Mike Norman Economics

Politicians should be as focused on bank malfeasance as they are on welfare overpayments and strawberry sabotage In handing down his interim report last week at the financial services royal commission, the Honourable Kenneth Hayne was damning in his criticism of the behaviour of Australian bankers. It wasn’t a lack of laws, guidelines or codes of conduct that led to the richest banks stealing from the poorest Australians, the commissioner argued, it was simply greed The neoliberal...

Is Beijing aware of the trap being set? It would be crazy to follow through with liberalization of the financial sector, inviting Western takeover.Defend Democracy PressIs China still willing to open its financial sector during trade war? Frank TangSee also “We at the Trump administration have updated our China policy to bring the concept of competition to the forefront. It’s right there at the top of the president’s national security strategy.” Revealing. US tells China: we want...

The crazies gets crazier. President Trump seems to have lost control of them, prompting the question, who is the president now anyway.Just as with Iraq and WMD, the New Times and the Washington Post are driving the crazy.The NationMore Cold War Extremism and Crises Stephen F. Cohen | Professor Emeritus of Russian Studies, History, and Politics at New York University and Princeton UniversitySee also As the United States squeezes China economically through an escalating trade war, it is...

The Iranian economy is mired in a deep recession. The real or productive sector of the economy is paralyzed, largely by out-of-control (and often illicit) imports that have replaced domestic production. Rent seeking, corruption and the looting of national resources is pervasive. Both unemployment and inflation are extremely high. National currency is on the verge of collapse, and financial resources of the country are disproportionately invested in unproductive or parasitic activities such...

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,...