Most post-WWII recessions have lasted less than a year; this crisis has been going on for five. Conventional "Neoclassical" economists didn't see it coming, can't understand why it hasn't gone away, and their preferred cure of austerity seems to be making it worse. To understand where it came from, why it hasn't gone away, and what might work to end it, you have to understand the dynamics of private debt.
Steve Keen's models, inspired by Hyman Minsky's "Financial Instability Hypothesis", anticipated the crisis and explain why it won't go away until private debt levels are drastically reduced.

Steve Keen was one of the handful of economists to realize that a serious economic crisis was imminent, and to publicly warn of it from as early as December 2005 (Bezemer 2009). This, and his pioneering work on modeling debt-deflation (Keen 1995), resulted in him winning the Revere Award from the Real World Economics Review for being the economist “who first and most clearly anticipated and gave public warning of the Global Financial Collapse and whose work is most likely to prevent another GFC in the future”.
He maintains an influential blog on economics (www.debtdeflation.com/blogs) which has more than 50,000 unique readers and a million page views each month. His book Debunking Economics ((Keen 2001; Keen 2011); http://debunkingeconomics.com/) sets out the many formal critiques of Neoclassical economics in a manner that is accessible to the intelligent non-academic reader.
Steve Keen is Professor of Economics & Finance at the University of Western Sydney. He has over 70 academic publications on a diverse range of topics, including: modeling financial instability; monetary macroeconomics; mathematical flaws in Neoclassical microeconomics; logical flaws in Marxian economics; and Econophysics, chaos and complexity theory.
Keen's pre-academic career included stints as a school librarian, education officer for an NGO, conference organizer, computer programmer, journalist for the computer press, and economic commentator for ABC Radio.

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