Debt Makes the World Go Around

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A63afuvkbmk RADHIKA DESAI: Hello and welcome to the 21st geopolitical economy hour, the show that examines the fast-changing political and geopolitical economy of our time. Welcome also to a new year that promises to be nothing but rocky, so let's help rock it in the right direction. I'm Radhika Desai. MICHAEL HUDSON: And I'm Michael Hudson. RADHIKA DESAI: There's an old saying, money makes the world go around. Like so many other truths, neoliberalism has subtly but decisively altered this one too. The adage of the neoliberal age can be said to be "debt makes the world go around". Indeed, debt is not just making the world go around, it is making it spin madly. So madly that the possibility that it will spin out of control is ever present. Everywhere you look, ...

Third World-Like Debt Crisis

A new Third World debt crisis? The need for system change https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uxyjIFqi4o   RADHIKA DESAI: Hello and welcome to this 12th Geopolitical Economy Hour, the fortnightly show on the political and geopolitical economy of our times. I'm Radhika Desai. MICHAEL HUDSON: And I'm Michael Hudson. RADHIKA DESAI: And today we are joined by Anne Pettifor to discuss an urgent issue of our time, that of the third world debt crisis. As we record this, this is the topic of the Summit on New Global Financing Pact called by Emmanuel Macron in Paris. And we couldn't find a more authoritative guest for this show. Anne Pettifor does not really need any introduction, and I'm only going to give one to remind ourselves of the range of her contributions. She's a prolific writer on issues relating ...

Buying US Debt Subsidizes Imperialism

Michael Hudson | A piece of advice: Buying U.S. debt is to provide ammunition for U.S. military expansion Source: Observer Network 2023-06-01 08:01 The June 5 deadline referred by US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has fallen, and the US debt ceiling negotiations have entered the final congressional voting juncture. House Speaker McCarthy, who was eager to reach an agreement with President Biden, faced the threat of being kicked out because the far right of the Republican Party was dissatisfied with the negotiating plan with too many compromises. In the heated stage of debt ceiling negotiations, how do Americans view this partisanship and the snowballing expansion of U.S. debt behind the partisanship? The current crisis in Ukraine is still stalemate. The United States and its allies have joined forces to contain China. As the second ...

War and Debt to Rule

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Cross posted from La Tribune Diplomatic International. French version Mohsen Abdelmoumen: Your analysis of Mesopotamian times and the wise rule of Emperors embodied by the practice of the Jubilee (compared to the predation of oligarchies) resonate with the Islamic economic theory which forbids riba (meaning usury) and imposes that banks and creditors share the risk of investment or debt. It also seems something deeply rooted in our Arabic and North African traditions of equality and justice where it is socially unacceptable to leave part of the community in dire poverty. As an anthropologist, have you related the success or failure of modern finance to anthropological factors like the structures of the rural families, theories developed by some like Emmanuel Todd? Michael Hudson: I have written a long article on Ibn Khaldun, ...

On Debt Parasites

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We're told that debt forgiveness is impossible, because all debts must be paid, and to do the opposite is to invite anarchy and chaos. But what if none of it was true? Renowned economist Michael Hudson tells Branko Marcetic on New Zealand's 1/200 podcast about the debt jubilees of the ancient world, how Jesus preached debt forgiveness, and how the finance sector has become a parasite feeding off the productive parts of the economy. Transcript Okay, welcome everyone to another episode of 1 of 200, the New Zealand and international politics podcast. I am very excited about today's episode, we have a brilliant guest. His name is Michael Hudson. He is an economist. He is a professor of economics at the University of Missouri Kansas City, and a research associate at the ...

Removing The Debt Barrier To Economic Growth

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Michael Hudson and Paul Craig Roberts Cross posted from Paul's site. Out of habit, American economists worry about federal debt. But federal debt can be redeemed by the Federal Reserve printing the money with which to retire the bonds. The debt problem rests with individuals, companies, and state and local governments. They have no printing press. We have explained that the indebtedness of the population means there is little discretionary income with which to drive the economy. The offshoring of middle class jobs lowered incomes, and after paying debt service—mortgage interest, car payments, credit card interest, student loan debt—Americans’ pockets are empty. This situation has been worsened by Covid lockdowns. In the US the federal government has sent out a few Covid payments to ...


Debt Deflation and the Neofeudal Empire

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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

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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 ...

Unpayable Corporate Debt: A Brady Bond Solution for America’s Economic Crisis

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Even before the Covid-19 crisis had slashed stock prices nearly in half since it erupted in January, financial markets were in an inherently unstable condition. Years of quantitative easing had loaded so much money into stock and bond prices that stock price/earnings multiples and bond prices were far too high by any normal and reasonable historical standards. Risk premiums have disappeared, with only a few basis points separating U.S. Treasury bills and corporate bonds. The Fed’s Quantitative Easing since 2008 plus large companies using their earnings for stock buybacks drove the prices of financial assets into a realm of unreality. The result was that markets already were teetering on the brink of fragility. Any rise of normal interest to more normal conditions, or any external shock, was bound to crash the ...