Mike Norman Economics

What the article says about Xi is also true of Putin. They both have traditional, legal, and charismatic authority.  When this is true of leaders of great powers, they become world-historical figures. Xi and Putin are already emerging as key figures in the history of the 21st century.  Andrew Batson's BlogA Weberian analysis of Xi Jinping’s power Andrew BatsonSee alsoRussia InsiderExcellent New Russian Biography Film of Chinese Leader Xi Reveals His Thinking Mark Boden

Excellent backgrounder. It's mostly about the intricacies of the Lebanese voting system and Lebanese politics, but this is an interesting aside on the US showing that "democratic elections" are not so democratic in the developed world as well as the emerging world. In the U.S., there is still a clear agenda to suppress wide political participation. The U.S. is one of the few countries in the world which holds the vote on a working day—and in the winter where much of the East coast is...

You can't really look at GDP to figure out what is really going on...The Trump tax reforms of this past January 1 at least removes financial incentives for the multinational firms to cause this type of financial result.So even the recent weakness in both the UK and EZ prints of GDP could easily be the result of a change in tax reduction strategy by the US multinationals in response to the Trump corporate tax policies.And not some nebulous "austerity neoliberal conspiracy lies!"...

Ha!  President or wtf of Canada: U.S. government borrowing is not sustainable and divisive social policies will ultimately exacerbate tensions that will disrupt American business profitability, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said.  Asked in an interview how his government will respond to competitiveness concerns spurred by U.S. tax cuts, Trudeau said Canada is focused on generating long-term economic growth and wouldn’t engage in a “race to the bottom.” “I certainly know that I...

A special commission report on foreign meddling in the 2018 presidential election has been unveiled in Russia’s Upper House. The document highlighted the main methods of the elaborate campaign, spearheaded by the US.The report, presented on Wednesday in Russia’s Upper House (the Senate), was prepared by the Commission for State Sovereignty Protection in cooperation with leading experts and analysts. The publicly available document was presented by the head of the commission, Senator Andrey...

I decided to write an extended blog post today (Wednesday) because events in Italy are so interesting. My usual short post on a Wednesday will resume next week. George Soros is now saying that “everything that could go wrong has gone wrong” in Europe and a financial collapse is in the wind (Source). I doubt the latter but agree with the former assessment. All the flaws in the original neoliberal design of the Eurozone have been revealed and all the reasons why those flaws were created in...

Although highly unstable there are 2 extremely powerful things holding it together.

Yesterday brought the launch of a new and revised edition of Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy by William Janeway. Anybody who read the first (2012) edition will recall the theme of the ‘three player game’ – market innovators, speculators and the state – informed by Keynes and Minsky as well as Janeway’s own experience combining an economics PhD with his experience shaping the world of venture capital investment. The term refers to how the complicated interactions between...

Professor Roger E. A. Farmer has written Prosperity For All: How to Prevent Financial Crises, in which he lays out the case for creating a sovereign wealth fund whose objective is to stabilise financial markets. If we can eliminate financial crises, we can avoid the rise in unemployment that results. Although that is an interesting concept, I was highly skeptical about the idea before I read the book -- and my skepticism remains after reading it. Instead, the discussion of macro theory...

Despite the harmful effects of the ECB asset purchases to their biggest bank.... still down to 5.2%. #Germany marches on: German unemployment rate falls to record low of 5.2%. pic.twitter.com/PrF9Llejpd— Holger Zschaepitz (@Schuldensuehner) May 30, 2018