Mike Norman Economics

This really is terrible: Cyber Monday becomes largest online shopping day in US history, ringing up $6.59 billion in sales https://t.co/ihLA1upXag pic.twitter.com/cxoAivamt8— Blimling&Associates (@Blimling) November 29, 2017 Oops this is going the wrong way now too:U.S. third-quarter GDP revised up to 3.3%, a three-year high https://t.co/jwCP8xWstJ pic.twitter.com/hdemaEQadL— Bloomberg Markets (@markets) November 29, 2017

20 Ft. tall Ivanka!Oh God, Ivanka Trump is being promoted as a role model. ??‍♂️Need a banging head against a brick wall emoji. ? pic.twitter.com/i1eC2UaPEJ— Ramanan (@Ramanan_V) November 28, 2017 LOL!!!

Lane departure from previous two Fed morons:Fed chair nominee Jerome Powell tells Congress: Measures to boost U.S. growth 'in your lane, not so much ours' https://t.co/PolpKRR0mQ pic.twitter.com/k9EEP5mGDq— Real Time Economics (@WSJecon) November 28, 2017

This blog continues the discussion from yesterday’s blog – The EMU reform ruse – Part 1 – where I consider the reform proposals put forward by German academic Fritz Sharpf, which have been held out by Europhile Leftists as the progressive way out of the disaster that the Eurozone has become. Yesterday, I considered his first proposal – to continue with the enforced structural convergence to the Northern model – the current orthodoxy in Brussels. Like Sharpf I agree that the agenda outlined...

Last night Chris Hayes ended "All In" with a discussion of the GOP Tax Plan. Economists David Cay Johnston and Stephanie Kelton agreed that if Republicans get their long-awaited wich and this budget-busting tax plan is enacted, the huge deficits it will create might not lead to the promised "growth" Steve Mnuchin insists will result.What happens if Steve Mnuchin is wrong? Austerity budgets that cut into the heart of the biggest programs paid for out of the federal budget: Social Security...

Children playing feet away from open pools of raw sewage; drinking water pumped beside cracked pipes of untreated waste; human faeces flushed back into kitchen sinks and bathtubs whenever the rains come; people testing positive for hookworm, an intestinal parasite that thrives on extreme poverty. These are the findings of a new study into endemic tropical diseases, not in places usually associated with them in the developing world of sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, but in a corner of the...

Conyers on Sunday announced he is stepping down as the top-ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, launching a battle for his successor that has pitted two Democratic rivals — Lofgren and Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y. — against each other. On the one hand, his resignation comes in a politically fortuitous way for Lofgren, with Conyers felled not by age but by allegations of sexual harassment. The political logic of replacing him with a woman is obvious. But then there’s Google. The race...

Here we go again.ReutersTrump: 'I don't see a deal' with Democrats on keeping government open Reuters StaffSo there!Zero HedgeTop Democrats "Abruptly" Pull Out Of White House Meeting After Trump Twitter Attack Tyler Durden

What I want to highlight here is this: the private sector needs government deficit spending if it is going to recover properly from both the heart attack of the Financial Crisis and the decades of disease brought on by income redistribution and rising debt levels. This is so because government deficits are private-sector surpluses. The logic is really very simple. What number do you get when you add up every trade surplus and trade deficit on the planet? Zero, of course, because one...

By declaring Putin’s Russia to be the greatest danger to America, the political-media establishment itself is endangering US national security. The NationRussia Is Not the ‘No. 1 Threat’—or Even Among the Top 5 Stephen F. Cohen |  professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University, and a contributing editor of The Nation.See alsoCounterpunchSuddenly, I’m a ‘Russian Agent’! Dave Lindorff, investigative reporter, founding member of...