An Interview with Dr. Michael Hudson October 21, 2010 Interviewer: iTulip’s Eric Janszen (E): Welcome Michael Hudson to iTulip again. Thanks for joining us. Hudson (H): Thank you, Eric. E: So we’ve had discussions in the past about China’s response to America’s escalation of the currency wars. Yesterday they made a bold move, raising their interest rates and also imposing an export embargo on an important industrial commodity, rare earth metals. H: Let’s talk about the latter first. I think China finally caught on to the fact that it was pricing its rare earth minerals at the uneconomic low-cost margin of extraction, not taking into account the environmental clean up costs or the replacement costs for these basically irreplaceable rare metals. They pointed out that these exports rightly should be priced at the high-cost margin, ...
Why the IMF Meetings Failed
And the Coming Capital Controls “Coming events cast their shadows forward.” – Goethe What is to stop U.S. banks and their customers from creating $1 trillion, $10 trillion or even $50 trillion on their computer keyboards to buy up all the bonds and stocks in the world, along with all the land and other assets for sale, in the hope of making capital gains and pocketing the arbitrage spreads by debt leveraging at less than 1% interest cost? This is the game that is being played today. The outflow of dollar credit into foreign markets in pursuit of this financial strategy has bid up asset prices and foreign currencies, enabling speculators to pay off their U.S. positions in cheaper dollars, keeping the currency shift as well as the arbitrage interest-rate margin for ...
Latvia’s Neoliberal Madness
World Economic Crisis: Latvia’s Neoliberal Madness You Think Greece Has Problems? Latvia's Road to Serfdom By Prof. Michael Hudson and and Prof. Jeff Sommers While most of the world’s press focuses on Greece (and also Spain, Ireland and Portugal) as the most troubled euro-areas, the much more severe, more devastating and downright deadly crisis in the post-Soviet economies scheduled to join the Eurozone somehow has escaped widespread notice. No doubt that is because their experience is an indictment of the destructive horror of neoliberalism – and of Europe’s policy of treating these countries not as promised, not as helping them develop along Western European lines, but as areas to be colonized as export markets and bank markets, stripped of their economic surpluses, their skilled labor and indeed, working-age labor generally, their real estate and ...
Duck, Duck, Goose: Financing the War, Financing the World
By STANDARD SHAEFER (Interview with Michael Hudson, author of Super Imperialism, Pluto Press, 2003) Now that even the LA Times has begun to show a modicum of willingness to discuss US foreign policy in terms of a potential imperialism, it has become clear that those on the right have avoided this debate so far only by sticking to the strictest, most out-dated notion of empire. The left, however, for too long has been satisfied with talking about cultural imperialism and corporate exploitation, both of which are serious problems. Recently, however, the left has often clumsily explained the economic motives for the war in terms of big oil, sheer greed and more ephemerally as a desire to weaken the euro. This is all likely, but it also reveals the degree to which the ...
