Mike Norman Economics

The Grayzone entered the carefully concealed offices of a covert, British government-backed propaganda mill that is at the center of an international scandal the mainstream media refuses to touch. The entire extremely shady enterprise, as Miller explained, is an elaborate front for the British military-intelligence apparatus. Its covert coordination with friendly politicians and mainstream journalists recalls the Cold War-era intrigue known as Operation Mockingbird. That scandal involved...

Russia Insider All of Europe’s Powerful Countries Are Effectively Leaderless, EU Adrift - Russia’s Top Anchor (Dmitry Kiselyov) Michael Quinn Spiegel OnlineYellow Vests Protests: If Macron Fails, Europe Fails A Commentary by Henrik Enderlein, president and professor of political economy at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin as well as the director of the Jacques Delors Institute SouthFrontUS Coast Guard Turns Down Arctic Exercise Because 40-year-old Icebreaker Might Break Down And...

More humor. Did you know that Russia is now weaponizing humor. The BBC just said so. Moon of AlabamaHow Putin's Russia Weaponizes XSee alsoCaitlin Johnstone — Rogue JournalistDon’t Laugh : It’s Giving Putin What He WantsCaitlin Johnstone See also   Russian President Vladimir Putin is surpassing dashing Japanese heartthrobs in 2019 calendar sales thanks to an unexpected legion of young fans.The calendar, exclusively sold by popular Japanese chainstore Loft, has reportedly surpassed all...

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)....