Mike Norman Economics

I spend most of my time on this blog mocking all the exaggerated nonsense which passes for political commentary nowadays. It’s a rare day that I come across something which is both stimulating and well-written. Fortunately, this is one of those days. Via Facebook (which has its uses), I was pointed in the direction of an excellent article by Patrick Lawrence in this summer’s edition of the magazine Raritan Quarterly, of which I had not previously been aware. I can recommend it to you all,...

"The more complex the math, the more simplistic and banal the postulated relationships and conclusions tend to be." - Michael hudson

All the "$Trillion Deficit!" club members (which btw is E-V-E-R-Y-B-O-D-Y...) were only off by about 30% of how we ended up...The U.S. federal budget deficit rose in fiscal year 2018 to $779,000,000,000, $113 billion higher than the previous fiscal period, CNBC reports. https://t.co/EckTstJKBZ— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) October 15, 2018

No bottom in sight; down another 0.85% last night....US in 2008 iirc via same moron monetary policy implementation was down about 40% off its highs before govt said uncle and added capital to banks via fiscal policy so maybe (hopefully) they only have another 12% to go...Chinese stocks close at their lowest level of the year. Shanghai Composite Index down 28% from its high in January. #China pic.twitter.com/VBqs98z9vw— jeroen blokland (@jsblokland) October 16, 2018

Automation will bring growth, but history tells us labour’s share of national income will decline The World Bank has a reassuring message for those fearful of being made obsolete by automation. The robot age is nothing to be worried about. Just like all previous waves of technological advance, the fourth industrial revolution will create rather than destroy jobs, so fears of mass unemployment are largely unfounded. Nor should we be concerned that the arrival of the new machine age is...

We are the most loving and the most violent creatures in nature; the most artistic and the most destructive; the most altruistic and the most greedy; we have the most extremes.Do animals think and feel, do they love and have friends, do they feel sad, lonely and get depressed, do they have empathy?Why do so few animals attack us and yet we attack them?Humans believe they have free will, but I think animals believe they do too. Well, they don't believe because they don't have our type of...

Mankind learned the art of going into battle much later than previously thought, a new academic study I read somewhere once, and I think I even posted it here, that years ago human groups got no larger than about a hundred people and so everyone knew who the psychopath was. Only a few people needed to be conned by the lying, cheating, toe rag for everyone to know who he was, and after that, he had to behave himself or he would get thrown out of the group. But in modern society, though,...

Float it already! No float, no currency sovereignty. East Asia ForumChina must release the renminbiYu Yongding is a Senior Fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and former member of the monetary policy committee of the People’s Bank of China. This article is abridged from Yu Yonding, ‘The reform of China’s exchange rate regime’ in Ligang Song and Ross Garnaut (eds.), Forty Years of Chinese Reform, China Update, ANU Press, 2018.

I am back in Australia now and I don’t have to stand on my head to write (a reference to the hassles of trying to maintain some order while travelling to different destinations on an almost daily basis). Last week, the IMF released its so-called – Fiscal Monitor October 2018 – and the mainstream financial press had a ‘picnic’ claiming all sorts of disaster scenarios would follow from the sort of financial situations revealed in the publication. At the time of the publication I was in London...

Christopher Columbus was worst than Pol Pot by a long shot. He even sold under aged girls into the international child slave sex trade. Rape, pillage, and torture, yet Christopher Columbus considered himself to be a Christian. [embedded content] In this video below, George Monbiot describes the crimes of Christopher Columbus and also of the the European empires. [embedded content] The true legacy of Christopher Columbus: 'Western Civilisation' | George Monbiot