Mike Norman Economics

Have these people lost their minds? Who would ever vote for them?  The whole stable needs to be cleaned out.Zero HedgePutin Plot? Democrats Ridiculed For Claiming Moscow Behind Chelsea Manning's Senate Run Tyler Durden Also The Intercept Centrist Dems Launch Smear Campaign Against Young Trans Woman, All to Keep an Old Straight White Man in Power Glenn Greenwald

Germany looks to the future. Uncle Sam won't be pleased. HSBC chief executive Stuart Gulliver, speaking at the same conference in Hong Kong, said that the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) will increase the usage of RMB even further. China’s central bank announced new measures earlier this month to encourage cross-border yuan transactions in support of BRI projects. Asia TimesGerman central bank to add RMB to currency reserves: Follows ECB’s move to include China’s currency last year

Three Major Forces Dalio says this model has guided Bridgewater for over 30 years, and that there are three major forces that shape the economy: 1. Productivity Growth Productivity growth, which is measured as a percentage of GDP, grows over time as knowledge, technology, and innovations help to raise our productivity and living standards. 2. Short-Term Debt Cycle Usually lasting 5-8 years, the short-term debt cycle is a repeating pattern that occurs as credit expands and contracts.3....

Beneath the rosy picture of the upturning global economy. I would like to be optimistic that this upturn will be followed by a shallow recession and then continued economic growth. After all, banks have been recapitalized and companies are flush with cash. But on the household side of things, it’s a different story. What I see is rising economic and social anxiety and a broken social compact in advanced nations. This is feeding political populism, even as the economy enters its best phase...

Short and significant.Russia Feed.One third of Russian currency assets are in the US – what if Washington freezes them?Dmitriy Sudakov

The US argues that US intervention in foreign elections to "promote democracy" is completely legitimate because "human rights.' Liberal interventionism good, all other interventionism bad. Liberal internationalism good, socialist internationalism bad. Hypocrisy based on double standards?Actually, it not about dominance of Western liberal values, but really about Western neoliberal economic dominance as the basis of transnational corporate totalitarianism supplanting...

While this is an important post worth reading in full, I think Professor Robinson misses the point in speculation about the outcome of the ideological conflict between the US and Russia.  His account is based on political philosophy. It ignores both the economics and the geostrategy of the US based on economics, which is where the rubber meets the road. Principles are only necessary for rationalization of otherwise aggressive behavior aimed at dominance. Political dominance is only...

There are times when so-called progressives outdo themselves with their (usually self-styled) ‘genius solutions’ to the ravages of neoliberalism. They come up with elaborate ‘solutions’ that people on the Left get feverishly excited about yet fail to see how obviously ridiculous these strategies are when all the options are allowed. They, in fact, step further into the mirky neoliberal world by trying to be progressive because they fail to see what the basic issue is. One recent example of...

I covered the war in El Salvador for five years. It was a peasant uprising by the dispossessed against the 14 ruling families and the handful of American corporations that ran El Salvador as if it was a plantation. Half of the population was landless. Laborers worked as serfs in the coffee plantations, the sugar cane fields and the cotton fields in appalling poverty. Attempts to organize and protest peacefully to combat the huge social inequality were met with violence, including fire from...

How strategists think. Taiwan should buy 1,000 missiles to seal off China's central and southeastern provinces in the event of war, said the scholar. Why 1000 when two supposedly would do the job. Swarm tactics. Also good for business. Asia TimesTwo missiles could blow up Three Gorges: strategistCounterpoint. Signs of growing universalism in Europe, although  a lot of "nationalists" won't be happy even though she is first generation Belgian, born in Antwerp of a Chinese father and...