Mike Norman Economics

Information is the basis for our economic and financial decisions. As buyers, we collect information about products before entering into a transaction. As investors, the same goes for information about firms seeking our funds. This is information that sellers and fund-seeking firms typically have. But, when it is too difficult or too costly to collect information, markets function poorly or not at all. This form of asymmetric information―where two parties to a potential transaction have...

The two standard explanations for why labor’s share of output has fallen by 10 percent over the past 30 years are globalization (American workers are losing out to their counterparts in places like China and India) and automation (American workers are losing out to robots). Last year, however, a highly-cited Stigler Center paper by Simcha Barkai offered another explanation: an increase in markups. The capital share of GDP, which includes what companies spend on equipment like robots, is...

Now that the US Civil War 2.0 has broken out in violence, it is good to be aware of this. The background is given in the links Sandwichman provides at the beginning of the first post. The AltRight is livid that Gen. McMaster is cleaning house, and it seems that Gen. Kelley is too, having sidelined Steve Bannon.EconospeakThe Higgins Memo, Anders Breivik and the Lyndon LaRouche Cult The “Narratives” of Higgins’s “Warfare” SandwichmanThe full text of the memo that Sandwichman links to at FP...

Policy models and their implications — not just economic.The Case for Concerted ActionAlex Izurieta On UN Global Policy ModelV. Ramanan

The unexpectedly strong GDP print was driven by a 9.9% jump in private non-residential investment as well as an striking 21.9% annualized surge in public investment as some of the public works spending included in last year’s economic stimulus package starting to emerge; meanwhile exports declined.... Zero HedgeJapan GDP Surges 4%, Most In Two Years, On Jump In Government Stimulus Spending Tyler Durden

In the above Tweet, Assange has juxtaposed a neo-Nazi torch march in Kiev with the far-right torch march in Charlottesville. Apart from the torches, it is clear that the Ukrainian fascists were far more equipped for violence as they were wearing bullet-proof combat gear and facial coverings. The DuranJulian Assange asks why the US said nothing when Obama supported Ukrainian neo-NazisAdam Garrie

It is amazing how history is revised when it is convenient. It is also amazing how the same events, that from my perspective are rather clear, can be diametrically interpreted by others, who want to run a different agenda. A good example of these phenomena can be found in a recent UK Guardian article (August 11, 2017) – Jacques Delors foresaw the perils of austerity. How we need his wisdom now. When I saw the headline I thought it must have been an article seeking to elicit some sort of...

Cato Institute vs Niskanen Center Libertarianism.John Quiggin's BlogWhat’s left of libertarianism?John Quiggin | Professor and an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow at the University of Queensland, and a member of the Board of the Climate Change Authority of the Australian Government

The dominant view of banks and other financial institutions is that they function primarily as intermediaries, managing flows of scarce funds from those who have accumulated them to those who have need of them and can pay for their use. This understanding pervades textbooks, scholarly writings, and policy discussions – yet it is fundamentally false as a description of how a modern financial system works. Finance today is no more primarily “intermediated” than it is pre-accumulated or...

In The Dialectical Imagination, Martin Jay says that economics was not a central part of Critical Theory, but that several scholars of the Frankfurt School worked in the area. One of the leading economists was Friedrich Pollock, especially after the Institute moved to New York. Like the other scholars of the Institute for Social Research, Pollock was trained in Marxist economics. This school mosttly followed Marx in thinking that capitalism would collapse under the weight of its own...