Inflation usually helps the economy at large, but not the 1% if wages rise. So the 1% says that it is terrible.
MICHAEL HUDSONMost people think of the economy as producing goods and services and paying labor to buy what it produces.
More Michael Hudson Quotes
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This is not really currency that circulates. It’s like the old joke about expensive vintage wine. Wine prices will go up and once in a while somebody will buy a 50-year-old bottle of wine and say, “Wait a minute. This has gone bad.” The answer is, “Well, that wine isn’t for drinking; that’s for trading.”
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I think I’m just going to move out and buy a cheaper house.” So it’s very risky when you have only a 3% or 3.5% equity for the loan. The bank really isn’t left with much cushion as collateral.
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The one sure mark of a con, though, is the promise of free money.
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Today, people are having to spend so much of their money, to acquire a house and to get an education that they don’t have enough to spend on goods and services, except by running into yet more debt on their credit cards and other borrowings.
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You’re having government spending on the economy being cut almost everywhere. That means that the only source of spending for growth has to come from borrowing from the banking system.
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If bankers can push the loans and make more profits for the bank, they get paid higher bonuses. They often also get stock options.
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We’re still in the collapse that began after 2008. There’s not a new collapse, there hasn’t been a recovery.
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you’ll load the company you take over with debt. But you don’t have to pay taxes on the profits that you pay out in this way. You can deduct the interest from your tax liability.
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These $100 bills aren’t meant to circulate. They’re not to spend on goods and services. They’re a store of value. They’re a form of saving.
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Once the speculative demand ended, all of a sudden the added production facilities that had been brought into production by the high prices went out of production again, and there was a glut.
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Textbooks don’t teach people how to avoid paying any income tax. But that’s what an army of tax lawyers and corporate tax accountants do.
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The United States and Europe are in a state of debt deflation, where people and businesses have to pay banks instead of spending their income on goods and services. So markets shrink, sales and profits fall, and the stock market turns down.
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It will make his fellow developers rich, and it will make the banks that finance this infrastructure rich, but the people are going to have to pay for it in a much higher cost for transportation.
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Most people think of the economy as producing goods and services and paying labor to buy what it produces.
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The other dynamic keeping the stock market up – both for technology stocks and others – is that companies are using a lot of their income for stock buybacks and to pay out higher dividends, not make new investment,.
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Seventy-eight percent of millennials are worried about not having enough good paying job opportunity to pay off their student loans. Seventy-four percent can’t pay the health care if they get sick.
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To the deficit commission, a depression is the solution to the problem, not a problem.
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Deflation is a leakage from this circular flow, to pay banks and the real estate, called the FIRE sector – finance, insurance and real estate. These transfer payments leave less and less of the paycheck to be spent on goods and services, so markets shrink.
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I think the less fracking there is, the better it is for the economy and society.
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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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I don’t think that governments should permit speculation in raw materials, because they’re what the economy basically needs.
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One of the big problems in America’s economic polarization and shrinkage is that pensions can’t be paid. So there are going to be defaults on pensions here, just like Europeans are insisting in rolling back pensions. You can look at Greece and Argentina as the future of America.
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If you look at payments to labor as a proportion of national income or gross domestic product, you find profits going way up, investment and savings going up.
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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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More and more money is being extracted from of the production and consumption economy to pay the FIRE sector. That’s what causes debt deflation and shrinks markets. If you pay the banks, you have less to spend on goods and services.
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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.
MICHAEL HUDSON