Mike Norman Economics

Huawei has dramatically ramped up investment in Russia due to US restrictions against the tech giant, CEO Ren Zhengfei has said. “After the United States included us in the Entity List, we transferred our investment in the United States to Russia, increased Russian investment, expanded the Russian scientist team, and increased the salary of Russian scientists,” Ren said in a recent speech to Chinese universities, his comments cited by Shanghai Jiao Tong University on Sunday.... Sputnik...

In sum, lockdown has been positive for knowledge worker productivity in the short term. But it has also created some concerns and challenges around longer-term effectiveness, creativity, and personal resilience. Let’s consider the findings from the research in more depth, then discuss what the opportunities and challenges are for the months and years ahead.... Harvard Business ReviewResearch: Knowledge Workers Are More Productive from HomeJulian Birkinshaw, professor at London Business...

Regular readers will know that for the last few years I have been documenting the way that the dominant paradigm in macroeconomics (New Keynesianism) is slowly disintegrating as the dissonance between its empirical predictions and reality becomes too great to ignore and justify. The once-in-a-century pandemic hasn’t given us much to celebrate in 2020. One cause for optimism, perhaps, is that we might finally jettison the mainstream economics fictions about government deficits and debt,...

The Monetary Monopoly Model (Section 4.3) is a core model of Modern Monetary Theory. If we take it literally, we do not need a theory of inflation, since the price level in some variants of the model is explicitly set as a policy variable. However, reality is far more complex than the model suggests, and if we want to match theory to reality, we are faced with the realisation that governments act in a fashion that sabotages the control of the price level that they do have. (Note: This is...

A propos our recent discussion of whether MMT is a theory, a dogma, or a description.I’ve always been baffled why ‘modern monetary theory’ is called a theory. I don’t mean this in a disparaging way. As far as theories of money go, I think modern monetary theory (MMT for short) is the correct one. But having a correct theory of money is a bit like having a correct theory of traffic lights.Understanding this act of money creation is trivial — much like understanding the creation of a traffic...

Plans for a TikTok sale may have a new obstacle, with China implementing new rules on AI technology exports, The New York Timesreported. The new export control rules, which focus on technology the Chinese government considers sensitive, could mean that TikTok’s parent company, Beijing-based ByteDance, might need a license before it can sell TikTok to an American company. The updated regulations prohibit exporting technology including text analysis, voice recognition, and content...

A socialist government such as China’s can keep its industry going simply by simply writing down debts when they can’t be paid without forcing a closedown and bankruptcy and loss of assets and employment. The world thus has two options: a basically productive public financial system in China, or a predatory financial system in the United States.... Incidentally, I searched on the title in Google search to see whether this site is being deplatformed and came up with nothing. The Unz Review...

So now they find out. Journal of PsychopharmacologyA low dose of lysergic acid diethylamide decreases pain perception in healthy volunteers ht Naked Capitalism

But there has been an issue: Steve did not 'get' MMT and its argument that spending creates the money to pay tax and fund what is called government borrowing, but which is actually the redepositing of the excess of government spending over taxes raised back with the government for safekeeping. And that obstacle meant that we could never quite agree. And then he read The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton, which is also essential reading. And he did some double-entry book-keeping to build a...

Governments the world over are spending like crazy to try and steer their economies through the COVID-19 crisis. Whether it’s the fiscal policies of the government or the monetary policies of the central bank, it all still revolves around using money that wasn’t around a few months ago. So how much of what is happening is described by Modern Monetary Theory – and how much more could be done if we accepted that MMT is the way things should really work. And do central banks, or treasurers...