Mike Norman Economics

This was an incisive post from B. Gray, which I thought deserved much more attention:It follows:Austerity has two parents: greed and fear, both of which are powerful motivators among the wealthy elites and the politicians that do their bidding....Short.Elites fear if the public understood MMT and the power of the government purse, it would lead to anarchy in the allocation of real resources, which would lead to a reduction in the elites share of resources, as well as their influence in the...

 A seemingly strange phenomenon of a smaller dose of the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine being more effective than a bigger one is reportedly explained by it first being tested on a younger group.RTPuzzling higher AstraZeneca vaccine efficacy for smaller dosage explained: It was reportedly tested on people only under 56

Got that. Criticism now joins BDS. Right out of 1984.Middle East EyePompeo spells out the new normal: All criticism of Israel is ‘antisemitic’Jonathan Cook

Finally!The Case for Concerted ActionGita Gopinath On Fiscal PolicyV. Ramanan

A very good article here that comes closer than most to what I consider the crunch issue. The key point is that if a currency moves down so that imports become ‘more expensive’, then the ‘inflation’ that goes off is a distributional response that tries to eliminate some of those imports so that the exchange demands equalise. That also eliminates somebody else’s exports. The important thing to remember is that when a currency goes down, all the others in the world go up in relation to it and...

The decline of the dollar as a world currency has set a new record recently. In October, the euro replaced the dollar as the preferred currency for international payments for the first time in seven years. In the same month, the growth of the pound sterling and the Japanese yen as alternative models of global payment was impressive, indicating even more rejection of the American currency, until now considered absolutely hegemonic. About 37.82% of the money transfers that the Society for...

 Scott Sumner is not satisfied with the answers he received.If I were to try to develop a radical new macro theory, I’d try to come up with a way of explaining my new model using the framework of existing models. Actually, I often do that here, translating market monetarism into New Keynesian language. I’m not seeing that with MMT. And it’s not just me. I see other bloggers like Noah Smith, Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong, Nick Rowe, etc., who seem to have an equally hard time trying to figure out...

Whatever the reason, the darkness that started growing around the crimes committed by the big Wall Street banks during the Obama administration has now evolved into such a complete dark curtain that regulators are refusing to say what the crimes actually are that are being settled for huge amounts of money....Wall Street On ParadeBoth Citigroup and JPMorgan Have Now Received Huge Fines for Crimes the Regulators Won’t RevealPam Martens and Russ Martens

While India is managing the COVID-19 pandemic, it cannot lose sight of climate risk, which is rising. The coronavirus crisis holds profound lessons that can help us address climate risk—if we make greater economic and environmental resiliency core to our planning for the recovery ahead. Indeed, economic stimulus in the wake of the pandemic can help restore growth, while also addressing climate risk.India faces a rapidly changing and degrading physical environment. The challenges of water...