Mike Norman Economics

We are going to visit relatives that live in warmer climes, so I'll be limited in the amount of time I spent on net for a while. Will post as I get a chance, but that may be sporadic.

This is fiscal injection using the books of the Central Bank of Russia rather than the government budget. The central bank is acquiring assets for its own liabilities denominated in the currency it issues, while if fiscal spending were used to inject currency into the economy, the fiscal balance would be show increasing government liabilities.A declining fiscal balance would be interpreted as a negative signal, whereas the central bank acquiring gold reserves ("hard assets") is considered...

Lots of people are going on holiday in Iran and finding out that the Iranians are a very friendly people. And many of these travelers are specifically going there to see if they are bad as the U.S. makes them out to be. Reiner Van Oosouw, who is from Germany, found the Iranians to be very friendly and he really liked them.At about 2:50 minutes into the second video - Iran: It's Just Not What You Think - an English woman gets all emotional after taking to some Muslim and wonders why anyone...

The economy doesn’t hinge on one company

Some interesting stuff here, which is worth watching just to see the clip of Trump refusing to shake hands with Benjamin Netanyahu. But there is also an article about the hackers who are blackmailing the U.S. government by saying they will release damming information about 911.  Then there is an article about the Neo-Nazis in the Ukraine, which Israeli News Live say Israel are arming. and this is followed by an article about Gary Webb. I don't know much about Israeli News Live, except they...

Foreign real estate is a favorite vehicle. You probably know that Al Capone was prosecuted on tax evasion, but did you know the details? Al Capone had a problem: he needed a way to disguise the enormous amounts of cash generated by his criminal empire as legitimate income. His solution was to buy all-cash laundromats, mix dirty money in with clean, and then claim that washing ordinary Americans’ shirts and socks, rather than gambling and bootlegging, was the source of his riches....

I am not so sure that the "slowdown" of the Chinese economy is the chief factor in Apple's declining sales there. In the first place, I predicted the strong possibility of Chinese consumers voluntarily boycotting American products, Apple in particular, whereas in the past, American was a status symbol and American products commanded a premium. The Chinese people are very nationalistic, and they are extremely sensitive to perceived "humiliation,"especially by the West considering the...

My new essay examines the question from three points of view: the coverage provided by tax data in the world economy, the consistency of tax data with other sources of information on income inequality, and the peculiarities of tax-based measurement of inequality in the United States. It goes on to make a comparison with measures drawn from other forms of administrative data—specifically payroll records, used by the University of Texas Inequality Project—which are generally more consistent...

...the standard Judd 85/86 result that the optimal rate of taxation of capital income* goes to zero as time goes to infinity is what mathematicians call a boo boo (oopsie). The asserted theorem is false as explained by Ludwig Straub and Ivan Werning.… Angry BearOptimal Taxation of Capital Income 2019 (let them Bern) Robert WaldmannSee also * We just raised the federal tax rate on capital gains and dividends from 15 percent to 23.8 percent, but most economists say these tax rates should be...

I have read an article from Hyman Minsky which is only 6 pages long but contains some major arguments of his thought. There are also some very nice quotes to take out of the text. The article was published in the FRBNY Quarterly Review issue of spring 1992 on pages 77-82. Minsky attacks equilibrium economics: econoblog 101Minsky in 1993 on the Non-Neutrality of MoneyDirk Ehnts | Lecturer at Bard College Berlin