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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.

Michael Hudson

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

Country People Population 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
What 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 HUDSON

Giving Government Income
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.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Good Loans Percent Salary Student
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.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Cards Income Three
There are two definitions of deflation. Most people think of it simply as prices going down. But debt deflation is what happens when people have to spend more and more of their income to carry the debts that they’ve run up – to pay their mortgage debt, to pay the credit card debt, to pay student loans.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Running Thinking Two
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Look More Union Withdrawn World
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
Driving down the interest rates creates a boom in the stock market, and also the real estate market. The resulting capital gains not treated as income.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Driving Estate Income Rates Real
The problems of 2008 were never cured. The Federal Reserve’s solution to the crisis was to lend the economy enough money to borrow its way out of debt.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Balance House People
Normally, if someone goes bankrupt, you wipe out the debt and get a fresh start. But that’s not permitted with student loans. So the effect is to impoverish many graduates with very high debts.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Debt Fresh Start Wipe
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.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Banks Developer Fellow Finance Transportation
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

Campaign
“We’ll help you get a better job. We’ll arrange a loan so that you don’t have to pay a penny for this education.” Their pet bank gets them the government-guaranteed loan, and the student may get the junk degree, but doesn’t get a job, so they don’t pay the loan.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Arrange Education Guaranteed Student
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
When you say “bank,” a bank is a building, a set of computers and chairs and things.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Bankers People Running
You have to abolish pension plans. You have to abolish social spending. You have to raise taxes.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Pension Plans Simple Thinking
Debt deflation is when there’s less money that people have to spend out of their paychecks on goods and services, because they’re paying the FIRE sector. Oil going down is a function of the supply and demand of oil in the market. It’s a separate phenomenon.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Fire Oil People Services Spend
Much 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 HUDSON

Investment Plan Proposing Summary
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
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

Circulate Drinking Like Somebody Wine Years
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.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Factor Get Money Order
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 HUDSON

Crisis Discipline Politician
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.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Gains Income Real
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.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Army Income People
I don’t think that governments should permit speculation in raw materials, because they’re what the economy basically needs.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Government Needs Thinking
The only way people can repay the debt is by cutting their living standards very drastically. It means agreeing to shift their pension plans from defined benefit plans.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Cutting Mean Pension Plan

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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We’re still in the collapse that began after 2008. There’s not a new collapse, there hasn’t been a recovery.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Michael Hudson Quotes