GlobalResearch Last week the Good Lord evidently realized that not enough people had been reading Hyman Minsky’s explanation of how financial cycles end in Ponzi schemes – the stage in which banks keep the boom going by lending their customers the money to pay interest and thus avoid default. So He sent Bernie Madoff to dominate the news for a week and give the mass media an opportunity to familiarize newspaper readers and TV watchers with just how Ponzi Schemes work. What Mr. Madoff did was, in a nutshell, what the economy as a whole has been doing under the moniker “wealth creation.” If the media were able to wait until as late in the financial collapse as last week to provide helpful diagrams about how Ponzi schemes need to keep on ...
Scrawny Geese; No More Golden EggScenes From the Global Class War
Counterpunch On Friday, October 24, the pound sterling dropped to just $1.58 (down from $1.73 earlier in the week, an enormous plunge by foreign-exchange standards), and the euro sunk to just $1.26, while Japan’s yen soared by 10 per cent. These shifts threatened to disrupt export markets and hence industrial sales patterns. Global stock markets plunged from 5 to 9 per cent abroad, and there was talk of closing the New York market if stocks fell more than 1,000 points. Pre-opening trading saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average down the maximum limit of 550 points (largely on foreign selling) before bounding back to lose “only” 312 points as the dollar soared against European currencies. Friday’s currency turmoil and stock market plunge was a case of the chickens coming home to roost from ...
Financial Warfare against Labor and Industry
Global Research On Friday, October 24, the pound sterling dropped to just $1.53 (down from $1.73 earlier in the week, an enormous plunge by foreign-exchange standards), and the euro sunk to just $1.26, while Japan’s yen soared by 10%. These shifts threatened to disrupt export markets and hence industrial sales patterns. Global stock markets plunged from 5 to 9% abroad, and there was talk of closing the New York market if stocks fell more than 1,000 points. Pre-opening trading saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average down the maximum limit of 550 points (largely on foreign selling) before bounding back to lose "only" 312 points as the dollar soared against European currencies. Friday’s currency turmoil and stock market plunge was a case of the chickens coming home to roost from the class-war policies ...
Parsing Mr. Paulson’s Bailout SpeechThe Unprecedented Giveaway of Financial Wealth Story
Global Research Mr. Paulson’s bailout speech on Monday, October 13 poses some fundamental economic questions: What is the impact on the economy at large of this autumn’s unprecedented creation and giveaway of financial wealth to the wealthiest layer of the population? How long can the Treasury’s bailout of Wall Street (but not the rest of the economy!) sustain a debt overhead that is growing exponentially? Is there any limit to the amount of U.S. Treasury debt that the government can create and turn over to its major political campaign contributors? And is it too much to say that we are seeing the end of economic democracy and the emergence of a financial oligarchy – a self-serving class whose actions threaten to polarize society and, in the process, stifle economic growth and ...
Guns and Butter: The Bailout’s New Financial Oligarchy
Guns and Butter Interview on KPFA radio. For part one of this interview click here. “If you want to see the ideal of the World Bank and the IMF, look at the Russian, Latvian and Estonian economies. They have shrunk as if there were a war on. And in a sense it is a war – a class war and simultaneously a war of American high finance against the rest of world. As in military wars, its devastating consequences threaten to include shortening life expectancy, lower health standards and depopulation, poverty and de-industrialization, rising debt arrears and defaults. You’re going to have many of the post-Soviet countries going the way of Iceland very quickly as their real estate debt collapses. Because crazy as it may seem, it was the real estate bubble ...
Guns and Butter: The New Kleptocracy
Guns and Butter Interviews on KPFA radio. You can read part two of this interview, The Bailouts New Financial Oligarchy, here. “Considering that there is an $800 billion giveaway, to be followed by another trillion and another trillion after that, this is the biggest giveaway since the land giveaway to the railroads in the mid-nineteenth century and just as that giveaway created a power elite that would rule America for a century and a half, this is creating a new power elite that has changed America from a democracy into an oligarchy. And as Aristotle said, ‘what is democracy but the stage immediately preceding oligarchy?’” I’m Bonnie Faulkner (BF): Today on Guns and Butter, Dr. Michael Hudson. Today’s show: “The New Kleptocracy”. Dr. Hudson is a Financial Economist and Historian. He is ...
The New Kleptocracy
Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's "Plan" passed by Congress on October 3rd, 2008 Listen Here
The Big Bank Job: The Insanity of the $700 Billion Giveaway
Counterpunch The banksters’ plan now is for icing on the cake – to take Mr. Paulson’s $700 billion and run. It’s not a “bailout of the financial system.” It’s as giveaway – to insiders, to sell out all their bad bets. Companies across the board will get rid of their bad mortgages, and also their bad car loans, furniture time payments, credit-card loans, student loans – all the debts that any competent actuary could have told them never could have been paid in the first place. This is not what Treasury Secretary Paulson is acknowledging, and shame on him for it. Last Friday, Sept., he was joined by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke singing in unison an advertising jingle for America’s new kleptocracy that rings so false that Congress and the American public ...
Houses as a Tax Shelter
Houses as a Tax Shelter, interview by Karl Fitzgerald, from the Renegade Economists podcast. Houses as a Tax Shelter
