Mike Norman Economics

Trump's new trade deals with China could turn out bad for American workers. Let’s start with the issue of forced technology transfer. Boeing is upset, because under the current rules, if they set up shop in China, they are going to have to partner with a company that is likely to be a competitor a few years down the road. Suppose tough-talking Trump forces China to accept rules that prohibit these mandated partnerships. Under his new deal, if Boeing wants to set up shop in China it just...

Flaunting Élysée Palace’s gilded rooms does little to quell ‘president of the rich’ tag Talk about backfiring?  It was the most important TV appearance of Emmanuel Macron’s presidency: the 40-year-old former banker had to prove to an angry nation that he was not an arrogant “president of the rich” and that he understood ordinary French people’s struggle to make ends meet. Yet Macron’s choice to deliver his prerecorded speech on social inequality from one of the most opulent and golden...

On the EconomyNick Hanauer’s Progressive Labor Standards: A bold idea to do more than just repair the damage. Jared Bernstein | Senior Fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and former Chief Economist and Economic Adviser to Vice President Joe Biden in the Obama Administration econintersectHow Where You're Born Influences The Person You Become Samuel Putnam, Bowdoin College and Masha A. Gartstein, Washington State University Valdai Discussion Club Imperialism, Geopolitics...

The Trump administration's conflict with China has little to do with US external imbalances, closed Chinese markets, or even China’s alleged theft of intellectual property. It has everything to do with containing China by limiting its access to foreign markets, advanced technologies, global banking services, and perhaps even US universities.… The Trump administration, not Huawei or China, is today’s greatest threat to the international rule of law, and therefore to global peace....

In reading this, it is good to realize that feudalism was justified by the religious paradigm then prevalent in Europe. It was based on the great chain of being, with God (the Lord) at the top and the king as God's earthly simulacrum. This implied the divine right of kings, kings being temporal lords.Today, the great chain of being has been replaced by naturalism as the overarching paradigm owing to science replacing religion as authoritative. The concept of person has been submerged in the...

I would suggest there are three things we know. The first is that climate change is real. The result is that nothing can stay the same.The second is that neoliberalism has reduced most people to living in states of profound insecurity. Ignore that poverty is supposedly being beaten. This is almost for nought if the result is disabling fear for future well-being. This cannot persist because people will not tolerate it. We are seeing that, very widely. Third, our economic and social orders...

Last week’s (December 7, 2018) release by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) of their latest labour market data – Employment Situation Summary – November 2018 – showed that total non-farm payroll employment rose by 155,000 and the unemployment rate was essentially unchanged at 3.7 per cent. Participation was steady. While the US labour market is reaching unemployment rates not seen since the late 1960s, the participation rate is still well below the pre-GFC levels and a substantial...

This is not on politics or economics, so this comes under the 'anything' category that Mike Norman said was okay. It's important to me because my dad suffered from multiple sclerosis most of his adult like.  [embedded content]

Sure sounds like incipient fascism to me. But, hey, it couldn't happen here, could it?The DuranThe EU and the warning signs of Fascism Kit Knightly | co-editor of OffGuardian (UK)

What is really at the basis of the ongoing civilizational conflict between the US and China, a feud which many say has gradually devolved into a new cold war if few top politicians are willing to call it for what it is, are China’s ambitions to be a leader in next-generation technology, such as artificial intelligence, which rest on whether or not it can design and manufacture cutting-edge chips, and is why Xi has pledged at least $150 billion to build up the sector. But, as the FT notes,...