July, 2021 | Michael Hudson

Living with Price Above Value

By Michael Tuesday, July 13, 2021 Interviews rentier Permalink

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1L3FQDmYSjI An interview with the Positive Penger group. Jussi: So welcome all and welcome Michael. Good to have you here again. How are you? Hudson: It’s good to be back. Jussi: Our pleasure as usual. Let me just introduce you shortly first. I think most people know quite a lot about you. I’ll make it short. You have been an advisor to governments, warned correctly about the debt crisis in Latin America and the great financial crisis 2008. You worked on Wall Street as an economist. One of your assignments was to calculate how much it was possible to indebt Latin American countries so all their export income was used to pay interest on loans. Another way to put it, how much can you put these countries in debt. As an associate ...

Moving Beyond Dollar Hegemony

By Michael Tuesday, July 6, 2021 Articles superimperialism Permalink

Understanding of the dollar’s world role is dominated by the ideas of ‘dollar hegemony’ and ‘US hegemony’. In this paper, based on our extensive past work, we reveal how these ideas are ideologies, not theories. In their place, we reveal an understanding one that is theoretically sound and accords with the historical record, a geopolitical economy of the international monetary system of modern capitalism. We begin with a theoretical outline of how money operates under capitalism. We then consider how capitalism needs world money and, at the same time, makes its stable functioning difficult. We then go on to trace the fundamental instability of the modern international monetary systems based on national currencies of dominant countries, from the gold standard to the current volatile and predatory dollar-centred system, and their ...

Finance Capitalism versus Industrial Capitalism: The Rentier Resurgence and Takeover

By Michael Tuesday, July 6, 2021 Articles Marx, rentier Permalink

Published by Sage Journals Abstract Marx and many of his less radical contemporary reformers saw the historical role of industrial capitalism as being to clear away the legacy of feudalism—the landlords, bankers, and monopolists extracting economic rent without producing real value. However, that reform movement failed. Today, the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sector has regained control of government, creating neo-rentier economies. The aim of this postindustrial finance capitalism is the opposite of industrial capitalism as known to nineteenth-century economists: it seeks wealth primarily through the extraction of economic rent, not industrial capital formation. Tax favoritism for real estate, privatization of oil and mineral extraction, and banking and infrastructure monopolies add to the cost of living and doing business. Labor is increasingly exploited by bank debt, student debt, and credit card ...