Mike Norman Economics

CO2 is, in fact, greening the planet, and as the plants absorb the extra CO2 it's helping to keep our planet cooler too. Also, if we manage our soil better we may be able to get get it to absorb up to 5.5 billion tons of the CO2 per year, and with this more productive use of the soil we can grow more food.With all of the above, plus switching to green energy, the future may not be so bad after all.As our planet gets greener, plants are slowing global warmingEarth's Soil Could Absorb 5.5...

Can high taxes be good for business? You bet. We’ve now been living in Finland for more than a year. The difference between our lives here and in the States has been tremendous, but perhaps not in the way many Americans might imagine. What we’ve experienced is an increase in personal freedom. Our lives are just much more manageable. To be sure, our days are still full of challenges — raising a child, helping elderly parents, juggling the demands of daily logistics and work. But in Finland,...

I remember when I was young there was this new homeless guy who turned up on the street. Occasionally he would come into the pub my friends and myself drank at, but he would only ever drink half a pint. One day he saw me with the Guardian and he said he used to read it. We got chatting to him and he seemed to be a nice guy.On another occasion he was in the pub when an old friend of his turned up, who said he said he had been looking for him everywhere. He seemed middle-class and he spoke to...

We have to watch the details of how they actually do this:Coronavirus aid bill includes $3,000 for families, $4 trillion liquidity for Fed: Mnuchin https://t.co/rxU0CZyISx pic.twitter.com/yaYSCFhePY— Yahoo Finance (@YahooFinance) March 22, 2020 If they plan to have the Fed just "inject!" or "pump in!" $4T of new Reserves then Depositories are going to need either 1. significant regulatory modifications or 2. about a $400b addition of regulatory capital...

Why is the ratio for the system always about 9.5% and for the 4 more conservative money centers about 9.0%?Evolved from the apes by random chance maybe?  Somebody flipped a coin?  Rolled dice?

Dr Youssef El-Gingihy is putting out some interesting tweets, not that they are helping me to relax all that much.Coronavirus mortality rate may well be below 1% but virulence means tens of thousands of deaths. Also 4% critical illness need intensive care. 10-15% hospitalisations means collapse of healthcare system. Wider political, economic and social implications enormous 1/ This is calm before storm. What is about to be unleashed hasn’t been experienced by whole world since WWII. It will...

The conspiracy theorists are going ten-to-dozen on twitter, but they won't like it when I throw this in their threads.One persistent myth is that this virus, called SARS-CoV-2, was made by scientists and escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China, where the outbreak began. A new analysis of SARS-CoV-2 may finally put that latter idea to bed. A group of researchers compared the genome of this novel coronavirus with the seven other coronaviruses known to infect humans: SARS, MERS and SARS-CoV-2, which...

Mike Pompeo sees Covid-19 virus as an opportunity to strike Iran to cause maximum misery and deaths.Russia is set to send teams of doctors, protective gear and medical equipment to Italy to help fight the Covid-19 pandemic in the country. It follows an appeal by Italian PM Giuseppe Conte during a phone call with Vladimir Putin. RT Putin offers to send medical personnel & equipment to help Italy contain coronavirus outbreak

Washington always finds the money for wars, and bailing out banks, but what about the American people? [embedded content]

Here from 10 years ago in NYT they are doing the same thing this week in earnest and have obviously capped the bond rally: But inside the Operations Room, on the ninth floor of the New York Fed’s fortresslike headquarters, there is no time for second-guessing. Here the second round of what is known as quantitative easing — QE2, as it is called on Wall Street — is being put into practice almost daily by the central bank’s powerful New York arm.  Each morning Mr. Frost and his team face a...