well as the why that so many others predicted, but decades too soon.
Apparently I’m poor at following instructions. But I have a hard time ignoring any one of the 4 groups I mentioned. They all helped me prepare for what was coming.
But I’d like to question the wisdom of requiring that nominees be “economists” by training. We just finished describing how the economics profession had essentially been overtaken by fallacious neoclassical ideology, and anyone who had figured this out on their own (like myself) prior to enrolling in an Econ program would not have bothered becoming an “economist.” Because they pursued alternate educational paths should not exclude them from nomination in my opinion.
I heartily second both your nominations and your point that the field should be expanded beyond plain vanilla economists. The unfortunate fact is that even many of the “heterodox” economists such as Joseph Stiglitz, Richard Koo, the Chartalists, etc. are still fundamentally apologists for overindebtedness — as long as that indebtedness is assumed by the sovereign government.
Furthermore, understanding why the GFC took place requires looking beyond economics to fields such as history, psychology, and political science for explanations of how and why the “safeguards” put in place after the Great Depression were dismantled (or in some cases contributed to the bubble, as was the case with the FDIC).
Along those lines, I would add Charles Mackay, historian and author of “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” to the (unofficial) list of non-economist nominees.
1. Brooksley Born
2. Brooksley Born
3. Brooksley Born
Robert Brenner…a historian. His “Economics of Global Turbulence” was originally published in the New Left Review in 1997. Later revised and published by Verso.
Giovanni Arrighi and Immanuel Wallerstein
Steve Keen, Hyman Minsky, Irving Fisher.
1. dean baker – stated in 1997 we have a housing bubble.
2. anybody else with half a brain that could see that things weren’t right.
Before proceeding to nominate my candidates to the Revere Award in Economics, I would like to propose that a candidate to nomination should fulfill the following criteria, as outlined by Dirk J. Bezemer(*):
(1) The candidate to a nomination must have provided an account on how he/she arrived at their conclusions.
(2) The candidate to a nomination went beyond predicting a real estate crisis, tracing the likely recessionary consequences of one such crisis on the real economy.
(3) The relevant work must have been made publicly available by the candidate, ideally in writing.
(4) And the prediction must have had some timing attached to it.
I believe these criteria, however stringent, ensure that a candidate to nomination did not just make a lucky guess, but indeed is making a contribution to economic knowledge.
With these criteria in mind, I nominate
Steve Keen, Associate Professor of Economics and Finance at the University of Western Sydney, NSW. Australia.
Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. USA.
(*) Dirk J. Bezemer. “No One Saw This Coming”: Understanding Financial Crisis Through Accounting Models. 2009. Faculty of Economics University of Groningen.
http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/15892/
I nominate Yves Smith (naked capitalism) and Tyler Durdan (Zero Hedge)
Steve Keen
Nouriel Roubini
Steve Keen, Associate Professor of the University of Western Sydney Australia
Steve Keen, because with his work to put mathematical rigour into Mynski’s model, one day you’ll be able to say “go down this economic route and you will blow the conomy up sometime around x, it will cost y GDP and take z years to overcome it”.
And if that doesn’t get a politician’s attention, then frankly nothing will.
1)MIke Ruppert (Crossing the Rubicon), because it’s an energy crisis, it’s an oil crisis, it’s an energy crisis…
2) Doug Noland at Prudent Bear.com (I NEED that Saturday morning fix)
3)Yves Smith (Author of “Econned”).
I nominate Warren Buffet for seeing in 2002 exactly what the trigger for the Global Financial Crisis would be and keeping his financial powder dry accordingly. See http://www.fintools.com/docs/Warren%20Buffet%20on%20Derivatives.pdf for an excerpt from the Berkshire Hathaway Annnual Report 2002.
See my crash papers at
http://www.foldvary.net/works/crash08.html
Fred Foldvary
I write to nominate Fred Foldvary for the Noble prize in predicting the great crash.
His prediction was based on the cycle theory and evidence he published in 1997 in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, which is a peer-reviewed journal long indexed by ISI/SSCI/Web of Science. Foldvary had developed the ideas and prediction earlier, back in 1991 (as evidenced by the 1991 link below), but the published statement in AJES in 1997 is perhaps the most focal proof of his worthiness for the award:
“the next major bust, if there is no major interruption such as a global
war, will be around 2008.”
Fred E. Foldvary. 1997. The Business Cycle: A Georgist-Austrian
Synthesis. American Journal of Economics and Sociology 56(4): 521-41,
quote at p. 538.
That statement probably beats all in its foresight and its exactitude. Are there any comparable published, specific, and unequivocal predictions from the 1990s?
Foldvary’s unequivocal theory and prediction were repeated by him throughout the 17 years preceding the crash of 2008, as shown by the following list of publications:
Fred Foldvary on the Crash of 2008
First presentation, Foldvary’s real-estate theory of the business cycle, 1991
http://www.foldvary.net/works/rebc.html
I forecast a severe recession for 2008 in this 1997 paper:
“The Business Cycle: A Georgist-Austrian Synthesis.” American Journal of
Economics and Sociology 56 (4) (October 1997): 521-41.
http://http://www.foldvary.net/works/geoaus.html
http://www.jstor.org/pss/3487330
http://www.highbeam.com/The+American+Journal+of+Economics+and+S
ociology/publications.aspx?date=199710
Article published in 2001:
The Economy, Ursa Major, and 2008
http://www.progress.org/archive/fold192.htm
Articles published in 2004:
Economic Forecast, 2004-2010
http://www.progress.org/2004/fold334.htm
The Real Estate Bubble
http://www.progress.org/2004/fold364.htm
August 2005
California’s Real Estate Bubble
http://ca.lp.org/lp20050802.shtml
January 2006
The Real-Estate Deceleration
http://www.progress.org/2006/fold440.htm
I forecast the coming crash and recession at:
Seminar, Dept. of Economics, Santa Clara University. “A Synthesis of the
Austrian-school and the Georgist Theories of the Business Cycle, and its
Empirical Testing.” Oct. 9, 2006.
Economic Forecast 2008
http://www.progress.org/2008/fold542.htm
May 2007
Lecture to the Real Estate Network, Santa Clara University
The Real Estate Cycle and the Depression of 2008
http://www.foldvary.net/works/recd8.html
Booklet, The Depression of 2008,
published on paper, first ed. June 2007, 2nd ed. Sept. 2007
Published in the Internet in Sept. 2007:
Click to access dep08.pdf
“Why my Georgist Economics Predicts a Depression in 2008.”
FreedomFest, Las Vegas, July 7, 2007. Available as a CD.
October 2007
The Recession of 2008
http://ca.lp.org/lp20071016.shtml
During and after the crash:
Spring 2008:
Real Estate and Recession A Peak in Land Values Can Predict the Next
Downturn
http://www.scu.edu/business/mindwork/archives/spring08/foldvary.cfm
Economic Forecast 2008
http://www.progress.org/2008/fold542.htm
“The state’s complicity in the real estate crash.” Land and Liberty 114, no.
1220 (Winter 2007-8): 18-20.
December 2008
Why the Crash of 2008 Is Not a Market Failure
http://ca.lp.org/lp20081208.shtml
Video, interviews with Fred Foldvary regarding his prediction of a crash:
http://www.frtv.org/2009/08/freedom-fest-fred-foldvary/
http://www.frtv.org/tag/fred-foldvary/
Foldvary is a professional economist by training (PhD, George Mason University) and vocation (Santa Clara University).
I hope he gets the recognition he deserves.
Thank you for your attention.
Sincerely,
Daniel Klein
Professor of Economics, George Mason University
I write to nominate Fred Foldvary for the Noble prize in predicting the great crash. His prediction was based on the cycle theory and evidence he published in 1997 in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, which is a peer-reviewed journal long indexed by ISI/SSCI/Web of Science. Foldvary had developed the ideas and prediction earlier, back in 1991 (as evidenced by the 1991 link below), but the published statement in AJES in 1997 is perhaps the most focal proof of his worthiness for the award:
“the next major bust, if there is no major interruption such as a global
war, will be around 2008.”
Fred E. Foldvary. 1997. The Business Cycle: A Georgist-Austrian
Synthesis. American Journal of Economics and Sociology 56(4): 521-41,
quote at p. 538.
That statement probably beats all in its foresight and its exactitude. Are there any comparable published, specific, and unequivocal predictions from the 1990s?
Foldvary’s unequivocal theory and prediction were repeated by him throughout the 17 years preceding the crash of 2008, as shown by the following list of publications:
Fred Foldvary on the Crash of 2008
First presentation, Foldvary’s real-estate theory of the business cycle, 1991
http://www.foldvary.net/works/rebc.html
I forecast a severe recession for 2008 in this 1997 paper:
“The Business Cycle: A Georgist-Austrian Synthesis.” American Journal of
Economics and Sociology 56 (4) (October 1997): 521-41.
http://http://www.foldvary.net/works/geoaus.html
http://www.jstor.org/pss/3487330
http://www.highbeam.com/The+American+Journal+of+Economics+and+S
ociology/publications.aspx?date=199710
Article published in 2001:
The Economy, Ursa Major, and 2008
http://www.progress.org/archive/fold192.htm
Articles published in 2004:
Economic Forecast, 2004-2010
http://www.progress.org/2004/fold334.htm
Foldvary is a professional economist by training (PhD, George Mason University) and vocation (Santa Clara University). I hope he gets the recognition he deserves.
1. Steve Keen for calling this early, his continued work and his solutions for not allowing this to happen again.
2. Hyman Minsky for obvious reasons, providing the foundation for Keen’s work.
3. Irving Fisher for his debt delfation theory of the Great Depression.
Mises, Hayek, Schiff
Doug Noland: Senior Portfolio Manager, Federated Prudent’s Bear Fund and Global Income Fund
Steve Keen: University of Western Sydney
Reading these two left me well prepared for the crash.
Anthropologist Paul Jorion ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Jorion ) who wrote in 2004 a book explaining step by step the GFC. By far!
First i nominate Peter Schiff… he may be classed as a broker rather then an economist, however his understanding of macro economics is outstanding. Watch this speech he gave in Nov 2006 to bankers/mortgage brokers. Very inciteful.
2nd nomination, steve keen from UNSW in australia. He predicted the crises and is warning of things worse to come in australia. he’s a lone voice again and it will be interesting to see whether he is right a 2nd time…. it will certainly justify his economic modelling if thats the case.
3rd nomination is for michael hudson, who predicted the crises, but is actively working to help govts like latvia stave off the financing jackels and impoverishing the people.
RICHARD BOOKSTABER, for his book “A Demon of our own Design”, the final alarm before the explosion!
I nominate Fred Foldvary. Dan Klein has spelled out the reasons, and I second his nomination. Note especially Fred’s 1997 article in the AJES; and his 2007 monograph, both calling the shot for 2008.
I nominate John Kenneth Galbraith, particularly for his book: A Short History of Financial Euphoria. Galbraith was often dismissed by neoclassical economists because he didn’t buy into their “lemma-lemma-proof” mathematical analysis.
Ive heard JK Galbraith sniggered as “the popular poster boy of economics” by neoclassical maths weirdos….but he was right and he has been right for longer than they have studied statistical packages and been lost in their faulty models.
He was valiant economist for decades…not a trained seal performer.
I nominate (1) Dean Baker, (2) Fred Foldvary, (3) Brooksley Born (who, though not an economist, should be made an honorary one).
1. Robert Shiller…actually told Greenspan in person, to his face, what was happening. Kept showing everyone what was happening….
2. Brooksley Born…succinctly explained the regulatory problem, again to Greenspan, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Congress, President Clinton, all of whom preferred the political benefits over reasonable economic policy.
Most of the nominees — Mises, Hayek, Minsky, etc. — are not even eligible because they predicted neither the land-speculation character nor the exact timing of the GFC. AFAIK Fred Foldvary predicted both of them earlier and more precisely than any other nominee, and in a peer-reviewed paper to boot. If Foldvary does not get the prize, it will prove that mentioning facts about land is still taboo not only in neoclassical economics, but anti-neoclassical economics, too. Michael Hudson and Steve Keen also deserve recognition for their specific warnings of the nature and timing of the crash, but Foldvary got it so right, so early, that no other nominee has a claim of comparable strength.
Michael Hudson (Univ of Missouri, Kansas City)
http://www.michael-hudson.com
1)
Fred Harrison of the UK in his book Boom Bust in 2005 predicted the bubble bursting and its aftermath, but he’d been making that prediction since at least 1997; he also noted that the bust would be worse in areas where land taxes are low.
2)
Fred Foldvary of the US predicted the bubble bursting and its aftermath in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology in his article, “The Business Cycle”, in 1997, the October issue.
3)
Phil Anderson of Australia predicted the bubble bursting and its aftermath in his newsletter to clients in 2003 in which he even advised them to short bank stocks in three years.
Where is Joseph Stiglitz? He identified the perverse incentives and stood in front of Davos two years running. His piece with Greenwald 30 years ago proved markets were not efficient with asymmetrical information, which — as he noted — is always.
I nominate Joseph E. Stiglitz. Please don’t hold his two Nobels against him.
I second Siglitz – the rare breed – an honest economist not beholden to others.
Stiglitz has been going around saying that the euro’s difficulties (caused by the massive public deficits of which he is an enthusiastic proponent) show the need to use antitrust regulation against hedge funds, which he apparently believes are capable of manipulating the largest and most liquid market in the world.
Pair that with his early-2000s defense of the GSEs and it’s clear he’s just an incoherent apologist for large public debts, and quite beholden to the governments that run them up.
1) Brooksley Born
2) Marc Faber and Jim Rogers
3) Peter Schiff
These people have guts to fight the banking oligarchy and political roadblocks of USA/UK
gerald celente. not only for predicting the meltdown, but i also tend to agree with him about the waters up ahead; the worst is yet to come.
also peter schiff. he is the ONLY one i hear making sense from the point of basics on the lev el of debt vs. savings. in a time of obfuscation and “big talk” by economists from krugman (a mediocre “talent” if ever there was one, but like britney spears, he’s a prom queen) to journalists like sorkin (another mediocre talent, this time a mere human tape recorder masquerading as a journalist/analyst) to politicos like geithner (where do we begin, folks…?), there is something about lying – which obfuscation, mis-direction, deflection, and just plain avoidance/censorship are tantamount to that is magnified in times like these; it’s a special category of evil. you know, the province of cheney.
no more talk of a “recovery,” which is utter absurdity in the face of the numbers alone. no more happy talk, “america’s so great” talk and all of the nonsense that the elites love as throwing bones to dogs.
we need plain, cogent, strategic thinking and PRAGMATIC PLANS that organize us, the little people, for the coming tsunamis (yes, that’s plural).
William White for his efforts to warn the Federal Reserve about the impending financial crisis.
See: “The Man Nobody Wanted to Hear”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,635051,00.html
Paul Krugman. In his book “The Return of Depression Economics” in 1999, he talked about how the real estate bubble bursting in Japan led to a “lost decade” (now a lost *two* decades), and how other economies — including the USA — were susceptible to the same problem if they developed a real estate bubble. And his September 30 2001 editorial, “Fear Itself”, in the New York Times, is downright prescient — he talks explicitly about the policy mistakes that led to Japan’s “lost decade”, and stated explicitly, “It could happen here.” And it did. That it did.
Dean Baker : In August 2002 he stated that housing was entering a bubble as housing prices rose above what fundamentals would predict. By August 2003 he was stating that the collapse of the housing bubble would impoverish millions. By November 2005 he was stating, “The costs of a collapse of the housing bubble will be even greater than the costs of the collapse of the stock bubble, because housing wealth is much more evenly held.” Unlike Krugman he did not accurately predict that the economy would approach or reach liquidity trap territory after the collapse of the housing bubble (he predicted a serious recession, but from what I read did not predict anything worse than the Bush 1 recession), but still, he was a canary chirping early and often that there was a bubble and its collapse was going to have dire effects upon ordinary people.
I nominate John Maynard Keynes for identifying animal spirits 80 years ago.
Wynne Godley.
More than 10 years of good predictions, mainly on USA economy.
In the context of the current mess: Foldvary. Also: Minsky. But how can we ignore Keynes?
Charles Kindleberger, still the preeminent sage on bubbles!
1. John Kenneth Galbraith
2. Hyman Minsky
3. Steven Keen
1. Steven Keen – Still trying to get the message out while being described as a doomsday voice.
Professor Keen has been refered to in the Aussie papers as Prof ” doomsday” Keen by Real Estate moguls, who have a vested interest to discredit him, and by government stooges who created the first home “vendors “boost fiasco and probably don’t want anyone to critisise their ridiculous fiscal misadventures. I also nominate Professor Keen
More than 3 I know, but in no particular order:
Michael Hudson
Nouriel Roubini
Steve Keen
Ellen Brown
F. William Engdahl
Richard C Cook
Peter Schiff
So what I see is that quite a few were priescent in predicting the crisis but there were many more willing to predict the field of dreams when the market was riding high. Just like 1928/29.
You cant tell a massive mob making money that its a bubble can you? Not now..not next time.
1) Michael Hudson
2) Steven Keen
3) Irving Fisher
James Galbraith has been an exceptionally rational and prescient observer through all of this.
Krugman shouted “housing bubble” long and loud.
Doug Noland – consistently and calmly pointed out exactly where it was going wrong
Steve Keen
Stephen Roach
James Montier and Albert Edwards dissected it more entertainingly than anyone
Jim Walker of Asianomics
1. Steve Keen – For Debunking Economics. I knew there was something wrong with economics, but didn’t quite understand why. Then he blew my mind away with his Cavaliers of Credit post.
2. Ravi Batra – Way ahead of his time but you cannot ignore is wage-productivity gap observations and linking it to debt. He also wrote a book destroying Greenspan.
3. Von Mises – For the Austrians. Although I personally don’t find their solutions very good (albeit they do have some good entrepreneurial theories), they did also call the Crisis.
I nominate Karl Marx, after all he’s not just the only real economist ever but also someone who foresaw the current crisis with nothing less than 150 years of anticipation. He deserves the crystal ball prize of economics more than anybody else.
Marx predicted that capitalism would painlessly dissolve into communism. Hasn’t happened, for numerous other fractional reserve banking collapses, and there is nothing different with this one. Like others you nominate without providing any evidence that his theories predict anything.
You need to either show a specific prediction or warning of this crisis, or you have to show how his theories predict the failure given specific actions by the government or private players.
It’s already clear that economic bubbles happen and collapse. The question is why. What leads so many economic actors to make the same mistakes in the same direction at the same time. What causes their errors to cluster. Marx has no explanation, and in fact his economic theories are ridiculous. No serious economist believes in the labor theory of value. You also have to explain why those countries that tried to implement Marxist policy actually made things far worse.
Marx is a non-player.
1) Michael Hudson
2) Steve Keen
For a specifically Irish perspective:
Morgan Kelly for spotting the Irish banking system was insolvent in 2006 (as the logical consequence of a property bubble).
David McWilliams for having the gumption to call it a bubble all the way up and for consistently explaining how aspects of it work in ways that are understandable.
Ireland is the new Sweden. Students will be swatting up on our mistakes for years to come…
I would like to include marxist economists in the nominations.
Prof. Anwar Shaikh deserves a place, since he’s predicted the crisis with an astonishing accuracy.
Argentinian economist and historian Eduardo Sartelli also predicted the meltdown in his book “La cajita infeliz” (“Unhappy meal”, http://openlibrary.org/b/OL9199867M/La_Cajita_Infeliz).
I would like to add my support to Prof. Anwar Shaikh, as well.
This way, my three nominees are:
Steve Keen,
Dean Baker, and
Anwar Shaikh
Brooksley Born, Dean Baker, Robert Shiller
Georgist economist Mason Gaffney, who wrote a detailed article, “The Great Crash of 2008” that summer, just before the worst hit with the collapse of Lehman Brothers. He not only predicted the “Big One” but also innumerated the dozen or so reasons for similar crashes gong back hundreds of years, for reasons that are well-known to all Georgists. Georgists, unlike the neo-classical theorists, know well it is Land speculation that causes the booms and busts that are erroneously attributed to the so-called Business Cycle.
I would like to mention Wynne Godley, whose work in the Levy Institute anticipated much of what happened. Hyman Minsky also should be included, because he developed much of the theoretical framework used these days to analyze the crisis. But in my view, and being perhaps unfair with others (particularly in this case, Dean Baker and Steve Keen), John Maynard Keynes should be the winner of the Award.
Please consider Peter Schiff. Since most with advanced economics degrees have had no clue in understanding economic forces and in projection–it should lead one to exclude most official economists from consideration. In my profession, if you make a mistake, you could kill someone and your license may be suspect. The same should hold here. Schiff’s “thesis” (the best-selling book) Crash Proof predicted the economic collapse and government response.
Peter Schiff. & Robert Precther, whose book “Conquer the Crash” I bought in 2002
Prechter wrote a book called, At the Crest of the Tidal Wave back around 1995. I have it somewhere. In it he correctly named a credit bubble as the propellant of asset prices and that the turn would come in a reversal of confidence. Prechter is a psychologist, which is kind of like an economist. He has a lot of detractors because he called the end of the bull market too early. What is missed is he kept his followers out of the mess so they can extract themselves out of it while the rest go down with the ship. I doubt many of us on this board would be here if we felt this recovery in asset prices was real (2% SPX yields are bubble prices and have been ever since there has been a stock market and never proven to be anything else). Prechters followers cashed in a 7000 Dow point gain and were out of the shorts on the bottom. He has again missed the top, but he will be right. My hope is we can develop a new view in economics and in managing debt in the future, maybe an end to the compounding of money through fractional reserve banking. It seems to be the nature of man to destroy what he has created through speculation.
Fred Harrison (author of “Boom Bust: Housing Prices, Banking and the Depression of 2010”) is at the top of my list, followed by Mason Gaffney (U. of California) and Fred Foldvary (Santa Clara Univ.)
Their writings have correctly analyzed the operation of land markets as a distinct component of property markets and the effects of changes in the credit markets on the depth and duration of recessions.
Why not a German? I nominate Jörg Huffschmid
Steve Keen, not only for his forecast/prediction of the debt crisis, but also for his ability to get the issue raised regularly in the media, in Australia at least.
Steve Keen for calling attention to indebtedness and deflation.
Irving Fisher for studying deflation and coining the phrase debt-deflation.
Fred Foldvary wrote “The Coming Depression of 2008.” 2006
Mason Gaffney wrote “The Great Crash of 2008″2005
Fred Harrison wrote “Boom Bust” 2007
Phil Anderson wrote “The Secret Life of Real Estate.” 2009
Bryan Kavanagh, wrote “Unlocking the Riches of Oz: A Case Study of the Social and Economic Costs of Real Estate Bubbles (1972-2006)”2007
I nominate:
Joseph Stiglitz (author of the recently-released Freefall, etc. etc.)
Robert Shiller (author of Irrational Exuberance, etc.)
Dean Baker (author of False Profits, etc.)
Hmmmm,
Very interesting nominees. I would have guessed Dean Baker because he is an economist and outside the ambit of the Fed and the rest of the establishment.
Ditto Roubini, who has made his reputation for raising the alarm: ‘Dr. Doom’.
Robert Prechter, Marc Faber.
I don’t know about Fred Foldvary. Why not? He put his ideas in writing and deserves credit.
James Grant … a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Hayek, Minsky, Fisher, J. K. Galbraith, et al … they are all dead, they predicted nothing.
Born … wow, talk about no honor in his own land.
Schiff and the other gold touts … See James Grant above.
Doug Noland … this is interesting. Noland has been arguing credit bubble for years and was on top of the collapse. He’s a good one.
Keen … why not? His blog/contest!
George the Electrician … not an economist but neither is Schiff. He was right.
As a matter of fact … all the above need to leave the room since none are aware of (a) that the ongoing Great Economic Meltdown is really an ENERGY CRISIS rather than a credit crisis and (b) the crisis is intensifying! It’s one thing to be unable to predict the future but another thing altogether to miss a CRISIS THAT IS BEATING YOU OVER THE HEAD WITH A CHAIR.
All the monetary/fiscal/currency maneuvering are a waste of time w/ $80 oil. We’re dead. Our economy – everywhere – is dead. Our darling industrial future is also dead. $45 oil strands the infrastructure that is necessary to consume it. Our built environment is obsolete, unaffordable, unprofitable!
$80 oil kills the economy faster!
I’d nominate Herman Daly but he doesn’t make predictions. James Hamilton got 2008’s spike but is missing the BIG UGLY SHOW that is taking place right now.
Gregor MacDonald.
Saudi Arabia has given the USA a hard currency. There is absolutely nothing the Fed, ECB, PBOC, Congress, the Russian Federation or anybody else can do about it. Welcome to 1931: Montagu Norman, Creditanstalt and Herbert Hoover. A Bronx cheer for all the economists listed above and their promoters who are MISSING THE CURRENT PARTY!
YIKES!!!!!
Steve Keen – University of Western Sydney. Provides a hugely useful account of private debt bubbles and their disastrous impact on the real economy using the economic theories of Hyman Minsky, Irving Fischer and Keynes.
Private debt bubbles are merely a symptom of policies caused by the central banks. I’ve seen Steve Keen’s models and they are extremely simple. In effect they model a fractional reserve system with a single government owned central bank, or single government granted monopoly bank. It has nothing to do with “private” vs. “public” since the model does not model 95% of what economies actually do. For example, in his modle there is no pricing system, no market interest rates, no account of real savings vs. nominal, no physical capital, etc. Austrians have know about the problems with such a system for over one hundred years. Keen’s models fail to take into account many other factors the Austrians have pointed out. It’s still tinker toys compared to what needs to be modeled.
I still think Keen’s model is valuable because Keynesians of all stripes have rejected the idea that central banking can result in this kind of crisis. Obviously since the model is applicable to central banking there is a problem.
Using Keen’s models to decide policy will let to the mistake of not understanding that the damage caused by the boom has already been done, and that one can correct the problem merely by changing monetary policy. That would be a big mistake. They high debt levels themselves are not the cause of the problems. In fact, in a free market a “high debt level” may be exactly the proper state of affairs given the right conditions.
Current high debt levels are a symptom and any attempts to reduce their levels by debasing the currency will NOT fix the true causes of the current economic situation. Such monetary policy can certainly erase the debt, but is in reality shifting the costs of the economic destruction caused by central banking in fractional reserve system from one set of players to another, from the judicious to the irresponsible. It shifts costs from borrowers to savers. Such a shift discourages savers and businesses from making present and future investments. That and other governmental intrusions only increase the level of malinvestment in the economy and destruction of real goods production.
Kudos to Keen for rediscovering and modeling a tiny part of Austrian theory. Problem is that he doesn’t have the big picture.
Fred Foldvary, Mason Gaffney, Fred Harrison.
1. Michael Hudson
2. Hyman Minsky
3. Steve Keen
And not Austrian economists (such as Schiff) who called the right crisis for the wrong reasons. Their ideology has done as much to cause the crisis as to warn about it – and many of the solutions they propose would prove disastrous.
Michael Hamilton,
You make absolutely unsupported claims about the Austrians. They have been complaining about Greenspan since the Clinton administration. They called the internet bubble and warned against artificially lowering interest rates in response to the 2001 downturn in opposition to people like Krugman, Greenspan and the rest. You don’t know what you are talking about.
These economic swings will continue to happen so long as there is government support for the fraudulent practice of fractional reserve banking. All the governmental attempts to control the business cycle have failed precisely because they did not follow Austrian proposals. Governments have been allowing banks to defraud their customers from almost the moment that they were first established. It is the inherent Ponzi-like scheme of borrowing short term and lending long that leads to the boom bust cycle. If you want to end the cycle you need to end the practice.
Instead, what we have gotten is the government subsidizing and encouraging the practice of FRB. The entire history of US banking has been the story of setting up central banks that have given the “fraudlent” reserve banking backing causing bubbles that then crash, and often along with the central bank.
“Solutions” like FDIC insurance, the Federal Reserve (and prior central banks), fiat currency, below market interest rates, government sponsored entities (Fannie, Freddy, FHA), programs like Community Reinvestment Act, stimulus programs, government guarantees, all add to the instability of fractional reserve banking. These will all tend to amplify the fraudulent price signals caused by fractional reserve banking. These bubbles have, throughout history, always been associated with central banking and government sanction of banking fraud by failure to enforce free market contracts, such as “banking holidays”.
Ludwig Von Mises wrote the recipe back in the 1930’s. It is the same recipe Minsky wrote in the 1980’s. Where Minsky errs, is the continuation of bank rescue and fiscal stimulus replacement of demand eventually ends us up at where we are now, facing total collapse. The cure is always more of the hair of the dog that bit you, a bigger bubble and a larger problem next time.
Henry Hazlitt and I will let him speak in his own words:
Although he does not fit neatly the criteria, I nominate one of history’s greatest mathematicians,
Henri Poincare. He was Bacheliers’s doctoral adviser, (random price movements), which Poincare
DEMOLISHED), and a strong critic of Walras, (EMH) whose assumptions (pure self interest and perfect
foresight) he derided (though more the latter than the former). Without the Gaussian copula and
EMH, there is no neoclassical synthesis.
Dr Steve Keen, University of Western Sydney, he will be proven correct..
Fred Harrison POWER IN THE LAND (1983-4)& BOOM BUST (2005)
Bryab Kavanagh
Fred Foldvary http://www.foldvary.net/works/crash08.htmlas (nominated above several times for his 1997 prediction)
Phil Anderson in THE SECRET LIFE OF REAL ESTATE & HOW IT MOVES (2009)- Phil’s been on this for years!
Mason Gaffney http://www.masongaffney.org
all of the above via Homer Hoyt (1933 University of Chicago Thesis)
Gavin Mooney, fredberg80 and Luis (above) are clearly correct.
Marx is the obvious the father of it all.
One can only laugh at poor ‘ol struggling Brian Macker (see above), who could only hurl the usual misconceptions against Marx.
However Ann Pettifor should also be nominated for her “The Coming First World Debt Crisis” (Palgrave, 2006).
Although his work was in a slightly different direction, in 1988 Marc Faber cited the “forthcoming economic and financial apocalypse” (Ch.11 “The Great Money Illusion” Longman 1988).
1. Steve Keen…a true pioneer!!!
My pick would be Tim Congdon. I believe his book was titled the “The Debt Threat”. I think it was written about 15 years ago. It’s been awhile and I may have messed up the details.
Doug Noland. If you research Doug’s Credit Bubble Bulletin, you will find he has been on this subject since 2000, if not earlier. I mentioned Doug, who spent some time back in 2002 in Australia adding to his economics knowledge and Steve Keen said he knew Doug. There isn’t a continual, blow by blow recount of the last 15 or so years that I know of that matches Doug’s. Read all about it here and I think you will come to agree. http://www.safehaven.com/archive-2.htm
Well Im sure the global bankers that ran Goldmans thought they could manipulate the markets – in fact they did. Anti trust regulation needed in a lot of markets, or any decent regulation for that matter. Stiglitz was right.
Why was the Foldvary paper in the 1997 AJES on The Business Cycle, which predicted the year of the crash as 2008, not in the time line?
Why was Fred Foldvary’s forecast not in the timeline? He called it on the nose, ten years ahead; then again, one year ahead.
A ‘magicicada’ index for the housing market. Towards a short ‘leading indicator’ for callapsing real estate bubbles?
Dean Baker is desparate. Why did so few economists see the collapse of the USA housing market coming? Are these economists right when they state that: “The state-of-the-art tools of economic science were not capable of predicting with any degree of certainty the collapse of U.S. house prices that started in 2006.”? Why do so few Dutch economists the collaps of the Dutch housing market coming, even though ‘real turnover’ has already decreased with 42% (prices minus 8, transactions minus 38 percent)? Can we develop tools which focus our attention towards ‘infrequent and unwanted events’? Can we develop tools which make clear that a drop in the number of transactions might precede a fall in prices?
I just finished reading an article of Mason Gaffney (written before the ‘Lehman-moment’, which rated the hurricane to come as a ‘5’):
Click to access Great_Crash_of_2008.pdf
This article was, to me, some kind of ‘the missing piece of the puzzle’ and gives a clue how a ‘short’ leading indicator for the housing market might look like. It’s simple and it might already exist. If not, the ideas below might be helpfull.
According to Gaffney, “At the crest, asking prices almost always drop slower than bid prices. This makes sales (deeds recorded) drop sharply, even as recorded prices hold steady.”
I.e.: the ratio of ‘houses for sale’/’houses sold’ drops. This ratio can easily be measured. As a quick and preferably ‘leading’ indicator is wanted, deeds are not the right variable to include. The problem with deeds is that it typically take some months before these are processed. Dean Baker however mentions that “The Mortgage Bankers Association … puts out data on mortage applications every week”. Therefore,
A. One might calculate ‘Houses for sale’/’Mortagage applications’, preferable as some kind of running average. A kind of example of exactly such a variable can be found on (table 13): http://www.woningmarktcijfers.nl/downloads/rapport_nederland_2010_2.pdf
B. A prolonged and large increase of this variable warns us that there might be ‘trouble with a bubble’, with the Gafnney model as the necessary historical/theoretical background.
C. One might call this indicater the ‘magicicada-index’, after the kind of cicades which fly only every 13 or 17 years: according to Gaffney this is also about the period for housing bubbles to grow and burst. I’m very serious about this name: something has to remind future economists that some events can be ‘underground’ and hardly perceptible for a very extended period.
D. This index should be completed with a ‘Ricardo’ index, consisting of something like (output price index)/(input price index), the output price index being a quality (volume, region, kind of buyer etc.) corrected index of selling prices of new homes and the input index being a building cost index consisting of labor, materials and the like but without land, profits and taxes. The long term development of this index gives a clue about ‘Ricardian rent’. The Dutch Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek estimates both indices for the Netherlands, but does not compare them. Comparison yields that the input index was abut stable between 1993-2010, while the output index showed a strong increase, i.e. a strong increase in prices of land, taxes and profits (or: Ricardian rent) (very recently, the index started to fall).
The ‘magicicade’ index for the Netherlands increased from 8 months in 2006 to 17 months in 201-II. Still, according to almost all economists there was and is no bubble which can burst. Ooops.
My vote would have been to nominate Hyman Minsky and Peter Schiff
1. Steve Keen
2. Nouriel Roubini
3. Mason Gaffney
Keynes, Minsky, Keynes
All three should share the prize as all three share a characteristic and deliver individual success.
Keynes framed the general problem
Minsky carefully elaborated on ‘it ‘
Keen used Keynes/Minsky to predict the Great Recession
What do all three share?
None of them are Keynesians