February, 2016 | Michael Hudson

The Commanding Heights

By Michael Wednesday, February 17, 2016 Interviews guns n butter, superimperialism Permalink

This is Guns and Butter Suppose a country owes money to another nation’s government or official agency. How can creditors collect, unless there’s an international court and an enforcement system? The IMF and the World Bank were part of that enforcement system and now they’re saying: ‘We’re not going to be part of that anymore. We’re only working for the U.S. State Department and Pentagon. If the Pentagon tells the IMF it’s okay that a country doesn’t have to pay Russia or China, then now they don’t have to pay, as far as the IMF is concerned.’ That breaks up the global order that was created after World War II. The world is being split into two halves: the U.S. dollar orbit, and countries that the U.S. cannot control and whose ...

The Federal Reserve and the Global Fracture

By Michael Wednesday, February 17, 2016 Articles wall st Permalink

Interview with Antti J. Ronkainen, January 11, 2016, for Revalvaatio (Finland). Edited transcript. The Federal Reserve is the most significant central bank in the world. How does it contribute to the domestic policy of the United States? The Federal Reserve supports the status quo. It would not want to create a crisis before the election. Today it is part of the Democratic Party’s re-election campaign, and its job is to serve Hillary Clinton’s campaign contributors on Wall Street. It is trying to spur recovery by resuming its Bubble Economy subsidy for Wall Street, not by supporting the industrial economy. What the economy needs is a debt writedown, not more debt leveraging such as Quantitative Easing has aimed to promote. But the Fed is in a state of denial that the U.S. ...

The Atlanticist Tactic Revisited

By Michael Monday, February 8, 2016 Articles austerity, Russia Permalink

Paul Craig Roberts and Michael Hudson Two years ago, Russian officials discussed plans to privatize a group of national enterprises headed by the oil producer Rosneft, the VTB Bank, Aeroflot, and Russian Railways. The stated objective was to streamline management of these companies, and also to induce oligarchs to begin bringing their two decades of capital flight back to invest in the Russia economy. Foreign participation was sought in cases where Western technology transfer and management techniques would be likely to help the economy. However, the Russian economic outlook deteriorated as the United States pushed Western governments to impose economic sanctions against Russia and oil prices declined. This ...

Listen Here

By Michael Monday, February 1, 2016 Articles Killing the Host Permalink

Cross-posted from Paul Craig Roberts, who gives a very kind review of Killing the Host. February 1, 2016 The West Is Traveling The Road To Economic Ruin Paul Craig Roberts Michael Hudson is the best economist in the world. Indeed, I could almost say that he is the only economist in the world. Almost all of the rest are neoliberals, who are not economists but shills for financial interests. If you have not heard of Michael Hudson it merely shows the power of the Matrix. Hudson should have won several Nobel prizes in economics, but he will never get one. Hudson did not intend to be an economist. At the University of Chicago, which had a leading economics faculty, Hudson studied music and cultural history. He went to New York City to work in ...