Mike Norman Economics

Despite years of denial, there can no longer be any doubt that the US is pursuing a bipartisan containment strategy vis-à-vis China. Whether justified or not, the real problem with this strategy is less the merits of the allegations leveled by US politicians than the incoherence of the Trump administration’s policies to address them.... It's still "Red China," after all.Stephen Roach understand Chinese political economy. This is a good summary of his course at Yale on "The Next...

I always enjoy reading Thorstein Veblen, partly because his writing strays back and forth across the line between "raising questions of real interest" to "just plain old dyspeptic and cantankerous." His 1918 essay "The Higher Learning In America:A Memorandum On the Conduct of Universities By Business Men" is full of comments from both categories, often closely overlapping. It's also the source of one of the liveliest insults to the field of economics, that economics is "a `science' of...

Presidential contender Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Monday released a plan to protect independent news outlets and journalists from the effects of widespread media consolidation.Sanders, decrying the mega-mergers he says have led to a handful of large corporations acting as gatekeepers for the information most Americans receive, calls for concrete steps “to rebuild and protect a diverse and truly independent press so that real journalists can do the critical jobs that they love” in an...

Smoot-Hawley redux?  Tariffs and trade wars have knock-on effects. It's impossible to tell that this point where this is all leading, but one thing is sure, the status quo ante is dead. What will emerge is uncertain. The presumption in the US that things will get better. This is yet to be determined and it isn't possible to  know from the data. In addition, the policy is in constant flux.  As a result, expectations are becoming more and more subject to "animal spirits," and less and...

Must-read. It's short.Not only does this have a potentially huge impact on Big Pharma, but it is also China poking the US in the eye in retaliation for it regards as humiliation. So it is also "saving face."Perhaps the largest and longest lasting impact of the trade war that is already occurring is the change in attitude of Chinese consumers about American products. The Chinese are very nationalistic and patriotic. They are also ethnically proud and justifiably so based on being able to...

The same day I wrote that capitalism was coming apart at the seams, indicated by the shocking disparity between the compensation of corporate CEOs and workers, the Business Roundtable published its new statement of purpose of a corporation.* The 180 or so corporate executives who signed the statement declared that all their stakeholders, not just owners of equity shares, were important to their mission. Many business pundits, such as Andrew Ross Sorkin, greeted the new statement as a sign...

The rest of the media is catching on to the fact that there is a paradigm shift underway in economics. This won’t be a surprise to you if you are a regular reader of Independent Australia. I’ve writtenabout two dozen articles on the main challenger to the old paradigm, which is modern monetary theory (MMT). Others have also written on this topic for IA. If you’ve been relying for news and current affairs on the usual suspects, however, the current controversy might have crept up on you....

This is Part 2 (and final part) of my series on printing money, debt and power. The two-part series is designed to draw a line through all the misconceptions and errors that abound on the Internet about the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) treats deficit spending and bond issuance. The social media debate about MMT is at time nonsensical, thriving on falsehoods and fantasy. I get many E-mails after some robust Twitter exchange between some self-proclaimed expert who has found the latest fatal...

Fear and impatience.

I don't know what to make of this. Is it that the Iranians didn't back down so Trump is trying a different approach? Was it always just a bluff? Or is he still saying, "do as we tell you, or else?" [embedded content]