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...
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Debt
Europe’s Transition From Social Democracy to Oligarchy
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...
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Australia’s Needless Foreign Borrowing
Michael Hudson and Shann Turnbull* (First published via Prosper Australia, written during Michael’s recent Oz tour.) Confronted by the global financial crisis that is burying foreign economies deeper in debt deflation each month, Australia needs to protect itself – indeed, to liberate itself from as many costs and risks as it can. Fortunately, many...
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History of Debt and Credit
Debt cancellation. History of Debt and Credit, Bloomberg radio with Lewis Lapham, Laphams Quarterly.
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The New Road to Serfdom – An illustrated guide to the coming real estate collapse
Can be downloaded from here or from Harpers.
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Saving, Asset-Price Inflation, and Debt-Induced Deflation
Post-Keynesian Conference Kansas City Summary The exponential growth of savings and debt takes the form mainly of loans to finance the purchase of real estate, stocks and bonds. These loans extract interest and amortization charges that divert revenue away from being spent on goods and services. The payment of debt service by the economy’s...
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The Mathematical Economics of Compound Rates of Interest: A Four-Thousand Year Overview Part I
“Whoever enters here must know mathematics.” That was the motto of Plato’s Academy. Emphasizing such abstract ratios as the Pythagorean proportions of musical temperament and the calendrical regularities of the sun, moon and planets, its philosophy used the mathematics of nature to reveal an underlying harmony and order in the universe and hence, in...
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The New Economic Archaeology of Debt
Introduction to Debt and Economic Renewal in the Ancient Near East (ed. with Marc Van De Mieroop) (CDL Press, Baltimore, 2002) Economists, anthropologists and assyriologists have discussed the origins of debt and the setting of interest rates from such different perspectives that there has been remarkably little overlap or mutual discussion. Indeed, when economic...
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I Meet the Leading Authority on the Babylonian and Near East Tradition of Debt Cancellation
Copy of a regular newsletter by Boudewijn Wegerif, Sweden WHAT MATTERS-77 Dear list members, Yesterday I was with an American economist who says of himself that he is a Marxist, whose godfather was Leon Trotsky, whose father was thrown in prison in the US in 1941 for advocating the overthrow of the government, who...
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The Mathematical Economics of Compound Rates of Interest: A Four-Thousand Year Overview Part II
2. Why Economies Develop Debt Crises: The Mathematics of Compound Interest The past century’s economic schoolbooks have described a universe running down from entropy. Production is assumed to be plagued by diminishing returns, so that each additional unit of input produces less and less output. Even if technology were recognized to raise the productivity...
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How Interest Rates Were Set, 2500 BC – 1000 AD
Originally published in Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 43 (Spring 2000):132-161 Máš, tokos and fænus as metaphors for interest accruals* * An earlier draft of this paper has benefited from comments by William Hallo, the late W. F. Leemans, Johannes Renger, Piotr Steinkeller, Cornelia Wunsch and Norman Yoffee. For...
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The Lost Tradition of Biblical Debt Cancellations
This article can be downloaded from here.
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Did the Phoenicians Introduce the Idea of Interest to Greece and Italy – and if so When?
(from the Temples of Enterprise book in progress) Delivered at a symposium at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, March 15th-16th, 1990, this article was published in Gunter Kopcke and Isabelle Tokumaru, eds, Greece between East and West: 10th – 8th Centuries BC (Mainz: Verlag Phillip von Zabern, 1992). This paper seeks...
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Books by Michael Hudson
