Mike Norman Economics

On November 27, 2023, the Economic Affairs Committee of the British House of Lords completed their inquiry into the question – Bank of England: how is independence working? – by releasing their 1st Report after taking evidence for several months – Making an independent Bank of England work better. The report is interesting because it contains a confusing array of contrary notions. On the one hand, the witnesses to the Inquiry claimed it was “Groupthink” in operation that prevented the Bank...

The Smith Family manga continues – Episode 6 is now available….William Mitchell — Modern Monetary TheoryThe Smith Family manga continues – Episode 6 is now availableBill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

 😂😂😂BREAKING 🚨: Short SellersHedge Fund short sellers sustained losses of approximately $43 billion over the past few days pic.twitter.com/k2FXpsY0cZ— Barchart (@Barchart) November 22, 2023 What Art Degree Monetarist wouldn’t be short into this:You’d have to be…

For the record. Short.Real ProgressivesFinding the Money: A ReviewBrad Sandler

Beijing: China needs to decisively ramp up fiscal spending so it can support an economy damaged by Western restrictions on trade, according to a Chinese scholar studying an unconventional school of economic thought.Jia Genliang – the co-author of the new book Modern Monetary Theory in China and a professor at the Renmin University of China in Beijing – said China should lift its headline deficit ratio to above 5% of gross domestic product on average for the next decade.…Jia is one of the...

Episode 5 in our new weekly Manga series – The Smith Family and their Adventures with Money – is now available. Have a bit of fun with it and circulate it to those who you think will benefit …William Mitchell — Modern Monetary TheoryThe Smith Family manga continues – Episode 5 is now availableBill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

I have just finished reading the excellent new book by Branko Milanovic. It’s called “Visions of Inequality” and is a tour through the history of economics since the days of Quesnay. More specifically it takes a look at how a handful of prominent economists have treated the topic of inequality. Most of you will have covered this territory before, but examining how people such as Quesnay, Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Pareto and Kuznets discussed the problem of distribution is not only an...

NEARLY 30 YEARS AGO, a New York fund manager named Warren Mosler noticed a discrepancy between what he saw day-to-day in his interactions with the Federal Reserve and the way almost all academic economists write about money. The way they write, you would think currency-issuing governments need to tax before they can spend — Mosler noticed it is the other way around.Getting this wrong is not trivial. It biases policy narratives. It misleads politicians into thinking that there is something...

It’s Wednesday, and today I discuss the latest US inflation data, which shows a significant annual decline in the inflation rate with housing still prominent. But for reasons I discuss, we can expect the housing inflation to fall in the coming months. I also discuss how on-going fiscal ignorance allows the Australian government to avoid investing in much-needed fast rail infrastructure which would solve many problems that are now reducing societal well-being. And then some of the best guitar...

The resurgence of economic orthodoxy is a great example of how declining schools of thought can maintain dominance in the narrative for extended periods of time if the vested interests are powerful enough. In the case of the economics profession, mainstream New Keynesian theory persists because it serves the interests of capital. Recently, the IMF urged the Australian government to engage in ‘fiscal consolidation’ in order to support further interest rate hikes by the RBA aimed at reducing...