Mike Norman Economics

I was hunting for the exact location of "Prince's Tavern" in Manchester in 1833 when I stumbled upon an Economist article from March 30, 1844 addressing the "practical consequences" of reducing the length of the factory working day from 12 hours to 10. I am always fascinating by the profound and enduring hostility of a faction of employers -- amplified by their mouthpieces in academia and the press -- to the reduction of working time. I'm amazed how often their bile and zeal leads them to...

Scott Fullwiler's article "The debt ratio and sustainable macroeconomic policy"* offers a very good introduction to Modern Monetary Theory's (MMT) stance on fiscal policy. It covers a lot of ground, making it hard to summarise. This article has some general remarks on why I recommend reading the paper as an introduction to MMT thinking. The key argument is that interest service is what matters for sustainability (and not the debt-to-GDP ratio) -- and that the rate of interest is under the...

The Powell Fed is the worst Fed since Volker. Maybe even worse. Trade and invest using MMT. Get a 30-day free trial to MMT Trader. https://www.pitbulleconomics.com/mmt-trader/?s2-ssl=yes/

Trump has a logical point here... maybe Monetarism works differently in the southern hemisphere?Australia’s Central Bank cut interest rates and stated it will most likely further ease in order to make up for China’s Coronavirus situation and slowdown. They reduced to 0.5%, a record low. Other countries are doing the same thing, if not more so. Our Federal Reserve has us....— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 3, 2020

One of the themes I exercised when speaking in Europe recently, particularly when presenting at the French Senate Commission and the Ministry of Finance, was that by pushing European integration into an unworkable currency union and refusing to budge, the European political class was undermining the valid aspects of the ‘European Project’, which the likes of Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman saw as a way of bringing peace to the Continent after several attempts by Germany to usurp the rights...

Record one-day rise in the stock market, but this is not the bottom. 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/

Not to bad an article overall, but Dion Rabouin goes off the rails at the conclusion: The takeaway: There's no telling whether Kelton and Sanders are right, because no government has ever attempted to implement the MMT approach.  The reality is that all governments are accounted for in MMT and all governments fall under a special case of the general case set forth in the MMT conceptual institutionalist model that is grounded in law and accounting rather than mathematical models based on...

Might as well be planning to distribute free bowls of bat guts soup chased down with shooters of raw snake blood  to prevent the corona virus....Issuing an emergency statement, Kuroda said the BOJ "will closely monitor future developments, and will strive to provide ample liquidity and ensure stability in financial markets through appropriate market operations and asset purchases” @Lagarde and @federalreserve , your move. https://t.co/NqSAyBI46X— Sara Eisen (@SaraEisen) March 2, 2020

One of the enduring myths that mainstream macroeconomists and the politicians that rely on their lies to depoliticise their own unpopular actions continue to propagate is that of ‘central bank independence’. This is the claim that macroeconomic policy making improved in the ‘neoliberal’ era following the emergence of Monetarism because monetary policy was firmly in the hands of technocratic bankers who were not part of the political cycle. As such, they could make decisions based on...

Swedish prime minister Olof Palme was assassinated on this day in 1986. He was an internationalist and the last social-democratic leader to really believe in a world beyond capitalism. JacobinToday’s Social Democrats Should Be More Like Olof PalmeDaniel Suhonen