Economists often define their discipline as “the allocation of scarce resources among competing ends.” But when resources or money really become scarce, economists call it a crisis and say that it’s a question for politicians, not their own department.
MICHAEL HUDSONIf you want to see where Trump is moving, look at what the United States neoliberals advised Russia to do after 1991, when they promised to create an ideal economy.
More Michael Hudson Quotes
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Somehow most people believed they could get rich by going into debt to borrow assets that were going to rise in price. But you can’t get rich, ultimately, by going into debt. In the end the creditors always win.
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I don’t think that governments should permit speculation in raw materials, because they’re what the economy basically needs.
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People think of a parasite as simply taking money, taking blood out of a host or taking money out of the economy. But in nature it’s much more complicated.
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The reason is that every recovery since 1945 has begun with a higher, and higher level of debt. The debt is so high now, that since 2008 we’ve been in what I call, debt deflation.
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Inflation usually helps the economy at large, but not the 1% if wages rise. So the 1% says that it is terrible.
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Since 2008 you’ve had the largest bond market rally in history, as the Federal Reserve flooded the economy with quantitative easing to drive down interest rates.
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Money is not a factor of production. But in order to have access to credit, in order to get money, in order to get an education, you have to pay the banks.
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If you have to pay about forty to forty-three percent of your income for housing, you also have to pay fifteen percent of your paycheck for the FICA for Social Security wage withholding.
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Then, all of a sudden, the Fed can raise interest rates, let the stock market prices collapse and the people will lose even more in the stock market than they would have by the negative interest rates in the bank. So it’s a pro-Wall Street financial engineering gimmick.
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Most of these charges that people pay are economically unnecessary. There’s no real cost behind them. There’s no real value behind them. So, they’re what the classical economist called empty pricing. Prices with no real cost value.
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Mathematically, debts grow exponentially at compound interest. Banks recycle the interest into new loans, so debts grow exponentially, faster than the economy can afford to pay.
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The price decline is a result of having to pay debts. That drains income from the circular flow between production and consumption – that is, between what people are paid when they go to work, and the things that they buy.
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In fact, there’s no way that banks can be paid everything that they’re owed.
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You have to abolish pension plans. You have to abolish social spending. You have to raise taxes.
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While escalating war in Afghanistan and maintaining over 850 military bases around the world, the administration has run up the national debt that Smith decried.
MICHAEL HUDSON







