Mike Norman Economics

Central Bank resists calls for interest rate cuts despite inflation plunge Russia FeedRussia’s inflation rate plunges to 2.8%; historic lowAlexander

In 1986, the Supreme Court ruled extreme partisan gerrymanders unconstitutional. But without a reliable test for identifying unfair district maps, the court has yet to throw any out. Now, as the nation’s highest court hears arguments for and against a legal challenge to Wisconsin’s state assembly district map, mathematicians are on the front lines in the fight for electoral fairness. Simple math can help scheming politicians draw up districts that give their party outsize influence, but...

Milestones Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba surpassed its U.S. counterpart Amazon as the world's biggest e-commerce company Tuesday as the Hangzhou-based company reached the threshold of 470 billion U.S. dollars in market value.… Alibaba's net profit jumped 96 percent to more than 2.1 billion dollars year-on-year in the first fiscal quarter ending June, beating market expectations. Moreover, the number of active buyers on Alibaba's retail platform climbed to 466 million, accounting for...

The first trade war of the Trump administration is with — Canada! Not counting sanctions as trade war, of course. Sanctions are just war by non-military means. Justin Trudeau, the Canadian Prime Minister, told President Donald Trump on Wednesday he would block his country’s armed forces from buying Boeing aircraft if the US presses ahead with plans to slap import tariffs of 300 percent on Bombardier aeroplanes. The issue is threatening to ignite a trade war between the US, Canada and the...

On fake patriotism as a political stratagem.Liberty BlitzkriegEmpire Destroying Wars Are Coming to America Under Trump – Part 2Michael Krieger

Western elites frothing at the mouth. These people are acting like they are running scared. Sic Semper Tyrannis The MSM are denouncing South Front as a Kremlin instrumentCol. W. Patrick Lang, US Army (ret.), former military intelligence officer at the US Defense Intelligence Agency

In Post 20, a lot is said about the role that the rate of return on financial instruments—the interest rate—plays on the pricing on securities, but little was said about what determines that rate of return. Two competing theoretical frameworks explain what influences the interest rate, one of them emphasizes the role of real factors and the other emphasizes monetary factors. New Economic PerspectivesMoney and Banking Post 21: The Interest RateEric Tymoigne | Associate Professor of Economics...

Perhaps another way of putting this is that SDR inclusion is a commitment device. In addition to the practical concerns raised by Zhou, there would also be reputational costs to reversing exchange-rate and capital-account reforms. Since SDR inclusion is contingent on the IMF’s determination that the renminbi is “freely usable,” it could conceivably be reversed if the currency were to stop being freely usable. What future Chinese central bank governor will want to see headlines screaming...

This neoliberal era has a habit of getting ahead of itself and exposing its internal contradictions. In fact, the Capitalist system, as Marx, Keynes and others have demonstrated, it inherently inconsistent. The imposition of neoliberalism has only heightened those inconsistencies and made it more likely that we will move beyond this period in the foreseeable future (fingers crosssed). Last week, the Australian Bureau of Statistics released the latest Retail Sales data for August 2017. The...

The announcement by the European Central Bank that it has so far made €7.8bn in profits from its holdings in Greek government debt reveals the true nature of the so-called bailouts of Greek government finances that the EU leaders organised in return for massive austerity measures from 2012 onwards.... Michael Roberts BlogBeware the ECB bearing gifts for GreeksMichael Roberts