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The companies aren’t hiring, because consumers don’t have enough money to buy the goods and services.

Michael Hudson

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 HUDSON

Decade Economic Real Wall War
The United States Government has fought against creation of an international court to adjudicate the ability of national economies to pay debts.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Ability Creation Economy
We’ve turned the post-war economy that made America prosperous and rich inside out.
MICHAEL HUDSON

People Rich Winning
“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.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Arrange Education Guaranteed Student
The 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.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Cutting Mean Pension Plan
People think of a parasite as simply taking money, taking blood out of a host or taking money out of the economy. But in nature it’s much more complicated.
MICHAEL HUDSON

People Thinking Wall
Either you can save the economy, or you can save the One Percent from losing a single penny.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Economy Losing Pennies
The economy is being run primarily by the banks for their own interest.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Economy Interest Running
When you say “paying the banks,” what they really mean is paying the bank bondholders. They are basically the One Percent.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Mean Percent Really
The other dynamic keeping the stock market up – both for technology stocks and others – is that companies are using a lot of their income for stock buybacks and to pay out higher dividends, not make new investment,.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Engineering Government Technology
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

Driving Estate Income Rates Real
People are putting their money into treasuries because they worry that the risk of putting their money into the bond market, the stock market or even the money markets is very high.
MICHAEL HUDSON

People Risk Worry
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.”
MICHAEL HUDSON

Circulate Drinking Like Somebody Wine Years
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

Fire Oil People Services Spend
What do the 5%, or the 1% actually use their money for? They lend it back to the economy at large, they load it down with debt. They make their money by lending to the bottom 95%, or the bottom 99%.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Giving Government Income
We’re still in the collapse that began after 2008. There’s not a new collapse, there hasn’t been a recovery.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Collapse Recovery Stills
Britain is having a referendum as to whether to withdraw from the European Union, and it looks more and more like it may do so. So the world’s politics are in turmoil.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Look More Union Withdrawn World
If bankers can push the loans and make more profits for the bank, they get paid higher bonuses. They often also get stock options.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Government Guy Running
The companies aren’t hiring, because consumers don’t have enough money to buy the goods and services.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Consumers Enough Hiring Services
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

Heirs Income Paying Taxes
Much higher cost for all the infrastructure that he’s proposing. You could call Trump’s plan “public investment to create private profit”. That’s really his plan in a summary.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Investment Plan Proposing Summary
To save the banks, you would have to turn the entire Eurozone into Greece.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Country Eurozone Greece People Turns
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

Mean Mortgage Moving Thinking
Education is something that should not be organized on a for-profit basis, because in that case its purpose is not really to provide an education.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Fall Government Opportunity
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

House Suffering Want
Inflation usually helps the economy at large, but not the 1% if wages rise. So the 1% says that it is terrible.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Economy Helping Wages
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.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Debt Deflation Fire Pay

The companies aren’t hiring, because consumers don’t have enough money to buy the goods and services.

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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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