Mike Norman Economics

What US economic warfare looks like in Cuba.As a Canadian with family members that live in Cuba, who was in Cuba during the anti-government protests that occurred on July 11, I found myself in a unique and disturbing position where I could see and feel the disconnect between what was being reported by the mainstream media back home and what was really happening on the ground in Cuba.International 360ºEye-Witness Account of US Attempts to Destabilize CubaKatheryne Guerrera *guerrera means...

Delegation from militants meets Chinese foreign minister as Beijing seeks to extend influence in AfghanistanAlthough the US might once have fiercely resisted Chinese attempts to increase their influence inside Afghanistan, now Washington’s priority appears to be staving off a collapse into full civil war.Beijing is especially concerned about the prospect of Afghanistan becoming a base for Uyghur militants from China’s western Xinjiang province, where authorities maintain vast networks of...

Moon of Alabama attacks an article by Stephen Roach, former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and chief economist at Morgan Stanley. Roach is looking through a US-centric lens and as a result gets the bigger picture wrong.There is a further reason that is not mentioned. Big Tech, while a driver of profit, is not only economically unproductive but also undermining of a culture. TV was supposedly the cause of turning Western culture into a wasteland. Social media and gaming do that on steroids....

US elite wildly wrong on the Russian economy? Paul Robinson provides some numbers.RTPutin is broke? Biden the latest American leader to publicly expose the dangerous lack of genuine Russia expertise in WashingtonPaul Robinson | Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa

Why won’t America’s 1 percent—such as the six Walmart heirs, whose wealth equals that of the entire bottom 30 percent—be a bit more . . . selfish? As the widening financial divide cripples the U.S. economy, even those at the top will pay a steep price.Why excessive income Inequality harms society. Put sentiment aside. There are good reasons why plutocrats should care about inequality anyway—even if they’re thinking only about themselves. The rich do not exist in a vacuum. They need a...

New IDEAS Working Paper on the alternative views of the collapse of Bretton Woods. From the abstract:Contrary to conventional views which suggest that the collapse of Bretton Woods represented the beginning of the end of the global hegemonic position of the dollar, the collapse of the system liberated American policy from convertibility to gold, and imposed a global fiat system still dominated by the floating dollar. The end of Bretton Woods and the set of regulations that imposed capital...

Some setting the record straight on MMT.MMT is an economic framework for understanding how the macroeconomy works and the role of the currency-issuer in the monetary economy.It has a rich history and provides a novel way of generating that understanding.Its predictive capacity is excellent over 25 or more years. Many economists and observers keep saying they knew all this stuff but if you go back through the historical record, they were not rehearsing these ideas or conclusions until...

The loanable funds theory is in many regards nothing but an approach where the ruling rate of interest in society is — pure and simple — conceived as nothing else than the price of loans or credit, determined by supply and demand — as Bertil Ohlin put it — “in the same way as the price of eggs and strawberries on a village market.”In the traditional loanable funds theory — as presented in mainstream macroeconomics textbooks — the amount of loans and credit available for financing investment...

 AN SNP activist, a medical student and a retiree are to challenge the legality of UK Government subsidies for oil and gas in a landmark court case.The UK is an oligarchy run by the few for the benefit of themselves only. I live in a very Conservative area. I spoke to one of my neighbours recently, and she said the Tories look after the British more, while Labour panders to the immigrants. She said the Tories were strong on law and order, and on defence, standing up to our enemies like, Xi,...

 The Delta variant. It now makes up more than 80% of COVID cases in the US. Overall COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are going up. According to the data from the US Department of Health and Human services, hospitalizations have been increasing for about three weeks, rising about 37% over the past week. This is what happens when we don’t have enough people getting vaccinated, we fail to reach herd immunity. Now we have the more contagious, and scarier delta variant going...