Mike Norman Economics

Quantitative Tightening is not a tightening at all, just like Quantitative Easing is not an easing.

I read Nick Shaxson's book years ago and it was excellent. Finance is an important part of society helping businesses to grow while earning interest on people's investments, but when it gets too large it can become parasitic harming growth.Also, the best brains are attracted to finance and so other vital sectors of the economy may suffer. The best engineers, scientists, and mathematicians will often go into finance when they could be designing state-of-the-art products to improve the...

The Spider's Web explores how London became the money-laundering capital of the world We released The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire for free download in mid-September and close to half a million people have viewed this film since its release.  Here’s why I think it is resonating with audiences across the world. The Spider’s Web is a documentary about how the City of London emerged from the demise of the British Empire in the 1950s and re-established itself as the leading global...

[embedded content] Chunky Mark - The Funny Tinge Group. Seven Labour MP's resign to form a centrist party for more wars, more neoliberalism, more privatisation [embedded content]

Big! We really need to be talking about this and examining assumptions and presuppositions that act as hidden assumptions. Yanis is a systems thinker. The Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, Oxford University, kindly invited me to deliver the 2019 Taylor Lecture on 12th February 2019. I chose the topic of Realistic Utopias versus Dystopic Realities – my aim being to highlight the manner in which really-existing capitalism is marketed as a utopian science fiction that has nothing to...

Backing into MMT. The point of all this is, IF higher inflation is desired (and I am by no means advocating any such policy), THEN why not keep the policy rate low and use "free lunch" fiscal policies as long as inflation remains below target? Why bother experimenting with the Neo-Fisherian prescription of raising the policy rate that's somehow supposed to make people magically expect higher inflation? The post is a just a bit wonkish (equations) but worth reading since this is coming up...

A new report on US policy toward China launched by the Asia Society in New York is another example of how supposedly bipartisan US intellectual elites, instead of offering impartial advice, do little more than parrot Washington’s talking points, failing to admit they know nothing of substance about the existential “threats” posed by Russia and China. The report ‘Course Correction: Toward an Effective and Sustainable China Policy‘ was written in collaboration with the 21st Century Chinese...

Amazing. A major player at the Fed and key voice in setting monetary policy didn't know how the monetary system works based on correct operational understanding — which MMT provides and which he also proves ignorant about. And this when he was also serving on the FOMC and deeply involved in setting monetary policy for the US, which also affects the entire world, during the crisis and aftermath. Bloomberg OpinionBudget Deficits Still Matter Bill Dudley William C. Dudley is an American...

More "criticism" of MMT for the record. Another rant by the clueless for the clueless. Handwringing.Cranach at Patheos“Modern Monetary Theory”: Deficits Don't Matter Gene Veith

Last week (February 14, 2019), Eurostat released its latest national accounts estimates – GDP up by 0.2% and employment up by 0.3% in the euro area – which confirmed that EU growth rates have declined significantly over the course of 2018. Moreover, the December-quarter data confirmed Italy is in official recession and Germany recorded zero growth (thereby avoiding the ‘technical recession’ category after contracting by 0.2 per cent in the September-quarter). Export expenditure accounts for...