Australian economist and critic of mainstream economics, known for arguing that private debt and bank lending drive the boom and bust of modern economies.
Contribution
Keen builds on Hyman Minsky’s financial instability hypothesis. He argues that mainstream macroeconomic models leave out banks and private debt, and that these omissions hide the main cause of financial crises. Before 2008 he warned that rising private debt would end in a crisis. He developed Minsky, an open-source program for modeling economies as systems of monetary flows between balance sheets.
He was an associate professor at the University of Western Sydney until 2013 and head of the School of Economics, History and Politics at Kingston University London from 2014. He is now an honorary professor at University College London and a distinguished research fellow at its Institute for Strategy, Resilience and Security.
On this wiki
The Sensor-Response Money page cites Keen on the Reserve Currency Cycle, and the S-Curve Thesis lists him among its related figures. The attribution of the Reserve Currency Cycle to Keen awaits a source [TBV].
Selected works
- Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences (2001; revised edition 2011).
- Can We Avoid Another Financial Crisis? (2017).
- The New Economics: A Manifesto (2021).
Related pages
Provenance
Stub entry created 27 September 2026 in the Quartz Sanitation run, to give a page to links from the Sensor-Response Money and S-Curve Thesis pages that pointed at no page. Written from his published books and public academic roles. First-pass entry: sections require enrichment from the underlying project documents.