Mike Norman Economics

Since the combat deaths of four Special Forces soldiers in Niger in October, AFRICOM has been under greater media scrutiny than at any other time in its history. There have also been reports that Navy SEALs are being investigated in the strangulation death of another Green Beret in neighboring Mali (the site of previous shadowy deaths of special operators), and that U.S. personnel took part in a massacre in Somalia. The command has deflected questions about the killing in Mali, offered...

I’m late to Zeynep Tufekci’s excellent Twitter and Teargas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. It analyses the impact of social media on political events such as the Arab Spring – remember that? – and Occupy. Her thesis is that online organization is a powerful political tool when combined with offline organization, but cannot substitute for it; and the evidence presented here from a range of mass protests certainly convinces me. The problem mass socially-networked protests have...

Trump followed in the footsteps of Obama and pardoned five megabanks—one of which he reportedly owes up to $300 million in outstanding loans. While Americans celebrated the holidays, President Trump followed in the footsteps of his predecessors by acting in the interest of Wall Street and using the distraction to do something that was not in the best interest of the American people. He pardoned five megabanks for rampant fraud and corruption, which is especially notable because of the...

MMT alert.Could be better, but not bad. The WeekThe national debt, explained The Week Staff

The United States can strike back with its own systems, of course,but on balance the U.S. military demands access, while the Chinese military wins by denying that access. Please notice that Chinese strategy is based on defense (denial of access) rather than offense (access). So is Russia's and also Iran's.The Chinese "threat" to the US is chiefly economic, and one the present trajectory, China surpasses the US economy in the next decade in output owing to its sheer size, even the US...

One of the findings of the dynamic information equilibrium approach (see also my latest paper) is that nominal output ("GDP") has essentially the same structure as the size of the labor force. The major shocks to the path of NGDP roughly correspond to the major shocks to the Civilian Labor Force (CLF). Both are shown as vertical lines. The first is the demographic shock of women entering the workforce.... With the positive shock of women entering the labor force ending, immigration is a...

Steve Keen writes satire.RTWhy economics is too important to be left to the (academic) economistsSteve Keen | Professor and Head Of School Of Economics, History & Politics, Kingston University, London

Neoliberalism arrived with globalization or else globalization arrived with neoliberalism; that is how the Great Regression began. [1] In the 1970s, the capital of the rebuilt industrial nations started to work its way out of the national servitude in which it had been forced to spend the decades following 1945. [2] The time had come to take leave of the tight labour markets, stagnant productivity, falling profits and the increasingly ambitious demands of trade unions under a mature,...

Matias Verengo sums up the Latin American crises, present and past. Manufactured.Naked KeynesianismThe Latin American CrisisMatias Vernengo | Associate Professor of Economics, Bucknell University

Carillion builds schools, roads, hospitals – and it’s meant to be a big part of HS2. What’s more, if it goes bust, the bill will be picked up by taxpayers It looks like the usual load of shady deals. Maybe there are some things that the government can do much better than the private sector? You may never have heard of Carillion. There’s no reason you should have. Its lack of glamour is neatly summed up by the name it sported in the 90s: Tarmac. But since then it has grown and grown to...