Mike Norman Economics

In short, if the US fails to prevent Europe and Asia’s burgeoning trade with Iran – and I think they will fail – this moment will be seen by historians as a key marker in US decline as a world power. Trump & Co. (GOP) betting the farm? The ROW is opposed and so are a majority domestically.Craig Murray BlogTrump’s Act of American Hubris Craig Murray, formerly British ambassador to Uzbekistan and Rector of the University of Dundee See also World Economic ForumThis is what you need to...

No post for the liberal Kudrin, but the fiscal hawk Siluanov heading the treasury is promoted to First Deputy Prime Minister Russia InsiderPutin Starts Fourth Term by Sacking Several Senior Ministers

Gina Haspel is just the type of status-quo choice that Donald Trump promised not to make. She’s not a swamp-drainer. She’s a swamp thing. Trump doesn't have what it takes to confront the US siloviki. LobeLogThe Banality* of Haspel John Feffer* "Banality" is an allusion to Hannah Arendt's The Banality of Evil.

[embedded content] Off-GuardianRaising the serious possibility even the director-general of the OPCW doesn’t really know what Novichok is supposed to be, Ahmet Uzumcu, incumbent of that post, claimed May 4 that a “quarter cup to a half cup” of Novichok had been used to attack the Skripals in Salisbury. This, of course, would be enough to kill every man. woman and child in the city. This led into an even odder “clarification” from the OPCW within hours, which didn’t so much correct Uzumcu’s...

While mainstream ecological theory has been dismissive of Karl Marx, serious research in recent decades has recovered some of his very important insights on ecological issues. The pioneers have been James O’Connor and the journal Capitalism, Nature and Socialism—a tradition continued by Joel Kovel—but the most systematic and thorough investigations on Marx’s ecological views are those of John Bellamy Foster and his friends from Monthly Review. Many ecologists accuse Marx of “productivism.”...

I was running late yesterday and the blog post was already rather long so I left some matters concerning central banks for today. The question we address briefly today is what is the role of central banks in all these trade transactions. Does an export surplus country face an ever increasing money supply as central banks provide the counterparty service to traders who sell in a foreign currency but want their own currency (such as a manufacturer who incurs costs in say Yen but sales revenue...

From the perspective of those who work or are interested in finance, it seems obvious that business decisions are a major driver of the business cycle, assuming that policymakers are not doing anything particularly stupid (as in the Euro area in the post-crisis period). The important exception is the housing market, which is dependent upon the willingness of households to borrow insane amounts of money. (However, even this exception is dependent upon the decisions of the financial sector to...

Denial — from the highest levels of government to mainstream media still reluctant or refusing to even say or print the word torture to a public which still embraces torture despite its barbarity and inefficacy — is the order of the day when it comes to facing America’s tortured history. Our nation’s failure to honestly examine its darkest deeds raises the all-too-real prospect of their repetition, a chilling possibility that seems likelier than ever given Trump’s choice of Haspel, someone...

Analysis. "b" doesn't mention it, but all analysis needs to focus on the big picture, in which China is the only adversary that the US perceives as an actual threat to permanent US global hegemony. Russia is just a sideshow in this.  Therefore, every analysis should ask what US policy and actions imply with respect to China.  An obvious economic goal of the US is to be able to shut down the export of energy to China. This is an overarching aspect of what's up in the Middle East and...

Impact on markets.