Mike Norman Economics

The partnership at the center of European integration is unraveling just when Euroskeptic forces are coming together. If French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel cannot start rebuilding the political center, next year's European Parliament election will produce the biggest victory yet for anti-EU populists.… Entering the endgame?Project SyndicateThe Coming Franco-German Bust-Up Mark Leonard | Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations

So what do we have here? We have a programme, the Integrity Initiative, whose entire purpose is to pump out covert disinformation against Russia, through social media and news stories secretly paid for by the British government. And we have the Skripals’ MI6 handler, the BBC, Porton Down, the FCO, the MOD and the US Embassy, working together in a group under the auspices of the Integrity Initiative. The Skripal Case happened to occur shortly after a massive increase in the Integrity...

President Trump campaigned on lessening U.S. involvement in wars abroad. He wants to get reelected. He does not need a Secretary of Defense that involves him in more wars that have little to none defined purpose. Mattis is an ingrained imperialist. He always asked for more money for the military and for more meddling abroad. One of Mattis' little notice acts as Defense Secretary was a unannounced change in the mission of the Pentagon:For at least two decades, the Department of Defense has...

Martin Armstrong mentions the increasing tax burden on workers in Europe. He doesn't mention that the increasing tax burden results from the institutional structure of the EZ, where the member countries have ceded currency sovereignty to the ECB. As a result, these countries are no longer sovereign currency issuers and cannot self-fund. Like US states, they have to tax or borrow to spend and there are institutional limits on borrowing (deficit spending) imposed by treaty.The key point in...

The Agency for Health Care Policy and Research is a government agency that does research into finding safer, more effective treatments for many medical conditions. When it reported that the majority of people suffering from lower back pain do not need medical treatment, or prescription medicines, the medical-industrial-complex tried to shut it down, or change its role, or reduce its funding.  The AHRQ said that OTC medicines were good enough, and that manipulation and gentle exercise was all...

Dan Kovalik was brought up in a very conservative household and was very much a patriarch until he traveled the world and saw first hand the effects of the American Empire. He says how the U.S. has the world's largest empire, but has got away with denying its existence. It controls the world through vassal states and installed cronies.He has a new book out called, The Plot to Control the World: How the U.S. Spent Billions to Change the Outcome of Elections Around the World. He seems too see...

Some of the most interesting of that new work is from, and about, central banks. As an example, here is a remarkable speech by BIS economist Claudio Borio. I am not sure when I last saw such a high density of insight-per-word in a discussion of money and finance, let alone in a speech by a central banker. I could just say, Go read it. But instead I’m going to go through it section by section, explaining what I find interesting in it and how it connects up to a larger heterodox vision of...

This is an odd one, but totally fascinating. When I first saw this I felt alarmed as the host looked like he was part of the occult, maybe Count Dracula even (although he is a very nice guy), and then there is the title suggesting massive conspiracy theories, but not far into the interview I started to warm towards Mads Palvig.Mads Palvig is Norwegian and had been an investment banker, but he started to question the role played by central banks who he believed were controlled by a handful of...

The bifurcation of the global economy was already in process. This stemmed firstly from America’s geo-political financial sanctions regime (i.e. Treasury Wars) – and the consequent attempts by targeted states to de-couple from the dollar sphere. The ‘war hawks’ surrounding the President are now inventing a whole new swathe of ‘tech crimes’ for sanctioning – ostensibly to give Trump oven more of his much-desired negotiating ‘leverage’. Clearly the hawks are using the ‘leverage’ pretext, to...

… the main task today remains to prevent a global war, which is increasingly seen in the US by some as the only way to avoid a day of reckoning. Needless to say, this war is seen as possible in the US by people who have zero knowledge and qualifications in serious military issues and it is not a bad idea to keep reminding all kinds of neocon trash which runs Empire today from their comfy country clubs and offices that many of them will have their own personal conventional 3M14 or X-101 with...