Mike Norman Economics

Yep, part 3 is excellent. Paul Jay tries to take a balanced view and is sometimes critical of Putin, but Stephen Cohen explains why Putin has done the things he has.Paul Jay says that Putin could have had a referendum in Crimea and then not taken the country back but gone to the U.N to negotiate its future, but Steve Cohen says Putin was given two types of advice and one was what Paul Jay had described above, but other advisers told Putin that to stop a civil war he had to act now and take...

Remember when everyone was screaming recession? I told you growth would be strong. Better information. Better understanding.

Peter Joseph dismantles Jordon Peterson's arguments about the merits of our present capitalism system. Peter Joseph says he's not a socialist, but his system is based on the cooperative and sharing, so it's sort of leftist.Jordon Peterson says that government planned economies take away people's freedom, but Peter Joseph argues that the complete opposite is the case, because when the government provides the health service, a safety net, and other vital services it liberates people. That is...

Brinksmanship — or a ship of fools?Consortium NewsPEPE ESCOBAR: War on Iran & Calling America’s Bluff

The trend towards looser fiscal policy could mark the biggest shift in economic thinking in a generation,,,, Discussion of pros and cons in which MMT gets a play, of course.Favorite paragraph: “The winning formula for the Democrats is they are going to have to endorse some of these relatively fiscally extreme positions to get nominated,” says one Democratic strategist, speaking of the 2020 presidential contenders. “The threats of debt and deficits have not panned out. We have been running...

In Marc Lavoie's Post-Keynesian Economics: New Foundations, he has an interesting discussion in Section 6.10.4, which is labelled "Minsky or Steindl Debt Dynamics?" The Minsky dynamics are the well-known Financial Instability Hypothesis (link to primer), while the Steindl dynamics refers to the discussion in Maturity and Stagnation in American Capitalism by Josef Steindl. Lavoie's discussion raises some issues with the limitations of aggregated analysis in this context. This is a brief...

Eurostat released the latest fiscal data for 2018 on Tuesday (April 23, 2019) which showed that – Euro area government deficit at 0.5% and EU28 at 0.6% of GDP – apparently a cause for celebration if you can believe the news reports that have accompanied the data release. The problem is that these numbers are meaningless without a context. And a relevant context is how well the monetary system is accommodating the advancement of material well-being among the citizens of Europe. On that...

It's difficult to project precisely what the overall economic impact of this would be. Student debt is distributed all up and down the income ladder, and people at different income levels will spend or save the freed up money in varying proportions — it's the spending that will juice job growth and economic activity. But a Levy Institute paper from early 2018 — written by economists Scott Fullwiler, Stephanie Kelton, Catherine Ruetschlin, and Marshall Steinbaum — took a crack at figuring it...

Noah Smith assumes that the methodological question has been decided in favor of formalism.Lars P. Syll’s BlogNoah Smith’s new MMT critique — more nonsense on stiltsLars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

To think correctly about globalization one needs to think of it in historical context. This means seeing today’s globalization and its effects, positive and negative, as in many ways a mirror-replay of the first globalization that took place from the mid-19th century to the First World War.... That globalization was grounded in imperialism and colonialism.  WWI was the culmination of this, and the aftermath was its dénouement. That led to the rise of neo-imperialism and...