Mike Norman Economics

Prime Minister Theresa May committed a blood libel against Russians in the House of Commons last week. This was the allegation that the Russian state and all Russians are murderers. May has subsequently asked the Foreign Secretary and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to correct the record by charging that only one Russian, President Vladimir Putin, is a murderer. The Canadian Government was also requested by the British to urgently correct the record May has been making in...

Young people getting up off their butts en masse, taking their eyeballs off their phone, and striking to protest gun violence in schools. 60's redux? Is activism on the rise again after Occupy?New York Daily News — OpinionThe youngsters school the college kids: Last week’s gun protests were powerfully effective — older students should take notes Todd Gitlin | professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University and the author of "Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit and the Promise...

China has selected American-trained economist Yi Gang to become the country’s new central bank governor, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Sunday, citing unnamed people with knowledge of the matter. "American-trained." Oh oh. Hope he is not as clueless as the US Fed and conventional US academics. OANChina To Appoint Yi Gang As New Central Bank Governor: WSJ

A new review in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that America spends about twice as much as other high-income countries on healthcare.  At the same time, the health outcomes, or how well people fare with their health, aren't any better and are often worse than countries that spend half as much on healthcare as the US does. The study's authors concluded that the main reason the US spends so much has to do with the prices of labor, goods (like pharmaceuticals), and...

I have encountered a number of discussions of fiscal sustainability over the past weeks. In particular, there have been debates between proponents of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and mainstream economists. This article does not attempt to settle the debate (although I am in the MMT camp, and obviously biased), rather frame the discussion. One of the problems with the debate is that the sides tend to talk past each other, as they have a quite different theoretical views, and this article...

This is a really good and is three articles in one. KVYou would have to have been in a coma or otherwise unconscious to not have heard the one about the two poisoned Russians on an English park bench and how those evil Russians did it, the news media has talked of little else in the past week. Despite giving this story immense amounts of air time, the media have completely failed to apply even the most rudimentary standards of journalism, they have done a shockingly bad job of reporting on...

Good analysis.Paul Craig Roberts War Is On The HorizonAlsoHaaretzIsraeli Military Drill Simulates Multi-front War – With Russia Intervening Over Syria Yaniv KubovichAlsoLies and shifting goal posts. The US leadership never intended to deliver.National Security ArchivesNATO Expansion: What Yeltsin Heard

The line that novichoks can only be produced by Russia is now proven to be a complete lie. As I previously proved by referencing their publications, in 2013 the OPCW scientific advisory committee note the evidence was sparse that novichoks had ever been successfully produced, and in 2016 that was still the line being published by Porton Down in 2016. You can find the hard evidence of all that here. I have now been sent the vital information that in 2017, Iranian scientists set out to study...

Sort of like taking away one's driver's license in the US for offense like reckless driving, accumulating too many citations in a period, or driving while intoxicated. It's unclear in the US why persons are put the no-fly list since the government does not have to divulge the reason. The two statements published on NDRC's website elaborate on cases which would garner a bad rating. One statement says that restrictions on train travel apply to people who've engaged in wrongdoing, as defined...

US empire is in decline. Reports of the end of the US being the unitary power in world affairs are common, as are predictions of the end of US empire. China surpassed the United States as the world economic leader, according to Purchasing Power Parity Gross National Product, and Russia announced new weapons that can overcome the US’ defense systems. What is happening in the United States, in response, is to do more of what has been causing the decline.... Too many wars on the periphery of...