Mike Norman Economics

How Columbus’ plagues sparked forest regrowth and global cooling A really interesting article which covers diseases, man's dark side, and the cause of the Mini Ice Age. Yoko Ono said recently tweeted - 'I love nature, but nature doesn't love me!' Anyway, if we plant more trees we can save the environment from anthropogenic climate change. The Black Death killed about 30 per cent of the European population in a few years in the middle of the 14th century. A century and a half...

I've just watched this, and.... well, I'm going to have to watch it again later after my cycle ride, and then again, and again, probably!In another universe could I be the President of the United States? Well, most likely yes according to the maths and laboratory experiments.At every moment we are splitting into different parallel universes, maybe infinitely so, and so in some of these universes we are living completely different lives.I liked some of the replies under the video.. There's a...

Payroll tax cut and Universal Basic Income fiscal transfer for lost wages/salary....Hopefully the payroll tax cut will reduce the current rate of tax deposits and the UBI fiscal transfer will increase withdrawals and we can get some increased UST issuance to exceed the current nutter Fed suicidal policy of buying all the  80b per month of USTs being issued so banks have "more money to lend out!"... Nobody can get a UST and bonds are going asymtotic... maybe the Trump policies can result in...

My MMT Trader subscribers saw this coming. Trade and invest using the concepts of MMT. Get a 30-day free trial to MMT Trader. https://www.pitbulleconomics.com/mmt-trader/?s2-ssl=yes/

Talk about to the point, concise, and direct. Superb! In an interview, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova claims that "politics is dominating" in the #MH17 case and calls me "a piece of propaganda." [embedded content]

The headline is correct but the analysis is ridiculously off the mark. Fiona Hill claims that America is deeply divided internally and Russia is exploiting this weakness to further weaken the US. My take is that this view is has been highly exaggerated to the point of contributing to the weakness of the US. Meanwhile, the real story is being missed. The reality is that Russia is no longer dependent on the USD and export substitution owing to the sanctions has not only made Russia...

We are witnessing a historic moment. DB's Jim Reid concludes the overnight wrap When you’ve worked through the Asian crisis, the Russian/LTCM crisis, the 2000 equity bubble collapsing, the GFC, the European sovereign crisis, and several other smaller wobbles it takes a lot to stun you in financial markets. However the weekend news-flow and overnight price action in oil - just at a time a beaten up market could have done without it - has done that and deserves its own place in the history...

I have a new peer-reviewed journal paper out this morning on a theme many on this blog might be interested in. Tax Research UK Modern Monetary Theory and the Changing Role of Tax in SocietyRichard Murphy | Professor of Practice in International Political Economy at City University, London; Director of Tax Research UK; non-executive director of Cambridge Econometrics, and a member of the Progressive Economy Forum

After 90 years, scientists have revealed the structure of benzene. 126? Crikey!!!Although benzene has few atomic components it exists in a state comprising not just four dimensions – like our everyday “big” world – but 126. Benzene: solving a mystery in 126 dimensions

The secular bull market in U.S. Treasury bonds has once again resumed in full force, probably driven by short-covering. Meanwhile, risk markets are in disarray. The main question for markets is predicting when these trends will be broken. Since I do not give market forecasts, I will keep this article short, as I will just outline what I think what needs to be kept in mind.... Bond EconomicsBreaking Market TrendsBrian Romanchuk