Interview of Michael Hudson by Andrei The Saker, August 2022 Russian transcript Transcript Key: ATS = Andrei The Saker; MH = Michael Hudson ATS Well first of all, Michael, a huge, huge thank you for agreeing to this conversation. It’s a big pleasure for me to have you here, it's a big honour too, and I really look forward to getting your insight as to what's happening, 'cause there's a lot happening right now. The first thing I want to ask you about is a current event then we can go into deeper things. What do you make of Pelosi landing in Taiwan and how do you see … what is this all about, what's happening here? MH Well I think in what you just wrote today you made it all clear. There's really no practical effect ...

As in a Greek tragedy whose protagonist brings about precisely the fate that he has sought to avoid, the US/NATO confrontation with Russia in Ukraine is achieving just the opposite of America’s aim of preventing China, Russia and their allies from acting independently of U.S. control over their trade and investment policy. Naming China as America’s main long-term adversary, the Biden Administration’s plan was to split Russia away from China and then cripple China’s own military and economic viability. But the effect of American diplomacy has been to drive Russia and China together, joining with Iran, India and other allies. For the first time since the Bandung Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in 1955, a critical mass is able to be mutually self-sufficient to start the process of achieving independence from ...

To Wall Street and its backers, the solution to any price inflation is to reduce wages and public social spending. The orthodox way to do this is to push the economy into recession in order to reduce hiring. Rising unemployment will oblige labor to compete for jobs that pay less and less as the economy slows. This class-war doctrine is the prime directive of neoliberal economics. It is the tunnel vision of corporate managers and the One Percent. The Federal Reserve and IMF are its most prestigious lobbyists. Along with Janet Yellen at the Treasury, public discussion of today’s inflation is framed in a way that avoids blaming the 8.2 percent rise in consumer prices on the Biden Administration’s New Cold War sanctions on Russian oil, gas and agriculture, or on ...

It is now clear that today’s escalation of the New Cold War was planned over a year ago. America’s plan to block Nord Stream 2 was really part of its strategy to block Western Europe (“NATO”) from seeking prosperity by mutual trade and investment with China and Russia. As President Biden and U.S. national-security reports announced, China was seen as the major enemy. This despite China’s helpful role in enabling corporate America to drive down labor’s wage rates by de-industrializing the U.S. economy in favor of Chinese industrialization, China’s growth was recognized as posing the Ultimate Terror: prosperity through socialism. Socialist industrialization always has been perceived to be the great enemy of the rentier economy that has taken over most nations in the century since World War I ended, and especially ...

The MIC, OGAM and FIRE Sectors Conquer NATO My old boss Herman Kahn, with whom I worked at the Hudson Institute in the 1970s, had a set speech that he would give at public meetings. He said that back in high school in Los Angeles, his teachers would say what most liberals were saying in the 1940s and 50s: “Wars never solved anything.” It was as if they never changed anything – and therefore shouldn’t be fought. Herman disagreed, and made lists of all sorts of things that wars had solved in world history, or at least changed. He was right, and of course that is the aim of both sides in today’s New Cold War confrontation in Ukraine. The question to ask is what today’s New Cold War is trying to change ...

Cross-posted from The Saker, who writes: Intro: I need to begin with a MAJOR caveat and tell you how/why this “interview” happened. I did not plan to interview Michael Hudson. I was listening to a well known Russian economist, Mikhail Khazin, and I was fascinated by what he was saying. I also understood only some of the points he was making. To put it mildly, I am not an economist, and while listening to Khazin did did not take any notes. What I did do is email Michael and ask him a few question by email, just to clarify my own thoughts and marginally better my (rather dismal) “understanding” of economic and their role in the current standoff. With this typical kindness and generosity, Michael gave me some very interesting answers, ...

Economist Michael Hudson explains inflation crisis and Fed's secretive $4.5 trillion bank bailout. Economist Michael Hudson discusses the global inflation crisis and how the US Federal Reserve quietly (and apparently illegally) bailed out big banks in 2019 with $4.5 trillion of emergency repo loans. TRANSCRIPT BENJAMIN NORTON: Hey, everyone. This is Ben Norton, and I'm joined by a friend of the show, one of our favorite guests, Michael Hudson, the economist. His reputation precedes him; many of you probably know him. You can go to michael-hudson.com and check out his excellent articles and his books. We had him on a few months ago to talk about the new, third edition of his book “Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire.” And today we're going to talk about the inflation crisis around the world. In ...