Mike Norman Economics

The trajectory toward rising fascism and impending war. I guess "the war to end all wars" didn't.Asia TimesWelcome to the G-20 from Hell Pepe Escobar

It is Wednesday and I am reverting to my plan to keep my blog posts short on this day to give me more time for other things. Today, I will briefly outline what happened last Thursday when I met with Shadow British Chancellor John McDonnell in London. As I noted yesterday, I was not going to comment publicly on this meeting. I have a lot of meetings and interactions with people in ‘high’ office which remain private due to the topics discussed etc. But given that John McDonnell told an...

Bank created credit is a force outside of market forces which distorts the markets. With an infinite supply of money and a shortage of houses, the sky's the limit on house prices. The only thing holding back the cost of housing is the ability of people to work hard enough to service the loan on a property. Extra hours at work, two or three jobs, mini-cabbing in the evening, renting a room or two out, friends getting together to buy a hime, etc, but all this does was raise the price of...

The least-gifted children of high-income parents graduate from college at higher rates than the most-gifted children of low-income parents. On blog I was on recently the libertarians were getting out of hand and all over themselves because genetic researchers had found that intelligence was inherited down on the mother's side. They believed this proved that intelligence was genetically determined. Our schools are getting dumber, some British conservatives said, because grammar schools...

Have the wheels have come off the wagon? Now that cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin have plummeted from last year's absurdly high valuations, the techno-utopian mystique of so-called distributed-ledger technologies should be next. The promise to cure the world's ills through "decentralization" was just a ruse to separate retail investors from their hard-earned real money.  Yet far from ushering in a utopia, blockchain has given rise to a familiar form of economic hell. A few self-serving...

[embedded content] Tweet Double Down News @DoubleDownNews Our film on Columbus by @GeorgeMonbiot has been deleted by @facebook for "violating community standards." The film was a serious piece of historical journalism, gaining 1m views We were given no right of appeal, or exact reason for censorship Why is Facebook censoring history?

Civil War 2.0 (along with Cold War 2). Racial politics in the United States, both before and after the end of slavery, has blocked the emergence of a class politics that would unite poor whites and poor blacks in a demand for more public services. So what will happen when, by around 2045, non-Hispanic whites become a minority of the total population?…. It's the demographics.Project SyndicateAmerica’s Ongoing Civil War Jeffrey D. Sachs | Professor of Sustainable Development and Professor of...

Civil War 2.0. Where some see nationalist populism, others see incipient fascism. Irreconcilable differences?Bracing ViewsAmerican Fascism: No Longer Misleading WJ Astore | Lt. Col. USAF (retired)

Mainstream neoclassical economics is hooked on the idea of individual worker-savers as prime movers in capitalist market economies. As workers, individuals choose how much to work, determining the economy’s output; as savers, they determine how much of that output takes the shape of the economy’s capital investment. With banks as conduits channeling saving flows into investment, firms churn inputs into outputs that match worker-savers’ tastes. In this way, the neoclassical world gets shaped...

On October 5, the White House released a 139-page report, "Assessing and Strengthening the Manufacturing and Defense Industrial Base and Supply Chain Resiliency of the United States." The report had been originally due to be completed in April, but the deadline was extended, due to the importance of the study and the involvement of the Defense Department, the Commerce Department, the Treasury Department and the White House in researching and writing it. The report is unclassified (there...