Mike Norman Economics

In the end, while standard macroeconomic reforms may work in theory -- albeit under an unrealistic set of assumptions -- they’ve never worked in practice. Rather than eliminating the controls that protect China from a financial crisis, leaders should confront their debt problem head-on and begin deleveraging. For that to happen, it would help if the decision-making process were more, not less centralised. Only forceful action from the top can overcome the tremendously powerful vested...

Since its financial meltdown in 2008 and unprecedented bailout by the U.S. taxpayer, Citigroup (parent of Citibank) has been repeatedly charged by its Federal regulators with odious crimes against its pooled mortgage investors, credit card and banking customers, student loan borrowers, and for its foreclosure frauds. It has paid billions of dollars in fines for its past misdeeds while new charges pile up. In 2015, it became an admitted felon for participating in rigging foreign exchange...

The latest – EIB Investment Report 2017/2018 – published last week by the European Investment Bank tells anyone who cares to take those Europhile Rose Coloured Glasses off for just a second how deep the failure of the European policy making structures are and how long the negative impacts of those failures will resonate. This is the true ‘burden for our (their) grand kids’ sort of stuff. In claiming they had to run tight fiscal policy biased towards surpluses to avoid forcing the future...

UK Russiagate. More insanity. Paul Robinson takes it apart.IrrussianalityThe hunters become the huntedPaul Robinson | Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa

Was Ayn Rand just the expression of a cultural syndrome and an amplification of the Horatio Alger myth? Have new cultural myths been born to suit the historical transition from feudalism to liberalism, in the West at least?  Are the conflicts between liberalism and traditionalism the conflict of different myths characteristic of incompatible worldview? How is it that many conservatives find no contradiction between economic liberalism and social and political traditionalism? Is...

Where are the politicians on the left and the right who believe in free speech who should be trying to stop the loss of our Net Neutrality?RT and other non-western news sources in English provide a different lens through which we can view such important events, perspectives unclouded by a western patrician agenda. They and progressive sites are being gradually silenced and blacklisted, herding us back into the arms of the corporate propagandists. Few liberals have been prepared to raise...

The BBC has got into trouble for reporting the C14 Ukrainian neo-Nazi as just lovable rogues trying to protect their country. BBC LEGITIMISING NEO-NAZI HATE CRIMES IN UKRAINEIf the BBC carried a report portraying Neo-Nazi’s engaged in hate crime in London as lovable rogues turned to a good cause there would be outrage.  Yet that is what the BBC has done in a report on Ukraine entitled ‘C14 Group: hooligans who catch separatists’.    An impartial journalist adhering to the BBC “editorial...

Most of what lies ahead hinges on who will control Syria’s oil and gas fields. It’s Pipelineistan all over again; all wars are energy wars. Damascus simply won’t accept an energy bonanza for the US-supported SDF, actually led by the YPG. And neither would Russia. Apart from Moscow holding on to a strategic eastern Mediterranean base, eventually Gazprom wants to be an investment partner/operator in a newly feasible Iran-Iraq-Syria gas pipeline, whose main customer will be the EU. Beyond...

Mathew Robane says that many cities compete with each other by offering massive incentives to attract large corporations to set up businesses in their cities, but, he adds, when you do the math these financial incentives are terribly inefficient and wasteful of tax payers money.  Mathew Rohane says how these big corporations know exactly where they intend to place their new second headquarters, shop, warehouse, or offices, and are just pretending to be looking around so as to get the maximum...

A superb article by Pat Buchanan. Are we willing to play passive observer as thousands and then tens of thousands of innocent civilians—the old, sick, weak, and infants and toddlers first—die from a starvation blockade supported by the mighty United States of America? Without U.S. targeting and refueling, Saudi planes could not attack the Houthis effectively and Riyadh could not win this war. But when did Congress authorize this war on a nation that never attacked us? Yemen today is...