Mike Norman Economics

Bad title, which the author corrects in the article. Neoliberalism is a political theory rather than an economic theory. Neoclassical economics is an economic theory. The tile contains a category error. The most important thing to understand is that neoliberalism is a post-war political movement that grew out of the Mont Pelerin Society, a thought collective that formed a consensus not to put the market at the centre of the state, but to take it over completely. Its entire objective is to...

Nothing will say more about who we've become as a nation than if a torturer is allowed to head the CIA. Sums it up. It's bad now, and her nomination makes it worse. But her confirmation and occupying office would be the icing on the cake.Kills US soft power. It's a gift to enemies of America, too.The American ConservativeGina Haspel: As If Nuremberg Never HappenedPeter Van Buren, 24-year State Department veteran

In the crosshairs? Not just Brennan either. None of the leaking, unmasking, surveillance, or other activities directed against the Trump campaign can be properly understood, if one does not bear in mind that it was considered a sure thing that Secretary Clinton would become President, at which point illegal and extralegal activities undertaken to help her win would garner praise, not prison. But she lost. The "perfect crime" that wasn't. Now "the gang that couldn't shoot straight" is...

Cryptocurrencies have been the subject of recent attacks by official sector representatives, and the G20 finance ministers will consider regulatory proposals at their next meeting in Buenos Aires. This column argues that while cryptocurrencies present certain risks, they also represent an important innovation that promises to enhance choice and efficiency in monetary transactions. A proportionate, risk-based regulatory approach is required to accommodate differential attitudes and...

I have been arguing, since 2016 (e.g., here, here, and here), that one of the likely outcomes of the kind of corporate tax cuts Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans have supported—and, as we saw, eventually rammed through—would be an increase in inequality. That’s because corporations would likely use a portion of their higher profits to engage in stock buybacks, leading to an increase in stock prices. And stock ownership in the United States is already grotesquely unequal. Therefore,...

On March 13, 2018, the OECD released its latest Economic Outlook with accompanying “Interim projections” as at March 2018) suggesting that the current growth phase will continue through to next year as consumer and business confidence improves and translates in higher investment rates. The OECD, however, forecasts that growth in the Eurozone will decline over the next two years. The major Eurozone nations (France, Germany and Italy) are not witnessing the growing investment expenditure. The...

Here are the preliminary results with only 76% of the votes counted (but the outcome is already obvious) explained in simple, plain English: 1) Putin easily wins by a landslide and is *more* popular than ever2) The Russian Communists and Zhirinovsky have reached terminal irrelevancy3) Only 2.6% of Russians are pro-USA and generally pro-West (Sobchak+Yavlinsky)4) The entire AngloZionist anti-Putin campaign has miserably failed5) The Empire has two choices left: go to war or fold6) If the...

First, this is not a "bad apple" story. The dark art of dynamic psychometric manipulation in politics was not pioneered by Cambridge Analytica for Trump, but by i360 Themis, the operation founded by the Koch brothers.… The second danger is to forget that the GOP has been using computer power to wipe away voting rights of Black and Hispanic voters for years — by "caging," "Crosscheck," citizenship challenges based on last name (Garcia? Not American!?!) and more — a far more effective use of...

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase are working with the e-commerce giant. Game-changer?Recode Amazon is creating a health care company with the help of Warren Buffett and JPMorgan Chase Jason Del Ray ht Brad DeLong at Grasping RealitySee also The e-commerce giant is muscling its way into a number of businesses that banks have long dominated. American BankerHow Amazon is shaking up financial services Keven Wack

Andrew McCabe’s claim that his firing amounts to a “war on the FBI” doesn’t make sense considering it was the FBI’s own internal affairs office that recommended he be fired, as FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley explains.... About more than just McCabe. The real problem that most of the mainstream media don’t want to even mention is how unprecedented it was to have both Presidential campaigns under serious criminal investigation in the weeks before the 2016 election! In all fairness, even if...