Mike Norman Economics

An excellent account of where America has gone wrong. At the end of the interview Alfred McCoy says how Obama was a brilliant strategist who was cutting China out of Western markets through trade deals which would have halted its rise but neoliberalism had disenfranchised so many working people that they voted for Trump who run on a populist ticked who wanted to end these deals. You can see here another reason why Trump was certainly not the leader the US elite wanted. [embedded content]...

Today, with the kind permission of Phil Butler, I am posting the full text of my contribution to his book “Putin’s Praetorians: Confessions of the Top Kremlin Trolls“. There are a couple of reasons for that.... The Vineyard of the SakerBook excerpt: How I became a Kremlin trollThe Saker

I say the challenge in Robin's final sentence is easily answered: Conscious intentions are all-important for the welfare analysis of signaling. Standard signaling models assume that people dislike sending the signal. It is this assumption that implies that signaling equilibria are highly inefficient - or even full-blown Prisoners' Dilemmas. If people enjoyed signaling, in contrast, signaling equilbria could easily be ideal. What superficially appears to be a vast zero-sum game turns out...

[Noah] Smith is keen to refute the ‘mixed economy’, anti free trade ideas that have been sneaking into mainstream economics since the Great Recession, namely that ‘neo-liberalism’ and free markets are bad for living standards. Instead, a little dose of protectionism on trade (Rodrik) and state intervention and regulation (Kwak) helps capitalism to work better. But no, says Smith. Neoliberalism works better. He cites China’s growth phenomenon as his main example! In China, “the shift...

Italian journalist Gian Micalessin's interviews with three Georgian mercenaries who took part in the shooting massacre of protesters and police in Kiev in early 2014, and led to the overthrow of the Ukrainian government, have dismantled the new government's account of the tragedy. Micalessin spoke to Sputnik about the implications of his findings. Sputnik InternationalDeadly Political Games: Italian Journalist Blows Lid Off Maidan Snipers Mystery The Vineyard of the SakerThe hidden truth...

Former G.W. Bush-era NSA and CIA head Michael Hayden has joined the ranks of Trump's social media critics, tweeting that the president's "outrageous assault" on press freedom makes him feel like he's "wasted 40 years of [his] life." However, Hayden's record doesn't exactly inspire confidence in his newfound role as defender of the Constitution.… The outpouring of support for George W. Bush's CIA & NSA chief — who oversaw torture, rendition, illegal domestic spying and an array of...

Col. Lang wraps it up. Interesting comments, too.Sic Semper Tyrannis The end is in sight in Syria Col. W. Patrick Lang, US Army (ret.) At the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lang was the Defense Intelligence Officer (DIO) for the Middle East, South Asia and counter-terrorism, and later, the first Director of the Defense Humint Service. At the DIA, he was a member of the Defense Senior Executive Service. He participated in the drafting of National Intelligence Estimates. From 1992 to 1994,...

In the end, while standard macroeconomic reforms may work in theory -- albeit under an unrealistic set of assumptions -- they’ve never worked in practice. Rather than eliminating the controls that protect China from a financial crisis, leaders should confront their debt problem head-on and begin deleveraging. For that to happen, it would help if the decision-making process were more, not less centralised. Only forceful action from the top can overcome the tremendously powerful vested...

Since its financial meltdown in 2008 and unprecedented bailout by the U.S. taxpayer, Citigroup (parent of Citibank) has been repeatedly charged by its Federal regulators with odious crimes against its pooled mortgage investors, credit card and banking customers, student loan borrowers, and for its foreclosure frauds. It has paid billions of dollars in fines for its past misdeeds while new charges pile up. In 2015, it became an admitted felon for participating in rigging foreign exchange...

The latest – EIB Investment Report 2017/2018 – published last week by the European Investment Bank tells anyone who cares to take those Europhile Rose Coloured Glasses off for just a second how deep the failure of the European policy making structures are and how long the negative impacts of those failures will resonate. This is the true ‘burden for our (their) grand kids’ sort of stuff. In claiming they had to run tight fiscal policy biased towards surpluses to avoid forcing the future...