Mike Norman Economics

Backgrounder on what's up in Deutschland.Sputnik InternationalLittle Trouble in Big Bundestag: Sputnik's Guide to Merkel's Coalition FiascoalsoStrategic Culture FoundationGermany"s Government Impasse: End of Merkel Era Is Within SightAlex Gorka

Something else to keep an eye on as part of changes to bank regulation.Doesn't understand the QE effects causing the GFC and subsequent credit contraction but not too bad otherwise; gets the direction right anyway: One large downside to Dodd-Frank was that in order to hold the required capital, all banks decreased lending to shore-up their liquid holdings and meet the regulatory minimums.  Without the ability to borrow funds, small businesses have a hard time raising money to create...

Here is a summary of another interesting study I read last week (published March 30, 2017) – Happiness at Work – from academic researchers Jan‐Emmanuel De Neve and George Ward. It explores the relationship between happiness and labour force status, including whether an individual is employed or not and the types of jobs they are doing. The results reinforce a long literature, which emphatically concludes that people are devastated when they lose their jobs and do not adapt to unemployment...

A new paper challenges Thomas Piketty’s portrayal of an income distribution dominated at the top by passive rentiers who do nothing to earn their money, arguing that income inequality in America today is driven by the working rich. ProMarket — The blog of the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago Booth School of BusinessWho Are the Top 1 Percent in America? The Answer from New Research Might Surprise You Samantha Eyler-Driscoll

I just wanted to let everyone know that I have a Kindle edition of the SFC models textbook available. However, the ebook edition is a "textbook" version of the book -- effectively the same thing as a PDF with fixed pages. Not all Kindle readers will support this format (particularly older ones). I believe that the Kindle store will not sell you the book if your reader does not support it, but I suggest caution. I just glanced at the book on my iPad, and it looked OK (which is unsurprising,...

See how evil the people are behind Russiagate which the MSM are getting their information from. [embedded content]

According to fresh figures from the IMF (October 24), Russia’s GDP is expected to exceed $4 trillion first time ever. By this measure, Russia is the 6th largest economy in the world, virtually on par with Germany, who scored $4.15 trillion. At the same time, China has solidified its position as the world’s indisputably largest economy. With its $23 trillion, China’s economy is already bigger 1/5th than the U.S. economy with its $19 trillion [based on PPP].... Emerging countries, and not...

It has been amusing to watch the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets express their dismay over the rise and spread of “fake news.” These publications take it as an obvious truth that what they provide is straightforward, unbiased, fact-based reporting. They do offer such news, but they also provide a steady flow of their own varied forms of fake news, often by disseminating false or misleading information supplied to them by the national security state, other branches of...

As it turns out, Nature (unfortunately behind a paywall) has just published a study in which the authors attempt to estimate the degree of wealth inequality in ancient societies for which we do not have written records.* What they did is collect data from 63 archaeological sites or groups of sites, used the distribution of house sizes as a proxy for wealth, and assigned Gini coefficients to each society. What they are able to show is that wealth disparities generally increased with the...

Guy Standing’s The Corruption of Capitalism (Biteback Publishing 2017) is a powerful attack on rentier capitalism and, very explicitly, a call to revolt. It is very informative and the detailed factual descriptions that Standing puts before his readers are intended to make them angry. He succeeded with me and probably will with most readers. Standing is at his best describing the features of crony capitalism that are totally different from the neo-liberal story of free markets that...