Trump's claim that China is paying for the tariffs is completely false and basically serves to redirect income from his poor supporters to his wealthy supporters. Not only that, the policy will have the consequence of further isolating the United States, says Michael Hudson. unsplash-logoPang Yuhao

Control of oil has long been a key aim of U.S. foreign policy. The Paris climate agreements and any other Green programs to reduce the pace of global warming are viewed as threatening the aim of dominating world energy markets by keeping economies dependent on oil under U.S. control. Also blocking U.S. willingness to help stem global warming is the oil industry’s economic and hence political power. Its product is not only energy but also global warming, along with plastic pollution. This fatal combination of the national security state’s mentality and oil industry lobbying threatens to destroy the planet’s climate. The prospect of raising temperatures and sea levels along the coasts while inland regions suffer drought is viewed simply as collateral damage to the geopolitics of oil. The State Department is ...

Trump’s New Tariffs on China Help Pay for his Corporate Tax Cut, TRNN, August 2, 2019, Trump's claim that China is paying for the tariffs is completely false and basically serves to redirect income from his poor supporters to his wealthy supporters. Not only that, the policy will have the consequence of further isolating the United States, says Michael Hudson GREG WILPERT: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Greg Wilpert in Baltimore. President Trump announced on Thursday via Twitter that trade negotiations with China have stalled and that he will now impose a 10% tariff on $300 billion worth of goods imported from China. At a rally later in the day on Thursday, Trump said the following. PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I just announced another 10% tariff on $300 billion worth of ...

Debts that can’t be paid, won’t be. That point inevitably arrives on the liabilities side of the economy’s balance sheet. But what of the asset side? One person’s debt is a creditor’s claim for payment. This is defined as “savings,” even though banks simply create credit endogenously on their own computers without needing any prior savings. When debts can’t be paid and debtors default, what happens to these creditors? As President Obama showed, banks and bondholders can be bailed out by new Federal Reserve money creation. That is what the $4.6 trillion in Quantitative Easing since 2008 was all about. The Fed has spent the last few years supporting stock market prices (and holding down gold prices) by manipulating the forward option markets. But this artificial life support to keep the debt overhead ...

"Is inflation dead?" asks the Bloomberg/BusinessWeek magazine cover. DOUBLE DOWN's Max Keiser & Stacy Herbert talk to Dr Michael Hudson, an economist and author, who laughs out loud at the notion. Inflation in asset prices has soared as witnessed in Berlin recently where tens of thousands took to the street to protest rising rents. The rise in inflation has been reflected in the rise in debt that is where it is all masked. Hudson notes that student debt, most of it unpayable, is now at over $1.5 trillion. They also discuss policies like Medicare4All now taking off amongst the younger generations saddled with all these debts. Healthcare costs also burden US employers in a way none of their competitors around the world have to deal with. So is inflation dead? ...

I appeared at The People's Forum on this highly recommended panel. Join Dr. Michael Hudson, New Testament Scholar, Dr. Aliou Niang and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, Biblical Scholar and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, for a discussion on the history of debt and what it means for our context today. Moderated by Shailly Gupta Barnes and the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice.

An interview with Dr Simon Radford for the Church Times. IN HIS essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”, published in 1930, John Maynard Keynes wrote of his hope that, in the future, people would need pay no attention to the “dismal science” of his field. The study of economics would reach such maturity that ordinary people would live in luxury, able to contemplate the more important things in life, “free . . . to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue — that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable”. It is easy to think that the great recession of 2008 served as a harsh refutation of this Utopian prediction. The wave ...