Fabio Braggion and Steven Ongena have a post at Vox which looks at corporate leverage and firm-bank relationships in the UK from 1895 to 2009. They document an increase in corporate leverage from c.1970 and a simultaneous increase in firms having multiple relationships with banks. Braggion and Ongena argue that the increase in leverage can be traced to the deregulation of the UK banking system in the early 1970s and the breaking up of the banking cartel. Their working paper is available here.
The Berkeley Earth Project , an independent study of global warming, has found that the earth has become a degree warmer over the past half century. However, the statistical uncertainty surrounding pre-1920 estimates makes it very hard to say much about long-term trends - click here for graph . This is one of my concerns with the global warming debate - we simply don't have trustworthy long-run data which looks at temperature changes over the last millennium (or two). My second concern with the global warming debate is that it is very hard to prove any sort of casual link between global warming and human activity. The scientists may be able to show correlation between global warming and our production of carbon dioxides etc., but correlation is not causation. My third concern with the debate is that those who are sceptical or agnostic are stereotyped as flat-earthers or intellectually-challenged crackpots. This only stifles debate and the progress of science itself.