Mike Norman Economics

76% support the single currency... hate to break the news to you but its not going away any time soon... deal with it... Support for the euro hit another record high. 76% of citizens in the eurozone are in favour of a European economic and monetary union with one single currency – the euro – the latest Eurobarometer survey shows. Full results here https://t.co/huG2Al3Zm3 pic.twitter.com/y3YrNMHYD1— European Central Bank (@ecb) August 8, 2019

Prof. Steve Hawke is a goldbug but what he says about the Trump administration is interesting - that they are all businessmen and haven't got a clue about international economics.He also says that the U.S. deficit is not really a big problem. In the last part he talks about the global water shortage problem. Many countries have greatly increasing populations putting stress on the water supply. He cites London as a city with a huge problem. London has had a massive influx of immigrants over...

Joe Weisenthal has been causing a stir on Twitter discussing "yield bugs": people who have an ideological belief that bond yields out to be positive. This Bloomberg opinion piece discusses this, as well as some other comments on negative yields coming to the United States. I have not followed that debate too closely, as I initially assumed that there was not a whole lot of people who believed that bond yields ought to be positive. This is because bond yields are essentially determined by...

Central bank monetary policy apocalypse.

In this installment, Equitable Growth Executive Director Heather Boushey talks with Gabriel Zucman, professor in the Economics Department at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on global wealth, inequality, and tax havens. Zucman also is co-director of the World Inequality Database, a database aiming at the provision of access to extensive data series on the world distribution of income and wealth. In an in-depth conversation about his research and its implications...

Pretty fair article. Stephanie Kelton is solidifying in the role of being the public face the MMT. This is doubly beneficial. Not only is it good for popularizing MMT, but also there are not many other women among economists that the public is familiar with.ReutersExplainer: Five questions about Modern Monetary Theory See also at ReutersMMT: controversial plan to boost economic equality Also in the news. WTVBMMT may be Democrats' economic cure, but only Trump got the memo Howard...

Meet the man on a mission to take down Cambodia's timber tycoons and expose a rampant illegal cross-border trade.  How anyone would want to destroy a rainforest for money is beyond me? How do these people get away with it, and why is the world the way it is, where money trumps all other values? You would think that there would be lots of powerful people who would try to put a stop to it, but, sadly, the world doesn't seem to work like that. Liberals tend to have a lot of empathy, and...

On a range of ethical issues, philosophy professors specializing in ethics have been found to behave no better than professors working in other areas of philosophy, or than non-philosophy professors. But that doesn't necessarily mean that ethical reasoning is powerless to make people behave more ethically.… One problem in teaching philosophy is that people are seeking pat answers as it math and science. Life is not cut and dried like that. Most areas are gray, and thus the ongoing...

Helena Sheehan’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Science , originally written in 1985, but reprinted at the end of 2017, recounts a wide history of serious Marxist thought on science starting with Marx and Engels themselves, and going up to the mass workers’ movements of the 1930s and 1940s. In keeping with a dialectical conception of science, Marxist ideas aren’t presented as static but evolving through debate and experiment in the face of new scientific and political challenges.... This...

The standard account of China’s economic rise focuses on its state capitalism, whereby the government, endowed with huge assets, can pursue a wide-ranging industrial policy and intervene to mitigate risks. This explanation is wrong.… Project SyndicateThe Real Reason for China’s Rise Zhang Jun | Dean of the School of Economics at Fudan University and Director of the China Center for Economic Studies, a Shanghai-based think-tank