Mike Norman Economics

I am going to break a rule and link to this at the New York Times because it is noteworthy owing to its implicit support of MMT. The New York Times is "the paper of record" so this is a big deal.But aware that you may encounter a paywall. I don't usually link to paywalled sources.New York TimesHow the Government Pulls Coronavirus Relief Money Out of Thin Air Matt Phillips

The International Monetary Fund wants policy makers to avoid repeating the Depression-era mistake of ratcheting back budget deficits. Instead, it’s urging them to ramp up fiscal stimulus when the coronavirus contagion starts to abate.…  This doesn’t sound all that different from the prescription of Modern Monetary Theory proponents -– a heterodox economic school that contends countries such as the U.S. can run bigger budget shortfalls without worrying about going broke because they print...

Important.Here are a couple of tidbits. Together, China and Russia have an eight-to-one advantage over the United States in engineering graduates.... Pumping them out. In addition, high school and undergrad STEM education in Russia, China, and some other countries, including Iran, is more advanced than the US. The US faces a steep uphill climb to compete. It’s important to remember that every single invention of the digital age, from the microchip to the semiconductor laser, to the graphic...

Neoliberals are lining up another round of futile austerity for the post coronavirus world - hitting the low-paid, senior citizens  and the vulnerable. Austerity is in their DNA and people must say no.  Remember the last banking crash, caused by reckless risk-taking, fraud and speculation by banks? The UK government bailed them out by providing guarantees and cash outlays of £1,162bn and quantitative easing of another £435bn. Very few bankers faced any retribution. Instead, the government...

It’s Wednesday, and a quiet day for writing blog posts for me. But I want to comment briefly on the latest economic news that sees the IMF claiming the Australian economy will contract by 6.7 per cent in 2020 and the Treasury estimates that the unemployment rate will rise to 10 per cent (double) by June this year. While this all sounds shocking, the emerging narrative in the media and among politicians is that this is sort of inevitable given the health crisis and the Government’s Job...

I wash my keys, wallet, credit cards and phone when I get back from the shops, as well as the food and door handles, etc. Dr John Campbell says he washes his phone as much as he does his hands.C-19 can be partially aerosolized for up to 3 hours before it falls to the floor.I have a fridge engineer coming around this Monday which I'm not looking forward too, but he will be wearing a mask and gloves, they told me. I will wait three hours after he has left and then wash the whole kitchen down....

A tweet yesterday.  Do remember an uncontrolled Covid 19 pandemic would also completely tank the economy.  Hundreds of thousand dead, widespread panic and break down of public trust and order, will be devastating, and harder to return from, "herd immunity" or not. Aggressive social distancing policies being used to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 are hammering the U.S. economy, but an analysis by University of Wyoming researchers suggests that these measures are...

After the fossil fuel industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars undermining climate science, it’s easy to see how epidemiology came next. I've been debating with the anti-vaxxers and C-19 conspiracy theorists on twitter. Many of these people say they are on the left, like the Off-Guardian, but they come across more like libertarians to me. I find these people disturbing and they make me feel like a centrist, which I'm not, but one guy said I was a neoliberal and told me to look at...

My brother expressed racist views towards the Chinese the other day and I defended them, but it wasn't easy with their horrible wet markets where live animals are sold.But in the West we have farmers markets where live animals are sold too, and then taken to slaughter, and with what I've seen on Twitter it's often horrendous, so horrible, in fact, that I won't describe it here.Sinophobia is a fear or prejudice of expressed towards China and its people. Similar to other varieties of...

Where the COVID-19 pandemic began is still an open question. The Unz ReviewThe Hunt for Patient Zero Godfree Roberts