Mike Norman Economics

More libertarian utopia...Japanese Electronics Retail Giant Launches Bitcoin Payments https://t.co/6Gvd2AcyFn pic.twitter.com/JfGgERKGUq— CoinDesk (@coindesk) January 29, 2018

Jeremy Grantham sat down with Consuelo Mack at WealthTrack to expand upon his recent bullish comments about the US markets. However, far from being bullish, the essence of Grantham’s comments were extremely bearish, suggesting investors could expect only a couple of percent real return over the next couple of decades in US equities. The veteran investor also made bearish comments about the US bond market. His advice is to rotate out of US equities and pile into emerging markets, as much as...

Speculation at his point, but if the US doesn't do something like this, China will leave the US seriously in the dust. Jesse's Café AméricainUS Government Considers Nationalizing US Cellular Network And Unifying Upgrade to 5G Next Generation WirelessSee also President Donald Trump’s national security team is looking at options to counter the threat of China spying on U.S. phone calls that include the government building a super-fast 5G wireless network, a senior administration official said...

Market saturation. Asia TimesChinese phone market enters ‘zero growth’ stageOlivia Lin

The IMF put out a new working Paper last week (January 23, 2018)) – Economic Convergence in the Euro Area: Coming Together or Drifting Apart? – which while they don’t admit it demonstrates that the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has failed to achieve its most basic aims – economic convergence. The stated aim of European integration has always been to achieve a convergence in the living standards of those within the European Union. That goes back to the 1957 Treaty of Rome, which...

An Australian study has found that about one in five corporate executives are psychopaths – roughly the same rate as among prisoners.  The study of 261 senior professionals in the United States found that 21 per cent had clinically significant levels of psychopathic traits. The rate of psychopathy in the general population is about one in a hundred. Nathan Brooks, a forensic psychologist who conducted the study, said the findings suggested that businesses should improve their recruitment...

In today’s widespread rejection of politics as usual, an objective systemwide crisis has found its subjective political voice. The political strand of our general crisis is a crisis of hegemony. Donald Trump is the poster child for this hegemonic crisis. But we cannot understand his ascent unless we clarify the conditions that enabled it. And that means identifying the worldview that Trumpism displaced and charting the process through which it unraveled. The indispensable ideas for this...

It is with a heavy heart that we inform Consortiumnews readers that Editor Robert Parry has passed away. As regular readers know, Robert (or Bob, as he was known to friends and family) suffered a stroke in December, which – despite his own speculation that it may have been brought on by the stress of covering Washington politics – was the result of undiagnosed pancreatic cancer that he had been unknowingly living with for the past 4-5 years. He unfortunately suffered two more debilitating...

Caitlan Johnstone gets the policy, strategy and tactics right, in line what we have been saying here for some time. It's about the US maintaining and extending global hegemony in face of the challenge of China's rise. The 2018 US National Defense Strategy all but spells it out. We are facing increased global disorder, characterized by decline in the long-standing rules-based international order… Translation: The so-called international liberal order that held sway in the West since...

Anatoly Karlin reports from Moscow. Putin is expected to win handily, but the rest of the vote does count because Putin will take the results into consideration in governing. So voting does actually send a message.  Choosing not to vote does too, since it sends a message of citizens' political apathy and discouragement, as well as a vote for "none of the above" without actually casing it. The Unz Review Russia Elections 2018: VCIOM Predictions Market Anatoly Karlin