Mike Norman Economics

China warned on Friday it would fight back "at any cost" with fresh trade measures if the United States continues on its path of protectionism, hours after President Donald Trump threatened to slap an additional $100 billion in tariffs on Chinese goods.... China’s Commerce Ministry spokesman, Gao Feng, called the U.S. action “extremely mistaken” and unjustified, adding that the spat was a struggle between unilateralism and multilateralism. He also said no negotiations were likely in the...

Fans of “let-the-market-decide” thinking face a trillion-dollar puzzle that’s deadly as well as costly. To diagnose this unhealthy situation, we’re fortunate to have Robert Frank (RF), an economist who writes regularly for The New York Times (he’s also written books I regularly quote). Evonomics The American Healthcare System Shows Why We Can’t Trust Free Market Ideologues Jag Bhalla interviews Robert H. Frank

Neolithic and Bronze Age economies operated mainly on credit. Because of the time gap between planting and harvesting, few payments were made at the time of purchase. When Babylonians went to the local alehouse, they did not pay by carrying grain around in their pockets. They ran up a tab to be settled at harvest time on the threshing floor. The ale women who ran these “pubs” would then pay most of this grain to the palace for consignments advanced to them during the crop year. These...

Good backgrounder. Relatively short. From another vantage, Xi Jinping is also reformulating Chinese Communist thought. This is the underlying meaning of Xi Jinping Thought. Xi is emphasizing the continuous history of China as the "Middle Kingdom" operating "under Heaven." The CCP now holds the mantle and will only do so and can only do so as long as it possesses the "mandate of Heaven." Debunking the "China-watchers."Xi Jinping is moving away from the European roots of Communism in...

Newsletter Archive: the whole series of 87 issues of the History of Economic Thought Newsletter is now available on line. Download free at Dropbox.History of Economic Thought Newsletter Archive

Who's in charge here? Now that Trump has given in to Pentagon demands that the US stay in Syria, it will be interesting to see just how long "a little longer" will actually become. Will we be having the same discussion 17 years from now? Zero HedgePentagon Says No Syria Pullout Timeline; "Exasperated" and "Frustrated" Trump Concedes Tyler Durden

Only two years after Tim Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web, he wrote a sentence which, for me, teaches us more about the Cambridge Analytica story than much of the punditry that we've seen since: "just as wealth is no longer measured by the ostentation of wealth but by the secret circulation of capital, so war is not measured by being unleashed but by its speculative unfolding in an abstract, electronic and informational space." Must-read. Details how the British ruling class is...

As a long-term columnist at the NYT, Thomas Friedman apparently never feels the need to know anything about the topics on which he writes. This explains his sarcastic speculation that Putin could be a CIA agent, since he has done so much to hurt Russia.For all his authoritarian tendencies, it is likely that most Russians think primarily about Putin’s impact on the economy, just as is typically the case among voters in the United States. On that front, Putin has a very good record....

Here’s my forecast for tomorrow’s jobs number.

Video and story.This is turning into farce.Is Boris Johnson trying to live down the common Russian name Boris?The London EconomicWatch: Jeremy Corbyn accuses Boris Johnson of misleading public on the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia SkripalSee alsoRussian and Eurasian PoliticsPutin, Skrypal, Novichok, and Spy Markets: UPDATEGordon M. Hahn, analyst and Advisory Board member at Geostrategic Forecasting Corporation, member of the Executive Advisory Board at the American Institute of Geostrategy,...