Mike Norman Economics

The premise and promise of capitalism, going back to Adam Smith, have been that global wealth would increase and serve as a benefit to all of humanity.2 However, the experience of recent decades has challenged those claims: while global wealth has indeed grown, most of the increase has been captured by a small group at the top. This has continued into the“recovery” in the United States and globally. The result is that an obscenely unequal distribution of the world’s wealth has become even...

Review of ‘Consolation philosophy’ understands the human being as a unity of feeling and reason, in a cosmos rich with primal emotion… Here I offer a brief presentation of this African philosophical synthesis, which I hope will help to resolve the dilemma eloquently put forward in 1997 by professor of philosophy at Penn State University Robert Bernasconi: ‘Either African philosophy is so similar to Western philosophy that it makes no distinctive contribution and effectively disappears; or...

What I fascinating about this video is that Rana Foroohar could have made an absolute fortune out of banking but she wasn't interested saying that banking was boring and that journalism was far more interesting. She says she studies bankers like an anthropologist studies tribes of people. Anyway, she describes how high finance is destroying the Western economy and how it has captured the government. [embedded content] On Reality Asserts Itself, Ms. Foroohar says financialization delivers...

I discuss the outlook for bonds.

Canadian RE boom finally winding down? The reason for the collapse in transactions: the formerly all too willing buyers, mostly Chinese oligarchs who would use Vancouver real estate as their offshore Swiss bank account, have disappeared.… The report signals buyers are still adjusting to tougher mortgage qualification rules the federal government introduced Jan. 1, and more worryingly, to the four increases in the Bank of Canada’s interest rate over the past year. Those rules were put in...

The Indian economy is in a tailspin. This cannot be attributed only to innocence in economic matters of the command-centre of the NDA government. While that is indubitably a contributing factor, the current travails of the economy point to something deeper, namely the dead-end to which neo-liberalism has brought the economy. Without moving away from the neo-liberal trajectory, the economy cannot come out of its current difficulties.... Neoliberal solutions that rely on only a few factors,...

Too little public debt can be as damaging economically as to much public debt, since public debt is the one-to-one measure of deficit spending, and public spending increase flows, both financial and economic, in the economy. On the other hand, MMT shows that issuance of public debt is unnecessary for funding governments that are currency sovereigns and suggests that interest payments on public debt constitute a subsidy to bond holders.  Thus, the need arise to justify the continued...

This article is an introduction to the post-Keynesian approach to inflation. It is largely based on Section 8.1.1 of Professor Marc Lavoie's Post-Keynesian Economics: New Foundations (link to my review). Similar to the work on stock-flow consistent models, we start out with what is essentially an accounting identity: a statement that is true by definition. We need to understand the implications of the accounting identity before we worry about the behavioural aspects (which are not pinned...

I have very little free time today. I am now in Dublin and am travelling to Galway soon for tonight’s event (see below). Last evening I met with some Irish politicians at the Irish Parliament and had some interesting conversations. I will reflect on the interactions I have had so far in Ireland in a later blog post. But today (and next time I post) I plan to reflect briefly on my thoughts about the Second International Modern Monetary Theory which was held last weekend in New York City....

Trump tells the Saudi King he wouldn't last 2 weeks without US protection. Then he rants about oil prices being too high.Expect lower oil prices.Remember when Obama bowed?