Mike Norman Economics

 From the start, the alleged Navalny poisoning was riddled with contradictions and should have raised eyebrows by every politician and journalist.  Being discharged from the Charité Clinic in Berlin, Navalny went into attack mode against President Vladimir Putin. As it seems, this will be his role designed to him by the intelligence agencies. In a couple of days, the Navalny hype will be over. One can only blame Putin for the alleged poising once. If Navalny had the guts, he would return to...

An excellent podcast, which was on YouTube until they removed it. The first half is very good which looks into why people hold conspiracy theories about Covid-19, but it's the radical second half by Nafeez Ahmed which is the most interesting where he talks about the doctors who are involved with right-wing groups that advised the government to take it's present disastrous course. They were more concerned about the economy than people's lives, says Nafeez Ahmed, and put out the idea that...

The COVID-19 pandemic has intensified socioeconomic disparities between and within countries around the world, offering a disturbing preview of what awaits us on a warming planet. To get ahead of both current and looming crises, the world must commit to a recovery agenda that is not only green, but also blue, purple, and red.… In a world facing war, disease, famine, and natural disasters–exacerbated by climate change, a comprehensive new deal that addresses the needs of people and the...

Author Sarah Chayes, known for her analysis of corruption, has spent decades studying the ways of corrupt networks in countries around the world. In 2016, she caught a radio program about the Supreme Court overturning a conviction of Virginia’s former governor Bob McDonnell, found guilty of corruption by lower courts. The sort of thing Chayes had long observed in places like Afghanistan and Nigeria was now showing up in the United States. Her latest book, On Corruption in America And What...

[embedded content]Here's Trump -- who just announced he and Melania are under quarantine for possible COVID infection -- mocking Joe Biden at Tuesday's debate for wearing a mask 

 The scale of mass movement in such a short period of time is unthinkable in many parts of the world, where governments are still struggling to control soaring infections. In the United States, the number of coronavirus cases topped 7 million over the weekend. Much of Europe is now in the grip of a second wave of infections; even countries largely spared by the first wave, such as Greece and Croatia, have seen cases surging as tourists took summer vacations following the reopening of...

 The same psy-op is probably being staged against China. A trove of leaked UK government documents exposes a massive propaganda network used to shape the media narrative during the Syrian proxy war. Western government-funded intelligence cutouts trained Syrian opposition leaders, planted stories in media outlets, ran a cadre of journalists, and whitewashed the jihadist militants armed, trained and supported by the US, UK, Turkey and Gulf monarchies. "Every very single aspect of the [Syrian]...

As governments grapple with the dissonance that the pandemic is causing them – realising that their old mainstream economics narratives are not going to cut it any more but still reluctant to admit that and pass onto a new phase of creative policy making – we are observing these contradictions in both statements about fiscal policy and monetary policy. The Australian government, for example, is convinced tax cuts are required but have observed that recent tax cuts, before the pandemic...

The FRED graph above shows the potential number of hours per week spent on commuting that are being saved by working from home: Between April and July, that potential weekly time savings in each county ranges from 1 million to 1.5 million hours. *The physicist Enrico Fermi used this method to great effect in his research and teaching to get rough orders of magnitude. We wonder what Professor Fermi would have been able to accomplish if he had access to FRED… He received a Nobel Prize in...

Although it can be politically expedient to draw a thick line between capitalist decentralization and socialist central planning, the truth is that these two systems have converged on many occasions. Moreover, each was conceived for the same purpose, and elements of both could be realized in today's digital economy. China has already figured this out and established one organizational model to do it. Moreover, it's a dynamic model rather than a static one, adapting to changing conditions.In...