Tax-Avoidance - The Worst is Yet to Come “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” “The Rich Boy,” by F. Scott Fitzgerald The 30-year campaign of the wealthy to rig our economic system – especially the tax component – for their own benefit will accelerate with the GOP capture of the House of Representatives and the likely capture of the presidency and Senate in two years. For a foreshadowing of what is to come, a dress rehearsal has been conducted in Latvia, Iceland, Ireland and other financially strapped countries. Latvia has been burdened with the world’s most regressive tax system, while Iceland and Ireland have become record setters in tapping taxpayers to bail out financial crime syndicates, a.k.a. banks. The Irish bailout will encumber its people ...
Krugman, China and the role of finance.
Here’s the quandary that the U.S. economy is in: The Fed’s quantitative easing policy– creating more liquidity so that banks can lend more – aims at helping the economy “borrow its way out of debt.” But banks are not lending more, for the simple reason that a third of U.S. real estate already is in negative equity, while small and medium-sized businesses (which have created most of the new jobs in America for the past few decades) have seen their preferred collateral (real estate and sales orders) shrink. How can banks be expected to lend more to re-inflate the economy’s asset prices while wages and consumer prices continue to drift down? The “real” economy as a whole therefore must shrink. What has made the argument over Fed policy so important over ...
Dollar War in Detail
Eric Janszen, Interview with Dr. Michael Hudson 6 November, 2010 Janszen (E): What I’m noting, starting with the gold crisis over the last few weeks, and the public nature of some of the complaints that we’re hearing out of Brazil and China and the front page of the Financial Times, we seem to be heading into a pretty serious currency crisis. Hudson (H): Yes, the currency crisis is caused by what’s called Quantitative Easing (QE) – flooding the economy with credit, and specifically Ben Bernanke’s and Tim Geithner’s threat to create another $1 trillion worth of new Federal Reserve credit over the next twelve months. The Financial Times reports that all of the last $2 trillion the Fed created has gone to the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and to Third ...
Mr. Obama’s Most Recent “2%” Sellout is his Worst Yet
Now that President Obama is almost celebrating his bipartisan willingness to renew the tax cuts for the super-rich enacted under George Bush ten years ago, it is time for Democrats to ask themselves how strongly they are willing to oppose an administration that looks like Bush-Cheney III. Is this what they expected by Mr. Obama’s promise to rise above partisan politics – by ruling on behalf of Wall Street, now that it is the major campaign backer of both parties? It is a reflection of how one-sided today’s class war has become that Warren Buffet has quipped that “his” side is winning without a real fight being waged. No gauntlet has been thrown down over the trial balloon that the president and his advisor David Axelrod have sent up over the ...
Hudson to Hudson
Part One of this discussion was published in the Huffington Post today. You get to see the whole piece here. Michael Hudson talks with . . . Michael Hudson Michael Hudson and Michael Hudson are often mistaken for each other. Along with sharing a name, they share an interest in economics, debt and the creative ways that some people help themselves to other people’s money. Michael Hudson the economist – author of such books as Super-Imperialism – teaches at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. In 2006, he wrote a prescient cover story for Harper’s entitled “The New Road to Serfdom: An illustrated guide to the coming real estate collapse.” Michael W. Hudson the reporter is a staff writer at the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit journalism organization. He has been credited ...
Russian TV, the G20 and US dollar diplomacy
Michael was interview on Russian TV yesterday by Lauren Lyster. Watch the 10 minute clip here. There is no possibility of agreement at the upcoming G20 summit because the U.S. is declaring financial war on other countries, believes American economist Michael Hudson. The U.S. has been pushing China to revalue its currency – at a time when Washington has been pumping billions of dollars into its economy – a move viewed by other countries as an attempt to deliberately weaken the greenback. The issue of exchange rates is expected to be one of the toughest discussion points at the G20 summit in South Korea later this week.
American Monetary Institute presentation
Michael gave this presentation at the AMI conference recently. You can watch it in 5 parts on youtube via the AMI page or Steve Keen kindly recorded it all as a single file here. The audio is better via AMI.
Hudson, Democracy Now on Currency Wars
Michael Hudson as interviewed by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez on Democracy Now! Summary: The Federal Reserve will pump $600 billion more into the U.S. economy and keep interest rates at historical low levels. The short-term impact of the Fed's move—known as quantitative easing—has been a jump in stock prices across the globe. Many nations, however, have accused the United States of waging a currency war by devaluing the dollar. We speak to former Wall Street economist and University of Missouri Professor Michael Hudson. "The object of warfare is a takeover a country's land, raw materials, and assets and grab them," Hudson says. "In the past, this used to be done militarily by invading them. Today, you can do it financially simply by creating credit, which is what the Federal Reserve has ...
Speculating on Quantitative Currency Wars
An Interview with Dr. Michael Hudson October 21, 2010 Interviewer: iTulip’s Eric Janszen (E): Welcome Michael Hudson to iTulip again. Thanks for joining us. Hudson (H): Thank you, Eric. E: So we’ve had discussions in the past about China’s response to America’s escalation of the currency wars. Yesterday they made a bold move, raising their interest rates and also imposing an export embargo on an important industrial commodity, rare earth metals. H: Let’s talk about the latter first. I think China finally caught on to the fact that it was pricing its rare earth minerals at the uneconomic low-cost margin of extraction, not taking into account the environmental clean up costs or the replacement costs for these basically irreplaceable rare metals. They pointed out that these exports rightly should be priced at the high-cost margin, ...
