What good is a country’s creditworthiness if keeping it means shutting down its economy? In this conversation with Robinson Erhardt, Michael examines how an energy shock becomes a debt crisis. His challenge to China is just as pointed: a different world order would require its strongest creditor to accept losses when borrowers cannot pay.
When Protection Becomes Tribute
Washington wants South Korea and Japan to bankroll American industry while paying more for energy and American technology. It’s an expensive offer: finance your competitor, inflate your own costs, call it protection.Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff examine an empire that needs its allies’ money—and keeps giving them reasons to leave.
AI Technoimperialism — and Sanders’ endorsement of it
There is a v ery good article by Evgeny Morozov in today's FT, emphasizing how the U.S. progressive movemenet endorsing Trump's U.S. attempt to maintain its postindustrial prosperity by establishing monopoly choke points is reminiscent of how Britain's Labour Party sught to benefit its membership from the predatory takings of British imperialism in the late ...
China’s Unfinished Break with Property Speculation
China built its industrial strength by keeping credit under public control. But financing local government through land development helped create a property problem it now has to unwind. I join Lau Kin Chi to discuss how to protect working families through that transition, alongside the changing dollar system and Keynes’s unfinished challenge to creditor power.
Your Sunday Read
Adam Smith, Ricardo, Mill and Marx disagreed about plenty, but agreed on one thing: prices routinely exceed the cost of production, and that gap is economic rent. Michael Hudson traces how the concept anchored classical economics for a century, then vanished from the curriculum after the First World War. Patreon supporters bring him back to ...
The UN is blocked from effective leadership
My friend Amarynth at Sovereignista.com has posted the folloing information. Blocking Bachelet leaves only Grossi -- who turned over Iranian scientists names and labs as targets for Israeli assassins to kill afer his "inspections" -- as a candidate not recommended by tiny island nations at the behest/threat of financial support or non-withdrawal of such ...
Who Gets Paid When the System Breaks?
A gold bar in a vault and a currency bound to gold are two different things.Kathleen Tyson joins me to explain how gold-backed collateral could support trade outside the dollar system. We examine why that need not recreate the gold standard’s deflationary discipline, before debating what should happen to the debts countries already owe.Can cheaper ...
When the World Stops Paying Tribute
What does an empire expect to live on after losing its industrial advantage?In this discussion with Richard Wolff and Nima Alkhorshid, I examine the economic rent at stake in the struggle over oil. Paying for extraction while claiming the resource surplus leaves the producing country working through its natural wealth for someone else’s benefit.Richard traces ...
But Wait There’s More!
Scott Bessent calls it Operation Economic Outcast: an attempt to sever Iran’s financial connections and punish any country or bank that continues trading with it.But China has already built an alternative payment system beyond Washington’s control. Threatening countries with expulsion from the dollar system no longer guarantees obedience. It gives them a reason to leave.Richard ...
Everything Important Is an Externality
War, debt, artificial intelligence and climate breakdown are no longer separate crises. Steve Keen and I examine the permanent-war economy, the physical limits confronting Silicon Valley and the intellectual failure of a discipline that treats everything essential to life as an externality. Economics may now be better understood as a branch of fiction.
Escape from Creditor Rule
Paying for oil in another currency does not cancel the dollar debts already on a country’s books. In this discussion with Richard Wolff and Nima Alkhorshid, I explore why an alternative source of emergency credit may need to be accompanied by a moratorium on old debt payments. Otherwise, new lenders could find themselves financing the ...
The Architecture of Dependency
The dollar system was never a neutral arrangement. Radhika Desai and I examine the alternative Keynes proposed at Bretton Woods - and how its rejection allowed debt, capital flight and IMF conditionalities to become instruments of international control. Any viable replacement must balance trade, cancel unpayable debts and restore governments’ power to develop their own ...
How Washington Built the BRICS Alternative
The oil war was designed to preserve US control over global energy and finance. Instead, it is raising costs, weakening indebted Western economies and accelerating the construction of a payment system beyond Washington’s reach.BRICS does not need a common currency. China, Russia and Iran are building a government-level clearing system that can settle trade without ...
The End of the Creditor’s World
An oil shock becomes a debt crisis, and a debt crisis becomes a struggle over who controls the future.In this new Vladivostok address, I explain why countries across Asia and the Global South may soon have to choose between servicing dollar debts and keeping their people fed, housed and working.The real question is whether the ...
Sanctions Against the Dollar
Washington’s economic D-Day against Iran may become an economic D-Day for the dollar.A reserve currency cannot remain universal when access to it is conditional on political obedience. Every new secondary sanction gives governments, banks and trading companies another reason to move their payments and reserves beyond US reach.This discussion goes beyond de-dollarization. Radhika Desai and ...
Last night’s Patreon meeting — and German gold
It was a great discussion last evening. I woke up this morning and was still thinking about the Dutch demand to get their gold back ("if you don't physically have it, you don't really own it."). And indeed, my memory was right about those German reporters who kept calling me wanting to know if ...
Most Popular Interview
Over 261K views, one of the more popular interviews I have done for awhile. The West calls itself democratic while creditors increasingly write its economic rules. Its debts cannot be paid without reducing consumption, investment, and living standards, yet the financial system blocks any serious write-down. In this conversation with Glenn Diesen, I trace that ...
The World Has No Plan B
Richard Wolff and I examine Washington’s claim that it has deliberately shifted from military attacks on Iran to economic pressure. The military campaign failed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or force Iran to surrender, but that defeat is now being presented as a strategic pivot towards bankrupting the Iranian economy.The problem is that Iran ...
