Paying debt service to banks leaves less income to buy goods and services.
MICHAEL HUDSONEurope 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.
More Michael Hudson Quotes
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While escalating war in Afghanistan and maintaining over 850 military bases around the world, the administration has run up the national debt that Smith decried.
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This is the sector that backs the political campaigns of senators, presidents and congressmen, and they use this leverage to make sure that their people dominate the Federal Reserve, Treasury and the federal housing agencies.
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I think I’m just going to move out and buy a cheaper house.” So it’s very risky when you have only a 3% or 3.5% equity for the loan. The bank really isn’t left with much cushion as collateral.
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When you say “bank,” a bank is a building, a set of computers and chairs and things.
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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.
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There are so many currency exchange rate problems that people are buying gold as a safe haven. Right now, gold looks like a safe haven if international exchange rates break down.
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The 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.
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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.
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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.
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The price decline is a result of having to pay debts. That drains income from the circular flow between production and consumption – that is, between what people are paid when they go to work, and the things that they buy.
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When economists speak of money, they neglect that all money and credit is debt. That is the essence of bookkeeping and accounting. There are always two sides to the balance sheet. And one party’s money or savings is another party
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The result of this anti-classical revolution you had just before World War I was that today, almost all the economic growth in the last decade has gone to the One Percent. It’s gone to Wall Street, to real estate.
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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.
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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.
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When people are running up more and more debt for housing, they call that “real wealth.” It exposes what’s wrong in the mainstream economics and why most of the economics that justifies austerity programs and economic shrinkage is in the textbooks is not scientific.
MICHAEL HUDSON