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2 weeks ago | 
profstevekeen.substack.com | Steve Keen |Phil Dobbie
In 1944, at Bretton Woods, 44 countries agreed to make the US dollar the world's reserve currency. This decision inflated the dollar's value, making American exports expensive and imports cheaper. Donald Trump is now addressing this imbalance with tariffs on countries with high trade surpluses.
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3 weeks ago | 
profstevekeen.substack.com | Steve Keen |Steve Keen
It’s clear that President Trump lied to the American people about his reciprocal tariffs. Many of the countries he is imposing tariffs do not impose anywhere near those numbers on imports from America.
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1 month ago | 
profstevekeen.substack.com | Steve Keen
Macroeconomics abounds in ratios and products.
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1 month ago | 
profstevekeen.substack.com | Steve Keen
Are we kidding ourselves when we talk about an energy transition? Sure, we are using more renewables than ever before, but the planet is also using more fossil fuels than ever before. Phil asks Steve whether part of the problem is that we pout faith in incumbent energy companies managing that transition.
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1 month ago | 
profstevekeen.substack.com | Steve Keen
The beliefs that the State faces a fiscal crisis if its debt gets too high, and that it is prudent for the government to reduce its debt by running surpluses rather than deficits, have existed since the dawn of the Republic. The empirical record of such attempts is definitive, and runs contrary to the expectations of governments at those times. A serious crisis, triggered by a private debt bubble and crash, has followed every sustained attempt to reduce government debt.
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1 month ago | 
profstevekeen.substack.com | Steve Keen
Advocates of the Endogenous Money model—which I prefer to call Bank-Originated Money and Debt, or BOMD for short—reject the Loanable Funds model as structurally incorrect. Banks are not intermediaries, they assert, but loan originators. This was a minority and non-mainstream position in economics, until it was endorsed by some Central Banks after the Global Financial Crisis {McLeay, 2014 #5066;Deutsche Bundesbank, 2017 #5312}.
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1 month ago | 
profstevekeen.substack.com | Steve Keen
In a recent podcast Phil suggested that bringing manufacturing home to America won’t necessarily create jobs, because most factories will be automated. They just need one man and a dog, he said. The man to turn the machine on, and the dog to make sure he doesn’t touch anything else.
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2 months ago | 
profstevekeen.substack.com | Steve Keen
I am releasing one chapter from this book every Friday. The previous introductory chapter is here: https://profstevekeen.substack.com/p/money-and-macroeconomics-from-firstDouble-entry bookkeeping has a conservation law, which accountants call “the Accounting Equation”.
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2 months ago | 
profstevekeen.substack.com | Steve Keen
By Steve Keen (@profstevekeen)“Physics is the law, everything else is a recommendation”[1] is one of your best-known phrases. This leads to you practicing “First Principles” reasoning, which is:a physics way of looking at the world … you boil things down to the most fundamental truths and say, “OK, what are we sure is true, or as sure as possible is true?” Then you reason up from there.
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2 months ago | 
profstevekeen.substack.com | Steve Keen
The new US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently re-iterated the US desire to remain as the world’s reserve currency, because they like a strong dollar that’s in demand worldwide. Burt he also says he doesn’t want other currencies weak, because that gives thema trade advantage. That sounds like a “cake and eat it” philosophy.