© Toby Melville / Reuters
Ten years on from the start of the global financial crisis, one of only a handful of economists to predict the crash, Professor Steve Keen, warns another one is "almost inevitable."
On August 9, 2007, the French investment bank BNP Paribas announced it was shutting down three investment funds specializing in the US subprime market, explaining it was struggling to calculate their values against a backdrop of growing concerns over liquidity.
The rest is history. Banks collapsed, unemployment soared, and some governments even went bust. For a decade, politicians, regulators, and financiers have sought to find ways to recover and stop a similar catastrophe befalling the system.
Keen, now head of the economics department at Kingston University in London, anticipated the last financial crisis at a time when most academic economists complacently didn't.Speaking to RT, Keen said another financial crisis could be just around the corner unless a fundamentally different approach to debt is adopted. He says we are too focused on government debt, when what actually caused the crisis was "run-away private debt."
Comment: These convictions apparently took place two years ago.
And we're only hearing about it now?