Mike Norman Economics

Biggest business inventory increase in history in Q4 just as fiscal is pulling the rug out from under the economy. And OPEC+ is about to raise output. Recipe for broadly falling prices. (Oh yeah, and Fed raising rates.)

These are part of my cycle ride which were taken last year. I put them through twitter first to compress them, so I hope they look okay on a tablet, or a PC. Twitter compresses videoes quite a bit. I use my phone to take the videos, so I have to cycle with one hand on the handlebars, while the other holds the phone. It can feel tricky at times. [embedded content][embedded content][embedded content][embedded content]

Bad, bad, China! It's pounded into us everyday. AJ+ are going to do a series about China. China is bad. At least, that's what even a glance of U.S. reporting on China tells us. It’s a way of reporting that follows a long history of constructing the Chinese — in news, popular culture and the halls of DC — as a threat. In the first episode of Backspace, a new media critique series from AJ+, Sana Saeed explores what China and the Chinese have looked like in the American imagination, how that...

This is a fairly complicated matter and "b" has followed it closely all long. He provides the latest analysis based on the recently released report. This may be more than you want to know about it. The takeaway is that the propaganda against Belarus is partially contradicted and the rest left unsubstantiated.Moon of AlabamaICAO Report - Ryanair Plane That Landed in Minsk Was NOT Forced Downhttps://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/01/belarus-ryanair.html

I re-read a consulting report from May 2021 – Nature and Net Zero – which was commissioned by the World Economic Forum and prepared by a management consulting company. One of those consulting companies that exemplifies the neoliberal era where everything and anything is classified in terms of its financial value or corporate value and the company’s grand visions for nations amount to little more than transferring massive amounts of public money into their coffers for blueprints about...

 The key to China’s security riposte to the U.S. is linked to two words that go unstated in U.S. formal policy documents, but whose silent presence nevertheless suffuses and colour-washes the text of the 2022 National Defence Authorisation Act.The term ‘containment’ never appears, neither does the word ‘encirclement’. Yet, as Professor Michael Klare writes, the Act “provides a detailed blueprint for surrounding China with a potentially suffocating network of U.S. bases, military forces, and...

Short piece that says don't rush to judgment. Uncertainty prevails. Wait and see.The Vineyard of the SakerNow is the time to give time to timeThe Saker

Most people are quite reasonably not concerned about economic theory disputes most of the time. But one needs to keep them in mind when keeping up with the latest events.Whenever you are reading commentaries about central banking outlooks, you need to ask yourself: are the people in the discussions using any of the mathematical models that the literally thousands of neoclassical doctorates employed by the central banks produced? If not, what exactly was the point of them? Why is it so...

The last thing a volatile stock market needs right now is more surprises from the dark corners of Wall Street. Unfortunately, we can guarantee you that more surprises are coming in the way of uncleared derivatives blowing up on the balance sheets of publicly-traded corporations.How do we know this? The information in the chart above comes from a study quietly released last July by the Office of Financial Research (OFR). That’s the federal agency that provides research to bank regulators to...

Here is the audio, transcript, and video, here is part of the CWT summary:Tyler and Stewart discuss what drives his curiosity, including the ways in which he’s a product of the Cold War, how he became a Darwinian decentralist, the effects of pre-industrial America on his thought, the subcultural convergences between hippies and younger American Indians, why he doesn’t think humans will be going to the stars, his two-minded approach to unexplained phenomena, how L.L. Bean inspired the Whole...