Mike Norman Economics

Now if Thatcher had said as she should have, that the government has actually got all the money but has no labour which it has to hire in, that would have been correct. But the neoliberal financialisation of our society might have been stopped in its tracks. The deification of her misunderstanding has been Conservative philosophy ever since and I’m pretty certain that subsequent Labour oppositions and indeed governments, were persuaded to believe much the same thing. Progressive PulseThe...

About power. Marx got this, so it was ruled out of polite conversation and conventional economics, which acknowledges power ("monopoly power") but seldom investigates it or calls it out.  Adam Smith got it, too. That  is seldom mentioned though. Instead Adam Smith is misrepresented as basing his analysis on "the invisible hand" of the market, which Smith scholar Gavin Kennedy shows he did not do. It's a fiction that seems to originate with Paul Samuelson.Cliodynamica — A Blog about the...

Fed has "un-printed" a half trillion in the last 6 weeks. Where's Zerohedge, Schiff, CNBC, Dalio, Gundlach? Trade and invest using the concepts of MMT. Get a 30-day free trial to MMT Trader. https://www.pitbulleconomics.com/mmt-trader/?s2-ssl=yes/ Download my podcasts! New one every week. https://www.buzzsprout.com/1105286

While all eyes were on the Supreme Court's Thursday decision granting New York prosecutors access to President Trump's taxes, a ruling earlier in the day recognized roughly half of Oklahoma as an Indian reservation - in a move which could have wide-ranging legal implications for the 1.8 million people who now live in "Indian Country," according to the New York Times. The decision, authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, holds the United States to an 1866 treaty that the Muscogee (Creek) Nation...

My argument why MMT is awkward to grasp for people with already fixed views about economics is that we need to draw a distinction between two concepts of MMT: a narrow version (or core MMT), and a broad version. (This is my preferred wording, but is probably non-standard.) Most MMT primers on the internet focus on the definition of narrow MMT, while many of the interesting questions in economics (which show up in financial macro analysis) end up in broad MMT. It should come as no surprise...

The – Report of the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights – for the UN was released this week (July 7, 2020). It was Philip Alston’s last report in that role. It is a shocking indictment of the way neoliberalism has distorted our societies and the way the governments with the capacity to ‘move mountains should they wish’ have been co-opted as agents of capital and perpetuate those distortions. The Report is 19 pages of horror. It also resonates with the latest information...

So, mainstream economists were all for more efficiency, eg, getting the trains running on time, but it put millions out of work and so the country become inefficient instead.With more unemployed, the government collects less taxes which means it needs to increase taxes on everyone else.More social programs are needed too, plus police & prisons when many of the destitute turn to drugs and crime. And more healthcare needed as poverty increases illness and stress.Is there a better way?Bill...

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More systemic racism? Isn't that what the protests were about?  The irony of it all. The HillNew York AG: Black protesters were disproportionately charged with feloniesZack Budryk

NYT with egg on its face, and many others that ran away with the story, too.The GrayzoneHow the Pentagon failed to sell Afghan government’s bunk ‘Bountygate’ story to US intelligence agencies Gareth Porter