Mike Norman Economics

When I first attended Davos in January 2013, I asked everyone I met if they’d heard of the term “sharing economy.” Ninety percent of people said no, 5% assumed I was talking about barter exchange, and the remaining 5% acknowledged new technologies and peer-to-peer networks were enabling emergent business models. It was difficult to find anyone who had used Airbnb or BlaBlaCar. Later that year I co-founded the Forum’s Sharing Economy Working Group with other Young Global Leaders, with the...

Many professions, including education and health care, will become increasingly automated. This won't eliminate the need for humans, however, since the social element is also a vital factor in many fields, especially education, which involves socialization.The problem inherent in this article is difficulty thinking outside the box, in this case the traditional classroom. That model is obsolescent, and technology will soon make it obsolete. Then we will look back on it and wonder why it...

Roger Farmer is out with an argument for the optimal level of public debt being 70% of GDP. Ralph provides the MMT answer. It is nicely succinct. MMTers have solved this one. Others are still floundering, in particular Roger Farmer in this NIESR article on the subject, is all over the place far as I can see (1). So I’ll run thru this vexed question for the umpteenth time.... Farmer bills himself as a Keynesian. Ralph reminds us of the answer Keynes himself gave to the question of public...

Do you remember back to May 2016, when the British Treasury, which is clearly full of mainstream macroeconomists who have little understanding of how the system actually operates released their ‘Brexit’ predictions? The ‘study’ (putting the best spin possible on what was a tawdry piece of propaganda) – HM Treasury analysis: the immediate economic impact of leaving the EU – was strategically released to have maximum impact on the vote, which would come just a month later. Fortunately, for...

Forecast.Credit Writedowns As the Fed meets, expect expansion through 2018, but problems thereafterEdward Harrison

This sets a precedence for banning products for national security reasons. It potentially has devastating implications for US tech companies that include backdoors for US intelligence agencies. This probably won't happen immediately but it is bound to happen over time as foreign nations, especially Russia and China, develop domestic capabilities. Being shut out of Russia would not be devastating perhaps, but being shut out of China would. Foreign countries that the US designates as...

US establishment refuses to accept reality.Sic Semper TyrannisRobin Wright Admits the Borg Has Lost 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...

Just think what they are worth now? This video is from 2013 but he must still be suffering. [embedded content] If someone told you you just threw away over $6 million worth of bitcoins, well you wouldn't be too happy. You can imagine how James Howells from Wales felt when he discovered that he had thrown away his hardrive containing over 7,000 bitcoins. The value of Bitcoins has reached an all time high so now Mr Howells is frantically searching his local tip in the hope of retrieving his...

We soon intervened is Yugoslavia with our air force to take out the bad guys and put the war criminals on trail. The Western media cheered on Clinton and Blair for 'sending in the cavalry' and saving the innocents, but now Yemen is getting constantly bombed and millions might stave to death the western media under reports the tragedy. Why haven't we put sanctions on Saudi Arabia if we are the 'good guys' always intervening around the world to get the 'bad guys'? We got Saddam and Qaddafi - ...

11 years after his death the NATO farce at the Hague has ruled that Milosevic did not play a part in "genocide" and "joint criminal enterprise" in Bosnia, but have you heard this reported anywhere? (The charges for "genocide" in Kosovo were dropped at the original Milosevic trial already.) More than eleven years after his death, a second trial chamber at the UN War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague has concluded that former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic was not responsible for war...