Mike Norman Economics

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The Bank of Russia had been preparing for an escalation of Western sanctions since 2014 and was beefing up additional funds as a hedge against future restrictions on its foreign exchange reserves, the regulator revealed on Wednesday.Amid “increasing geopolitical risks” the central bank ramped up investments in assets “that cannot be blocked by unfriendly nations” and transferred part of its reserves to gold, Chinese yuan and foreign currency in cash, the regulator announced in its annual...

Via Eric Tymoigne’s blog post, I came across this quote from Nicholas Kaldor in 1982 (page 13) on stability/solvency of financial institutions, especially relevant in recent times:The Case for Concerted ActionNicholas Kaldor On Monetary Policy And Stability Of Financial InstituitionsV. Ramanan

RADHIKA DESAI: Hello everyone, and welcome to the sixth Geopolitical Economy Hour, the fortnightly show on the political and geopolitical economy of our time. I’m Radhika Desai.MICHAEL HUDSON: And I’m Michael Hudson.RADHIKA DESAI: As you know, the last time when we closed we were scheduled to do our fourth and final show on the subject of dedollarization. However, as you know, the best laid plans can be thrown awry by, as Harold MacMillan said, “Events, my dear boy, events.”Since we...

Delusional, still captured by the colonial mindset.MericsVon der Leyen calls for de-risking EU-China relations in speech to MERICSJ.Heller See alsoProject SyndicateDestructive DecouplingMichael Spence | Nobel laureate in economics, is Professor of Economics Emeritus and a former dean of the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He is Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Senior Adviser to General Atlantic, and Chairman of the firm’s Global Growth Institute. He serves on the...

It should not be a surprise that John Maynard Keynes is often seen as being relatively conservative by many progressively inclined or radical economists, that often tend to prefer the views of Michal Kalecki, or the more radical approach of Keynes’ favorite disciple, Joan Robinson. That is not the case in James Crotty’s book Keynes Against Capitalism, who takes a diametrically opposite view. He tells us that: “It is almost universally believed that Keynes wrote his magnum opus, The General...

Things seem to be calming down in financial markets, which could be interpreted in one of two ways. The benign interpretation is that a few weak banks failed, but the rest of the financial system is in decent shape. The paranoid interpretation is that crises occur in stages, with pauses between the key failures. So far, I lean towards the benign interpretation — there are some areas of weakness, but not a lot of visible credit failures in the real economy. Things will deteriorate as the...

MMT for the "left." It's a reasonably good explanation of how a currency issuer is different from a currency user. Reading the comments section is depressing. The so-called left is about as clueless as the so-called 'right," e.g., as represented in the comments section at ZH. It seems doubtful that either of these heavily programmed groups will ever get it. However, here there are also commentors supporting MMT, holding out hope that the "left" isn't totally brainwashed. Daily KosThe...

Modern Monetary Theory and European MacroeconomicsThis course provides an introduction to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). During the course, students will examine the balance sheets and transactions that are relevant for understanding modern money, with a focus on the Eurozone. Furthermore, alternative explanations are brought forward that include, among others, the idea that governments spend first and collect taxes later...econoblog 101Summer School on “Modern Monetary Policy and European...

I regularly encounter mainstream economists who are confounded by the dissonance that the body of theory they have been working in introduces and then seem to think they have come up with new ideas that restores their credibility. The more extreme version of this tendency is called plagiarism in academic circles. But the less extreme version is to produce some work in which you conveniently ignore the main contributors in history but hold out implicitly that the ideas are somehow your own....