On finance, real estate and the powers of neoliberalism
America’s wars against Iran, Venezuela and Russia are designed to preserve dollar dominance by controlling oil exports, capturing their revenues and forcing them back into US financial markets. The result is accelerating the creation of a rival economic order.
Michael Hudson explains how the slave states’ defence of states’ rights reached far beyond slavery itself, shaping U.S. monetary and banking policy for more than a century. By opposing national banking, paper credit, federal reinvestment and industrial development, Southern slave interests helped impose a hard-money regime that constrained American growth until the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913.
Michael Hudson argues that America’s oil war reflects a deeper pathology in US foreign policy: the rejection of sovereignty, reciprocity and international law in favour of coercive control over oil, debt, finance and trade. He introduces the terms geopathology and econopathology to describe the imperial and economic doctrines driving today’s global fracture.
The 2026 World Financial Crisis Trump is threatening to escalate his war against Iran, and Iran is prepared to destroy the oil production and transport capacity of Arab OPEC countries that do not act to stop the U.S. attack. The result will be to deepen the world depression that already is underway. Yet the stock market has continued to rise, as have interest rates. The latter cannot stay up without crashing the real estate and stock markets. Yet the media and many investors view interest rates as rising so as to compensate investors for the risk of inflation. The reality is that higher interest rates will increase the economy’s inability to cope with the breakdown that already is in progress. How did the myth of interest rates rising in response to price inflation ...
Michael Hudson and Ian Proud discuss why modern wars are increasingly fought through economics rather than military force, and why sanctions against Iran may rebound on the US, Europe and the wider financial system. Hudson argues that oil shocks, debt fragility and military Keynesianism expose the weakness of US strategy, while pushing sanctioned nations towards self-sufficiency and accelerating the search for alternatives to dollar dominance.
Counterpunch May 1 2026 Guns and Butter Sixty years ago opposition to America’s war in Vietnam focused on the costs of diverting U.S. resources away from social spending to the military – what was called Guns and Butter. I was the junior member of the Columbia University triumvirate headed by Seymour Melman and Terence McCarthy. We lectured widely, wrote in magazines such as Ramparts and newspapers. The New York Tribune still existed as an alternative to The New York Times, and regularly published our critiques in its interviews and on its editorial pages. Those mid-1960s were the days! The antiwar movement had enough momentum to bring down Robert McNamara and Lyndon Johnson in 1968! Alas, that epoch seems long gone. There seems little hope that changing the party in power will change much. Neither ...
Cross-posted from the Democracy Collaborative. Postponing the World’s Financial Winter – For How Long? Iran’s MAD Standoff with the Rest of the World April 17,2026 Announcing that “A whole civilization will die tonight,” Donald Trump threatened on April 7, 2026 to destroy “every bridge in Iran” and “every power plant … burning, exploding, and never to be used again.” His intention to continue committing war crimes is driving the world toward a Financial Winter as devastating as the Great Depression. Iran’s April 8 response called his bluff, laying down the terms for ending the conflict and opening the Strait of Hormuz. Oil-importing countries will need to compel U.S. and Israeli compliance with these terms in order to avoid economic crisis. We are seeing the economic version of what the 1960s called Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). ...
A deep dive into how oil control, sanctions, and financial fragility are converging, as energy disruptions, debt structures, and geopolitical strategy push the global economy toward systemic rupture rather than recovery.
A breakdown of how energy chokepoints, currency shifts, and war strategy intersect, as oil trade routes, sanctions tactics, and reserve currency dynamics collide in a rapidly destabilising global system.
March 13, 2026 Robinson Erhardt You've been on the show and joined me a number of times now, but we've rarely spoken about the contemporary situation in the United States in our foreign policy. We tend to talk more about history, I'd say. So, I wanted to ask — just to begin — why it is that you're more interested in talking about the present today. Michael Hudson Well, I'd originally planned when you suggested talking about US foreign policy. I was going to go through my usual approach, which we've discussed, starting in the Bronze Age for, debt and debt financial policy and say, well, here's how American foreign policy has evolved. And here is why we don't have the world that we helped create in nineteen forty five. But I ...
