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 HUDSONThe 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.
More Michael Hudson Quotes
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Most people think of the economy as producing goods and services and paying labor to buy what it produces.
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The one sure mark of a con, though, is the promise of free money.
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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.
MICHAEL HUDSON -
Seventy-eight percent of millennials are worried about not having enough good paying job opportunity to pay off their student loans. Seventy-four percent can’t pay the health care if they get sick.
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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 -
The 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 HUDSON -
Either you can save the economy, or you can save the One Percent from losing a single penny.
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.
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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.
MICHAEL HUDSON -
It’s amazing that Europe says, “What are we going to do with these refugees?” It’s as if it doesn’t realize that being part of NATO and bombing these countries forces them to choose to live by fleeing, or to stay and get bombed.
MICHAEL HUDSON -
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 -
To save the banks, you would have to turn the entire Eurozone into Greece.
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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.
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In fact, there’s no way that banks can be paid everything that they’re owed.
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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.
MICHAEL HUDSON