Steve Keen is a very interesting hetrodox economist that I highly recommend to HN.

He is very difficult to categorize: he is a liberal Australian academic who is an admirer of both Keynes and Hayek, and has built upon and synthesized both of their work. He does a lot of computer simulations of economies using real-world behaviors (e.g. mark-up pricing) and has generated results and opinions that are guaranteed to annoy pretty much everyone.

He blogs at Forbes (which is funny, given his politics):

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevekeen/

And has a great book out that takes on classical economics:

http://www.amazon.com/Debunking-Economics-Revised-Expanded-D...

http://www.amazon.com/Debunking-Economics-Revised-Expanded-D...

Just going to leave this here. Its a real helpful read for any kind of economics debate.

The current and long-running debt and capital gains driven financial asset market has made everyone insane. If valuations were based on tangible cash flows (dividends paid out of profits) then the question of how much stocks are worth becomes far less insanely self-referential.

Real markets work on markup-based pricing and cash flow from profits. See Steve Keen's work[1]. In a world where the banking system can introduce nearly infinite leverage into any financial transaction (see student loans) what's the price of anything?

[1] - http://www.amazon.com/Debunking-Economics-Revised-Expanded-D...

I agree with you main point but I do think I should pick you up on the use of 'efficient' which I think is wrong in a technical way.

In an 'efficient' market all future risk is included in the analysis of current value meaning that if it was an 'efficient' market this would actually not be a problem. However it is just one of many* ways that markets are not in reality 'efficient' in the economics sense as the assumptions required to prove them just do not match up to the real world.

* http://www.amazon.com/Debunking-Economics-Revised-Expanded-D...