Mike Norman Economics

Last Friday I posted five economic questions I'm frequently asked. Earlier this week I discussed: Are house prices in a new bubble? Another common question is: Is a recession imminent (within the next 12 months)? Once again my short answer was: No. Calculated RiskIs a Recession Imminent? Bill McBride

This picture of a circuit with no source used as symbolism is being tweeted/retweeted lately taking some shots at "Keynesianism!" etc.  : Keynesian economics — the dream. pic.twitter.com/fn7JMZ5ES8 — TakingHayekSeriously (@FriedrichHayek) October 28, 2017 This is nothing new from this cohort of mankind; this is an equivalent picture of the serpent eating its own tail from an ancient pagan sect which is the same type of agnostic/atheist thing that we get from these libertarians today:...

Dr. George Szamuely, a distinguished member of the Global Policy Institute of London Metropolitan University, is a British citizen and not a partisan of US politics. He has carefully investigated the so-called Russian dossier and reports that it was entirely the work of the Hillary Democrats. This fact was known at the beginning both to former CIA director John Brennan and to former FBI director James Comey. Yet both went along with the DNC-invented story of Russian election hacking and...

What's happening behind the scenes.The Vineyard of the SakerHow the DPRK riddle is freaking out the US establishmentThe Saker

Russia continues its efforts to improve its business climate: this year the country has advanced to 35th position of 190 countries in ‘Doing Business’ ranking by the World Bank (note that only six years ago Russia was ranked 120th). This position can be considered rather decent: Russia’s nearest competitors are Japan, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and France. More detailed look. Russia is not just a "gas station" (McCain) any more. Awara Doing business is getting easier: Russia climbed 5...

As a number of participants (including myself) pointed out, compared with these existential threats to existing states, the issues currently dividing Russia and the West are likely to seem to the historians of the future (if there are any) so minor as to be almost insignificant. One hundred years from now, our descendants are likely to look back on disputes over Crimea, the Donbas and Syria with the same combination of incomprehension and contempt with which we regard the European elites...

The crucial fact about the vertical side is that the fact that a nation is not like a household is evident regardless of the operational details. Positive Money is wrong in their belief the current system must be changed to achieve the type of government spending they want.However, this does not mean that Positive Money is flat out wrong. Key MMT people would be perfectly happy to spend vertically in the way Positive Money wants, which is just PQE/OMF by another name. This is especially so...

What Western liberals assume is that the natural state of human being is defined by liberalism. That is an unsubstantiated assumption. Liberalism developed in the UK and was exported to the US and later to Western Europe. It is a cultural phenomenon that is historically and geographically based. The Western view at present is that China under Xi Jinping has de-emphasized Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' focus on class struggle, while emphasizing Lenin's focus on the party as revolutionary...

… as the authors of the new report from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development have explained, there is a growing concern that increasing market concentration in leading sectors of the global economy and the growing market and lobbying powers of dominant corporations are creating a new form of global rentier capitalism to the detriment of balanced and inclusive growth for the many. And they’re not just talking about financial rentier incomes, which has been the focus of...

The knives are out for the p-value. This statistical quantity is the Holy Grail for empirical researchers across the world -- if your study finds the right p-value, you can get published in a credible journal, and possibly get a good university tenure-track job and research funding. Now a growing chorus of voices wants to de-emphasize or even ban this magic number. But the crusade against p-values is likely to be a distraction from the real problems afflicting scientific inquiry.... The...