An excerpt from a paper published for the conference Paradigm Lost: Rethinking Economics and Politics. I am speaking to this paper in Berlin this week. The full paper can be downloaded from their website (PDF). A common denominator runs throughout recorded history: a rising proportion of debts cannot be paid. Adam Smith remarked that no government ever had repaid its debt, and today the same can be said of the overall volume of private-sector debt. One way or another, there will be defaults – unless debts are paid in an illusory fashion, simply by adding the interest charges onto the debt balance until the sums finally grow to so fictitious a magnitude that the illusion of viability has to ...
Film: Real Estate 4 Ransom
Michael Hudson features in this 40 min documentary on the role property speculation and public finance had on this Great Recession. What role does economics itself have to blame for policy failure? More details Real Estate 4 Ransom from Real Estate 4 Ransom on Vimeo.
Padding Banksters Pockets
Hudson giving an overview of current affairs with a fired up Lauren Lyster fresh back from Davos.
Russian Ripoff
President Putin, now Prime Minister Putin, has said that the demographic effect of just privatizing Russian real estate, and industry and following western advice has lost maybe 30 million Russians from what the normal demographic growth would be to 2050. So the effect of neo-liberal financial policy has been more devastating to Russia than WW2.
The State and Local Budget Crisis
The cost of the 2011 cutbacks in federal spending will fall most directly on consumers and retirees by scaling back Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and social spending programs. The population also will suffer indirectly, by lower federal revenue sharing with U.S. states and cities.
Why America Had A 90% Income Tax
Michael is interviewed on the Real News Network. History teaches...
From WikiLeaks to 21st Century Potato Famines
Professor Hudson appeared on the Renegade Economists radio show in Melbourne, Australia last Wednesday. Listen
Adam Smith critiques the Deficit Reduction Commission
What would Adam Smith have said about the Bowles-Simpson economic report last week? What a pity the great free marketer was not around to serve on the Deficit Reduction Commission. He not only would have rolled over in his grave, he would have risen up wielding an ax to the fiscal proposals that are diametrically opposite to the fiscal principles that he and his original free market contemporaries urged. Writing in the wake of the French Physiocrats with their Impôt Unique to collect the revenues that France’s landed aristocracy drained from the countryside and towns, Smith endorsed the idea that the least burdensome tax was one that fell on land rent: A more equal land-tax, a more equal tax upon the rent of houses, and such alterations in the present system of customs ...
Hudson – Today's Financial Times Article on the Euro Debt Bomb
This is an edited version of The Coming European Debt Wars. Greece is just the first in a series of European debt bombs about to go off. Mortgage debts in the post-communist economies and Iceland are more explosive. Although most of these countries are not in the eurozone, their debts are largely denominated in euros. Some 87 per cent of Latvia's debts are in euros or other foreign currencies, and are owed mainly to Swedish banks, while Hungary and Romania owe euro-debts mainly to Austrian banks. Read more at the Financial Times
Latvia’s Cruel Neoliberal Experiment
Latvia is being devastated by two global wars. On the geopolitical front is the Cold War’s coup de grâce. Neoliberals have managed to de-industrialize Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Union, persuading parliaments to dismantle government support for economic renewal. The “Washington Consensus” has backed a policy of giving away public enterprises and land to a newly minted oligarchy of insiders, and helped them sell shares to Western investors. The ensuing economic wreckage has helped avert future military rivalry to U.S. hegemony. Western investors are waging their own social war of finance and property against labor. Initiated by the Chicago Boys in Chile in 1973, sponsored in Britain by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives after 1979 and by Ronald Reagan’s Republicans in the United States after 1980, this class war was capped ...
