This article is based on Chapter 1 of Cold War 2.0. The Geopolitical Economics of Finance Capitalism vs. Industrial Capitalism (Dresden, ISLET: in press; Chinese translation 2021). © 2020. All rights reserved. Marx and many of his less radical contemporary reformers saw the historical role of industrial capitalism as being to clear away the legacy of feudalism – the landlords, bankers and monopolists extracting economic rent without producing real value. But that reform movement failed. Today, the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector has regained control of government, creating neo-rentier economies. The aim of this post-industrial finance capitalism is the oppositeof that of industrial capitalism as known to 19th-century economists: It seeks wealth primarily through the extraction of economic rent, not industrial capital formation. Tax favoritism for real estate, ...

Remarks given at the 1st ASECU Teleconference ‘Systematic Crises Triggered the Current Pandemic & Progressive Way-Outs, May 8, 2020. Well, I think you’re quite right in organizing the conference to point out that today’s pandemic crisis hastens and intensifies the internal contradictions that have been building up. Many of these contradictions are going to be blamed simply on the virus. But there is an underlying problem that the virus is exposing and turning into a crisis. That underlying problem is the debts that have been building up for the last few decades. We are in a situation much like a war. There are winners and there are losers in a war. In this case the winner is the aggressor – the financial sector. Its demands for payment have set the ...

Even before the Covid-19 crisis had slashed stock prices nearly in half since it erupted in January, financial markets were in an inherently unstable condition. Years of quantitative easing had loaded so much money into stock and bond prices that stock price/earnings multiples and bond prices were far too high by any normal and reasonable historical standards. Risk premiums have disappeared, with only a few basis points separating U.S. Treasury bills and corporate bonds. The Fed’s Quantitative Easing since 2008 plus large companies using their earnings for stock buybacks drove the prices of financial assets into a realm of unreality. The result was that markets already were teetering on the brink of fragility. Any rise of normal interest to more normal conditions, or any external shock, was bound to crash the ...

An interview with acTVism Munich. Johnson Wang   Michael Hudson on the History of Debt Cancellation, Austerity in Europe, January 2020 Rees Jeannotte Hello and welcome. I'm Rees Jeannotte, and you are watching Know Your Stuff. Joining me today is economist and anthropologist Michael Hudson. He is a professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and an author of many books, including Killing the Host, J for Junk Economics, and his most recent “...and forgive them their debts”. Today, we'll be talking with him about his latest book ...and forgive them their debts, the eurozone crisis and the problem of ever-increasing rental and home ownership costs around the world. Professor Michael Hudson, thank you for joining us. Michael Hudson It’s good to be here. Rees Jeannotte How did ...