Mike Norman Economics

Backgrounder on cyberwarfare, a step up from economic warfare and internal subversion in the arsenal of hybrid warfare. In this endeavor, the US has merged the State Department, the Pentagon, the intel services, and the private technological companies, along with allies, chiefly "five eyes" – the UK, Canada, Australia and NZ together with the US as leader. The basic idea is to avoid kinetic warfare insofar as possible owing to the high likelihood that kinetic warfare will quickly go...

Picked up two more mythology employment incidents here yesterday:Here from the Carillo article down-thread: The Dangerous Myth of 'Taxpayer Money'  For over 40 years, Republicans have controlled the conventional wisdom around budgets, successfully using the “taxpayer money” myth... Here from Brian R's article down-thread: ...essentially the same thing as Quantitative Easing (QE), which has had no measurable effect on any macro variables in places like Japan. (There is certainly a feverish...

More "pumping!" at the PBoC; last "pump!" was June 6th. The People's Bank of China (PBOC), China's central bank, on Thursday pumped 100 billion yuan (about 14.51 billion US dollars) into the financial system through open market operations.  To maintain stable liquidity in the middle of the year, the central bank conducted the operations with 28-day reverse repos at an interest rate of 2.85 per cent.  Net liquidity injection was 90 billion yuan on Thursday, as previous reverse repos...

Bingo!By "propaganda" Caitlin Johnstone means "narrative control."Maintaining narrative control was relatively easy prior to the Internet and social media. Now, the process has turned to access and exclusion as the means of censorship through control of the media and social media in particular. Access and exclusion have always been a reality in the case of print media. Now this is being extended to digital platforms. Caitlin Johnstone — Rogue JournalistPropaganda Is The Root Of All Our...

Simon Wren-Lewis is obviously upset because some MMTers have called his economic policy proposals (providing the theoretical foundation for Labour’s Fiscal Credibility Rule) “neoliberal”. Neoliberal or not, what he does have to say about MMT and his own mainstream economics makes it clear what the debate really comes down to: Monetary policy, except at the lower bound (to which Labour affixes a rule), versus fiscal policy in accordance with functional finance.What this boils down to is...

In the decades following the 1980s, free market policies dominated policy agendas across the world. The gains from growth, however, were not broadly shared within countries, as evidenced by the high levels of economic inequality in the United States and most other advanced economies. In a recent paper, a group of economists at the International Monetary Fund argue for a rethinking of the rules—actual or perceived—that guide economic policies, so that the distributional consequences are...

Yet again, the question of "printing money" and Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has come up on Twitter. In my view, these debates are confusing because critics of MMT tend to mash multiple concepts into a pile of textual sludge. Unfortunately, MMTers are forced to respond to those attacks, and the end result is that everyone is confused.One of the advantages of mathematical training is that you are forced to take definitions seriously, and step cautiously from premise to premise. This enforces...

Here we go again with the employment of mythology; from Bill's part 2 Tom posted down-thread: If the reader finds all this perplexing, it is because for the past forty or so years policymakers and mainstream economists and commentators have peddled a series of false myths about how modern monetary systems work.... To be clear, politicians and central bankers know full well how the system works. Uh.. no...lol... they don't know full well how the system works; that is why they are making...

Still clueless. Caught in the bubble and out of touch. “For every one positive article about capitalism, there are 11 negative ones,” said Nathan Rosenberg, founding partner of Insigniam, a management consulting firm. “CEOs should seize their job. Capitalism has created more elevation of [the] human condition than any religion or government ever has. We don’t tell our story. We don’t talk about the benefits. We have to get out and tell our story.”... FortuneDoes Capitalism Have a PR...

No way this is comparable to Japan. It amounts to adding apples and oranges. The differences outweigh the similarities.  China is not Japan, just as Iran is not Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, or Libya. There's a big difference in opening a can of worms and opening Pandora's box. The result so far has been to drive China and Russia closer together, which is a strategic nightmare for the US since this is the only existential military threat the US faces. That was a strategic blunder that...