Mike Norman Economics

Putin is coming across as very adroit. But it must also be mentioned — which Pepe Escobar doesn't do here — that securing the Middle East and Central Asia is existential for Russia.Jihadis present a major threat to Russia on their own and they are also a proxy force in US hybrid warfare.Putin is not just being a nice guy in helping out Assad. Russia has a major strategic interest in Mideast stability, which entails eradication of terrorism that can be directed at Russia from the south and...

Dances with Bears THE SULTAN BLINKED, THE TSAR AGREED TO CLOSE HIS EYES – THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE EXPANDS BY 118 KILOMETRES OF SYRIA John Helmer India PunchlineDeconstructing Putin-Erdogan MOU on Syria; this is how it looks. M. K. Bhadrakumar | retired diplomat with the Indian Foreign Service FAIRWhitewashing Neoliberal Repression in Chile and Ecuador Lucas Koerner Fort Russ NewsBREAKING: Evo Morales declares state of emergency in Bolivia because of coup attempt Paul Antonopoulos...

Neoliberalism is – literally – burning. And from Ecuador to Chile, South America, once again, is showing the way, Pepe Escobar writes. Strategic Culture FoundationBurn, Neoliberalism, Burn Pepe Escobar

Market is going higher folks.

This could force the story into the MSM. This past week, an employee of a Serbian arms manufacturer was arrested and thrown in jail after blowing the whistle on a covert US DoD and Serbian contractor trafficking weapons to ISIS in Yemen - a story exposed by Bulgarian investigative journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva. Co-hosts Mike Robinson (UKC) and Patrick Henningsen (21WIRE) breakdown the story which is still developing. [embedded content]

Regaining control of the narrative through economic censorship. We’re grateful for the support we’ve received over the years … Loyal readers have made insightful comments for many years. Some loyal readers have donated $2/month, or $5/month or $10/month, (and a few have donated even more) which we appreciate. Passionate writers have burned the midnight oil to report on stories which no one else is covering. But we simply can’t afford to keep paying the thousands of dollars of hosting...

[H]eterodox economists need to be more active in challenging the dominance and anti-intellectual behavior of mainstream economics and economists. Not being respectable, standing up and just saying NO, pursuing heterodox research, and working with and through groups that are not part of the social-political-economic elite to promote better social-economics policies that benefit the non-elite are just some of the things heterodox economists can do. Of course, such behavior is frown upon,...

In the end, MMT looks like an extreme version of conventional economics in which there is no independent monetary policy and there are a lot of unused resources. But when resources get tight, the reflex is command and control central planning. This cuts to the quick of it. The question is how much market state (where free markets determine outcomes, in theory at least) and how much welfare state (where the economy is managed based on desired outcomes). This is an ongoing dialectic among...

It is Wednesday and I am travelling a lot today with limited opportunity to write. I am reading a lot though. Highly significant political debates with far reaching effects on the well-being of citizens once policies are implemented are conducted on a daily basis in our national Parliaments and in the media with little correspondence to reality. This is the norm for debates on macroeconomics, which dominate political news every day. There is this fictional world that has been created to...

Globalization not as represented by the free traders, who now have egg on their faces and have to eat crow. To boot, trade was supposedly Paul Krugman's specialty, even though he is best known for witing a popular macro textbook. So he was one of "the experts." Will the inapplicability of the ISLM "gadget " be next? So far, Paul Krugman is hanging onto it as it crashes and burns.Lars P. Syll’s BlogPaul Krugman — finally — admits he was wrong!Lars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University...