What's New

By Colin Twiggs
April 7, 2010 2:00 a.m. ET (4:00 p.m. AET)

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Schedule Stock Screens   Why The Debt To GDP Ratio Matters

Schedule Stock Screens

There is a new beta facility available on the stock screener that enables members to schedule regular stock screens on a daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly basis. The emailed link will open the screen results in your browser, identifying new additions and stocks carried over from the last screen. The results can also be downloaded to a spreadsheet. To set up a scheduled screen:

Schedule Stock Screen Link
  1. Open the stock screener
  2. Open the Saved tab to view your saved stock screens
  3. Click the Sched link next to a saved screen
Schedule Stock Screen Settings

Select the day/s of the week that you wish to be emailed, otherwise Weekly, Monthly or Quarterly. Active traders will find daily emails particularly useful, but weekly emails are recommended for longer-term traders.

At this stage charts cannot be opened directly from the browser — that is planned for a future release.

Why the Debt to GDP Ratio matters

By Steve Keen


Background We have a new contributor to our Economy newsletter. Steve Keen is Associate Professor at the University Of Western Sydney in Australia and founder of the Center for Economic Stability, which evolved from his blog Debtwatch. Steve is an expert in the unconventional economic theory called "The Financial Instability Hypothesis", which was developed by the American economist Hyman Minsky.

Minsky's hypothesis emphasizes the importance of private debt in the economy — something that is ignored by the dominant "neoclassical" school of economics — and Steve's awareness of the rising ratio of private debt to GDP in Australia and the US is why he predicted, as early as December 2005, that a serious financial crisis was about to occur.

I have asked Steve to submit occasional articles based on his research into the threat of burgeoning debt to the global economy.

~ Colin Twiggs

The main feature distinguishing my approach to economics from mainstream theory (known as "neoclassical" economics) is a focus upon the importance of credit in a dynamic, non-equilibrium framework. From this perspective I identify the ratio of debt to GDP — and the rate of change of that ratio — as the key determinant of the state of the economy, and this is what alerted me to the approaching Global Financial Crisis in late 2005. Debt to GDP levels in both Australia and the USA — the two countries for which I could get reliable data — were clearly on an exponential path that I knew had to break and cause a large economic breakdown.

Private Debt to GDP ratios since 2006

.....read more.



I never learn anything talking.
I only learn things when I ask questions.
~ Lou Holtz.