Mike Norman Economics

One thing I have discovered when discussing inflation is that discussions very rapidly get derailed into discussions of the “cost of living.” I take a view that is conventional within market and economic discussion: inflation is a macroeconomic concept, and the consumer price index is one way to measure it. However, many people view inflation as rising cost of living.There is a link between these two ideas, but they are not the same thing. It is entirely possible that the reader might...

The US is launching a New Cold War against Russia and China in an attempt to deflect our attention from the escalating crisis of global capitalism....Making the world safe for democracy capitalism. On the systemic level, it is about Western resistance to losing the half-millennium of dominance the West enjoyed during an age of imperialism and colonization, as well as enclosure (privatization) of the commons domestically. When a moment expires in the historical dialectic, resistance is...

Scale.India PunchlineChina on the horizon as ‘world’s pharmacy’M. K. Bhadrakumar | retired diplomat with the Indian Foreign Service

Interview and transcript.Yves here. We are delighted to feature another talk by Michael Hudson and Jonathan Wilson-Hargrove of the Poor People’s Campaign, hosted by Jim Vrettos of The Radical Imagination. Topics include an assessment of the Biden Administration and who really benefited from its relief to lower-wage workers. They also discuss the role of preachers in promoting economic justice, and how the business community enlisted some as early as the Great Depression to promote “free...

Experts and former prosecutors say that such fines have essentially become the cost of doing business, and that America’s entire approach to money laundering needs radical rethinking...."Capitalism" again.The New RepublicHow America Became the Money Laundering Capital of the WorldPeter Stone

 Last week, the Biden administration asked for a global waiver on vaccine intellectual property protections. What is this waiver? Why does it matter? And why did Biden stand up to big pharma? Unless Covid is brought under control, if could near bankrupt the rest of the world, with much of the cost falling back on the United States, but Big Pharma only cared about its bottom line. Even the Biden administration thought letting neoliberalism run amok was too much in the middle a global...

A bit of a mishmash economically but it mentions MMT anyway. The major point of the article is that a lot of the fiscal relief that the US federal government is into the economy is likely to flow to Chinese exporters in that they already have a significant share of the US market and now the pandemic has resulted in economic contraction that is not yet moving very swiftly toward recovering. Global Times (Chinese state-sponsored media) How weak US jobs data could hurt emerging markets, but...

I spend quite a bit of time (more than I should) engaged in Twitter debates with advocates of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Some are generally sensible, while others are convinced they have learned a deep secret which enables us to have whatever we want without paying for it. Unfortunately, the sensible ones (Meaningful Monetary Theory) don’t do the hard work of correcting the others (Magical Monetary Theory)….I think MMT economists and advocates face a problem from two directions. The first...

Last Friday (May 7, 2021), the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released their latest labour market data – Employment Situation Summary – April 2021 – which showed that the recovery since the catastrophic labour market collapse in March and April 2020, has substantially slowed after signs in March that the revovery was accelerating. The change in payroll employment fell from 770 thousand in March 2021 to a miserly 266 thousand and unemployment edged up slightly to 6.1 per cent. The...

Henry Ford understood the value of paying high wages. He also understood that supporting the buying power of workers helped his business and all businesses in the economy. Trade and invest using the concepts of MMT. Get a 30-day free trial to MMT Trader. https://www.pitbulleconomics.com/ Download my podcasts! New one every week. https://www.buzzsprout.com/1105286 Mike Norman Twitter https://twitter.com/mikenorman