Mike Norman Economics

Wall Street appears to have a plan to get the deregulation it wants by pinning the start of the epic financial crash of 2007-2010 on (wait for it) the French, rather than its own unbridled greed, corruption and toxic manufacture of junk bonds known as subprime debt that it paid to have rated AAA by ethically-challenged and deeply conflicted rating agencies. (The same rating agencies that are getting paid by Wall Street to rate its debt issues today.)... Wall Street On ParadeWall Street’s...

Graphics and video. Big social, political and economic consequences in store.World Economic ForumThis alarming chart shows the reality of global warming over 100 yearsJohn McKenna

Some interesting history. The Levellers were one of the inspirations for classical liberalism and laissez-faire. Libertarianism is a contemporary manifestation of classical liberalism, in contrast to neoliberalism, which incorporates a role for the state in promoting commerce and capital formation.Mises Institute — Mises WireThe Levellers: The First LibertariansRoberta A. Modugno

A contrarian view. Idiosyncratic WhiskLeverage is not a sign of risk seeking, a continuing seriesKevin Erdmann

There seems to be an expectation in science that the people who gather a dataset should also be the ones who analyze it. But often that doesn’t make sense: what it takes to gather relevant data has little to do with what it takes to perform a reasonable analysis. Indeed, the imperatives of analysis can even impede data-gathering, if people have confused ideas of what they can and can’t do with their data. I’d like us to move to a world in which gathering and analysis of data are separated,...

This is a summary distinction between liberalism and traditionalism, although Weiner doesn't use the term traditionalism specifically. The distinction in the Western intellectual tradition begins with Plato and Aristotle's different political theories, with Plato's theory developing into traditionalism and Aristotle's into liberalism. In modern times, this would be reflected in the dichotomy between Hegel and Locke, and Continental versus Anglo-American thought.  The main protagonists...

After decades of turbulence, the world order led by the United States has begun to change, with the 2008 global financial crisis possibly being the turning point and this year signaling a new beginning....The changing world order is not about the decline of the U.S. but about the rise of other countries, as Fareed Zakaria, a CNN journalist and author of The Post-American World, said. Nevertheless, global governance is set to change from West-led governance to co-governance by the West and...

I am more positive and optimistic about the TOP (The Opportunities Party) critique of MMT than Bill is. It seems to me that it makes the major concessions that are most significant to reversing the status quo mindset about government finance. The objections are easily met, and Bill does in the post. So I would say that the ball has been advanced toward the goal in New Zealand. MMT got some free publicity, too.  I don't see a problem with people bringing up questions or making objections,...

Putin puts his finger on a key issue without naming explicitly.This is the classical question about what it means to be a good person in a good society.Under Anglo-American liberalism, this question is not to be asked because the market is the arbiter of truth and value equates to prices. In this view, culture is based on utilitarianism, with its stimulus-response model of human behavior, and law exists chiefly to provide security and protect private property.Traditionalism disagrees. In...

New sanctions are coming, whether he wants them or not. NATO expansion and the West’s Ukraine meddling will continue. Encirclement is firmly in place. It’s difficult to envision where this could lead, short of actual hostilities. Russia’s fundamental national interests, the ones Trump was prepared to accept, will almost certainly render such hostilities inevitable. The National InterestStop poking the Russian bearRobert W. Merry | Editor of the American Conservative