Mike Norman Economics

Nassim Taleb gets the smackdown. Bill Mitchell – billy blogThose Imbecilic Keynesianisticists are loose – lock up your … whatever!Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

It occurred to me recently that everything has gone wrong since Milton Friedman died in 2006. Enuff said. PowerLineThe Laffer Curve of the Left? Steve Hayward

How close is the US to a "Minsky moment" in the financial cycle?ReutersRed flags emerge as Americans' debt load hits another record Jonathan Spicer

This is indicative of a much larger problem than AIPAC. It's the basis of attacks grounded in sophistry that uses invalid logic. The aim is to attack an opposing party or cohort "X." The logic used runs thus. X is against Y. Y has a property. Therefore X is against everyone/everything having that property. This is clearly wrong if Y is not identical to everyone/everything having that property, e.g, being Jewish, which in this instance is not the case. Y is represents only some of...

Putin was not joking about sanctions being a blessing in disguise, since Russia would have found it difficult to restructure otherwise. Necessity is the mother of invention.Gold, Goats 'n GunsRussia’s Exports Continue to Defy Sanctions Tom Luongo

Gates also took exception to “modern monetary theory,” which is an economic theory with growing prominence on the policy teams of Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and others. MMT, as it’s known, suggests that governments need not worry about deficits because they can simply print their own currency, and should instead manage inflation with interest rates. (You can read more about it in this Vox explainer.) What does Gates think of MMT?“That is some crazy talk,” he told me. “It will come back...

Now that MMT is in the news big time, it's high time to repost a link to Brian's post on MMT and hyperinflation.Bond EconomicsA MMT View On The Theory Of HyperinflationsBrian Romanchuk

  "Radical socialists" now. This person has no idea of what a radical socialist is based on history and policy, or else he is using the term as a smear. Oh wait, Cato Institute. There's a third possibility. Ideological bias. Ocasio-Cortez and her cohorts are disciples of a new macroeconomic worldview called “Modern Monetary Theory” (MMT). This postulates that governments with sovereign currencies face no financing constraints, and can spend as much as they like through new printed money....

A perennial question for Marxists is how to overturn capitalism. Will institutional changes that improve the lot of workers but fall short of ending capitalism immediately help or harm this cause? To the extent that social struggle is a learning-by-doing process, it may be that the securing of small gains can whet the appetite for more significant gains and that institutional reforms of a transformational nature can place revolution on a more secure footing if and when it does occur. But...

I was reminded this week of an interesting studies published in 1987 by Arjo Klamer and David Colander on the influences that go into the training of a professional economist. This study was repeated by Colander in 2005. The results are rather disturbing although obviously I am an ‘insider’ in the sense I went through the process in one way or another myself (although not in a US graduate program). They demonstrate how far removed graduate students are from learning or being interested in...