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1. black
2. grey
3. blue
4. red
5. brown
6. white

You get a constituency; you make them believe your promises, and then you turn them over to your financial campaign backers. That’s what politics has become and that’s as much an art of deception as economics is.

Michael Hudson

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More Michael Hudson Quotes

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  Junk economics denies the role of debt and denies the fact that the economic system we have now is dysfunctional.

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• 

  What’s bad for the frackers usually is good for the rest of the world.

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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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• 

  If the economy is growing, people want to employ more workers. If you hire more labor, wages go up.

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• 

  Europe is acting in a very self-destructive manner, but is doing so because it’s trying to be loyal to the United States.

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• 

  Every government, from the Obama administration right through to Angela Merkel, the Eurozone and the IMF, promise to save the banks, not the economy.

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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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• 

  Russia was under the impression that the neoliberal advisors were going to make Russia as rich as the United States. What they really did was create a kleptocracy that was virtually tax-free.

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• 

  You have to pay medical care, you have to pay the banks for your credit card debt, student loans. Then you only have about twenty-five or thirty-five percent, maybe one-third of your salary to buy goods and services. That’s all.

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• 

  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.

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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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• 

  Paying debt service to banks leaves less income to buy goods and services.

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• 

  To save the banks, you would have to turn the entire Eurozone into Greece.

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• 

  New investment and employment fall off, and the economy is falls into a downward spiral.

  MICHAEL HUDSON
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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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• 

  So we are in for years of debt deflation. That means that people have to pay so much debt service for mortgages, credit cards, student loans, bank loans and other obligations that they have less to spend on goods and services. So markets shrink.

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• 

  You have to have at least fifty percent of the European population emigrate, either to Russia or China. You would have to have mass starvation. Very simple. That’s the price that the Eurozone thinks is well worth paying.

  MICHAEL HUDSON
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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.

  MICHAEL HUDSON
  CompanyLiabilityOverPayProfitTax
• 

  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
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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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• 

  It’s amazing that Europe says, “What are we going to do with these refugees?” It’s as if it doesn’t realize that being part of NATO and bombing these countries forces them to choose to live by fleeing, or to stay and get bombed.

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• 

  In fact, there’s no way that banks can be paid everything that they’re owed.

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• 

  The seeming irony is that it’s so bad that it enables the Democratic Party to think, “A-ha, all we have to do is be the lesser evil.

  MICHAEL HUDSON
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• 

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

  MICHAEL HUDSON
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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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• 

  The one sure mark of a con, though, is the promise of free money.

  MICHAEL HUDSON
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• 

  The companies aren’t hiring, because consumers don’t have enough money to buy the goods and services.

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