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 HUDSONYou 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 HUDSONWhat do the 5%, or the 1% actually use their money for? They lend it back to the economy at large, they load it down with debt. They make their money by lending to the bottom 95%, or the bottom 99%.
MICHAEL HUDSONTo save the banks, you would have to turn the entire Eurozone into Greece.
MICHAEL HUDSONMost 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 HUDSONYou 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.
MICHAEL HUDSONMathematically, 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.
MICHAEL HUDSONMr. Trump wants to turn the U.S. economy into the kind of real estate development that has made him so rich in New York.
MICHAEL HUDSONThe essence of the global financial bubble is that savings are diverted to inflate the stock market, bond market and real estate prices rather than to build new factories and employ more labor.
MICHAEL HUDSONWages for the ninety-nine percent have gone down, steadily, since 2008. They’ve gone down especially for the bottom twenty-five percent of the population.
MICHAEL HUDSONMuch higher cost for all the infrastructure that he’s proposing. You could call Trump’s plan “public investment to create private profit”. That’s really his plan in a summary.
MICHAEL HUDSONIn order to be an economist these days, you have to participate in this fairytale that somehow we can recover and still make the banks rich. And it is a fairytale.
MICHAEL HUDSONMost people think of the economy as producing goods and services and paying labor to buy what it produces.
MICHAEL HUDSONA bubble is only called that after it bursts, after the insiders get out, leaving the pension funds and small investors, Canadians and other naïve investors holding the bag.
MICHAEL HUDSONThis 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 HUDSONWhen you say “paying the banks,” what they really mean is paying the bank bondholders. They are basically the One Percent.
MICHAEL HUDSONTrump’s junk economics is the illusion that if we cut the taxes on the wealthiest brackets, it’ll all trickle down. But it doesn’t trickle down.
MICHAEL HUDSON