Mike Norman Economics

It’s Wednesday, and a quiet day for writing blog posts for me. But I want to comment briefly on the latest economic news that sees the IMF claiming the Australian economy will contract by 6.7 per cent in 2020 and the Treasury estimates that the unemployment rate will rise to 10 per cent (double) by June this year. While this all sounds shocking, the emerging narrative in the media and among politicians is that this is sort of inevitable given the health crisis and the Government’s Job...

I wash my keys, wallet, credit cards and phone when I get back from the shops, as well as the food and door handles, etc. Dr John Campbell says he washes his phone as much as he does his hands.C-19 can be partially aerosolized for up to 3 hours before it falls to the floor.I have a fridge engineer coming around this Monday which I'm not looking forward too, but he will be wearing a mask and gloves, they told me. I will wait three hours after he has left and then wash the whole kitchen down....

A tweet yesterday.  Do remember an uncontrolled Covid 19 pandemic would also completely tank the economy.  Hundreds of thousand dead, widespread panic and break down of public trust and order, will be devastating, and harder to return from, "herd immunity" or not. Aggressive social distancing policies being used to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 are hammering the U.S. economy, but an analysis by University of Wyoming researchers suggests that these measures are...

After the fossil fuel industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars undermining climate science, it’s easy to see how epidemiology came next. I've been debating with the anti-vaxxers and C-19 conspiracy theorists on twitter. Many of these people say they are on the left, like the Off-Guardian, but they come across more like libertarians to me. I find these people disturbing and they make me feel like a centrist, which I'm not, but one guy said I was a neoliberal and told me to look at...

My brother expressed racist views towards the Chinese the other day and I defended them, but it wasn't easy with their horrible wet markets where live animals are sold.But in the West we have farmers markets where live animals are sold too, and then taken to slaughter, and with what I've seen on Twitter it's often horrendous, so horrible, in fact, that I won't describe it here.Sinophobia is a fear or prejudice of expressed towards China and its people. Similar to other varieties of...

Where the COVID-19 pandemic began is still an open question. The Unz ReviewThe Hunt for Patient Zero Godfree Roberts

Longtime friend Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism published an interview today with Richard Vague, Pennsylvania's acting Secretary of Banking and Securities, that takes issue with my last two Substack pieces on the recent bailouts. Both Vague and Yves seem to think I've been "acrophobic" about modern Monetary Theory and perhaps unconsciously mired in questionable orthodoxies about debt and government spending.... Matt TaibbiA Quick Note In Response to Naked Capitalism— I'm phobic about...

Productive capital versus fictitious capital.Reminiscence of the FutureWhat Could Be Better Than...[Reading Michael Hudson] Andrei MartyanovSee also from Andrei Martyanov today.Who Would Have Thought. Reading The Signs. Noblesse Oblige 2.0.

These two banks are taking today about a combined $10B loan loss reserve from the Wuhan Virus... Citi and BofA reporting later this week probably count them in for another $10B so maybe $20B total from the 4 money centers...  so far... Chase Bank & Wells Fargo Prepare for MASSIVE Round of Defaults on Credit Cards, #Mortgages & Business Loans... https://t.co/8puIWQm0CJ #ChaseBank #WellsFargo #recession #CreditCards #SBAloans — The Altruist Party - Economic Sustainability...

And much more coming. If they reopen the economy soon, growth could skyrocket. Trade and invest using the concepts and understandings of MMT. Get a 30-day free trial to MMT Trader. https://www.pitbulleconomics.com/mmt-trader/?s2-ssl=yes/