Mike Norman Economics

A new quarterly report from logistics company DHL, measured global air and sea cargo trade volumes between March and June, found trade data continues to deteriorate in the US and China as there is still no resolution to end the trade war, reported South China Morning Post(SCMP). Chinese imports were "losing significant momentum," the report stated, indicating the epicenter of the slowdown was situated in basic raw materials, capital equipment and machinery, and consumer fashion goods. The...

Backgrounder. China is much different from the USSR, and the later should not be used as a measure. While the developed countries have largely flatlined, with GDP tracking population growth, China still has a lot of room to grow even though its population has stabilized.Conversable EconomistChina's Changing Relationship with the World EconomyTimothy Taylor | Managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, based at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota

Watch the debt ceiling developments.

Police officers had infiltrated some pretty harmless leftist, animal rights, unions, and environmental groups in the UK, and some of them had intimate relationships with women. To become a spy, an officer had to be married so that if he started a relationship with a campaigner he would have a real wife and family to help stop him forming a bond with the woman he was spying on.I remember years ago it was in the news how one police officer started to really like the animal rights activists...

Showdown. The US/UK appear to be driving China, Russia and Iran into a world war that none of them want. Who is going to blink? Or no one? OilPrice.comU.S. Threatens China With Sanctions On Iranian Oil Imports Irina SlavSee alsoReutersChina says it will sanction U.S. firms that sell arms to Taiwan

Paul Robinson shows how the attempt to create a "Putin is rehabilitating Stalin" meme is based on reaching and is clearly an exercise in propaganda.Robinson makes the point that celebrating Stalin as the victor in WWII and revering his leadership as Russia's savior from a dire future under the Reich does not imply condoning his other excesses.I would add that the US founding fathers are also celebrated and revered even though some of them, George Washington, for example, were slave-owners,...

M. K. Bhadrakumar seriously faults the Modi government for a strategic blunder of unprecedented proportion for India. India PunchlineUS pours oil into fire in Gulf, mum’s the word for IndiaM. K. Bhadrakumar | retired diplomat with the Indian Foreign Service

Bottom line: Russiagate is going up in smoke. The claim that Russian military intelligence fed thousands of emails to WikiLeaks doesn’t stand up to scrutiny while Mueller is not only unable to a prove a connection between the Internet Research Agency and the Kremlin but is barred from even discussing it, according to Friedrich’s ruling, without risking a charge of contempt. After 22 months of investigating the ins and outs of Russian interference, Mueller seems to have finally come up...

How the great game has changed. Turkey is pivotal, and the US, NATO and the EU overplayed its hand. Geopolitically and geostrategic pivot point Turkey is now turning to face East rather than West. Of course, this paints a target on Erdogan's back. The recent coup attempt against him, which he attributes to the CIA, may have failed, but that is the end of the game. The post is mostly of interest, however, since Andrei Martanov is well-versed in military science and military technology,...

Back in 2006, two encounters with grassroots change processes shaped a lot of what I have written ever since. The first was with the fishing communities of Tikamgarh – I went back to see them again in 2016 and made this video. The other was the Chiquitano indigenous group in Bolivia, a second inspiring story in which grassroots mobilization took them from a situation of apartheid/semi feudal servitude to winning a million hectares of land after Evo Morales became Bolivia’s first ever...