Mike Norman Economics

China tops the U.S. in number of companies on Fortune's Global 500 list published on Monday with 129 companies listed, exceeding the U.S., which had 121 companies listed, for the first time since the debut of the list in 1990, and becoming the first country to defeat the U.S. since WWII.  The overall turnover of the top 500 firms reached 32.7 trillion U.S. dollars, 8.9 percent higher over a year earlier. Up 14.5 percent year on year, the gross profit hit a record high at 2.15 trillion U.S....

Pretty funny, and very apt. Tulsi is the only foreign policy realist that is running against endless, so far at least.Duffel BlogMaj. Tulsi Gabbard receives surprise deployment orders to Antarctica [satire] Yossarian

Not Saul Alinsky, but good places to start.Oxfam Blogs — From Poverty to PowerTwo new Manuals for Activists, with some useful lessons Duncan Green, strategic adviser for Oxfam GB

— Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s recent testimony was a reminder that Russia attempted to influence the outcome of the 2016 election and very well may try to do so again in 2020. — This begs the question: Is there any evidence that Russian interference may have impacted the results, particularly in key states? — The following analysis suggests that the 2016 results can be explained almost entirely based on the political and demographic characteristics of those states. So from that...

But if Germany’s manufacturing woes were not sufficient in and of themselves, then combined with the threat of trade war with Trump, the prospect indeed is bleak for Europe: And the likelihood is that any of that ECB stimulus – promised for this autumn, as Mario Draghi warns that the European picture is getting “worse and worse” – will be very likely to meet with an angry response from Trump – castigated as blatant currency manipulation by the EU and its ECB. EU Relations with Washington...

Cultural paradigms and national models. Andrei Martyanov doesn't go into how the US is trying to impose its traditional cultural paradigm and it contemporary national neoliberal model on the rest of the world in an imperial fashion and how this is not going to work, but he alludes to it in the its assumption is the basis of his post. He focuses here on the incompatibility of the Russian and Chinese cultural paradigms and their respective national models as incompatible. I have...

Did you hear the joke about the economists who tested their theory by defining it to be true? Oh, I forgot. It’s not a joke. It’s standard practice among mainstream economists. They propose that productivity explains income. And then they ‘test’ this idea by defining productivity in terms of income. In this post, I’m going to show you this circular logic. Then I’ll show you what productivity differences look like when productivity is measure objectively. They’re far too small to explain...

Head in the sand, so far. Massive denial."Capitalize the gains, socialize the losses" is becoming an unsustainable business model.Tax Research UKThe world’s companies should be forced to account for Global Heating Richard Murphy | Professor of Practice in International Political Economy at City University, London; Director of Tax Research UK; non-executive director of Cambridge Econometrics, and a member of the Progressive Economy Forum

Last week (August 9, 2019), the British Office of National Statistics (ONS) – GDP first quarterly estimate, UK: April to June 2019 – told us that the UK economy contracted by 0.2 per cent in the June-quarter 2019 after having grown by 0.5 per cent in the March-quarter. The UK Guardian pundits and the Remain cheer squad all screamed Brexit and were heard to be walking around in circles saying “see, we told you so”. Meanwhile (August 7, 2019), not far away (according to the Remain crowd’s...

Trees to the rescue, although they might not be the complete solution. Scientists around the world are working on new technologies to combat climate change, like carbon capture and solar radiation management, but could simply planting enough trees stave off some of the devastation?  We’re actually in the midst of an international effort to do just that, but researchers have found there are some flaws in our approach. In 2011, the United States, Brazil and many other countries around the...