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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.”

Michael Hudson

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.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Debt Deflation Higher Reason
When I say the economy is shrinking, it’s the economy of the 99%, the people who have to work for a living and depend on earning money for what they can spend.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Gone People Shrinking
This means that they’ve gone down especially for Blacks and Hispanics and other blue-collar workers. Their net worth has actually turned negative, and they don’t have enough money to get by.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Blue Collar Enough Mean Money Negative
The bankers are the people running these banks. They’re the chief officers, and they push the loans because they don’t care if they go bad. For one thing, they may package these bad loans and sell them off to gullible institutional investors.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Banker Loan Package Running Think
You could say that the vote to withdraw from Europe is, it’s really a vote of the British middle class, the working class, to withdraw from the U.S. neoliberalism that has been running Europe for the last ten years.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Middle Class Running Vote
Junk economics denies the role of debt and denies the fact that the economic system we have now is dysfunctional.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Economic Fact Junk System
If 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.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Country Moving People United States
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.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Income Investment Looks National Savings
To the deficit commission, a depression is the solution to the problem, not a problem.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Deficit Problem Solution
Inflation usually helps the economy at large, but not the 1% if wages rise. So the 1% says that it is terrible.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Economy Helping Wages
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.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Demand Ended Glut Once Production
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.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Country Pension People Rolling
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,.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Engineering Government Technology
Nobody prefers to earn income any more, because that’s taxable. Rich people prefer to make capital gains.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Gains Income People
Britain is having a referendum as to whether to withdraw from the European Union, and it looks more and more like it may do so. So the world’s politics are in turmoil.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Look More Union Withdrawn World
Every government, from the Obama administration right through to Angela Merkel, the Eurozone and the IMF, promise to save the banks, not the economy.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Administration Government Promise

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