This is an edited and expanded transcript from a live phone interview by Dimitris Yannopoulos for Athens News, September 2012. Dimitris Yannopoulos: As an academic with a strong grounding in economic history as well as banking and a Clean Slate, professor Michael Hudson has built his own school of thought - distanced from both Keynesians and neoliberals – with regard to the stark options facing a contemporary Western world drowning in unsustainable debts of governments and households at the mercy of global banks and financiers. Options for the indebted amount to a choice between feudal-like servitude and freedom, because “debts that can’t be paid, won’t be.” That has become Prof. Hudson’s well-known tag line. He explains his logic in this interview with the Athens News, on the occasion of publication ...
QE3 = Jobs for Wall St
More at The Real News PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore. Ben Bernanke, the head of the Federal Reserve, announced a few days ago QE3, quantitative easing three, and now he says they're going to continue to buy assets, multibillion dollars of purchases, until the unemployment rate goes down. He was then followed by the European Central Bank and the central bank of Japan that are introducing their own monetary stimulus policies. Now joining us to discuss how effective all this might be is Michael Hudson. Michael's a former Wall Street financial analyst and now ...
Modern Money and Public Purpose
Here is the recording of the presentation I gave at the Modern Money and Public Purpose seminar recently. My delivery begins at the 43 minute mark. I highly recommend Randy's presentation beforehand. Moderator: William V. Harris, William R. Shepherd Professor of History and Director, Center for the Ancient Mediterranean, Columbia University Speaker 1: L. Randall Wray, Research Director of the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability and Professor of Economics, University of Missouri-Kansas City Speaker 2: Michael Hudson, President, Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends and Distinguished Research Professor, University of Missouri-Kansas City Tuesday, September 11, 2012 About the Seminar Series: Modern Money and Public Purpose is an eight-part, interdisciplinary seminar series held at Columbia Law School over the 2012-2013 academic year. The series aims to present new perspectives and progressive ...
Surviving Progress transcript
Below are the transcripts from the film Surviving Progress I was a part of. The film can be purchased here. Canada FILM group on PROGRESS 2010: The Road to Debt Serfdom Cinémaginaire, ASHOP (USA): Interview with Michael Hudson – Tapes #112-113-114 Theme: In the name of “progress,” the world is regressing to neoserfdom. Mainstream economics has become a body of assumptions selected to rationalize a “trickle-down” tax policy favoring the financial sector driving the rest of the economy into debt, turning the economic surplus into interest charges – to be recycled into yet more debt creation. Claiming that wealth at the top pulls up the rest (“the rich are job creators”), the policy inference is to shift taxes off financial wealth and property onto labor and industry. What this view leaves out of account ...
Set Up To Fail
Renegade Economists interview 05.09.2012 Interview with Professor Michael Hudson by Karl Fitzgerald Listen KF: We welcome to the show Professor Michael Hudson, Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, the leading Post-Keynesian university in America. It’s been fantastic to see, Michael, that the public profile of UMKC has really taken off with Randall Wray, yourself and Stephanie Kelton being quoted quite widely these days. Can you explain what Post-Keynesianism is? MH: The fact that we all have a very similar approach is what has enabled us to challenge the neoliberal Chicago School. Our approach is heterodox - we see that money is created, basically, on computer keyboards. When a bank lends money, they create a deposit by writing a loan. You sign an IOU, the bank has a promissory note from ...
Incorporating the Rentier Sectors into a Financial Model
by Dirk Bezemer and Michael Hudson As published in the World Economic Association's World Economic Review Vol #1. ABSTRACT Current macroeconomics ignores the roles that rent, debt and the financial sector play in shaping our economy. We discuss the Classical view on rents and policy responses to the rentier sector in the 19th century. The finance, insurance & real estate sector is today’s incarnation of the rentier sector. This paper shows how financial flows can be conceptually and statistically studied separately from (but interacting with) the real sector. We discuss finance’s interaction with government and with the international economy. 1. Introduction Now that the Bubble Economy has given way to debt deflation, the world is discovering the shortcoming of models that fail to explain how most credit creation today (1) inflates asset prices without raising ...
Upcoming Events
There are three upcoming events I will be presenting at: Sept 11: Modern Money & Public Purpose, Jerome Greene Hall, Room 104, Columbia Law School, 435 West 116th St, New York The event will be streamed live and questions can be asked via twitter. Reading Resources September 20-23: The American Monetary Institute’s 8th Annual AMI Monetary Reform Conference, Chicago. I will give a paper with Steve Keen on the mathematical model of the economy we are making. The essence is to add credit (or subtract net debt service to (from) income to get a measure of demand, to distinguish the FIRE sector (overhead) from the rest of the economy, and to distinguish commodity price inflation from asset-price inflation fueled by commercial bank credit. Dave Kelley tells me that he ...
