Mike Norman Economics

Mike sent this out in a note the other day.Household debt service bouncing along the bottom at 40 year low.You can see how over the last 10 years households have been starved of credit as banks had to divert allocation of their regulatory capital against the additional $trillions of Reserve Assets the Fed created under the various QE policies.This should begin to bottom as Fed has stated that they intend to reduce their QE policy by $400B this year and over $400B next year; allowing...

Now that is really upping the ante on economic warfare. Its' not even disguised anymore. Ironic after Alan Greenspan let the banks "terrorize" not only Americans but the world, and Ben Bernanke did nothing about it either.AntiwarUS Imposes New Sanctions on Iran, Labels Central Bank Head a Terrorist Jason Ditz

With an introduction by David Ownby and Timothy Cheek. From the intro: This essay by Jiang Shigong 强世功 (b. 1967), published in the Guangzhou journal Open Times (开放时代) in January 2018, aims to be an authoritative statement of the new political orthodoxy under Xi Jinping 习近平(b. 1953) as Xi begins his second term as China’s supreme leader. It offers a new reading of modern Chinese history in general and the history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in particular, arguing that Xi...

Backgrounder. Not looking good.Detailed and nuanced report. Maybe more than you want to know. Cutting to the chase, a lot of backroom deals. Looking at it structurally, our political project, the historic coalition that led to the Constitution of Montecristi [ratified by Ecuadorean voters in 2008] was gradually weakened over time by internal attrition. Contradictions were generated that made it difficult to keep the whole coalition together. During Rafael Correa’s last term in office the...

Russia responds, not tit-for-tat, but asymmetrically as it said it would. Navalny helped the EU compile sanctions on the people who made Crimea’s return to Russia possible in 2014. A year later, he submitted a list of Russian bureaucrats he believed should be sanctioned to the FT, many of whom were indeed later sanctioned by the West. Also in 2015, professional oppositionists Mikhail Kasyanov and Vladimir Kara-Murza traveled to the US to lobby Congress into putting Russian journalists –...

Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institution has just published The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50, which seems to be getting a major media push from a bunch of completely uncritical reviewers and commenters, some of whom really should know better. It is not that this book is totally wrong or bad, but that it way overstates its case, cherry picking data and the views of people he has interviewed, with only the slightest of caveats. A typical sophistic argument runs from...

There is often talk of the Pentagon's missing trillions, but now we know where the money went, on top secret organisations and project. A massive amount of money is spent on projects Americans know nothing about. Hmm, I bet a lot of that money made some people very rich indeed. KV Secrecy is the backbone of America. According to some historians’ estimates, each year, more than 500 million pages of documents are classified by the United States alone. The United States has also had a history...

The shocking 1950's film, Sands of Sorrow, showing the terrible living conditions of Palestinians after being forced off their land. [embedded content] Sands of Sorrow (1950); On the plight of Arab refugees from the Arab-Israeli war. Dorothy Thompson speaks on the refugee problem. Refugees live in tents in the Gaza Strip, are given blankets and food by Egyptian soldiers, and receive flour from UNICEF. A Lebanese priest conducts services. Refugees work as plumbers, carpenters, tailors,...

Yep, I like Chris Hedges too, Paul!Here, PCR doesn't mince his words. Reproduced in full. “You build a house. They destroy it. You raise a child. They kill him.” Chris Hedges, America’s Last Real Journalist, a profession now owned by propagandists hired by interest groups to tell their lies, gives us reason to think—Are Israelis God’s Chosen People or Satan’s Genocidal Racist Psychopaths? There is little doubt that Israel has the most totally evil government that has ever existed on Earth....

Yves here. While quite a few economists have thrown cold water on the rosy message of the latest drop of the headline unemployment stat to below 4%, this Real News Network interview with Robert Pollin of PERI does the useful service of providing a more realistic estimate. Naked CapitalismOfficial Unemployment Is at 3.9%? Economist Robert Pollin Says It Is More Like 12% Yves Smith