Mike Norman Economics

Most important at this aristocratic level of Empire is the extent to which, despite appearances, its general contours remain unchanged. From this perspective, the much-heralded return of the nation-state—along with nationalist rhetoric, threatened trade wars and protectionist policies—should be understood not as a fracturing of the global system, but rather as so many tactical manoeuvres in the competition among aristocratic powers. The elite may no longer be titled aristocrats, but the...

They are going to add a lot of Reserves to Depositories next week:Trea­sury Sec­re­tary Steven Mnuchin said he’s work­ing closely with Fed Chairman Powell to make sure there are am­ple re­serves fol­low­ing fund­ing strains in money mar­kets in September, which he attributed in part to bank liquidity rules.https://t.co/xA76QhGFvV— Kate Davidson (@KateDavidson) December 5, 2019 Treasury ops adding about 38B Tues+Thurs and Fed adding another 25B via new operation Monday... 20B social...

This old clip just turned up on my phone. I thought it was good. [embedded content]

An anti-neocon president appears to have been surrounded by neocons in his own administration. I recent survey I came across was checking for antisemitic views in the American population. One question was, Do you think Jews hold too much power in this country? The answer yes was considered to be an antisemitic viewpoint.In the UK, 80% of Conservative Party politicians are members of Friends of Isreal, and something like 30% of Labour Party politicians are.The larger question is who should...

More conspiracy theories, you decide?Is the US run by organised crime?The Clintons, the Clinton Body Count, blackmail, the Mossad, the CIA, cocaine, drug smuggling, Epstein, and Prince Andrew.Go to 1:46:00 [embedded content] This link might take you straight to the spot.https://t.co/UPrD13Gwoa

This is the final part of a two-part discussion about the consequences of a currency-issuing government exercising different bond-issuing options. The basic Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) position is for the currency-issuing government to abandon the unnecessary practice of issuing debt (which is a hangover from the fixed exchange rate, gold standard days). Currency-issuing governments should use that capacity to advance general well-being and providing corporate welfare to underpin and...

There is no substitute for the ‘big picture’. Economists should not be doctors but social scientists, or more accurately they should develop an economics that recognises the wider social forces that drive economic models, in particular, the social mode of production that is capitalism. That is political economy, mostly not taught in universities and certainly not practised in international agencies.... Michael Roberts Blog — blogging from a marxist economistEconomics as a social...

Peter Hadfield on conspiracy theories. [embedded content]

Britain at a crossroads.Boris wants to turn Britain into a low wage ecomomy, despite neoliberalisn consistently failing for forty years. Given the dismal empirical record of forty years of pro-market reforms, the only way this Conservative Government can create the low tax, low regulation, law and order state of Neoliberal fever dreams is under the cover of other projects. Brexit offers a unique opportunity: it allows a government of economic extremists to manipulate our cultural identity to...

I don't know if this is a good thing or bad thing. Quantum computers seemed to be so powerful I thought they mignt be dangerous, on the other hand, they may have saved a lot of power - which would have be great for cryptocurrencies.  Because they work on quantum probability, it seems you can never be sure how it's going to go.  Google announced this fall to much fanfare that it had demonstrated "quantum supremacy" — that is, it performed a specific quantum computation far faster than...