Mike Norman Economics

An announcement by Columbian President Juan Manuel Santos Friday said Colombia joined the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, known as OECD, and starting next week, will become a "global partner" of NATO. "We will formalize in Brussels next week -- and this is very important -- the entry of Colombia into NATO in the category of global partner, we will be the only country in Latin America with this privilege," the president said in a televised news address.... NATO is...

Karl Polanyi famously argued that land, labor, and money are “fictitious commodities.” They cannot be fully subjected to the dictates of the market without spurring backlashes that seek to re-embed them in society.… Polanyi was right to see land and labor in parallel, but we should now go further in unpacking globetrotting versus place-based industries and ask why “common good” frames have been so frequently embraced for environmental issues and rejected for global labor issues. Economic...

Economic warfare, political isolation, and subversion orchestrated by the neoliberal Empire and its vassals, cronies and minions. It's hardly just the result of "socialism," the collapse of the oil price, or the economic incompetence of the Bolivarian government. This is an attack. This is also a reason that the Soviet Union expanded post WWII to create a buffer, engaged in an arms race, and committed a huge portion of its resources to military use. Russia is now being forced to...

S&P 500 companies have returned a record $1 trillion to shareholders over the past year, helped by a recent surge in dividends and stock buybacks following sweeping corporate tax cuts introduced by Republicans, a report on Friday showed... ReutersS&P 500 Companies Return $1 Trillion To Shareholders In Tax-Cut SurgeNoel Randewich

Say's Law ("money is a hot potato").Lars P. Syll’s BlogMainstream economics — peddling fake knowledgeLars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

Spoiler: 2038 or before. If the world is still around then.Zero HedgeHere's When China Will Win The Arms Race With The US, And How BofA Is Trading It Tyler Durden

Lost economic and financially, that is. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis published a new report examining the relationship between a person’s birth year, and measures of his or her family’s economic status, including income and wealth. Fed economists determined that substantial wealth declines were visible across the age spectrum around the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) but found that young families suffered the most. Zero HedgeMillennials Are Now Considered The "Lost Generation"...

Good summary with timeline. Project SyndicateWhat Sank the Kim-Trump Summit?Ramesh Thakur, a former assistant secretary-general of the United Nations, is emeritus professor at the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, and co-convenor of the Asia-Pacific Leadership Network for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament

In Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, published earlier this year, Steven Pinker argues that the human race has never had it so good as a result of values he attributes to the European Enlightenment of the 18th century. He berates those who focus on what is wrong with the world’s current condition as pessimists who only help to incite regressive reactionaries. Instead, he glorifies the dominant neoliberal, technocratic approach to solving the world’s...

The Empire at work. Is history about to repeat?Al Jazzera — OpinionVenezuela is about to explode Matias Vernengo | Associate Professor of Economics, Bucknell UniversitySee alsoNaked KeynesianismLula da Silva is a political prisoner. Free Lula!Matias Vernengo | Associate Professor of Economics, Bucknell University