Mike Norman Economics

You don’t know what a market crash is.

In this post, which is based on my FTC testimony, I explain why growing market power provides a better explanation for higher price-cost margins and rising concentration in many industries, declining economic dynamism, and other contemporary US trends, than the most plausible benign alternative: increased scale economies and temporary returns to the first firms to adopt new information technologies (IT) in competitive markets.The benign alternative has an initial plausibility because the...

Interesting post, but I am skeptical of the conclusion that that China's "problem" is growing unproductive debt. All modern money is generated as a result of a credit-debit relationship that sums to zero economy-wide when the government is included. If government is considered exognenous, then endogenous credit-debits sum to zero and the government deficit is the nongovernment surplus, i.e., adds to accumulated nongovernment net financial assets in aggregate. What counts is 1) the...

DevSpeak is devspeak for "technical jargon." It's related to overuse of mathematical expressions for effect. The question for writers to ask is how the language they choose affects the signal/noise ratio for the intended audience. Useful post.Oxfam Blogs — From Poverty to PowerWhen to write in DevSpeak; when to use Plain Language? More handy tips. Duncan Green, strategic adviser for Oxfam GBRelatedLars P. Syll’s BlogWhy statistical significance is worthless in science Lars P. Syll |...

Everyone is better off in absolute terms (growth, trickle down) but distribution is becoming more asymmetrical, with growth income and wealth occurring largely at the top tier AKA "the 1%." Marginalism and "just deserts" don't explain it. The issue is not only asymmetrical income and wealth but also asymmetrical power rather than "merit." Taking capitalism is the economic system that favors capital (ownership and control) over labor (workers, i.e., people) and land (the environment),...

The stock market is not a good predictor of recession.

Accounting control frauds target creditors and shareholders as their primary intended victims. Their primary weapon of fraud and predation is accounting. The art is to inflate assets and understate liabilities, which overstates capital and income. White-collar criminologists, economists, accounting academics, and regulators have explained the ease with which the CEOs running control frauds are able to suborn supposed “controls” (auditors, appraisers, attorneys, and credit rating agencies)....

Everywhere I read it seems, the ‘Green New Deal’ appears. I wrote a bit about it last week in my evaluation of the latest US job numbers – US labour market moderated in November and considerable slack remains (December 11, 2018). The point I made there was that a shift to a green economy would possibly generate around 21 million jobs (14 per cent of total US employment), which given reasonable estimates of excess capacity would require a huge shift in the employment structure and multiples...

Anglo-US imperialism is a real menace in the world. If is evil, but masquerades itself as the good guy. It says it brings freedom and democracy - down the barrel of a gun - and free markets , so the Western elite can buy everything up, and usually very cheaply, because they have caused a crisis and bought at distressed prices. [embedded content] Kingdom of Saudi Arabia flooded the market with cheap oil. This was not a mere business decision, but a calculated move coordinated with U.S. and...

Historical backgrounder on Crimea. Asia TimesAn historical journey into Crimea Pepe Escobar