If 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 HUDSON“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.
More Michael Hudson Quotes
-
-
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 -
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 -
Paying debt service to banks leaves less income to buy goods and services.
MICHAEL HUDSON -
Small banks that lend to consumers are fine.
MICHAEL HUDSON -
New investment and employment fall off, and the economy is falls into a downward spiral.
MICHAEL HUDSON -
In 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 HUDSON -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
To save the banks, you would have to turn the entire Eurozone into Greece.
MICHAEL HUDSON -
I 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 HUDSON -
Deflation is a leakage from this circular flow, to pay banks and the real estate, called the FIRE sector – finance, insurance and real estate. These transfer payments leave less and less of the paycheck to be spent on goods and services, so markets shrink.
MICHAEL HUDSON -
The United States Government has fought against creation of an international court to adjudicate the ability of national economies to pay debts.
MICHAEL HUDSON -
The 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 HUDSON -
These $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 HUDSON -
It thought that if it could subsidize banks lending homeowners enough money to buy houses from people who are defaulting, then the bank balance sheets would end up okay.
MICHAEL HUDSON -
When we say “people worry” about inflation, it’s mainly bondholders that worry. The labor force benefitted from the inflation of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s.
MICHAEL HUDSON -
The 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 HUDSON -
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.
MICHAEL HUDSON -
If you want to see where Trump is moving, look at what the United States neoliberals advised Russia to do after 1991, when they promised to create an ideal economy.
MICHAEL HUDSON -
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 -
The reason is that every recovery since 1945 has begun with a higher, and higher level of debt. The debt is so high now, that since 2008 we’ve been in what I call, debt deflation.
MICHAEL HUDSON -
Every government, from the Obama administration right through to Angela Merkel, the Eurozone and the IMF, promise to save the banks, not the economy.
MICHAEL HUDSON -
Europe is acting in a very self-destructive manner, but is doing so because it’s trying to be loyal to the United States.
MICHAEL HUDSON -
Europe is sort of like the Soviet Union in the ’30s and ’40s. There was an argument, is it reformable or not? There is a feeling, and I think it’s correct, that the European Union, the eurozone, and the euro, is not reformable, as a result of the Lisbon treaties and the other treaties that have created the euro.
MICHAEL HUDSON