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 HUDSONTextbooks 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 HUDSONThese $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.
MICHAEL HUDSONWhen you say “bank,” a bank is a building, a set of computers and chairs and things.
MICHAEL HUDSONThe aim of promoting low down payments is to push prices back up so that fewer houses are going to be in negative equity and fewer people are going to walk away from the mortgages. That will save the from taking a loss on their junk mortgage loans.
MICHAEL HUDSONThe problem is indeed that one party’s debt finds its counterpart in some other party’s savings. Not paying debts therefore involves annulling some other party’s financial claims on the debtor.
MICHAEL HUDSONIf you’re a wealthy heir with a trust fund, and you sell stocks, make your 10% gains since Donald Trump, and then you buy other stocks, you can avoid paying taxes. And if your accountant registers your wealth offshore in a Panamanian fund, like Russian kleptocrats do – and as more and more Americans do.
MICHAEL HUDSONThe 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 HUDSONThe myth is that if housing prices go up, Americans will be richer. What banks – and behind them, the Federal Reserve – really want is for new buyers to be able to borrow enough money to buy the houses from mortgage defaulters, and thus save the banks from suffering from more mortgage defaults.
MICHAEL HUDSONWe’re still in the collapse that began after 2008. There’s not a new collapse, there hasn’t been a recovery.
MICHAEL HUDSONThe one sure mark of a con, though, is the promise of free money.
MICHAEL HUDSONI think we’re in the take-the-money-and-run stage of the economy. So the banks may go under, but the bankers, who make the policy, clean up.
MICHAEL HUDSONTo save the banks, you would have to turn the entire Eurozone into Greece.
MICHAEL HUDSONThe Eurozone die is cast. Countries must withdraw from the euro so that governments can create their own money once again, and resist creditor demands to carve up and privatize their public domain.
MICHAEL HUDSONThe 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 HUDSONSo 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.
MICHAEL HUDSONToday, 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.
MICHAEL HUDSON