Mike Norman Economics

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

An interesting article on Ann Pettifor's book, The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of the Bankers  Ann Pettifor is a director of Prime Economics, which advocates for a more Keynesian view of macroeconomics, and has been involved in development and environmental economics for many years. In The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of the Bankers (Verso, 2017) she correctly identifies that ‘money enables us to do what we can within our limited natural and human resources’,...

No austerity ever in the US anyway:Government spending is at an all-time high. Look at federal spending by agency and make your own charts here: https://t.co/lKB2Vykiit pic.twitter.com/NLjn2XxsDY— DownsizeTheFeds (@DownsizeTheFeds) January 3, 2018  Other harmful policies were implemented both to cause the GFC and the following slow recovery' but "austerity!" wasn't one of them...

Simonyan nails it, again.Simonyan nails it, again. Russia InsiderHead of RT: American Media is Completely Fake - Even Your President Agrees (Video)Leo Standish

That idea, that the market ensures that only the most efficient prosper, is a central message of neoliberal ideology, and it has held UK and US governments under its sway since the time of Thatcher and Reagan. But that ideology contains a large and deep internal contradiction, which applies particularly to large firms like Carillion. To see what that contraction is, we need to talk about ordoliberalism and Ronald Coase.Ordoliberalism is widely known as the German version of neoliberalism....

Interesting exploration of Nassim Taleb's systematic thought and its implicitly evolutionary basis. Global Inequality The importance of Taleb’s system: from the Fourth Quadrant to the Skin in the Game Branko Milanovic | Visiting Presidential Professor at City University of New York Graduate Center and senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), and formerly lead economist in the World Bank's research department and senior associate at Carnegie Endowment for International...