Mike Norman Economics

Crypto is quickly moving into all the shit holes...First Venezuela, then Iran, now Turkey - Are national #cryptocurrencies the new normal? https://t.co/3MjKSZKIhz— Crypto Dost (@TheCryptoDost) February 23, 2018

In an exclusive, Reuters reports that the Trump administration is going into the Iraq reconstruction conference in Kuwait this week with no plans to contribute a dime to the effort. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will attend. Iraqi Prime Minister Haydar al-Abadi estimates that Iraq needs $100 billion to rebuild. The country is still devastated from the 2003 US war of aggression and 8.5 year military occupation, which spurred Sunni insurgencies and led to the collapse of the US- and...

The US elite believes that this worked for Reagan. There is, of course, the side-benefit of feeding the military-industrial-govermental complex that is foundational for the US politico-economic system.I would add that Russia is not the principal target. The chief competitor of the US is China, and the US cannot achieve its goal of permanent global hegemony without regime change in China and partition of the country into pieces that cannot challenge the US economically. This is only...

In the wake of a Pennsylvania Supreme Court order that struck down a Republican congressional map as unconstitutionally gerrymandered, Sen. Pat Toomey said that impeachment of the justices is “a conversation that has to happen.”The GOP map had given Republicans a nearly 3-1 congressional majority in a state that leans Democratic; the court’s new map will still give Republicans a significant advantage, but slightly less of one. For Toomey, that amounted, he said, to a “blatant,...

New mission?The InterceptU.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Will Remove “Nation of Immigrants” From Mission StatementRyan Devereaux

It is amazing how frequently we hear people asserting that the massive inequality we are now seeing in the United States is the result of an unfettered market. I realize that this is a convenient view for those who are on the upside of things, but it also happens to be nonsense.The latest nonsense-pusher is Amy Chua, who warns in a New York Times column (2/20/18) about the destructive path the United States is now on, where a disaffected white population takes out its wrath on economic...

Commercial operation. The DuranJulian Assange explains how “troll farm” in St. Petersburg was nothing more than social media spam business (Video) Alex Christoforou alsoDemocrats want taxpayers to give them $300M to fight $100K in “Russian troll” Facebook ads Also at The Duran Lucy Komisar, who is perhaps the greatest living investigative journalist, has discovered — and has documented in detail — that the source of the Russiagate charge against Russia, the source of the charge that...

President Trump presented his infrastructure plan last week. If you’re keen on the idea of out-of-control privatized utilities gouging customers and manipulating energy markets, or consortia building overpriced, expensive toll roads (until they go bust), then you’ll love the president’s proposals. His mooted public-private partnerships are another variant of socialism for the rich and free market discipline for the rest of us. PPPs are like a religion that offers its adherents the promise...

The U.S. Treasury's top diplomat accused Beijing of "patently non-market behavior" and said that the United States needed stronger responses to counter it.  David Malpass, Treasury's undersecretary for international affairs, said that market-oriented, democratic governments were awakening to the challenges posed by China's economic system, including from its state-owned banks and export credit agencies. He reiterated his view that China had stopped liberalizing its economy and was actually...

All Mueller has found is a bait-click commercial marketing scheme that had nothing to do with election interference.… When a country armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons and overwhelmed by its own exceptionalism and indispensability has political and media lunatics equating a bait-click commercial marketing scheme with Pearl Harbor, that country is a recipe for the end of the world. After done a significant amount of research on this, I have come to this conclusion, too.  Paul Craig...