Mike Norman Economics

 Mostly about energy and the stupidity of imposing an oil price cap.Moon of AlabamaEU Pushes For More Sanctions Which Will Come Back To Bite ItSee alsoEurope is coming apart at the seams. And it is only just beginning to get cold there.The CradleUkraine’s revenge on the West M. K. Bhadrakumar | retired diplomat with the Indian Foreign Service and former ambassador

It’s Wednesday where I examine in short a few items that came to my attention in the last week and then retreat into the music segment. Yesterday, the Reserve Bank of Australia raised interest rates for the sixth time since May 2022. This time the increase was 0.25 per cent and the current cash rate target is 2.6 per cent. The below-expected increment has been hailed as the first central bank to ‘turn’. It tells me the RBA is now scared it has gone too far in its ridiculous show of power. It...

Biden/Summers rate increase jihad is causing them to become increasingly isolated from:The academe:Greg Mankiw endorses Paul Krugman’s view that the Fed might be tightening policy too aggressively https://t.co/Cl4VFonPLd pic.twitter.com/tcEXqVdLf4— Nick Timiraos (@NickTimiraos) October 1, 2022 International community:This is real. Not the Onion.The U.N. is asking the Fed and other central banks to stop tightening.Noone had an issue on the way up. (Even though the outcome was...

These people are really insane. I mean, they are talking about this casually now. Television viewers casually flipped on CNN yesterday, saw this segment sketching out the various nuclear destruction scenarios under consideration, and thought to themselves: "All is going well with US foreign policy" https://t.co/qVfiYMjQcw— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) October 4, 2022

You may have heard that the United Nations (U.N.) is urging the Federal Reserve and other central banks to stop raising interest rates. That’s how The Wall Street Journal reported the release of a new report yesterday.Not exactly.It’s not the position of the United Nations (general assembly) but the view of an agency within the United Nations known as the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). Here’s the report UNCTAD released yesterday....The LensUNCTAD Warns of Too...

"Never mind the public finances. Look after the economy and the deficit will look after itself." For years, critics of George Osborne such as me echoed Keynes' old line. At last, the Tories are, by their own lights, heeding this call. And financial markets hate it. Does this mean the Keynesian advice was wrong all along?No. There's a big difference between the 2010s and now...Stumbling and MumblingTHE FULL EMPLOYMENT QUESTIONChris Dillow, Investors Chronicle

My favourite BBC article has been rewritten again for the current era and has introduced a new set of material inaccuracies. Let’s go through this version and separate fact from fiction....New WaylandHow Much Is Government Borrowing? A CritiqueNeilW

Systemically important quote. Economists have way more political clout than they deserve based on past performance. Of course, that could change, but only if the profession changes. This quotation targets the core of the problem, over-reliance on modeling without adequate explanation of the limitations involved. Failure to do so appears to be an indicator of pseudo-scientific arrogance manifesting as a peculiar form of academic hubris.Lars P. Syll’s BlogThe economist’s oathLars P. Syll |...

I divide the regimes for the global capital markets into three states: crisis, pre-crisis, and no crisis. The one term that is non-standard is pre-crisis; it is a state where something has gone horribly wrong in funding markets, but it is not yet well known and there is a hypothetical possibility of a full financial crisis being avert…My “no crisis'“ state does not imply that we cannot find panicking people in the financial press. Unimportant markets like Magic the Gathering™️ cards, crypto,...

For the past several months I have been learning Japanese. I am now working at Kyoto University under a JSPS International Fellowship and living near the main campus. Each morning I go running along the Kamo River, which runs north-south through the east side of the city. It is a marvellous resource for runners, walkers, etc. While I have been learning Japanese formally, there is nothing like the real experience and just meeting people down the little lane where my house is or interacting...