Mike Norman Economics

America’s opioid crisis was caused by rapacious pharma companies, politicians who colluded with them and regulators who approved one opioid pill after another Of all the people Donald Trump could blame for the opioid epidemic, he chose the victims. After his own commission on the opioid crisis issued an interim report this week, Trump said young people should be told drugs are “No good, really bad for you in every way.” The president’s exhortation to follow Nancy Reagan’s miserably...

Japan is different, right? Japan has a different culture, right? Japan has sustained low unemployment, low inflation, low interest rates, high public deficits and high gross public debt for 25 years, but that is cultural, right? Even the mainstream media is starting to see through the Japan is different narrative as we will see. Yesterday (August 14, 2017), the Cabinet Office in Japan published the preliminary – Quarterly Estimates of GDP – which showed that the Japanese economy is growing...

French children don't need medications to control their behavior. In the United States, at least 9 percent of school-aged children have been diagnosed with ADHD, and are taking pharmaceutical medications. In France, the percentage of kids diagnosed and medicated for ADHD is less than .5 percent. How has the epidemic of ADHD—firmly established in the U.S.—almost completely passed over children in France? Is ADHD a biological-neurological disorder? Surprisingly, the answer to this question...

Short lesson in strategy. Current discussions of “punishing” Russia for interference in the 2016 presidential election, or “sanctioning” Russia for destabilizing eastern Ukraine, or “countering” Russian military deployments by stationing additional U.S. and NATO troops in the Baltics, fail to ask an elementary question from strategy 101: and then what? What will Russia do in response? And at the end of the sequence of actions and reactions, will Americans be safer than before? Bismarck...

This kind of deceleration has always been associated with recession.... The Center of the UniverseCredit checkWarren Mosler

You can rest easy. The nuclear threat narrative was a hoax according to these scientists. The Bulletin of the Atomic ScientistsNorth Korea’s “not quite” ICBM can’t hit the lower 48 statesTheodore A. Postol, professor of science, technology, and national security policy at MIT, and Markus Schiller, Robert Schmucker, engineers

Putting Assad's alleged Aleppo massacre aided by Russia to bed. It was disinformation.Sic Semper Tyrannis Large numbers of Syrians are returning homeCol. W. Patrick Lang, US Army (ret.), former military intelligence officer at the US Defense Intelligence Agency

As usual Moon is critical.Moon of AlabamaHyping North Korea To Relaunch Reagan's Star Wars? b

Thomas Goodrich is an historian and very right wing, but he is complex, he's a tree-hugger, an animal rights activist, and a vegetarian. He has written a book called Hellstorm, The Death of Nazi Germany 1944 to 1947 and it is terrifying.Paul Craig Roberts got me thinking about this again because he is reading David Irvin's book Nuremberg (1996), and like me, he is discovering that the world is not as it seems. I was your typical liberal and fully absorbed the narrative of WW2, yep, there was...

While Republican leaders are confident their party can set aside its differences to resolve the latest debt-limit impasse before the clock runs out sometime between late September and mid-October, investors are shying away from Treasury bills earlier than they have in the past.... BloombergU.S. Default? Unlikely, But Bond Traders Are Taking No Chances Brian Chappatta and Alex Harris