On finance, real estate and the powers of neoliberalism
If Washington and Brussels can seize sovereign reserves, what wealth is safe in Western custody? Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff unpack the gold surge, why BRICS needs a clearing union more than a new currency, and how tariffs, sanctions, and asset inflation push the world toward rupture. Clean-slate scenarios and bank risk included.
Neoliberalism blurred the line between output and overhead. In this conversation, Michael Hudson shows how land, monopoly, and financial incomes were reclassified as “growth,” why that distorts GDP, and how it fed deindustrialization. We also examine China’s engineer-led industrial policy and outline a credible post-neoliberal strategy: tax rent, treat essentials as utilities, and lower systemic costs for real producers.
The economists link election meddling, social media control and BRICS resilience—arguing U.S. hegemony now runs on narrative and coercion.
Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff debate whether U.S. overreach ends in negotiation or catastrophe, from nuclear risk, multipolar realignment, class war at home, oil and dollar strategy, China’s price edge, and what comes next.
Trump tells Fox “make people love Israel again.” Michael Hudson argues Gaza is NATO’s war and the real fight is the “ninth front”: control of the narrative—platforms, algorithms, donors, and universities. Richard Wolff reads a broader political turn: Israel losing hearts and minds, Europe recognizing Palestine, and U.S. empire overreach. Together they trace money, media, and power—AIPAC, Silicon Valley, campus repression, and what comes next.
Michael Hudson on the balance-of-payments illusion: how military outlays, foreign aid, and transfer pricing let the U.S. earn without paying—under dollar hegemony.
.. pits Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff’s analyses against U.S. overreach: tariffs that stall reshoring, austerity for social services, and militarized domestic control – asking whether Washington escalates toward wider war or negotiates a retreat from a fading unipolar order.
Two London-based Master’s students in Development Economics speak with Professor Michael Hudson about rentier capitalism, financialisation, and why Britain’s “stability” privileges creditors over productive growth. From Ricardo and the Corn Laws to Thames Water and the City of London, Hudson argues GDP mislabels transfer payments as output, central banks serve commercial banks, and the EU functions as NATO’s economic arm.
Who plans the economy—the public through elected institutions, or private finance through the Fed, markets, and lobbying? We trace how “central bank independence” became regulatory capture, why asset inflation replaced industrial policy, and what genuine democratic planning would prioritize: wages, production, and public investment over bubbles.
Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff trace how U.S. imperial power rests on fragile mechanisms: dollar reserves recycling deficits, tariffs as hidden taxes, and oil and food as leverage. But each policy now collides with shifting trade, new alliances, and domestic squeeze. The cascade of failures leaves America struggling to fund its empire or sustain its illusion of control.
