Mike Norman Economics

Despite all his tough talk and bravado, Trump is the weakest president in American history. He has lamely, and in record time, become the most malleable puppet of the neocon, military/security state. He is the embodiment of what Eisenhower warned against. Even the meek and thin-skinned Obama wasn't this bad. Obama at least pushed back. sometimes. He had limits. Trump? A total puppet.

At one stroke, there is a new asset class which is an easily divisible store of value. A decade since the "global financial crisis" in 2007, everyone from analysts to market commentators (to people who actually know what they're talking about) have been pondering what will end the quantitative easing (QE) fuelled rescue package? Apart from the moral hazard, the madness of ultra-low interest rates and the injustice of savers receiving next to nothing, it was always known that short-term...

Policymakers must stop pretending they can fix broken markets with more and more regulation.  Tory slogans are a gift to those who want to see everything nationalised. They had been ranting about wanting a capitalism ‘that works for all’, now it’s an economy that is ‘fit for the future’. What does that tell our young people about what we have now? It tells them that even the Tories are worried about seeing capitalism ‘red in tooth and claw’, particularly in our privatised public...

They are both good. The Real News Network have a very good interview with Jill Stein.Jimmy Dore - Jill Stein: Newest Target Of McCarthyism [embedded content] The Real News - Jill Stein Denounces Probe over 'Collusion with Russians' [embedded content]

[embedded content] In this video founder of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 and former finance minister of Greece, Yanis Varoufakis, talks about the concept of "Debtors' Prison" and the economic ideas of John Maynard Keynes. In addition Varoufakis surfaces the double standards of the European Union regarding the enforcement of economic rules amongst different member states.Nothing new here for seasoned economists, but I like the way Yanis Varoufakis put these points of view across....

The effusive praise for this cryptocurrency is nothing but self-generated flimflam. No messing here, Christopher Whalen, an investment banker, says Bitcoin is fraud.  Stripped down to its basic elements, bitcoin is a classical fraud, a form of high-tech gaming that has captured the imagination of millions of greedy and gullible people around the globe. Participants exchange a legal tender dollar or some other real asset, for example, for a share of the limited supply of bitcoins at...

The American Conservative is one of the best anti-war sites going.  Trump administration officials keep making reckless statements that could very well provoke an incident with North Korea that leads to war: White House national security adviser H.R. McMaster says that the United States “must be prepared, if necessary, to compel the denuclearization of North Korea.” McMaster’s comments, in an interview with the BBC that was posted on the Internet on December 19, were the latest...

So how did such a dangerous document emerge from the White House? This article also covers US antagonism towards Iran and China.  President Trump’s 2017 National Security Strategy, or NSS, is a dangerous document. If followed by the administration over the next three years, it will almost surely continue America’s arrogant ways of the past 30 years, destabilize major regions of the world, create hostilities where none need exist, and increase the chances of unnecessary U.S. wars,...

Katrín Jakobsdóttir, Iceland’s newest leader, took office in November after a litany of political scandals, including one involving pedophilia, led to a snap election in October. In early December, the 41-year-old formed a coalitionbetween her Left-Green party, the right-leaning Progressive Party and the conservative Independence Party, pulling across the political spectrum in an attempt to restore stability to a nation that’s been struggling to maintain its political institutions for the...

If Trump's new tax policy on US corporations can impose an immediate tax levy of 20% on these $2.5T of earnings retained offshore, then that would create a short term tax windfall of $500B. One of the best examples of this phenomenon is Apple (AAPL-US), a company that (according to FactSet’s GeoRev data) currently derives over 60% of its revenue outside the U.S. As of the company’s latest annual report (data for September 30, 2017), Apple had accumulated $268.9 billion in cash and...