Mike Norman Economics

Calling BS on the US political establishment and deep state. The US political establishment and the US deep state are joined at the hip through the military-intelligence-corporate-governmental complex that is foundational to US corporate statism.The National InterestThe Real Winner in America's Russia Crisis Is ChinaLeon Hadar | senior analyst with Wikistrat, a geostrategic consulting firm

Stock-Flow Consistent (SFC) models are a preferred way to present economic models in the post-Keynesian tradition. This book gives an overview of the sfc_models package, which implements SFC models in Python. The approach is novel, in that the user only specifies the high-level parameters of the economic model, and the framework generates and solves the implied equations. The framework is open source, and is aimed at both researchers and those with less experience with economic models. This...

Remember when I said I predict a boom of "golden age" vigor, beginning in 2016 and lasting eight to ten years. It has already begun. In two years everyone will be predicting it.  Tom, you said Art goes out on the limb.... Art follows up.I admit that things are looking up for the US and the global economy, which are still coupled.But there is also a lot of other coupling (like China), and so predictions have to be contingent on trends holding or improving, with no surprises like adverse...

MMT in the Guardian!The Guardian A budget to increase national debt? That would be a pay rise for Britain Phil McDuff

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said Tuesday that the central bank should continue to use interest payments on member bank reserve balances as its primary means of affecting short-term interest rates, rebuffing calls to return to more conventional monetary policy tools.... American BankerFed interest payments to banks are here to stay, Yellen says John Heltman

Executive Chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet, Eric Schmidt, says Google will “engineer” specific algorithms for RT and Sputnik to make their articles less prominent on the search engine’s news delivery services. Google will “de-rank” RT and Sputnik News articles to make them harder to find. Alex Christoforou Amazon launches a cloud service for US intelligence agenciesThe introduction of the AWS Secret Region for the U.S. intelligence community comes six years after Amazon...

Backgrounder on what's up in Deutschland.Sputnik InternationalLittle Trouble in Big Bundestag: Sputnik's Guide to Merkel's Coalition FiascoalsoStrategic Culture FoundationGermany"s Government Impasse: End of Merkel Era Is Within SightAlex Gorka

Something else to keep an eye on as part of changes to bank regulation.Doesn't understand the QE effects causing the GFC and subsequent credit contraction but not too bad otherwise; gets the direction right anyway: One large downside to Dodd-Frank was that in order to hold the required capital, all banks decreased lending to shore-up their liquid holdings and meet the regulatory minimums.  Without the ability to borrow funds, small businesses have a hard time raising money to create...

Here is a summary of another interesting study I read last week (published March 30, 2017) – Happiness at Work – from academic researchers Jan‐Emmanuel De Neve and George Ward. It explores the relationship between happiness and labour force status, including whether an individual is employed or not and the types of jobs they are doing. The results reinforce a long literature, which emphatically concludes that people are devastated when they lose their jobs and do not adapt to unemployment...

A new paper challenges Thomas Piketty’s portrayal of an income distribution dominated at the top by passive rentiers who do nothing to earn their money, arguing that income inequality in America today is driven by the working rich. ProMarket — The blog of the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago Booth School of BusinessWho Are the Top 1 Percent in America? The Answer from New Research Might Surprise You Samantha Eyler-Driscoll