Contents Introduction Why it was regressive to fund Social Security as an autonomous system Financial engineering vs. industrial profits and employment Social Security, forced saving and Labor Capitalism What if the stock market does boom? Will that save Social Security? Introduction This would not seem to be an auspicious time to mount a campaign...
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...
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...
The Methodology of Real Estate Appraisal: Land-Residual or Building-Residual, and their Social Implications
NYU Real Estate Institute’s Round Table Discussion of Land- and Building-Price Indices A meeting was held at New York University’s Real Estate Institute on October 25 to discuss the virtues and pitfalls of constructing a land-price index to distinguish between land and building values. The Institute’s Associate Dean Ken Patton had invited Michael Hudson...
The Land-Residual vs. Building-Residual: Methods of Real Estate Valuation
Some Prefatory Remarks to the N.Y.U. Real Estate Institute discussion, Oct. 25, 2001 Economic theory focuses on labor and capital, yet the largest category of tangible assets is not industrial plant and machinery earning profits, but real estate, and its primary objective is to make capital gains. Most new entries into the Forbes or...
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...
Where Did All the Land Go?
- The Fed’s New Balance Sheet Calculations A Critique of Land Value Statistics The most comprehensive official statistics on nationwide real estate values are those published by the Federal Reserve Board (FRB) in its annual “Balance Sheets of the American Economy.” As part of its Z.1 statistical release the FRB compiles annual balance sheets...
How to Lie with Real Estate Statistics
The Illusion that Makes Land Values Look Negative - How Land-Value Gains are Mis-attributed to Capital Dr Hudson is President of the Institute for the Study of Long-term Economic Trends, New York. He has specialised in national income accounting, the balance of payments and flow of funds analysis for leading Wall Street finance houses....
The Economics of Reality: How Finance Dominates Production and Rents Overshadow Profits
The Economics of the Future Wagner’s Music of the Future – his “total art work” – sought to integrate music and drama (along with art, dance and poetry). In a similarly broad way, the economics of the future will integrate finance and production, thereby restoring the lost link (as drama had been lost to...
Capital, capital everywhere – How to invest it wisely?
With oil revenues soaring, the time has come for Norway to consider how best to apply them to strengthen its economic infrastructure and policy framework to promote the nation’s longer-term development. As matters now stand, the oil wealth is causing problems by making the krone a petrocurrency pricing Norwegian labor and industry out of...
Oil in Norway’s Balance of Payments and the prospective impact of privatization on the krone
Speech to the Norwegian Shipowners’ Association, August 17, 2000 by Dr. Michael Hudson, ISLET © The debate over whether to privatize Norway’s oil, telephone system and other national assets has focused on considerations of whether private management would be more efficient than government management. The discussion to date has turned more on political ideology...
Tainted Transactions: An Exchange
From The National Interest No. 60 http://www.nationalinterest.org http://www.ciaonet.org/olj/ni/ni_00saj01.html A letter exchange in response to Janine Wedel’s “Tainted Transactions: Harvard, Russia and the Chubais Clan” (Spring 2000). Participants: Jeffrey Sachs, Anders Aslund, Marek Dabrowski, Peter Reddaway, Igor Aristov, Wayne Merry, Michael Hudson, David Ellerman, Steven Rosefielde and Janine Wedel. Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the...
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...
Speech to the Communist Party of Cuba
Personal Introduction Here is a copy of my Havana speech last week. I suspect that some of my statements may raise ideological hackles among you. But the fact is that it was enormously successful, and established credibility to be invited back to advise the Cuban government. I believe that the important thing is the...
How Large is Russia's Land Rent, and How Will it be Used?
In June, I travelled to Russia with Nicolaus Tideman to meet with some of our Georgist counterparts and help create a program for local communities to collect land rent. We also wanted to spell out the alternative. What would happen if the land were privatized in such a way as to let its rent...
The Use and Abuse of Mathematical Economics
* I thank Hans Maks and Peter Senn for their helpful suggestions that I have incorporated into this paper. – “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” (Hamlet, Act I, scene v) Content Mathematical economics as tunnel vision The semantics of mathematical equilibrium theory The...
How Russia May Create a More Viable Financial and Fiscal System
English translation of a pamphlet published in Russia by The Land Policy Association, St. Petersburg, Russia, April 1999 Instead of becoming wealthier and more like America since 1990, Russia is being turned into a third world country. In less than a decade the nation has been stripped of its capital and forced into debt...
From Sacred Enclave to Temple to City
On the origins of cities as offshore banking centers – chapter 3 from my Urbanization volume, Urbanization and Land Ownership in the Ancient Near East (ed. with Baruch Levine) Cambridge, Mass.: Peabody Museum, Harvard University, 1999 The social sciences have long viewed the earliest cities as playing much the same role as they do...
Dr. Michael Hudson's Testimony before the Russian Parliament
“Since 1995 I have been a consultant to the Duma’s Natural Resource committee, and have addressed the Duma on privatization issues on three occasions now. I am former balance-of-payments analyst for the Chase Manhattan Bank and Arthur Andersen, professor of international economics at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, former...
Books by Michael Hudson
