Mike Norman Economics

The market is always ingenious; the answer to school gun shootings: bullet proof blankets for kids! And Trump wants to arm teachers with guns too so then they can go into lessons with guns looking menacing in their gun holsters, while kids would be carrying about with them all day bullet proof blankets, Now I don't know how heavy a bullet proof vest is, but I a hunch that bullet anything would weigh a ton. Gee, what a place, hey, and the rest of us around the world think sod living there!...

Dick Welcome says he's not anti-market, but if you want a government funded school voucher system with private schools competing with each other then you will need more bureaucracy to police the system. Schools trying to survive will simply cook the books to make their schools look better than they are. But in the book, The Private Abuse of the Public Interest: Market Myths and Policy Muddles LD Brown and Lawrence Jacobs showed that when governments and local councils privatised services the...

[embedded content] It turns out that oil companies knew way back in the 1960's about climate change. They commissioned scientific research to see how bad it would be so they would know how strong to construct their oil rigs and pipelines. Their research showed that in Alaska the ice would start to melt so they knew that their oil rigs built for the current conditions would last well into the future, but in other parts of the world they built stronger pipelines and oil rigs to counter the...

Don't tell me now all these morons are going to be going all around saying: "we're running out of Olympics!!!!"...When the Olympics are over and you have to go home ? #PyeongChang2018 #Olympics pic.twitter.com/P53PQBJGw8— Madison Chock (@chockolate02) February 25, 2018 These were good games... South Korea: NOT a shit hole .... although they do eat dogs there I guess can't have everything...

After all the heavy politics, I found this to be light entertainment. And Steve Keen is a real nice guy. KV  [embedded content] Steve keen I had prepared a set of slides on "Can we avoid another financial crisis?", but with an audience exclusively of economics students at Sheffield University today, and pressed for time, I "went rogue", and challenged the limited nature of the "education" they get in economics today. Gee it felt good! I've endured seeing rubbish portrayed as reason...

Despite Putin's popularity it seems most Russians would prefer to go back to communism. They worked six days a week but it was leisure. The goods they made, like their cars, were often shoddy, but so what, life was easy. KV Over 50 percent of Russian citizens believe the collapse of the Soviet Union was bad and could have been avoided. The majority of Russians polled in a 2016 study said they would prefer living under the old Soviet Union and would like to see the socialist system and...

Hmmm what will they think of next.... maybe they could send an Ambassador from their Embassy to California to help that state with its financing...New Bitcoin Embassy Opens in the United States https://t.co/yZXlMFiiXu #Bitcoin pic.twitter.com/BYPcQvidlK— Bitcoin News (@BTCTN) February 25, 2018

More trite and coerced human behavior modification:How Billy Graham Changed My Life https://t.co/7p0LSpoUKt— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) February 24, 2018

The financial press said Latvia was said to be the poster child of neoliberalism. It massively deregulated, privatised, implemented austerity, lowered taxes on the rich and raised them on everyone else, crushed labour slashing wages,  and the economy seemed to boom as exports increased. But young graduates could not find jobs so they emigrated in droves, while Latvian gangsters came back seeing that the lack of deregulation meant they could get up to serious mischief.    Last week we...

Problems with pensions.  Two weeks ago, in the aftermath of the February 5 volocaust, we quoted David Hunt, CEO of $1.2 trillion asset manager PGIM, who said ignore the volatility spike, the real financial timebomb was and remains public pensions: "if you were going to look for what’s the possible real crack in the financial architecture for the next crisis, rather than looking in the rearview mirror, pension funds would be on our list."  In a brief discussion wondering what...