These past few weeks, I have been mostly drinking and working, in that order. Here's some stuff:

• I predicted the last financial crisis – now soaring global debt levels pose risk of another — Steve Keen in the Conversation: Bernanke, who got the job as head of the US central bank because he was supposed to be the expert on what caused the Great Depression, didn’t even consider similar data that was available at the time, nor 1930s economist Irving Fisher’s thesis, which pointed the finger at the bursting of asset bubbles. Bernanke believed that credit “should have no significant macroeconomic effects”. […] Empirically, this is manifestly untrue, but economists turn a blind eye to this data because it doesn’t suit their preferred model of how banks operate. They model banks as if they are intermediaries that introduce savers to borrowers, not as originators of both money and debt. This deliberate blindness was, in a sense, excusable before the crisis. But it’s unforgivable after it – especially since central banks are actually coming out now and saying that this “Loanable Funds” model is a myth.
• Aussie housing valuations obliterate all records — Leith van Onselen at MacroBusiness: The ABS on Tuesday released its property price data for the June quarter, which valued Australia’s dwelling stock owned by households at a record $6.39 trillion, whereas the total housing stock was valued at a record $6.73 trillion. As shown below, the total value of Australia’s dwelling stock owned by households was an all-time high 7.7 times employee incomes as at June 2017, up from 7.2 times incomes a year prior, whereas the total housing stock was valued at 8.2 times employee incomes:
• Bro Cat would like to hang out — The Oatmeal:
  
• There's a reason why anti-Muslim ideology hasn't found a home in Portugal — Robert Fisk, the Independent: Thanks to the work of Italian scholar Fabrizio Boscaglia and Brazilian researcher Marcia Feitosa, we find [modern Portuguese poet Fernando] Pessoa espousing “our [Portuguese] great Arab tradition – of tolerance and free civilisation. It is in the manner in which we are the keepers of the Arab spirit in Europe that we will have a distinct individuality… Let us revenge the defeat inflicted by those from the North to our Arab ancestors. Let us redeem the crime we committed when we expelled from the peninsula the Arabs that civilised it.” Perhaps it’s no wonder that less than two years ago, Portugal’s Prime Minister Antonio Costa said that his country would receive 10,000 Syrian refugees – double the number it might have taken under the EU’s relocation programme. Compare that to the “protectors” of our Christian “civilisation” further east.