Why Bondholders Can’t – and Shouldn’t – be Paid The pace of Wall Street’s war against the 99% is quickening in preparation for the kill. Having demonized public employees for being scheduled to receive pensions on their lifetime employment service, bondholders are insisting on getting the money instead. It is the same austerity philosophy that has been forced on Greece and Spain – and the same that is prompting President Obama and Mitt Romney to urge scaling back Social Security and Medicare. Unlike the U.S. federal government, most states and cities have constitutions that prevent them from running budget deficits. This means that when they cut property taxes, they either must borrow from the wealthy, or cut back employment and public services. For many years they borrowed, paying tax-exempt interest to ...
Union Discussion
Michael Hudson on the Union Solidarity International podcast dissecting the economic predicament, debt deflation, the problems of dollar hegemony, and the need for debt jubilees. Apologies - the audio has a reverb.
Overview: The Bubble and Beyond:
The Road from Industrial Capitalism to Finance Capitalism and Debt Peonage Essays on Fictitious Capital, Debt Deflation and the Global Crisis Michael Hudson's new book The Bubble and Beyond can be purchased here. Preface Summary and Analytic Table of Contents Introduction: Today’s Financial Crisis and Economic Theory I. Fictitious Capital and Economic Fictions 1. Two Traditions of Financial Doctrine 2. The Magic of Compound Interest: Mathematics at the Root of the Crisis 3. How Ricardo’s Value Theory Ignored the Role of Debt 4. The Industrialization of Finance and the Financialization of Industry 5. The Use and Abuse of Mathematical Economics 6. The Financial Character of Today’s Crisis II. From Inflated Debts to Debt Deflation 7. Property is Worth Whatever a Bank Will Lend Against It 8. The Real Estate Bubble at the Core of ...
Fireside on the Great Theft
Michael Hudson's new book The Bubble and Beyond can be purchased here. A recent interview in Frankfurt's FAZ newspaper: Dr. Schirrmacher: And then, just to find a starting point, maybe we can start with the personal, and then at least I would ask you both. Maybe that is a good starting point, very basic: What is the future of Europe? So, what do you conceive what will happen, and what is going to happen? Sie können sich auch gegenseitig … Now, Michael Hudson, you are in Germany and you are known to our readers, and Sahra Wagenknecht, of course, as well. Just very briefly your background. In your DNA, in your genetic code, you have traces of Indian roots. Prof. Hudson: Well, I am one-eighth (Chippewa) Indian, so I’m half Irish, a quarter ...
Escape Economics Review
PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS reviews my book in Escape from Economics. Hudson is totally outside the matrix in which economists imprison themselves. Hudson doesn’t live in the artificial reality of economists or shill for corporations and Wall Street. A person can learn a lot from Hudson. His book, Trade, Development and Foreign Debt (2009) explains how foreign trade and economic development have been used to concentrate economic power in the hands of dominant nations. What is really going on is covered up with do-good verbiage and formal models. In reality, trade and development are ways to colonize countries that think they are independent. (Another good book on this subject is Michel Chossudovsky’s The Globalization of Poverty.) Perhaps the best place to begin with Hudson is his latest book, The Bubble and ...
Financial Predators v. Labor, Industry and Democracy
Europe’s sovereign debt crisis in historical perspective Sankt Georgen University, Frankfurt, June 22, 2012 Michael Hudson's new book The Bubble and Beyond can be purchased here. The Eurozone lacks a central bank to do what most central banks are supposed to do: finance government deficits. To make matters worse, the Lisbon Agreement limits these deficits to 3% – too small to pull economies out of depression by offsetting private-sector debt deflation. Even if central banks could monetize higher levels of deficit spending, there are good reasons not to subsidize unfair tax systems and tax cuts on the real estate and financial “free lunch” windfalls that classical economists urged to be the tax base. Under classical tax policy, Europe would not have had a land-price bubble in the first place. “Free lunch” economic rent ...
