Mike Norman Economics

Tom back in Iowa City catching up on posting.I don't usually link to the NYT owing to the paywall and the propaganda, but this is an exception. The Times is making this op/ed available free. If you didn't catch Stephanie's opinion piece already, here it is. Congress has all the firepower it needs. It just needs to send spending instructions to the Federal Reserve, as it always does. New York Time Stephanie Kelton: Just Use ‘the Computer’ to Give People More Money Stephanie Kelton |...

Being a veqan I used to eat lots of soy products and drink soy milk. Then I read an article that I didn't realise was indirectly sponsored by the meat companies which said that soy puts dangerous levels of estrogen into men's bodies, and that it was cancerous too. Yikes! The article also said soy was dangerous for women.It was rubbish, and although soy does increase estrogen type chemicals in the body, it is not harmful at the amounts normally consumed.Anyway, Mary Enig, who wrote the...

Most people develop only mild symptoms. But some people, usually those who are older or have other medical complications, develop more severe symptoms, including pneumonia, which can be fatal.Coronavirus: How eyes may play a role in its spread

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...