Mike Norman Economics

The executive order, which prohibits direct investment in both debt and equity securities, but also bans Americans from investing in funds that contain Chinese securities in their portfolios, is meant to stop US capital from being used by China to undermine national security....Gives new meaning to "capital controls."The more the US attacks these companies economically, the more the Chinese government will support them economically, which is the US government's complaint, so it is not like...

This discussion is obscured by the widespread belief that a government has to obtain funding elsewhere even though it is sovereign in the currency of issue  and that taxes are used to pay for expenditure. A government has the ability to fund itself that is limited only by the availability of real resources, which impacts the general price level and individual markets. Fiscal policy is not only one of the factors affecting inflation (and employment) but also is a factor affecting the exchange...

 More than just a set of free-market policies, neoliberalism has always sought to alter society's balance of power in favor of bosses. Its assault on democracy and undermining of unions is now playing straight into the hands of the far right....JacobinNeoliberalism Has Always Been a Threat to DemocracyAldo Madariaga | assistant professor of political science at the Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile and associate researcher of the Center for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies

Everything you wanted to know about Iranian constitutional law and politics as a mixture of Islamic law and representative democracy in a liberal republic. Longish and detailed.The Vineyard of the SakerIslamic Republic of Iran’s Presidential Election 1400Mansoureh TajikRelatedThe division of the world into “democracies” and “autocracies” is an inaccurate reflection of reality. There are just governments, and each has elements of these two categories within them, albeit to differing...

 Turning point in warfare? (The drone was made in Turkey.)The UN in 2018 attempted to begin working on a treaty that would ban autonomous weapons, but the move was blocked by both the US and Russia.Some are hailing the coming of the new age of war. The events in Libya may similarly divide the time when humans had full control of weapons, and a time when machines made their own decisions to kill.The deployment of truly autonomous drones could represent a military revolution on par with the...

The floating Australian dollar. I wonder whether David Llewellyn-Smith following his own reasoning and going short.MacrobusinessAustralia has a devastating secret weapon against ChinaDavid Llewellyn-Smith in Australian DollarAlsoRussian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said earlier that Russia will completely abandon the US dollar and will reduce the pound sterling share in the National Wealth Fund’s structureTASSDe-dollarization takes place in many countries — KremlinAlsoMore detail from...

 Demographics and sociology in relation to US politics.Good historical summary and where matters stand now.CounterpunchBiden’s Gravest Challenge: White ResentmentDavid Rosen

Given I provided a detailed National Account analysis yesterday, I am using today as a blog lite day with just some snippets and then a musical offering – as per my usual Wednesday practice. I did an interview for Real Progressives last week and some of the social media reaction has been hysterical – claims that Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has gone political and that MMT advocates abandoning the capitalist system and so on so forth. Some of this stuff is coming from self-identified...

Table below shows some recent selected months net spending;  ie Total Withdrawals - Total Redemptions October 2020 $402b (month leading into election...Democrats really screwed Trump and us) November 2020 $472bFeb 2021 $598b March 2021 $985b (wow!) April 2021 $723b May 2021 $685b So this peaked in March on the 1.9B Biden stimmy and now is headed back down...   If no further stimmy is passed (imo does not seem likely) then we probably trend...

I later found out that Sam Vaknin is a psychopath, and that he is not a professor and neither does he have a PhD. I did think his style and delivery seemed too relentless and forceful for a genuine academic, although he does have an IQ of 188, which is phenomenonal. A third of the way through the documentary I started to like Sam Vaknim, but was I just being another victim too? It seems so!Why did he agree to make the documentary? I think it was just to promote his book. I found the...