Mike Norman Economics

On June 13, 2019, the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) released its – Terms of Reference for the Evaluation of the Greek Programmes. At the same time, the head of the ESM (Klaus Regling) was lecturing Greece, which is approaching a national election next month, that it “risks missing its budget target” (Source). Apparently, as the failed Syriza government tries to gain electoral support after years of abusing the Greek people who put their faith in them, the bean counters are worried that...

Time domain graph (abstraction) below quantifying the policy of US banking system Reserve Asset levels as percent  of US GDP over time for about the last 100 years. Color lines added to identify periods of time between significant transitions of the policy.Starting from left, green line identifies a period of time post WW1 where the reduction caused economic out performance known figuratively as 'The Roaring Twenties!'.... Red line identifies a period of time when a large and fast increase...

Apple woes mount. Is the shine off?Zero HedgeiPhone X Sales Collapse Triggers Serious Breach Of Contract With SamsungTyler Durden

More geopolitics and geostrategy, and how it impacts finance and economics. The danger here is that POTUS and US hardliners see this as a zero-sum game. This greatly increases the chance that it will lead to kinetic warfare on a grander scale. The US is already deep into deploying economic, information, and cyberwarfare against a number of countries, and positioning for kinetic warfare. The situation now is increasingly hair-trigger.Zero HedgeRabobank: Trump-Xi Meeting Is Not About...

Grasping Reality Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez (2002-2018): Income Inequality in the United StatesBrad DeLong | Professor of Economics, UCAL Berkeley

I was quite surprised by this Telegraph article, where Jonathon Ford says that private companies are not anymore efficient than publicly run ones, and that there is no 'magic of the private sector'. He then adds that PPI was bad for tax payer.EDF, an energy company, want money up front to help pay for a new nuclear reactor, but Jonathon Ford says the government could fund it more cheaply and could even start up a national infrastructure fund to finance public projects at fine rates.Jonathon...

Does technology lead to technocracy and is technocracy a form of feudalism? Technocracy and its tendency toward neo-feudalism is based on ownership of natural monopolies. Natural monopolies are candidates for anti-trust action.The New GeographyWhat Do the Oligarchs Have in Mind for Us? Joel Koltin

My fundamental understanding of the world has been warped by a now challenged approach. I'm not alone.… In the end, the chief byproduct of my general education exposure was a kind of indoctrination into the centrality of markets to understanding human behavior and the apparent importance of economics professors. I’m not alone. Introductory economics could be one of the most widely received credits in all of higher education. And unlike other common courses (like say, first-year writing),...

A few lonely voices disputed this consensus. In their view, these two distinct mysteries weren’t actually distinct — or all that mysterious. The reason wage growth wasn’t rising as one would expect with the economy near full employment was that the economy wasn’t near full employment. And the reason the economy wasn’t near full employment was that all those prime-age workers who’d supposedly exited the labor force for reasons totally unrelated to the strength of the economy hadn’t actually...

The expansion of banks such as Citigroup into Cuba, Haiti, and beyond reveal a story of capitalism built on blood, labor, and racial lines.  Scrubbed from the pages of glossy coffeetable books, the history of U.S. imperialism can be found in the archives of Wall Street’s oldest, largest, and most powerful institutions. A deep dive into the vaults and ledgers of banking houses such as Citigroup, Inc., and J. P. Morgan Chase and Co. reveals a story of capitalism and empire whose narrative is...