Mike Norman Economics

President Donald Trump’s chief economic adviser Gary Cohn said he sees a major risk evolving in clearinghouses, platforms that regulators turned to for swaps following the 2008 financial-market crisis. As “we get less transparency, we get less liquid assets in the clearinghouse, it does start to resonate to me to be a new systemic problem in the system,” Cohn, director of the White House’s National Economic Council, said at a banking conference in Washington on Sunday.... “It’s the things...

One suggestion in the comments to the ongoing “short & simple” series is to cover the balance of payments. This will be covered at some point in the introductory series, but I am still considering how best to present it in brief, simple form. With that in mind, it seemed worth attempting a regular post on the topic. The post is still intended to be elementary in nature, but is perhaps at about the introductory university level. The post is also too long to qualify as “short”, even...

[embedded content] Professor David Healy is a world-renowned psychiatrist and a leading psycho-pharmacologist who is studying the condition called Post SRRI Sexual Dysfunction (PSSD), an incurable permanent illness that can occur after taking SSRI’s or other modern antidepressant drugs. PSSD sufferers say that life feels pointless and that they are no longer able to feel sexual or romantic feelings anymore and can't fall in love either. Many children and adolescents who are given these...

If indeed Clinton were right that Trump was Putin’s “puppet,” then he would have agreed to negotiations to address the North Korean crisis; would have accepted constructive diplomacy toward Iran; and would have ended all U.S. support for the Syrian militants and encouraged a quick end to the bloodletting. Instead, Trump is moving in opposite directions, lining up with Netanyahu and the neocons, whom some European allies refer to as “America’s Israeli agents.” Although dressing up his...

“If current trends continue for another 20 or 30 years, democracy will be toast.” It isn't toast already? The next iteration, burnt toast? Vox 20 of America's top political scientists gathered to discuss our democracy. They're scared. Sean Illing See also Each of four theoretical traditions in the study of American politics—which can be characterized as theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic-Elite Domination, and two types of interest-group pluralism, Majoritarian...

Anti-Palestinian-ism is rife in the British Labour Party, but non Zionist Jews are fighting back.Over the past 18 months the British Labour party has been beset by a moral panic. According to pro-Israel activists in Labour, there has been a surge of anti-semitism in the party since Jeremy Corbyn became leader two years ago. Corbyn has broken with decades of party policy by placing a much stronger emphasis on the need to end Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. As we will show, these...

Everything you wanted to know about cryptocurrencies from an MMT perspective.Modern Money MattersCrypto-Shilling Neil WilsonSee also Bitcoin transactions use so much energy that the electricity used for a single trade could power a home for almost a whole month, according to a paper from Dutch bank ING. Bitcoin trades use a lot of electricity as a means to make verifying trades expensive, therefore making fraudulent transactions costly and deterring those who would seek to misuse the...

The Silicon Valley technologist, who helped create over 40 years ago with the late Steve Jobs, has debuted Woz U, an online university. He plans to eventually open physical campuses in over 30 cities in the U.S. and other unspecified countries. The institute, with a corporate headquarters in Scottsdale, Ariz., offers online courses that are intended to train people in computer science and related fields and help them land jobs in the technology industry. Woz U is part of the private,...

I believe I have a better understanding of Eric Lonergan's arguments regarding whether fiat money is a liability of a state with currency sovereignty. (This discussion does not apply to commodity money, or a state using a money issued by an entity not under its direct control.) If I am correct, I would phrase his argument as: the existing accounting treatment of money is incorrect, since it does not account for seigneurage revenue. (Seigneurage has multiple English spellings; I was using...

Backgrounder on Bolivia and Evo Morales.Market OracleThe Struggle for Bolivia Is About to BeginDan Steinbock | founder of the Difference Group