Mike Norman Economics

Topic came up in yesterday's testimony by Powell... between his being chastised by dumb Democrat legislators that the US was leaving too much debt to the grandchildren...The unqualified Journo doesn't describe the technical issue correctly here: The supplemental leverage ratio, which measures capital as a percentage of assets, restricts the amount of loan-making banks can make without raising more capital. Calculation of the ratio includes the non-risk assets as well as the risk assets...

China doesn't have a good public health care system although the Chinese government is looking into it. And most Chinese don't have a Western standard of living so labour is cheaper there and is this part of the reason for its success? Maybe, but it took centuries for us to go from as rural economy to a modern industrial one (but now being industrialised) whereas China is advancing in just decades. It seems their system is greatly outsmarting our one.I wonder if  Egmont Kakarot-Handtke pure...

Can economics ever be a hard science, like physics, chemistry, or biology, or is it a soft science, like psychology or sociology as it is about human behaviour, desires, wants and wishes? Should economists just stick to just pure economics as a pure science without politics, or desires, wishes, and concentrate instead on the perfect economy?  What would the perfect economy look like, would it provide welfare to the poor, and would it see this welfare as an investment into a country's...

I thought that rising rates were supposed to be bearish????JPMorgan's profit could increase $7 billion in the coming years from rising U.S. interest rates and accelerating loan growth https://t.co/ALEGO6GU8j pic.twitter.com/yGzK1YhwG8— Bloomberg Markets (@markets) February 27, 2018 JPM current market cap is $400B with a PE of 18. So an additional $7B of earnings at 18x would imply an additional $125B or perhaps well above a 25% increase in share price. Even just a 10x would imply close to...

Not only is America full of guns where teenagers going on a rampage shoot out in schools is commonplace, men of God, those that say they love Jesus, have preached death and destruction to millions of people around the world. Billy Graham encouraged Nixon to start a war with China - in which millions of people would have died, including Americans -  and to bomb the dykes in North Korea where a million people would have died in drowning and starvation. I guess Billy Graham got inspiration...

The market is always ingenious; the answer to school gun shootings: bullet proof blankets for kids! And Trump wants to arm teachers with guns too so then they can go into lessons with guns looking menacing in their gun holsters, while kids would be carrying about with them all day bullet proof blankets, Now I don't know how heavy a bullet proof vest is, but I a hunch that bullet anything would weigh a ton. Gee, what a place, hey, and the rest of us around the world think sod living there!...

Dick Welcome says he's not anti-market, but if you want a government funded school voucher system with private schools competing with each other then you will need more bureaucracy to police the system. Schools trying to survive will simply cook the books to make their schools look better than they are. But in the book, The Private Abuse of the Public Interest: Market Myths and Policy Muddles LD Brown and Lawrence Jacobs showed that when governments and local councils privatised services the...

[embedded content] It turns out that oil companies knew way back in the 1960's about climate change. They commissioned scientific research to see how bad it would be so they would know how strong to construct their oil rigs and pipelines. Their research showed that in Alaska the ice would start to melt so they knew that their oil rigs built for the current conditions would last well into the future, but in other parts of the world they built stronger pipelines and oil rigs to counter the...

Don't tell me now all these morons are going to be going all around saying: "we're running out of Olympics!!!!"...When the Olympics are over and you have to go home ? #PyeongChang2018 #Olympics pic.twitter.com/P53PQBJGw8— Madison Chock (@chockolate02) February 25, 2018 These were good games... South Korea: NOT a shit hole .... although they do eat dogs there I guess can't have everything...

After all the heavy politics, I found this to be light entertainment. And Steve Keen is a real nice guy. KV  [embedded content] Steve keen I had prepared a set of slides on "Can we avoid another financial crisis?", but with an audience exclusively of economics students at Sheffield University today, and pressed for time, I "went rogue", and challenged the limited nature of the "education" they get in economics today. Gee it felt good! I've endured seeing rubbish portrayed as reason...