Our latest Hudson Roundtable, where our beloved Patreon supporters gathered to investigate the deeper aspects to balance of payments theory was certainly in the deep dive category. Michael explains how U.S. balance-of-payments accounting masks real money flows—military spending, “foreign aid,” transfer pricing, and rentier gains—letting America earn without paying. We unpack dollar hegemony, GDP fictions, and what BRICS must do to break free.

“First of all, you think of the balance of payments as being the capital account and the trade account. Well, that’s not really the whole picture. Where is the government in all of this? I found that when you separated the government sector from the private sector, which you had to do, I was able to actually find out what are the balance of payments costs of military spending abroad and also of foreign aid. And the first study I did was the study of the statistics on foreign aid. “