Mike Norman Economics

Things to keep in mind as the world prepares for the Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki.Sic Semper Tyrannis America's Russia Derangement Syndrome Publius Tacitus

Backgrounder. Short. Immanuel WallersteinTwo Cheers for Mexico’s AMLO: A Great Victory for the Left Immanuel Wallerstein | Senior Research Scholar, Yale University, formerly a professor of sociology

Rallying the world to cut off Russia from the world stage and cripple its economy has been been a goal of the US power establishment since the collapse of the Soviet Union, so there’s no reason to believe that even the people who are making the claims against Russia actually believe them. The goal is crippling Russia to handicap China, and ultimately to shore up global hegemony for the US-centralized empire by preventing the rise of any rival superpowers. The sociopathic alliance of...

Distributive bargaining is win-lose aka zero-sum. Integrative bargaining is win-win aka compromise. Distributive bargaining is based on the assumption of conflict between the interest of the parties in dividing a fixed pie, while integrative bargaining is about cooperation on common interests and compromise on other interests to grow the pie. Trump's bargaining style based on his business background is distributive and based on competition, where there is a winner and a loser at the...

Imagine, if you can, that corporations truly are like people. They would vary in their dispositions. Some would be selfish and short-sighted, caring only about their own immediate gain. Others would be more prosocial and far-sighted, genuinely caring about the world around them and willing to do their part to promote the common good. As with real people, the cooperators would be in danger of exploitation by the knaves, but they would also be able to protect themselves by banding together,...

Here, Steve Keen goes over his familiar ground of too much private debt which will lead to the next financial crash so a debt jumble is required. Well, you will all be familiar with that but it is still a great interview nonetheless. Where it got really interesting is near the end where Steve Keen talks about private banking and China.Private banks can make the money out of thin air and charge a small interest to cover the costs of the service, but if the borrower fails to repay some of his...

Should read. Goebbels present Nazism as a political form that combines nationalism, socialism, populism, and progressivism, and is opposed to internationalism, bourgeois liberalism, and capitalism, which Goebbels equates with "international Jewry."Grasping RealityJoseph Goebbels (1932): Those Damned Nazis!: Weekend ReadingBrad DeLong | Professor of Economics, UCAL Berkeley

According to NBER, the four longest expansions in U.S. history are: 1) From a trough in March 1991 to a peak in March 2001 (120 months). 2) From a trough in June 2009 to today, July 2018 (109 months and counting). 3) From a trough in February 1961 to a peak in December 1969 (106 months). 4) From a trough in November 1982 to a peak in July 1990 (92 months). So the current expansion is the second longest, and it seems very likely that the current expansion will surpass the '90s expansion...

Short review of FT’s former Mumbai bureau chief James Crabtree’s The Billionaire Raj. The theme of the book is corruption, and its co-evolution with the Indian economy as the ‘licence raj’ restrictions were progressively removed, and new sectors like telecoms grew dramatically. In this new world, the super-wealthy businessmen and the politicians found they needed each other: the deployment of legislation and contracts helped the former, the opportunity to take part in business helped the...

Some people think that because banks create fiat money out of thin air it is not real money, and they might call it funny money, but what is money?Money is work done or the promise to do work, i.e, you can buy a product that someone made (work done), or get someone to do work for you.So, do banks create money out of thin air? What they do is get you to sign a contract that you will promise to do the work necessary to pay money back, in other words, the borrower creates the money by doing...