Mike Norman Economics

Disaster capitalism is being tried, and the worst case is now the likely case. But there is a scale beyond which disaster capitalism cannot go. At a certain point, the carnage becomes too great to neglect, impossible to avoid and lethal to overlook. At a certain point, ordinary people will stand up and refuse to be bullied any more. That point has not quite arrived; we are still in the mind-set of “getting back to normal,” even as the pandemic continues. The contradiction between...

Data is useless unless it’s used. Everything above is pointless unless governments actually want to use all this data to make decisions. And the last few years have been, ahem, challenging ones for those who think big decisions are best made using good evidence.So better data after COVID-19 isn’t about any one thing. It’s a slow incremental process of creating a system, based on good law and respect for rights, fully embedded into political cultures and expectations, attuned to market...

I suppose some people wonder why I keep coming back to Marx. Here is the reason.   This is how very influential - and not at all communist - Jacques Attali once described him, "He was the first to grasp the world as a whole, which is at once political, scientific and philosophical. From that point of view, he is, as the communist historian Eric Hosbawm said, “the recognized founding father of modern thinking about society.”... There is also a return that implies greater practical...

"The Treasury view" that fiscal  responsibility requires balancing the budget led to the second leg down in the US during the Great Depression when FDR listened to the fiscal disciplinarians at the outset of his second term. Note that Keynes had published the General Theory in 1936, and FDR was already quite aware of Keynes. When FDR adopted the Treasury view in 1937, the recovery began to tank, and and he reversed his position in 1938. See, How FDR Learned to Stop Worrying and Love...

It is Wednesday, so only some snippets today as I have deadlines and some travel to deal with. We have been finalising a Report on our latest estimates of the investment required to introduce a full-scale Job Guarantee in Australia. As part of that work, I have been going back through my NAIRU (Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment) estimates and updating data. I am also going to talk about that a bit in my presentation to the Economic Society of Australia tonight. That talk is...

Sees negative rates as a defense against all  "teh deficit!" criticisms he's been getting from his right libertarian flank...  at negative rates its "free money!" so "teh deficit!" doesn't matter, etc...And he's eventually been getting everything he wants from the Fed... As long as other countries are receiving the benefits of Negative Rates, the USA should also accept the “GIFT”. Big numbers! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 12, 2020

Dr Zubin Damania says you have got to be freaking stupid to take this garbage seriously. [embedded content]

Tcherneva is on the opposite side of the spectrum from Paul. She is a proponent of "Modern Monetary Theory," which argues that the government can always pay its bills by creating more money, minimizing the importance of deficits and debt. Does 'creating' money create an inflation risk? Paul, the former Texas congressman and author of "End the Fed," predicts such money creation will lead to disaster. He says it will cause overheated financial bubbles fueled by too much easy money in the...

Steep selloff today was a buying opportunity, but most investors will sell on fear. Trade and invest using the concepts and understandings of MMT. Get a 30-day free trial to MMT Trader. https://www.pitbulleconomics.com/mmt-trader/?s2-ssl=yes/

If you recall, we were out front in questioning this hoax from the get-go. Patrick Lawrence sums up the travesty. The sad reality is that while the Democrats had plenty of ammunition to attack candidate and then president Trump based on policy and character, too, if they wanted, they chose to concoct a bogus account of how they had managed to loss an election in which they were heavily favored. First, the impeachment scheme failed, and now their plot has been outed. What a bunch of...