Steve Keen

Steve Keen  ("As an economist, I do something very unusual: I treat money seriously.") is one of the few economists to have predicted the global financial crisis and now he says we are already in a Great Depression. He says the way to escape it is to bankrupt the banks, nationalise the financial system and write off people's debt.  He is a professor in economics and finance at the University of Western Sydney. He classes himself as a post-Keynesian, criticizing both modern neoclassical economics and Marxian economics as inconsistent, unscientific and empirically unsupported. The major influences on Keen's thinking about economics include John Maynard Keynes, Hyman Minsky, Piero Sraffa, Joseph Alois Schumpeter, and François Quesnay. His recent work mostly concentrates on mathematical modeling and simulation of financial instability. He is a Fellow at the Centre for Policy Development.  Steve predicted the financial crisis as long ago as December 2005, and warned that back in 1995 that a period of apparent stability could merely be “the calm before the storm”. His leading role as one of the tiny minority of economists to both foresee the crisis and warn of it was recognised by his peers when he received the Revere Award from the Real World Economics Review for being the economist who most cogently warned of the crisis, and whose work is most likely to prevent future crises. Keen's full-range critique of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoclassical_economics">neoclassical economics is contained in his book Debunking Economics. Keen presents a wide variety of critiques on neoclassical economic theory, and argues that they show neoclassical assumptions are fundamentally flawed. Keen points out that several neoclassical assumptions are empirically unsupported (that is, they are unsupported by observable and repeatable phenomena) nor are they desirable for society at large (that is, they do not necessarily produce either efficiency or equity for the majority).    Read his blog http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/">here or watch an interview with him: http://memefest.org/en/memeblog/2012/04/debt-bankrupt-banks-nationalise-financial-system/