Mike Norman Economics

Good backgrounder. Not just about "interference."The Vineyard of the SakerTracking foreign interference in Hong Kong Pepe Escobar

Last week, I posted a graph in this blog post – RBA cuts rates as a futile exercise as Dr Schwarze Null demands fiscal action (October 2, 2019) that showed that over the 12 months to August 2019, 312 thousand jobs have been created (net) in Australia. The stunning result is that 301 thousand (96.5 per cent) of those net jobs have been in the public sector. The private labour market is thus stagnating. I was interested to delve further into that result to see if I could bring more detail to...

Econo-physicist Jason Smith demonstrates how to deal with a failed model forecast — acknowledge it, explain it, learn from it, and move on to improving the process. Information Transfer EconomicsCalling a recession too early (and incorrectly)Jason Smith

Angry BearMind F*K, Cambridge AnalyticaDaniel Becker The GuardianNeoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problemsThe big polluters’ masterstroke was to blame the climate crisis on you and meGeorge Monbiot Project SyndicateDemocracy on a Knife-EdgeDani Rodrik | Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University Vox.euFrom workers to capitalists in less than two generations: Chinese urban elite...

Which is where financialization comes in. The defining event on the road to financialization in the 80s was not big bang: at the time, this was seen as merely the ending of a restrictive practice rather than the start of the creation of global investment banks. Instead, it was the credit liberalization of the early 80s, which made mortgages and consumer credit much easier to get. This did not merely increase the activity and hence profits of lenders: note the big rise in financial profits...

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.