A debt Jubilee for America?

by Paul Craig Roberts As school children my friends and I were very interested in archaeology and ancient civilizations. We read all the available books. My best friend intended to become an archaeologist and to explore ancient ruins about which we imagined more than we actually knew. As far as I can discern these days no one in the general population has any thoughts of Sumer, Babylonia, Assyria, Ur. For the American young the 1940s, not 2,500 BC, is the ancient past. A time so long ago that it predates the Old Testament by 2,000 years is probably imagined as a brutal and politically incorrect time of inhumanity and human sacrifice. In short, a script for a horror fantasy movie or a video game. In actual fact, these civilizations were ...

Are debts sins?

For millennia we have been told that Jesus Christ died for our sins. So much focus on sin hasn’t left much room for theologians to talk about Jesus’ thoughts on economic justice. But what if, as a social reformer, Jesus was killed because he talked about reforming the economics of his day? Writing-off debt has been a cornerstone of economic reform for millennia, so could it have been debt that Jesus wanted to do away with? Ross Ashcroft travels to New York to meet economist Michael Hudson, whose latest book explains why ancient debt principles have never been more relevant than today. LIKE Renegade Inc. on Facebook here FOLLOW Renegade Inc. at @Renegade_Inc PODCAST https://soundcloud.com/rttv/sets/renegade-inc  

Financial Time’s Best Books of 2018

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Included in Martin Wolf's (FT) favourite books of 2018: . . . and Forgive Them Their Debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption From Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year, by Michael Hudson, ISLET-Verlag, RRP $29.95 The American economist Hudson has written a fascinating book on the historical antecedents of the Mosaic debt jubilee. The work of Assyriologists has shown that by the third millennium BC, the rulers of the ancient Near East understood the necessity of repeated debt forgiveness. The alternative was, he writes, “economic polarisation, bondage and collapse”. The relevance of this history to the world of today seems clear: debt is necessary; too much debt is disastrous.

EVERYTHING YOU THOUGHT YOU KNEW ABOUT WESTERN CIVILIZATION IS WRONG

A Review of Michael Hudson’s new book .... and Forgive Them Their Debts As published on Naked Capitalism by John Siman To say that Michael Hudson’s new book And Forgive Them Their Debts: Lending, Foreclosure, and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year (ISLET 2018) is profound is an understatement on the order of saying that the Mariana Trench is deep. To grasp his central argument is so alien to our modern way of thinking about civilization and barbarism that Hudson quite matter-of-factly agreed with me that the book is, to the extent that it will be understood, “earth-shattering” in both intent and effect. Over the past three decades, gleaned (under the auspices of Harvard’s Peabody Museum) and then synthesized the scholarship of American and British and French and German and Soviet ...

…and forgive them their debts

I'm very excited to announce that my new book, ...and forgive them their debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption — From Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year (ISLET-Verlag Dresden), is available now. Thank you. You can learn more about the book below. Michael Copy for book description and advance praise: ...and forgive them their debts Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption From Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year In ...and forgive them their debts, renowned professor of economics, Michael Hudson – and one of the few who could see the 2008 financial crisis coming – takes us on an epic journey through the economies of ancient civilizations. For the past 40 years in conjunction with the Harvard Peabody Museum, he and his colleagues have documented the archeological record and history of debt, and how societies have ...