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 HUDSONWe’ve turned the post-war economy that made America prosperous and rich inside out.
More Michael Hudson Quotes
-
-
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 -
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 -
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.
MICHAEL HUDSON -
To the deficit commission, a depression is the solution to the problem, not a problem.
MICHAEL HUDSON -
You’re having government spending on the economy being cut almost everywhere. That means that the only source of spending for growth has to come from borrowing from the banking system.
MICHAEL HUDSON -
When you say “bank,” a bank is a building, a set of computers and chairs and things.
MICHAEL HUDSON -
The parasite can’t simply come in and take something. First of all, it needs to numb the host. It has an enzyme so that the host doesn’t realize the parasite’s there.
MICHAEL HUDSON -
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 -
Then, all of a sudden, the Fed can raise interest rates, let the stock market prices collapse and the people will lose even more in the stock market than they would have by the negative interest rates in the bank. So it’s a pro-Wall Street financial engineering gimmick.
MICHAEL HUDSON -
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 -
The 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 HUDSON -
Now, suppose that a homeowner puts down only 3% of their own money or 3.5% for the FHA. That means if prices go down by only 3%, the house will be in negative equity and it would pay the homeowner just to walk away and say, “The house now is worth less than the mortgage I owe.
MICHAEL HUDSON -
Most 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 HUDSON -
The ideological foundation of today’s business schools is that economic control should be shifted out of government hands into those of financial managers – that is, Wall Street.
MICHAEL HUDSON -
If the economy is growing, people want to employ more workers. If you hire more labor, wages go up.
MICHAEL HUDSON