On finance, real estate and the powers of neoliberalism
Economist Michael Hudson warns that the U.S. has morphed into a “free lunch economy,” where wealth flows not from production but from unearned rents and financial gains. Wall Street landlords like Blackstone buy up homes, driving rents higher while families face stagnant wages and rising debt. What was once industrial capitalism has become finance capitalism, hollowing out the economy and enriching a rentier elite. The result is growing inequality at home and financial colonialism abroad.
An excerpt from Michael’s as yet unreleased book tracking the role of debt and public finance from medieval times to the present.
Trump’s economic agenda is no longer about deregulation—it’s about dismantling the state itself. In this sharp commentary, economist Michael Hudson unpacks how Trump’s vision draws from Thatcherite austerity and Russia’s kleptocratic privatization of the 1990s. With Elon Musk and billionaire donors at his side, the plan is to turn public goods—parks, post offices, health care—into profit machines for monopolists. GDP would be redefined to ignore the shrinking public sector, while natural monopolies like water and power are handed to financiers. Hudson warns: this is neoliberalism on steroids, the final enclosure of the commons, and the creation of a corporate state where citizenship becomes subservient to shareholder returns. If history is any guide, the great fortunes of the future will be built not through innovation—but through privatizing what we already own.
Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff unpack how today’s BRICS nations face the same roadblocks that 19th-century industrial Europe did—landlords, monopolies, and bankers extracting unearned income. Reviving classical economics and the labor theory of value, they argue, is key to escaping neocolonial debt traps and unleashing industrial potential. From rentier capitalism to the myth of free markets, this discussion repositions Marxism not as radical but as the logical evolution of classical economics—and a toolkit for global economic emancipation.
Prof Michael Hudson discusses with his Patreon supporters the issues of the day. We traverse through rentier commissions, Ponzi schemes, the isolation of Israel and America,
Michael Hudson discusses the evolving disconnect between modern economics and practical economic realities, using the example of American capitalism and its global influence. He critiques the shift towards finance capitalism and deregulation, comparing it to Thatcher-era England’s libertarian model, which minimized state intervention in the economy. This trajectory, according to Hudson, has led to a situation where government influence is overridden by corporate donors and financial interests, sidelining public welfare.
Hudson explains his approach to economics, likening it to taking apart and reassembling an engine; it’s not just surface-level phenomena but understanding fundamental structures like balance of payments and GDP. He emphasizes how mainstream economics often ignores these practical frameworks, contributing to a distorted economic vision and misguided policy decisions.
Settle in for this interview. Michael Hudson, Shepheard Walwyn recording May 23, 2022 Part one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDo7HykYN9k Part two here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-xWgLertkg Jonathan Brown Michael, welcome to the podcast. Michael Hudson It's good to be here. I'm looking forward to it. Jonathan Brown Michael, I think you have one the most extraordinary upbringings and journeys into economics. And I just wanted to give our listeners just some sense of how you got from being the godson of Leon Trotsky all the way to what I consider to be probably the most important economist in the world today. Michael Hudson 00:23 There’s no direct causality there that could have been anticipated. I never studied economics in college, because I went to school at the University of Chicago. We know that there were some students at the university who were at that business school. ...
Rentier income is now treated as just another profit opportunity to gain from investing tangible or financial capital. Land and monopolistic rent-seeking activities are lumped together as “capital,” stripping away the classical distinction between economic rent and normal profit.
The Economics of the Future Wagner's Music of the Future - his "total art work" - sought to integrate music and drama (along with art, dance and poetry). In a similarly broad way, the economics of the future will integrate finance and production, thereby restoring the lost link (as drama had been lost to most operatic music in Wagner's day). Therefore, the economics of the future will pick up the thread where it was broken off in the 1870s. While many social sciences extended themselves to include physical science, technology and history, academic economics underwent its Great Narrowing. In an epoch of unparalleled social transformations, economics became marginalist rather than dealing with structural change. As politics was becoming radical, marginalism and its mathematics espoused the status quo implicitly, by not discussing the ...
