Mike Norman Economics

Sticking the dagger in and twisting it.CounterpunchConfession of a Putin-Nazi DenialistCJ Hopkins, author and playwright

General Electric Co. (GE) will be unceremoniously sacked from the Dow Jones Industrial Average on June 26, it was announced yesterday by the S&P Dow Jones Indices folks. GE was one of the original 12 companies in the index when it was created in 1896. The Dow now consists of 30 companies and GE has been in the index continuously since 1907. Curiously, GE – an industrial giant that makes highly sophisticated commercial jet engines for Boeing and turbines for power plants among numerous...

Abstract J M Keynes carefully read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) before he was 28. Of extreme importance to Keynes was Smith’s categorization of a group of upper income class citizens, whose speculative and financial interactions with the private banking industry created a very severe danger to the society as a whole, as being projectors, imprudent risk takers, and prodigals. Keynes’s description of Smith’s projectors, imprudent risk takers, and prodigals in the General Theory,...

Modeling economic forces, power relations, and stock-flow consistency:a general constrained dynamics approachby Oliver Richters and Erhard Gloetzl Abstract: In monetary Stock-Flow Consistent (SFC) models, accountingidentities reduce the number of behavioral functions to avoid anoverdetermined system of equations. We relax this restriction using adifferential algebraic equation framework of constrained dynamics.Agents exert forces on the variables according to their desire, forinstance to...

Russia draws a red line for the new US "Space Force" that the President established to ensure US dominance of space. Escalation.Another treaty about to bite the dust? (Outer Space Treaty of 1967.)RT‘Way to disaster’: Moscow warns US against deploying WMDs in space, threatens with ‘tough response’

It's not so much that the US is "agreement incapable" as that the US has no intention of keeping its agreements, as the historical record shows. They are just a matter of temporary convenience subject to overall national policy, strategy and tactics. Pear relates a sad story that starts with treaties with Native Americans, leading to the expression, "White man speaks with forked tongue."Naked CapitalismWhy North Korea Can Never Trust the U.S. David William PearSee alsoMedium It’s Time To...

Canada has endorsed US trade warfare against China, Russia, the European Union states, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela, but registers its dismay when the Trump Administration refuses to give Ottawa an indemnity pass so that it can benefit from the damage inflicted on the others. Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland has accepted a “Diplomat of the Year Award” from Foreign Policy Magazine, a subsidiary of the Washington Post and the Jeffrey Bezos media conglomerate which is sworn to topple...

If I had to recommend a single article for foreign policy decision makers to read, it would be Robert Jervis’s 1968 essay ‘Hypotheses on Misperception.’ As I’ve written before, many of the tensions between states derive from misperceptions. People misperceive others; misperceive themselves; and misperceive how they are seen by others. In his article, Jervis hypothesizes 14 misperceptions which are commonly encountered in international politics. Hypothesis number 9 is the following: ‘actors...

Michael Roberts reports from Brazil. The emerging economies are under the gun (of the the US).Michael Roberts BlogBrazil: austerity, debt and tradeMichael Roberts

One of the prime myths that white-collar criminologists have to refute repeatedly is that blockchain makes fraud impossible. Blockchain, in some settings, is a costly means of making some frauds much more difficult. Blockchain is useless against the most important frauds. The primitive worship of blockchain as a supposed garlic capable of warding off evil breeds complacency, and complacency produces increased fraud and greatly extends the life of fraud.… Sheriff Bill is on the case. New...