An excerpt from a paper published for the conference Paradigm Lost: Rethinking Economics and Politics. I am speaking to this paper in Berlin this week. The full paper can be downloaded from their website (PDF). A common denominator runs throughout recorded history: a rising proportion of debts cannot be paid. Adam Smith remarked that...
Articles
Functional Finance
States and cities have been convinced to lower the property tax burden and to take an income tax and a sales tax and the worst, most anti-labour, tax of all—your value added tax. Your value added tax is intruding onto the market and shrinking it and preventing you from buying the goods...
Film: Real Estate 4 Ransom
Michael Hudson features in this 40 min documentary on the role property speculation and public finance had on this Great Recession. What role does economics itself have to blame for policy failure? More details Real Estate 4 Ransom from Real Estate 4 Ransom on Vimeo.
Keiser Hudson
Michael appears about half way through.
Good Bank Bad Bank
As printed in FAZ Feuilleton, 06.02.2012 Schuldenkrise – Gute Bank, böse Bank Warum kapitulieren die Staaten vor der Macht der Banken? Es gibt Beispiele genug in der Geschichte für eine Politik, bei der die Banken produktive Aufgaben hatten. Von MICHAEL HUDSON Wenn es in der Schuldenkrise einen Silberstreif am Horizont gibt, dann ist es...
Europe’s Transition From Social Democracy to Oligarchy
As first published in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung The easiest way to understand Europe’s financial crisis is to look at the solutions being proposed to resolve it. They are a banker’s dream, a grab bag of giveaways that few voters would be likely to approve in a democratic referendum. Bank strategists learned not to risk...
Democracy and Debt
Has the Link been Broken? *This article appeared in the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung on December 5, 2011. Book V of Aristotle’s Politics describes the eternal transition of oligarchies making themselves into hereditary aristocracies – which end up being overthrown by tyrants or develop internal rivalries as some families decide to “take the multitude into...
Reforming the U.S. Financial and Tax System
The pretense is that privatization is more efficient. But privatizers add on interest and financial fees, high executive salaries and bonuses, and turn the roads into toll roads and other infrastructure into neofeudal fiefdoms to charge monopolistic access fees for people to use. .... So the financial sector first creates a problem by loading...
Iceland's Fair Value Vultures
The New Bank Disaster Olafur Arnarson, Michael Hudson and Gunnar Tomasson* The problem of bank loans gone bad, especially those with government-guarantees such as U.S. student loans and Fannie Mae mortgages, has thrown into question just what should be a “fair value” for these debt obligations. Should “fair value” reflect what debtors can pay...
Occupy Systemic Change
Hudson with Lauren Lyster, discussing shocking new census poverty figures and the coming change. This rushed interview required more detail on solutions as can be heard here and read here.
Books by Michael Hudson
