Mike Norman Economics

Why is NATO a zombie. According to Col. MacGregor, it fuels the military-industrial complex that lies at the heart of the US economy, so it is kept alive indefinitely. Of course, we knew this already, but here is a former insider saying it. Mysteriously, the promises given to President Mikhail Gorbachev by President George H. W. Bush, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, President Francois Mitterand, Chancellor Helmuth Kohl and their foreign ministers in 1990—not to expand NATO eastward; not to...

Corruption Watch.Regular readers may recall that MNE has been on this for along time.Zero HedgeForget 'Creepy' - Biden Has A Major Ukraine ProblemTyler Durden

The objections to an independent fiscal authority – continued... Who needs more technocracy when "democracy" is already a shambles? Bill Mitchell – billy blog The effectiveness and primacy of fiscal policy – Part 3Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

With human survival on the line the message needs to be loud, clear and repeated ad nauseam:The spending of a government like the UK which is a sovereign currency issuer is not constrained by its ability to collect tax. In other words, it is not like a household budget which needs income before it can spend. Whilst it is a good idea to review global corporate tax rules as a mechanism to redistribute wealth and resources more fairly Christine Lagarde’s claim that doing so will allow...

It’s not about the system, it’s about your behavior.

Think "money" is the biggie. Think again. Energy is real game changer.  "Money" is to the fore right now, but soon it is going to be energy. Keep your eye on energy technology. The world is in the process of scaling down carbon-based energy use and scaling up alternatives.  The industrial revolution took off with the coal-fired steam engine that powered steam ships, and railroads and factories. The harnessing of electricity and coal-fired power plants enabled the proliferation of...

The second article in this series deals with Modern Monetary Theory’s (MMT) predictive and policy successes. The article has three, separately published, parts. Part 2A deals explains why predictive ability and policy success are so critical – and notes that MMT’s critics have been conspicuously unable to provide a record of predictive failure by MMT scholars. Part 2B deals with MMT successes in microeconomics. The MMT work on microeconomics constitutes a powerful refutation of the...

Good read!  Controversy over money is nothing new in US history, since it has been a lively political issue. The arguments are not chiefly about money, although couched in terms of money, economics, and finance, but rather, politics, which involves winners and losers in the policy game. Historically, sound money advocated have been the wealthy, and functional finance people have been ordinary citizens aka "the little people" (h/t Alan Simpson).History News NetworkMMT and Why Historians...

This is the second part of a three-part series discussing the political issues that give me confidence in the primacy of fiscal policy over monetary policy. The series is designed to help readers see that the recent criticisms of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) as being politically naive and unworkable in a real politic sense have all been addressed in the past. In Part 1, I gave examples of how ‘agile’ or ‘nimble’ fiscal policy can be when an elected government has it in their mind to use...

Ha ha. Noah Smith criticizes an MMT formal model expressed in words rather than equations (which he thinks is OK as a formal method and as a logician, I agree) based on, wait for it, unrealistic assumptions, which is exactly the same thing that heterodox economists accuse conventional economists of doing, that is, if one considered John Maynard Keynes himself to be a heterodox economist.MMT economists should not fall into the trap of trying to mimics the mainstream in creating formal...