Mike Norman Economics

NOTE: THIS IS THE ENGLISH ORIGINAL OF A COLUMN SPECIALLY COMMISSIONED BY LEADING RUSSIAN BUSINESS DAILY VEDOMOSTIVKWaiting for the end of the worldPepe EscobarSee alsoPresident of RussiaMeeting on economic views

Most assessments of the effectiveness of sanctions on Russia, with some exceptions, hold them to have been highly effective. My new INET Working Paper analyzes a few prominent Western assessments, both official and private, of the effect of sanctions on the Russian economy and war effort. It seeks to understand the goals of sanctions and bases of fact and causal inference that underpin the consensus view. Such understanding may then help to clarify the relationship between claims made by...

Last Friday (April 7, 2023), the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released their latest labour market data – Employment Situation Summary – March 2023 – which revealed continuing employment growth and rising participation with unemployment falling modestly. A good confluence of events. We have been looking for a turning point in the US labour market after several months of interest rate increases. But it hasn’t come yet. Indeed, it is going in the opposite direction to that envisaged by...

Asia TimesXi topping Biden in New Cold War’s economic gameWilliam Pesek Asia TimesMacron has no interest in ‘decoupling’ from ChinaScott FosterBreaking DefenseUS tech firms should wargame response if China invades Taiwan, warns NSA cybersecurity chief Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.

I have been tied up courtesy of a major power failure, Easter, and other family obligations. Over the weekend, there was a blow up on Twitter between Richard J. Murphy and what appeared to be dozens of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) proponents. (I ignore any Twitter thread involving lots of people and lasts more than a day, so I cannot fill in more details.) The dispute was about the role of taxes (although it devolved into whining about attitudes). Since many of my readers will have found me...

Map of US states.Real Progressives (MMT based)Race to the Bottom

Goldman Sachs says public not afraid of banks anymore. So what was that all about?

The turning point came on 26 February, 2022, when Washington’s neocons – in a glaring display of their shallow intellects – decided to freeze and/or steal the reserves of the only nation on the planet equipped with all the commodities that really matter, and with the necessary nous to unleash a momentous shift to a monetary system not anchored in fiat money.That was the fateful day when the cabal, identified by journalist Seymour Hersh as responsible for blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines,...

Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Kristalina Georgieva on Thursday said the world economy is expected to grow less than 3 percent this year, with India and China projected to account for half of global growth in 2023....ECNS (Chinese official English news service)China, India to account for half of global economic growth in 2023: IMF chiefXinhua (Chinese state media)

An earlier post offered what is for me a fairly large change of orientation on fundamental questions of social ontology: a conviction that the concept of ontological individualism is no longer supportable. My concern there was that this phrase gives too much ontological priority to individual actors; whereas the truth about the social world is more complex. Individuals are indeed the substrate of social structures and entities, but social entities are in turn constitutive of individual...