2020 | Michael Hudson

A Hard Look at Rent and Rent Seeking

By Michael Monday, December 14, 2020 Debates No tags Permalink

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IquO_TcMZIQ&t=37s In this interactive seminar organized jointly by the Henry George School and the International Union for Land Value Taxation, Michael Hudson and Pepe Escobar will unpack one of the most destructive features of our economic system and the many different ways it drives wealth inequality. They will also focus on China and the “Great Game” regarding control of the world’s resources. Michael Hudson is an American economist, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City and a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College, former Wall Street analyst, political consultant, commentator and journalist. ... He identifies himself as a classical economist. Michael is the author of J is for Junk Economics (2017), Killing the Host (2015), The Bubble and Beyond (2012), Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (1968 & 2003), Trade, Development and Foreign Debt ...

Jubillee Perspectives with Steve Keen

By Michael Monday, December 7, 2020 Interviews Jubilee Permalink

DEC 4, 2020 Is it time for a debt jubilee? Steve Keen and Michael Hudson have both been arguing for a debt jubilee for some time. Now, as COVID-19 hits the poorest hardest, and leaves those with money better off than before, is this the right time to write off debt? Can the economy recover without it? After all, its stagnated since the 2008 global financial crisis. If you were to have a debt jubilee, how would you do it. Steve and Michael have different ideas about how it should be implemented. They explain their thinking to Phil Dobbie on this week’s free edition of the Debunking Economics podcast. TRANSCRIPT PHIL: It is obvious COVID-19 and our response to it is having a devastating impact on the world economy. And perhaps the biggest impact ...

2020 Election Preview

By Michael Monday, November 2, 2020 Interviews No tags Permalink

An interview with Paul Jay. Transcript Paul Jay Hi, I’m Paul Jay and welcome to theAnalysis.news podcast. Donald Trump has tried very hard to make this election about his pre-pandemic economic record, which is supposed to be a success story. Of course, he ignores the fact the cyclical upswing of the economy started during the last Obama years. But what Trump tries to trumpet is his approach to trade with China. He claims his tariffs and remarkable negotiating skills have brought hundreds of thousands of jobs back to the United States. Well, the Wall Street Journal reported on October 26 that, quote, “President Trump’s trade war against China didn’t achieve the central objective of reversing a U.S. decline in manufacturing, economic data show, despite tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese goods to ...

Odd Lots, Bloomberg

By Michael Wednesday, October 14, 2020 Interviews No tags Permalink

An interview on Odd Lots, Bloomberg In the wake of the Great Financial Crisis, you heard a lot of talk about the US becoming like Greece unless the budget deficit were brought under control. However, these warnings proved to be unfounded. That being said, there are risks of a different variety. On the latest Odd Lots, we speak with the economist Michael Hudson on the risk of too much private sector debt, which could lead to permanently degraded consumption and investment. Listen to the podcast. Photo by Hafidh Satyanto on Unsplash

Capitalism’s Charade Continues

By Michael Wednesday, October 7, 2020 Interviews No tags Permalink

In discussion alongside Steve Keen - always enlightening. Photo by Sigrid Wu on Unsplash

 Debt Deflation and the Neofeudal Empire

By Michael Sunday, October 4, 2020 Interviews No tags Permalink

Grumbine 2020` Macro N Cheese – Episode 88 Michael Hudson [intro/music] (00:02): The money that you pay for debt service to a bank isn’t spent back into the economy. The bank bond holders are basically the 1% of the economy. They’re rich enough that they’re not going to take all this extra money they get to buy more goods and services. They’ll buy shitty trophy art, Andy Warhol junk. Who is the dumbest economic Nobel Prize winner? Paul Krugman. That’s right. He was given a Nobel Prize for not understanding what money was. If he would have understood it, that would’ve excluded him from getting the Nobel Prize. Geoff Ginter [intro/music] (01:26): Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro and Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine. Steve Grumbine (01:34): All right. And ...

Debt, Land and Money, From Polanyi to the New Economic Archaeology

By Michael Friday, September 4, 2020 Debt Ancient Near East Permalink

Inspiration for The Great Transformation in the postwar monetary breakdown Karl Polanyi’s formative years in the aftermath of World War I were a period of monetary turmoil. The United States became a creditor nation for the first time, and demanded payment of the war debts that Keynes warned were unpayable without wrecking Europe’s financial systems. (Hudson, Super Imperialism, 1972, summarizes this era.) France and Britain subjected Germany to unsustainably high reparations debts, while imposing austerity on their own economies by adhering to the gold standard. Jacques Rueff in France and Bertil Ohlin in the United States argued that Germany could pay any level of reparations in gold – and the Allies could pay their foreign-currency arms debts – by imposing unemployment high enough to make wages low enough to make its ...

Vale David Graeber

By Michael Friday, September 4, 2020 Debt No tags Permalink

I’ve known David Graeber for over 15 years. After I published my third Harvard colloquium on Debt and Economic Renewal in the Ancient Near East, he contacted me to discuss the views of Karl Polanyi, as my group was in many ways the successor group to Polanyi’s at Columbia University (where the colloquium was held). We talked sporadically, and he mentioned he was going to write on the history of debt as an anthropologist. My own view was that people would not be very interested in the idea of debt cancellation in antiquity until the way could be prepared for discussing it in today’s world, which is what most of my own journalistic and academic writing was all ...

How an “Act of God” Pandemic is Destroying the West

By Michael Monday, August 31, 2020 Articles pandemic Permalink

The U.S. is Saving the Financial Sector, not the Economy Before juxtaposing the U.S. and alternative responses to the corona virus’s economic effects, I would like to step back in time to show how the pandemic has revealed a deep underlying problem. We are seeing the consequences of Western societies painting themselves into a debt corner by their creditor-oriented philosophy of law. Neoliberal anti-government (or more accurately, anti-democratic) ideology has centralized social planning and state power in “the market,” meaning specifically the financial market on Wall Street and in other financial centers. At issue is who will lose when employment and business activity are disrupted. Will it be creditors and landlords at the top of the economic scale, or debtors and renters at the bottom? This age-old confrontation over how to deal ...

A Battle Plan So Subtle It Sends You To Sleep

By Michael Friday, July 31, 2020 Articles No tags Permalink

Part 2 of the interview with Ellen Brown: It's a War: So says renowned economist Michael Hudson in the concluding part of our recent interview with him. Hudson makes no bones about the deadly serious game being played by the world’s financial powers and their intention to create a new feudal economic order. Hudson sees the privatization of public assets and institutions, like the Fed’s take-over of the Treasury a hundred years ago, as evidence that our struggle for people-focused public policy is being overwhelmed by debt at the hands of capitalism and greed. But people are rising-up as our guest Rickey Gard Diamond, author of “Screwnomics”, says in her recent article in Ms. Magazine “How Public Banks Make Black Lives Matter”. She talks with us about women and ...