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.
MICHAEL HUDSONThe United States Government has fought against creation of an international court to adjudicate the ability of national economies to pay debts.
More Michael Hudson Quotes
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The one sure mark of a con, though, is the promise of free money.
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The United States Government has fought against creation of an international court to adjudicate the ability of national economies to pay debts.
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More and more money is being extracted from of the production and consumption economy to pay the FIRE sector. That’s what causes debt deflation and shrinks markets. If you pay the banks, you have less to spend on goods and services.
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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.
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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.
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In fact, there’s no way that banks can be paid everything that they’re owed.
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The companies aren’t hiring, because consumers don’t have enough money to buy the goods and services.
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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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Most people think of the economy as producing goods and services and paying labor to buy what it produces.
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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.
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To the deficit commission, a depression is the solution to the problem, not a problem.
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When you say “paying the banks,” what they really mean is paying the bank bondholders. They are basically the One Percent.
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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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This is not really currency that circulates. It’s like the old joke about expensive vintage wine. Wine prices will go up and once in a while somebody will buy a 50-year-old bottle of wine and say, “Wait a minute. This has gone bad.” The answer is, “Well, that wine isn’t for drinking; that’s for trading.”
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So 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 HUDSON