steve keen

Steve Keen strikes us as the Nouriel Roubini of Australia: a vocal economist who pissed people off for predicting the recession before it happened, and is still pissing people off predicting further economic crisis.
In fact Keen says the world is in another Great Depression, where developed countries would be lucky to come out as easily as Japan.

Here's an excerpt from his interview with BBC's HardTalk:
HT: Do you really think we’re headed for another Great Depression?
SK: We’re already in one. And the same thing applied back in the last Great Depression that people didn’t call it one until it was over. Because in an experience like this you’re always hoping there’s change just around the corner, the system will turn around. It’s only after you’ve been through it people look back and see that it’s been going for some years. So the Great Depression wasn’t called the Great Depression until sometime in the late 1930s.
HT: For those people who are watching listening to this thinking okay I can cope with things as they are now, they should relax because it’s just a few more years of the same?
SK: I wouldn’t call it relaxing but certainly the situation now which economists in particular are hoping is transient is going to be a drawn out experience. The best we can hope for is something like what Japan has been through. Japan still talked about having a lost decade since 1990 but it’s really been a lost two decades.
HT: The best we can hope for is a lost two decades?
SK: If we leave it to the basic mechanism by which capitalism eliminates excessive debt which is bankruptcy and a slow grinding process of paying the debt down. Once we get back down to the level of debt that the system actually needs which is far lower than the level of private debt we have now then the process will be over. But that could take something like 20 years.
HT: You’ve also suggested that it could take a rising level of violence.
SK: The trouble is when you have a growing population and an economy that is used to growth and people expecting to get employed when they leave school and they find that in fact there are not enough new jobs coming on to handle the new entrants into the labor market, even if you grow slightly less than the rate of population change, that means that [you have] a population which you’re saying in the recent media is a lost generation. Well, that lost generation only has one outlet and that is frustration and violence. It is not the way to manage an effective society to be caught in a trap like this.