Mike Norman Economics

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

Crikey! This is bad, a US corporation has released an oil eating synthetic bacteria into the ocean to clean up an oil spill which it ate up at miraculous speed but it has now mutated into flesh eating bacteria killing fish and people and it is now moving through the Atlantic ocean towards Europe. If it mutates again and becomes air born, or gets into our drinking water, we've had it. So if we do mange to escape WW3 this thing might get us instead.However, in the nearest future, the planet...

From the highlighted link you can watch the Lobby documentary series and see how Israel influences our governments.  BRITAIN’S BROADCASTING REGULATOR on Monday concluded that Al Jazeera did not violate any rules in its controversial undercover investigation exposing the Israeli embassy’s campaign to target British citizens critical of Israel, a campaign that included attempts to destroy the careers of pro-Palestinian British politicians. The move by the communications regulator, known as...

The recent internet debates about Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) have been interesting, but the various critics of MMT have largely missed the elephant in the room: automatic fiscal stabilisers. In my view (which may not reflect the official "MMT Party Line"), one of the keys strengths of MMT is that it is largely built around the importance of automatic stabilisers, and institutional details. The conventional view is to acknowledge the existence of automatic stabilisers, but otherwise...

A great article by Andre Vitchek about the US led genocide in Indonesia and afterwards the puppet ruling class airbrushed it all out of history. I often wonder why the Islamic fundamentalists are so right wing - well,  the godless Bolsheviks banning religion didn't help - but Andre Vitchek says here how the religious leaders in Indonesia were very rich and owned loads of land.Andre says this was the worst genocide this century with three million people killed, including teachers, trade...

I’ve published several posts on the topic, with the most popular one titled, Prepare for Impact – This is the Beginning of the End for U.S. Empire. Here’s an excerpt: This is not the sort of thing you see in a confident, brave, and civilized nation, it’s the sort of stuff you’d expect to see toward the end. It’s the stuff of craven war-mongers, of dishonest cowards, of a totally deranged and very dangerous media. The signs are everywhere; imperial decline is set to accelerate rapidly in...