Dr. Michael Hudson
michael.hudson@earthlink.net
Education
Ph.D., New York University, 1968 (economics). Dissertation on American economic and technological thought in the nineteenth century.
M.A., New York University, 1963 (economics). Thesis on the World Bank’s philosophy of development, with special reference to lending policies in the agricultural sector.
B.A., University of Chicago, 1959 (philology, minor in history).
High school and grade school completed at the University of Chicago’s Laboratory School.
Present Academic Affiliation:
Distinguished Research Professor of Economics, University of Missouri (Kansas City), and Honorary Professor of Economics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), Wuhan, China.
Work History
Most of my professional life since 1962 has been spent in applying flow-of-funds and balance-of-payments statistics to forecast interest rates, capital and real estate markets. Academically, my focus has been on financial history and, since 1980, on writing a history of debt, land tenure and related economic institutions from Sumerian times through antiquity and feudal Europe to the present.
1996-present: President, Institute for the Study of Long Term Economic Trends (ISLET). Since 1998 my reports on dollar-yen relations and Japan’s financial bubble have been published monthly in Japan. These, along with my major books, have been translated and published in Japanese. In Russia I wrote a series of reports and testified on numerous occasions before the Duma with regard to its land policy and financial reforms. For the Norwegian Shipowners’ Association I produced a series of reports on the financial dimension of technology assessment, and for U.S. clients I traced the recycling of savings into mortgage credit and other financial markets.
My second duty at ISLET has been to organize and co-edit a series of conferences on the evolution of property and credit since the Bronze Age. I chaired conferences on the Mesopotamian roots of urbanization, interest-bearing debt and land redistribution, the origins of account-keeping and money, at New York University, the Oriental Institute (St. Petersburg, Russia), Columbia University, and the British Museum. The first conference, held in November 1994, was on Privatization in the Ancient Near East and Classical World (published by Harvard University, Peabody Museum, 1996), followed by Urbanization and Land Ownership in the Ancient Near East (Peabody Museum, 1999), Debt and Economic Renewal in the Ancient Near East (CDL Press, 2002), and Creating Economic Order: Record-Keeping, Standardization and the Development of Accounting in the Ancient Near East (CDL Press, 2004). A fifth colloquium, on the organization and structuring of labor in the ancient Near East, is scheduled for 2005.
1994-95: Research Director, Henry George School, preparing a statistical chart book tracing real estate’s role in the U.S. economy, its declining fiscal role and the role of land-price inflation in the economy’s overall capital gains. This work entailed reworking the Federal Reserve’s balance-sheet estimates for the U.S. economy to improve its land value estimates. I have since continued this work for the school’s sister institution, the Robert E. Schalkenbach Foundation.
1984present: Consultant to institutional investors on balance-of-payments and flow-of-funds analysis.
In 1989 I used my balance of payments country risk model to advise Scudder, Stevens & Clark on setting up its Sovereign High Yield Investment Co. N.V., an offshore fund traded on the London Stock Exchange. Starting business in November, by 1990 this fund ranked second worldwide in rate of return and capital appreciation. In the process of marketing this fund, I wrote a special report for Scudder on Sovereign High Yield Bonds: A Major New Investment Vehicle for the 1990s (published in Russian in 1993 by the state Economic Institute).
During the 1980s, when the trade deficit was the single major influence on 30year Treasury bond movements, my quarterly financial reports on the direction of long and shortterm interest rates (and, as a derivative, the stock market) forecast withinmonth movements on these bonds as well as medium-term trends.
1978 – 83: Consultant to the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) defining instability mechanisms inherent in the world economy and evaluating Third World strategies and U.S. responses to the proposed New International Economic Order.
1976 – 80: Consultant to Canadian government agencies. My main reports were to the Science Council on the implications of the New International Economic Order for Canadian industrial and trade prospects; to the Institute for Research on Public Policy (IRPP)on the adverse long term consequences of Canada’s foreign borrowing, high interest rates and its commercial banking structure; and to the Secretary of State on the implications of information-transfer technology for national communications policy, and to the Cultural Policy Task Force on the prospective impact on Canada of foreign domination of its television and film programming. For the IRPP I published a monograph on Canada in the New Monetary Order: Borrow? Devalue? Restructure!
1976: Consultant to The Futures Group (Glastonbury, Conn.) for the National Science Foundation analyzing the economic and financial consequences of life extending technology in two reports: When We Live Longer: Prospects for America (with Herb Gurjuoy et al., 1977) and A Technology Assessment of Life Extending Technologies (Vol. 5: Demography, Economics and Aging, 1977). I believe these were the first reports to pinpoint the implications for the Social Security system of an aging population and its inter-generational financial tensions.
1973 – 76: Consulting economist for the Montreal brokerage house Molson Rousseau, writing a bimonthly market report on U.S. economic conditions and international financial developments, and making oral reports to clients.
1972 – 76: Professional Staff, Hudson Institute. Published studies on world monetary reform (with Herman Kahn), the balance of payments implications of the energy crisis, Project Independence (coal liquefaction), technology transfer between the United States and Soviet Union, and related topics for the Dept. of Energy, Energy Research Development Agency (ERDA), NEH, White House Staff, Dept. of Defense and other U.S. agencies. In addition, undertook personal consulting for clients of the Institute’s Corporate Environment Study, including CibaGeigy (Basel) and the Bank of Mexico.
1970 – 71: Senior economist, Continental Oil Company (Coordinating and Planning Dept), where I wrote the company’s domestic and international economic environment studies, and special reports on U.S. trade
policy, and evaluations of the copper and real estate industries.
1968 – 69: Balance of payments specialist, Arthur Andersen and Company. Employed specifically to write a monograph on A Financial Payments Flow Analysis of U.S. International Transactions: 19601968, published by NYU’s Institute of Finance as a triple issue of its Bulletin in March 1970. This report was the first study to pinpoint that the entire U.S. payments deficit derived from government account, specifically the military sector (i.e., the Vietnam War), not foreign aid or private investment abroad.
1967 – 68: Consulting editor for the publisher Augustus M. Kelley in the history of economic thought, consultant on statistical model building for banks (in financial accounting techniques), and for New Mexico’s Home Education Livelihood Program (HELP) in the economics of rural economic development.
1964 – 67: Balance of payments economist, Chase Manhattan Bank (economic research division). Prepared country risk analyses, wrote the bank’s studies on The Balance of Payments of the Petroleum Industry (1966), and prepared speeches for bank officers on balance of payments topics. I left the bank to complete my doctoral dissertation.
1962 – 64: Economist, Savings Banks Trust Company. Wrote the quarterly Deposit Statistics, the annual Income and Expense Analysis and the Summary of Mortgage Statistics covering New York’s 126 savings banks.
BACKGROUND of Dr. Michael Hudson
President, Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends
Michael Hudson’s 1972 book Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (translated into Spanish and Japanese) is a critique of how the United States exploited foreign economies through IMF and World Bank. A second, revised edition was published by Pluto Press (London) in 2004. Other books by Dr. Hudson include The Myth of Aid (1971, Orbis Books); Global Fracture: The New International Economic Order (1979, Harper & Row, repr. Pluto Press 2005)
As an advisor to the White House, State Dept. and Defense Department at the Hudson Institute, and subsequently to the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), he became one of the best known specialists in international finance. He also has consulted for the governments of Canada, Mexico and Russia, most recently for the Duma opposition to the Yeltsin regime. He writes for the Japanese e-mail newsletter “Our World.”
Dr. Hudson has published a textbook reviewing the historical development of international trade and investment theory, Trade, Development and Foreign Debt (Pluto Press, 1993, two volumes). This history is based on the courses in international economics he taught at the New School for Social Research, Graduate Faculty in 1969-72.
In conjunction with the Peabody Museum at Harvard, Dr. Hudson has headed an archaeological research team on the origins of private property, debt and real estate. His ISLET group has published
Dr. Hudson is former balance-of-payments economist for the Chase Manhattan Bank and Arthur Andersen. In 1989 he organized the world’s first third world debt fund for Scudder Stevens & Clark (an offshore fund). He continues to conduct statistical research for financial and non-profit institutions, most recently for the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation and the Levy Economics Institute.
Academic career
2006-present: Prof. of Economics and Director of Economic Research at the Riga Graduate School of Law. My main task was to prepare a curriculum in international finance and tax policy, and to train graduate students for work on preparing a land-value map of Riga and other Latvian cities to form the basis for setting realistic market prices on public and private property, and to shift the onerous flat tax on labor more onto property as a means of stemming the debt-financed real estate bubble.
Toward this end I negotiated a contract with the Riga City Council to prepare a methodology for land-value taxation, and with the Ebert Foundation to prepare a pamphlet on the philosophy of privatization. My teaching at the RGSL also involved lectures at the Swedish School of Economics in Riga, at which I had lectured for the preceding year and supervised graduate theses.
2002-present: Distinguished Research Professor, Dept. of Economics, University of Missouri (Kansas City). During 2004 I was guest lecturer at the Berlin School of Economics (Hochschule für Wirtschaft), and am scheduled to be a guest lecturer at the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga in 2005.
1996-1998: Senior Research Associate, Levy Economics Institute at Bard College. With Prof. Kris Feder I published a monograph on Real Estate and the Capital Gains Debate.
19851998: Research Associate, Peabody Museum (Harvard), and Visiting Scholar, New York University (during 1988-89 in its Economics and Classics Departments, from 1990-94 at its Institute of Fine Arts) specializing in the economic archaeology. At the IFA I co-taught the 1989 course on Mycenaean archaeology. At both Harvard and NYU my role was to organize the above-mentioned assyriological colloquia, which were held at NYU’s Skirball Dept. of Hebrew Studies and published by the Peabody Museum.
1969 – 72: Assistant Professor of Economics, The New School for Social Research, Graduate Faculty. Taught international trade and investment; money and banking; and balance-of-payments analysis, as well as theories of national accounting and seminars in the balance of payments and theories of inflation.
PUBLICATIONS
Books and Monographs
America’s Protectionist Takeoff, 1815-1914: The Neglected American School of Political Economy (ISLET, 2010).
Creating Economic Order: Record-Keeping, Standardization and the Development of Accounting in the Ancient Near East (ed. with Cornelia Wunsch), (CDL Press, Bethesda, 2004).
Debt and Economic Renewal in the Ancient Near East (ed. with Marc Van De Mieroop) (CDL Press, Bethesda, 2002).
Urbanization and Land Ownership in the Ancient Near East (ed. with Baruch Levine)
(Cambridge, Mass: Peabody Museum (Harvard), 1999).
Real Estate and the Capital Gains Debate (with Kris Feder),
The Jerome Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, Working Paper No. 187 (March 1997).
Privatization in the Ancient Near East and Classical Antiquity (ed. with Baruch Levine)
(Cambridge, Mass: Peabody Museum (Harvard), 1996).
A Philosophy for a Fair Society (with C. J. Miller and Kris Feder) (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1994).
The Lost Tradition of Biblical Debt Cancellations (New York: 1993).
Trade, Development and Foreign Debt: A History of Theories of Polarization v. Convergence
in the World Economy (London: Pluto Press, 1992, 2 vols.; new ed. ISLET 2010).
Canada in the New Monetary Order: Borrow? Devalue? Restructure! (Toronto: Butterworth, 1978).
Global Fracture: The New International Economic Order (New York: Harper and Row, 1977),
translated into Japanese (1979).
Economics and Technology in 19thCentury American Thought: The Neglected American Economists
(New York: Garland Press, 1975).
Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1972 2nd ed., London: Pluto Press, 2002), translated into Spanish (1973, Dopesa), Japanese (1975, 2nd ed., 2002, Tokuma Shoten) and Chinese (2008, Government Publication and Translation House).
The Myth of Aid (with Dennis Goulet), (Orbis Books, 1971).
A PaymentsFlow Analysis of U.S. International Transactions: 19601968, NYU, Graduate School of
Business Administration, The Bulletin, Nos. 6163 (March 1970).
Reports for UNITAR (published by Pergamon Press)
“The Logic of Regionalism in History and Today,” “The Objectives of Regionalism in the 1980s,” and “A Regional Strategy to Finance the New International Economic Order,” in Davidson Nicol, Luis Excheverria and Aurelio Peccei, eds., Regionalism and the New International Economic Order (1981).
“The Structure of the World Economy: A Northern Perspective,” in Erwin Laszlo and Joel Kurtzman, eds., The Structure of the World Economy and Prospects for a New International Economic Order (1980).
“The United States and the NIEO,” in Laszlo and Kurtzman, eds., The United States, Canada and the New International Economic Order (1979).
Articles
“The use and abuse of mathematical economics,” real-world economics review, Issue no. 55, (December 2010), pp. 2-22, and “U.S. ‘quantitative easing’ is fracturing the global economy,” ibid., pp. 82-94.
“The Counter-Enlightenment: Its Economic Program, and the Classical Alternative,” Progress (Autumn 2010, Melbourne, Australia):4-27.
“The Transition from Industrial Capitalism to a Financialized Bubble Economy,” World Review of Political Economy (Vol. I, no. 1: Spring 2010): 81-111.
“Marx to Goldman Sachs: The Fictions of Fictitious Capital, & the Financialization of Industry,” Critique 53 (Vol. 38 #3: August 2010):419-444.
“How Neoliberals Bankrupted ‘New Europe’: Latvia in the Global Credit Crisis,” (with Jeffrey Sommers), in Martijn Konings, ed., The Great Credit Crash (Verso: London and New York, 2010):244-63.
“After the Ice Age: How Calendar-Keeping Shaped Early Social Structuring,” in Paul G. Bahn, ed., An Enquiring Mind: Studies in Honor of Alexander Marshack (American school of prehistoric research monograph series, Oxford and Oakville: Oxbow Books, 2009):149-53.
“Entrepreneurs: From the Near Eastern Takeoff to the Roman Collapse,” in David S. Landes, Joel Mokyr, and William J. Baumol, eds., The Invention of Enterprise: Entrepreneurship from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010):8-39.
“Trends that can’t go on forever, won’t: financial bubbles, trade and exchange rates,” in Eckhard Hein, Torsten Niechoj, Peter Spahn and Achim Truger (eds.), Finance-led Capitalism? (Marburg: Metropolis-Verlag, 2008):249-272.
“Tax the Land,” Harpers, Vol. 317, No. 1902 (November 2008):40-42.
“Fading Baltic Miracle,” International Economy, Winter 2008:74-78
“Henry George’s Political Critics,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 67 (January 2008):1-46.
Book review of Ph. Chancier, F. Joannès, P. Rouillard and A. Tenu, eds., Autour de Polanyi: vocabularies, théories et modalities des échanges (Paris 2005), and J. G. Manning and Ian Morris, eds., The Ancient Economy: Evidence and Models (Stanford: 2005), in Archiv für Orientforschung Vol. 51 (2005/2006):405-11.
“Saving, Asset-Price Inflation, and Debt-Induced Deflation,” in L. Randall Wray and Matthew Forstater, eds., Money, Financial Instability and Stabilization Policy (Edward Elgar, 2006):104-24.
“The New Road to Serfdom: An illustrated guide to the coming real estate collapse,” Harpers, Vol. 312 (No. 1872), May 2006):39-46.
“The $4.7 trillion Pyramid: Why Social Security Won’t Be Enough to Save Wall Street,” Harpers, Vol. 310 (No. 1859, April 2005):35-40.
“Technical Progress and Obsolescence of Capital and Skills: Theoretical foundations of 19th-century U.S. industrial and trade policy,” in Erik S. Reinert, ed., Globalization, Economic Development and Inequality: An Alternative Perspective (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2004):100-111.
Introduction to R. T. Naylor, Hot Money and the Politics of Debt (3rd ed., McGill-Queens University Press, 2004):ix-xxxiii.
“The Development of Money-of-Account in Sumer’s Temples,” in Michael Hudson and Cornelia Wunsch, ed., Creating Economic Order: Record-Keeping, Standardization and the Development of Accounting in the Ancient Near East (CDL Press, Bethesda, 2004):303-329.
“The Archaeology of Money in Light of Mesopotamian Records,” in L. Randall Wray (ed.), Credit and State Theories of Money: The Contributions of A. Mitchell Innes (Edward Elgar, 2004).
“The Cartalist/Monetarist Debate in Historical Perspective,” in Edward Nell and Stephanie Bell eds., The State, The Market and The Euro (Edward Elgar, 2003):39-76.
“America’s Monetary Imperialism,” Global Dialogue 5 (2003):73-81.
“Debt Forgiveness and Redemption: Where do the Churches now stand,” Geophilos, No. 2 (Autumn 2002):8-33
“Reconstructing the Origins of Interest-Bearing Debt and the Logic of Clean Slates,” in Debt and Economic Renewal in the Ancient Near East (2002):7-58.
“How Interest Rates Were Set, 2500 BC – 1000 AD: Máš, tokos and fænus as metaphors for interest accruals,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 43 (Spring 2000):132-161.
“The Use and Abuse of Mathematical Economics,” Journal of Economic Studies 27 (2000):292-315.
“The Mathematical Economics of Compound Interest: A Four-Thousand Year Overview,” Journal of Economic Studies 27 (2000):344-363.
“Karl Bücher’s Role in the Evolution of Economic Anthropology,” [Annual Heilbronn Symposium, 1997: Karl Bücher], in Jürgen Backhaus (ed.), Karl Bücher. Theory, History, Anthropology, Non-Market Economies (Marburg: Metropolis Verlag 2000):301-336.
“Music as an Analogy for Economic Order in Classical Antiquity,” ibid.:113-35.
“The Economic Roots of the Jubilee,” Bible Review 15 (Feb. 1999): 26-33, 44.
“From Sacred Enclave to Temple to City,” in Urbanization and Land Ownership in the Ancient Near East (ed. with Baruch Levine, Cambridge, Mass: Peabody Museum (Harvard), 1999):117-191.
“Just how did ancient bureaucrats set their interest rates?” Archaeological Odyssey 2 (July/August
1999):6-7.
“Land Monopolization, Fiscal Crises and Clean Slate ‘Jubilee’ Proclamations in Antiquity,” in A Philosophy for a Fair Society:33-79 (also in Robert C. Hunt and Antonio Gilman, eds., Property in Economic Context, University Press of America, Monographs in Economic Anthropology 14 (1998):139-169.
“Land Taxation in Mesopotamia and Classical Antiquity,” in Robert Andelson, ed., Land-Value
Taxation Around the World (New York: Robert Schalkenbach 1998):17-35.
“Privatization in History and Today: A Survey of the Unresolved Controversies,” and “The Dynamics
of Privatization, from the Bronze Age to the Present,” in Privatization in the Ancient Near East and Classical Antiquity (ed. with Baruch Levine, Cambridge, Mass: Peabody Museum (Harvard), 1996):1-72.
“Roscher’s Victorian Views on Financial Development,” Journal of Economic Studies 22 (Spring
1995):187-208.
“The Archaeology of Collapse: A 4000 Year Perspective” (with Fred Harrison, in A Philosophy for a
Fair Society [London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1994]):7-31.
“Did the Phoenicians Introduce the Idea of Interest to Greece and Italy – And if So, When?” in Gunter
Kopcke, ed., Greece Between East and West: 10th8th Centuries BC (Berlin: 1992):128-143.
“Statecapitalist vs. Privateenterprise Imperialism,” paper delivered at the Sept. 1973 meeting of the
American Political Science Association (reprinted in the 2002 2nd ed. of Super Imperialism, Pluto Press).
“Obsolescent Factors in the International Economy,” Review of Social Economics, March 1972 (paper
delivered at the 1971 meeting of the Association for Social Economics).
“Latin America’s Role in U.S.European Diplomacy,” Cross Currents 21 (Summer 1971):303-19.
“Does Economics Deserve a Nobel Prize?” Commonweal 93 (Dec. 18, 1970).
“Review of the Pearson Report: Partners or Pawns?” Commonweal 92 (March 17, 1970).
“Financing the World Empire,” Commonweal, 91 (Nov. 21, 1969.)
“Epitaph for Bretton Woods,” Journal of International Affairs 23 (Winter 1969).
“The Sieve of Gold,” Ramparts, MayJune 1968.
Popular Articles
International Economy
Global Dialogue
Yes
The New York Times (op ed)
Europa (Fakt) [in Polish]
Our World [Tokyo, in Japanese]
Interviews
Counterpunch
Multinational Monitor
Methodist magazine
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: Amaranth model: probability was not so random
From Prof Michael Hudson.Sir, John Kay (“Amaranth and the limits of mathematical modelling…financial markets. Hence, Long Term Capital Management and Amaranth.Michael Hudson,Forest Hills, NY 11375, USProfessor of Economics, Riga Graduate…
Oct 12 2006, By Michael Hudson, Financial Times
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: US zero savings rate appears to have become structural
From Prof Michael Hudson.Sir, Two statistics points are needed to put your editorial “Ignoring…central banks will contribute less to its savings rate. A conundrum.Michael Hudson,Forest Hills, NY 11375, USDistinguished Professor of Economics…
Aug 09 2005, By Prof Michael Hudson, Financial Times
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: Why US currency took a hit after Bush election victory
From Prof Michael Hudson.Sir, In your currency column “Dollar defies analysts’ predictions…international tensions rather than to pursue further confrontation.Michael Hudson, Forest Hills, NY 11375, US Distinguished Professor of Economics…
Nov 09 2004, By Michael Hudson, Financial Times
Interviews
“Debtor Nation: The Hijacking of America’s Economy,” Acres USA, Vol. 38 (No. 1), January 2008:44-53.
Books in various states of progress include a popular political commentary, The Age of Deception (with David Kelley), and a series of trade books on the evolution of money, debt and debt cancellations: Temples of Enterprise; The Collapse of Antiquity; and The Tyranny of Debt.
He has been named one of the Founding Professors at the new Shanghai School of Marxist Studies, where the Government Publishing House has translated his major books into Chinese
The author
Michael Hudson is former balance-of-payments economist for Chase Manhattan Bank and Arthur Andersen, and economic futurist for the Hudson Institute. For Scudder Stevens & Clark in 1990 he established the world’s first Third World sovereign debt fund. It became the second best performing international fund in 1991. (An Australian real estate fund beat it out.)
Prof. Hudson has written cover stories for Harpers and is on the editorial board of Lapham’s Quarterly. He is a regular on NPR’s Marketplace, Bloomberg Radio and numerous Pacifica interview programs, and is a regular contributor to CounterPunch. He has written for the Journal of International Affairs, Commonweal, Bible Review, and International Economy, and New York Times op-eds, and currently publishes editorials in leading Latvian, Polish and Arabic business papers. His trade books are translated into Japanese, Chinese, Spanish and Russian, and his website has over a million hits per year.
He is Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri (Kansas City). Along with the New School (where he taught previously), UMKC is the main alternative to Chicago School anti-government economics, along with the Berlin School of Economics where Prof. Hudson lectures and publishes at in association with UMKC.
Prof. Hudson served as Chief Economic Advisor for Dennis Kucinich’s 2008 presidential campaign, and holds the same position in Mr. Kucinich’s Congressional campaign. He has been economic advisor to the U.S., Canadian, Mexican and Latvian governments, and to the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), and is president of the Institute for the Study of Long-term Economic Trends (ISLET).
In 1972 his Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (Holt Rinehart) was the first book to describe the global free ride for America after it went off gold in 1971, putting the world onto a paper Treasury-bill standard. Obliging foreign central banks to keep their monetary reserves in Treasury bonds forced them to finance U.S. military spending abroad, which was responsible for the U.S. balance-of-payments deficit at this time. The book’s 1979 sequel, Global Fracture (Harper & Row), forecast the division of the world into regional trade and currency blocs. The Fictitious Economy is the first to explain to general readers how a corrosive Bubble Economy is replacing industrial capitalism with debt-financed asset-price inflation – that is, by creating a Bubble Economy to increase balance-sheet net worth via debt.
Prof. Hudson’s April 2006 Harpers cover story on “The $4.7 trillion Pyramid: Why Social Security Won’t Be Enough to Save Wall Street” helped defeat the Bush administration’s attempt to privatize Social Security, by showing its aim of steering wage withholding into the stock market to reflate stock market prices – for insiders and speculators to sell to the pension funds. His May 2006 cover story on “The New Road to Serfdom: An illustrated guide to the coming real estate collapse” was the first major article forecasting in precise chart form the bursting of the real estate bubble. The November 2008 “How to Save Capitalism” issue of Harpers includes an article by Dr. Hudson on the inevitability of a large write-off of debts and the savings they back.
In 1984, Prof. Hudson joined Harvard’s archaeology faculty at the Peabody Museum. A decade later he organized an international group of Assyriologists and archaeologists to publish a series of colloquia analyzing the economic origins of civilization. This group has become the successor to Karl Polanyi’s anthropological and historical group a half-century ago. Four volumes co-edited by Hudson have appeared so far, dealing with privatization, urbanization and land use, the origins of money, accounting, debt and clean slates in the Ancient Near East. (A fifth volume, on the evolution of free labor, is in progress.) This new direction of research is now known as the New Economic Archaeology.
Key points: Prof. Hudson has evolved from a trade and financial economist to economic futurism. In 1972 he moved from teaching graduate economics at the New School in New York City to the Hudson Institute, where he worked with Herman Kahn on analyzing how the world economy was evolving and what this meant for geopolitical relations and technology.
Prof. Hudson continued his writing and consulting as a financial economist specializing in statistical analysis and charting of balance-of-payments statistics, income national statistics on debt and saving. He has become increasingly active as a political advisor, most recently to the presidential campaign of Representative Dennis Kucinich (Democrat from Ohio), and to foreign governments on how to resolve their debt problems.
Prof. Hudson also heads the International Scholars Conference on Ancient Near Eastern Economies (ISCANEE). This 15-year-old working group emerged out of his interest in the history of debt and how various societies throughout history had coped with their debt problem. He has organized and edited five colloquia on the historical origins of interest, money and prices. In 1984 he joined the archaeological faculty of Harvard University (the Peabody Museum) in Babylonian economic studies. His finding that the biblical Jubilee Year had 2000 years of background in Sumerian and Babylonian practice is accepted by assyriologists today, but in 1994 the idea of regular debt cancellations occurring for more than two thousand years was so controversial that led Harvard (and some private foundations) backed a project to publish a series of symposia on the origins of money and interest-bearing debt, contractual arrangements for commercial financing and agricultural land ownership, property relations and urbanization, the privatization of public enterprise and the emergence of labor for hire. The world’s leading assyriologists, Egyptologists, archaeologists, Linear B specialists and classicists each surveyed their particular period and region to trace the evolution of economic practice that evolved into modern capitalism.
Prof. Hudson is on the editorial board of Lapham’s Quarterly, and has published numerous cover articles for Harpers’ (America’s oldest magazine), and contributes regularly to Counterpunch and Global Research.
Prof. Hudson was one of the earliest critics of neoliberal policies alerting his audience to the coming real estate crisis in a cover story for Harpers magazine in May 2006. This article and its charts were based on a paper he presented two years earlier at a University of Missouri Post-Keynesian conference, on debt deflation. The paper that has now become a classic in showing how the concept of “saving” has been transformed from what it was in Keynes’ day (liquid income that consumers and businesses chose not to spend) to what it has become in today’s national-income statistics: paying down (“amortizing”) debts taken on in times past. This debt service is a matter of contractual rake-off of income to pay creditors, eating into consumption and living standards rather than being a voluntary choice not to consume. Likewise for the corporate sector, debt service is crowding out the use of income to invest in new capital formation, especially in projects with a relatively long-term payout such as research and development.
In recent years, Prof. Hudson was a major critic of Alan Greenspan (especially of the Federal Reserve Board’s faulty statistical analysis). His analysis of domestic financial relationships has been developed in conjunction with Randall Wray and other colleagues at UMKC’s Center for Full Employment and Price Stability, as well as with Henry Liu’s writings on dollar hegemony. Last year he served as Chief Economic Advisor to Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich in his presidential campaign.
Prof. Hudson has long advised foreign governments, as well as U.S. Government and United Nations agencies. He just completed a trip to Europe, where he has advised governments and labor unions on how to counter the global neoliberal policies that have loaded them down with debt without providing them with the means to pay. He taught in Latvia for two years, warning of the distortion of their tax system and the danger pf borrowing in foreign currency, growing out of work he did as advisor to the Canadian government in the 1970s. His textbook survey of the history of theories of international trade and development was the first to explain the monetarist Chicago School approach capital-transfer problem and the fallacy of International Monetary Fund and World Bank development policy.
Dr. Hudson has subsequently provided an analysis of credit cycle focusing on asset-price inflation rather than the consumer prices and wages on which neoclassical theory focuses exclusively.
In 2009 Prof. Hudson was nominated for the Project Censored award for his Dollar Glut article, published by Global Research. The award is granted by the University of California.
www.counterpunch.org/hudson02172009.html
Michael Hudson: America’s Own Kleptocracy.
www.counterpunch.org/hudson09202008.html
Michael Hudson: How the Scam Works
Mar 27, 2009 … Michael Hudson is a former Wall Street economist. A Distinguished Research Professor at University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC), …
www.counterpunch.org/hudson03272009.html
Michael Hudson: Iceland and Latvia
Aug 18, 2009 … Michael Hudson is Distinguished Prof. of Economics at UMKC. In 2006 he was Prof. of Economics and Director of Economic Research at the Riga …
www.counterpunch.org/hudson08182009.html
Michael Hudson: The Real AIG Conspiracy
Michael Hudson is a former Wall Street economist. A Distinguished Research Professor at University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC), he is the author of many …
www.counterpunch.org/hudson03182009.html
Michael Hudson: The Toll Booth Economy
May 20, 2009 … Michael Hudson is a former Wall Street economist. A Distinguished Research Professor at University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC), …
www.counterpunch.org/hudson05202009.html
Michael Hudson: Rescue for the Few, Debt Slavery for the Many
Oct 13, 2008 … The brilliant economist Michael Hudson lays out the stupidity of Paulson’s bailout plan and the lead role in Congress of Democrats in the …
www.counterpunch.org/hudson10132008.html
Michael Hudson: Financing the Empire
Mar 30, 2009 … Michael Hudson is a former Wall Street economist. A Distinguished Research Professor at University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC), …
www.counterpunch.org/hudson03302009.html
Michael Hudson: Learning About Financialization the Hard Way
Aug 28, 2009 … Michael Hudson is a former Wall Street economist. A Distinguished Research Professor at University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC), …
www.counterpunch.org/hudson08282009.html
Michael Hudson: The Obama Letdown
Michael Hudson is a former Wall Street economist. A Distinguished Research Professor at University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC), he is the author of many …
www.counterpunch.org/hudson11262008.html
Michael Hudson Distinguished Research Professor of Economics, UMKC; Chairman, Committee of Experts for Renew Task Force Latvia; president, Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), and Honorary Professor of Economics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), Wuhan, China. His website is michael-hudson.com.
“The use and abuse of mathematical economics,” real-world economics review, Issue no. 55, (December 2010), pp. 2-22, and “U.S. ‘quantitative easing’ is fracturing the global economy,” ibid., pp. 82-94.
