Mike Norman Economics

The Trump administration is opening up retirement funds to private equity — at workers’ expense The way I see it, this is all part of America's decay. There's a moral decay here, but also an economic one. If retirees become less wealthy because of this, then the economy could be affected.Democracy just means rule by the rich.  The Trump administration is pushing dramatic changes to the American retirement system that will benefit Wall Street but push average citizens into plans that are...

News you don't want to hear. Many American nuclear facilities are vulnerable to emergent challenges of climate change. These plants were not designed with unprecedented change in mind. Like NOLA.OilpriceAmerica’s Ageing Nuclear Fleet Underprepared For Climate Change Haley Zaremba

The Covid-19 pandemic has added severe financial strain on a North American upstream industry that was already reeling under billions of dollars of debt. With WTI climbing past $40 a barrel, most exploration and production firms (E&Ps) have been able to keep their head above water, but unless prices strengthen further about 150 more E&Ps will need to seek Chapter 11 protection through 2022, a Rystad Energy analysis shows. So far this year, according to Haynes & Boone, 32...

Does this mean. cooperate on chip design and manufacture?Sputnik InternationalRussia is Willing to Cooperate With China, Huawei on 5G Tech, Foreign Minister Lavrov SaysAndrei Dergalin

More on the loanable funds fallacy in economics and finance.Lars P. Syll’s BlogMMT — debunking the deficit mythLars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

Arvin Ash has always tended towards reductionism in his videos in the past, and while he did embrace some metaphysics at times, he always stuck to the hard science in the end. But in this video he's open minded to the idea that consciousness maybe not just the result of cause and effect - where there is no free will, and everything is determined by what preceded it - but that there maybe self determination and free will after all. If that's true, then we are not merely just very advanced...

A laboratory demonstration of the classic “Wigner’s friend” thought experiment could overturn cherished assumptions about reality At a quantum level observation brings reality into existence, but what happens when the observer also gets observed, well, it seems there can be two different realities, so one scientist may see an electron spinning up, while the other sees it spinning down.Does an objective world actually exist, and will quantum physics need to be abandoned?The second...

A really good introduction to MMT with no ifs and buts. It's very positive. In Modern Monetary Theory Explained, I simply lay out the key principles of MMT and look at what some of the arguments are for and against it. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) may have been around for many years but it has recently gained in popularity with the advent of Stephanie Kelton's book, The Deficit Myth, and the way in which it accounts more elegantly for debt dynamics and inflation over the last decade...

The Grayzone's Anya Parampil joins Tucker Carlson Tonight to address the revival of Iraq war neocons and militarists by both the Biden campaign and Trump White House. This surprised me, Tucker Carlson interviewing Anya Parampil, and they were both in agreement too. [embedded content]

Between Whitehall and the City there is a revolving door of co-dependency An excellent article from Simon Jenkins. In the UK there is a revolving door between politics and banks. Socialism for the bankers (state hand-outs and soft touch regulation) and capitalism for the rest of us. Much attention has since focused on the inadequacy of regulation. Sputtering reforms have tried to curb the more outrageous tax dodges, offshore shelters and “London laundromats”. But money has talked: money...