Mike Norman Economics

What does it mean that some of the decade’s big market winners were companies with no real net worth? This should be of concern because it suggests that capitalism’s process of creative destruction isn’t working. Zombie companies tend to be less productive than others, so their survival may well be a part of the explanation for the low productivity that has bedeviled the West since the financial crisis.  All of these factors, I believe, are at work in the rise of negative-value...

Gold, Goats, 'n GunsAfter Soleimani Killing Suddenly the U.S. is Alone Tom Luongo Dances with BearsAGAINST THE BLITZ WOLF — RUSSIAN REINFORCEMENTS FOR IRAN’S DEFENCE IN WAR AGAINST ALLJohn Helmer India PunchlineIran loathes Pompeo’s Chabahar giftM. K. Bhadrakumar | retired diplomat with the Indian Foreign Service Caitlin Johnstone — Rogue JournalistOn The Idiotic Partisan Debate Over Regime Change In Iran Or SyriaCaitlin Johnstone Moon of AlabamaThe Axis Of Resistance Announces The...

We at CleanTechnica have been looking at the various 2020 US Democratic candidates for president (here, here, and here) and their funding plans for a clean energy future. We (and they) have learned a lot about what it will take to not only usher in an energy future devoid of fossil fuels but also to pay for such a transition. Maybe it’s time, though, to put at least some of the politics aside and see what economists and researchers out there are saying about investing in clean energy,...

Economics is sometimes portrayed as a contest between saltwater and freshwater, between the coastal pseudo-Keynesians and the Great Lakes neo-Walrasians, between the flaws-and-friction model-builders and the free-market hard-liners. As evolutionists know, both habitats are fairly sterile. Evolution occurs in the backwaters, in the mudflats, bogs, lagoons, cypress swamps and wetlands, in the shadows of perpetually endangered habitat. In this article I will sketch my personal journey through...

I have been commissioned to write the Introduction (Preface) to the upcoming book – The Last Colonial Currency: A History of the CFA Franc – by Fanny Pigeaud and Ndongo Samba Sylla, which is an English version of the original 2018 book, L’arme invisible de la Françafrique. It will soon be published by Pluto Press (UK) – as soon as I finish this introduction. The book is incredibly important because it shows the role that currency arrangements play in perpetuating colonial oppression and...

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Common DreamsThe So-Called War on Terror Has Killed Over 801,000 People and Cost $6.4 Trillion: New Analysis Jessica Corbett Bill Totten's Weblog (Simplification but useful for those with little background in this)American Values, Chinese Values Professor Joseph H Chung Global Research (December 17 2019) Econospeak [Probably a combination of the two with other factors also]Is The Chinese Economic System the "Mandarin Growth Model" or the "Chinese-Style Keiretsu System"? J. Barkley Rosser...

I have been commissioned to write the Introduction (Preface) to the upcoming book – The Last Colonial Currency: A History of the CFA Franc – by Fanny Pigeaud and Ndongo Samba Sylla, which is an English version of the original 2018 book, L’arme invisible de la Françafrique. It will soon be published by Pluto Press (UK) – as soon as I finish this introduction. The book is incredibly important because it shows the role that currency arrangements play in perpetuating colonial oppression and...

The assassination was intended to escalate America’s presence in Iraq to keep control the region’s oil reserves, and to back Saudi Arabia’s Wahabi troops (Isis, Al Quaeda in Iraq, Al Nusra and other divisions of what are actually America’s foreign legion) to support U.S. control o Near Eastern oil as a buttress o the U.S. dollar. That remains the key to understanding this policy, and why it is in the process of escalating, not dying down.  I sat in on discussions of this policy as it was...

Most debates around Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) revolve around the role of operations and the meaning of the “fiscal constraint”: what are the limits on fiscal policy? (The focus on this one topic is either the result of this being the most interesting topic, and/or critics not being bothered to read anything else in the MMT literature.) These debates are typically uninteresting, because they end up being purely semantic debates, and the two sides actually agreeing on the underlying...