Mike Norman Economics

MMT is gaining traction among progressives as an option for paying for massive government spending projects such as the Green New Deal. Even if it is useful for countries such as the U.S., can it be applied in developing countries? PERI's Matías Vernengo says only to a limited extent. [embedded content]

A short blog post today – being Wednesday. I am still catching up on things after being away for a few weeks. The British Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) offered its latest contribution to Project Fear this week with their claim that the fiscal response to a no-deal Brexit would “would send government debt to its highest level in more than half a century”. Sounds scary. Which, of course, was the intention. That is what Project Fear is about. Creating illusions of disaster to discipline...

BY MICHELLE STARR Researchers seem to be quite excited about acetyl-l-carnitine. Could this be the breakthrough they have been waiting for? It's an anino acid which is readily available as a supplement on-line and in health food stores.  People who live with depression have low blood levels of a specific molecule, new medical research has revealed. It's called acetyl-L-carnitine, and those with particularly severe, treatment-resistant or childhood onset depression were found to have the...

The world would be richer and healthier if the full costs of fossil fuels were paid, according to a new report from the International Monetary Fund By Tim Dickinson  The United States has spent more subsidizing fossil fuels in recent years than it has on defense spending, according to a new report from the International Monetary Fund. The IMF found that direct and indirect subsidies for coal, oil and gas in the U.S. reached $649 billion in 2015. Pentagon spending that same year was $599...

Powell announced today that Fed will start QE in November.

Francis Fukuyama says Beijing challenged the expectations he had when he published his book in 1992, but Chinese system must evolve to flourish This is not a glowing article about China, but it's interesting.  Francis Fukuyama says Chinese model may be very successful, but it could still go wrong. The Chinese middleclass are not interested in democracy, just a rising standard of living, and if the government fails to achieve this then the system may eventually fail.What I find...

This is not fixing anything.

Last Friday (October 4, 2019), a group of former central bank governors and/or officials in Europe, issued a statement damming the conduct of the European Central Bank. You can read the full text at Bloomberg – Memorandum on ECB Monetary Policy by Issing, Stark, Schlesinger. The timing of the intervention is interesting given the change of boss at the ECB is imminent. As I explain in what follows, the Memorandum should be disregarded. Its central contentions are mostly correct but the...

"Deficit too small!" ???Not that this is news to anyone here (at least shouldn't be): BREAKING: The CBO has estimated the federal budget deficit for 2019 to be $984 billion, the highest since 2012 - The Hill— News Breaking LIVE (@NewsBreaking) October 7, 2019

Book review by Marshall steinbaum.Binyamin Appelbaum’s new book has lived up to its controversial billing, particularly among its subjects. The book condemns the role the economics profession has played in breeding inequality, and holds economists to account for the resulting backlash of xenophobic white nationalism. When the New York Times published an excerpt, the reaction was sadly predictable: How dare he suggest that economists don’t care about inequality? It is only because of...