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 HUDSONI guess the main thing that came out of the Panama Papers was that Ukrainian President Poroshenko had promised to divest of his chocolate company and instead, he simply moved it into an offshore account.
More Michael Hudson Quotes
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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 -
I guess the main thing that came out of the Panama Papers was that Ukrainian President Poroshenko had promised to divest of his chocolate company and instead, he simply moved it into an offshore account.
MICHAEL HUDSON -
Europe is creating the flight of refugees that’s tearing it apart politically, and leading rightwing nationalist parties to gain power to withdraw from the Eurozone.
MICHAEL HUDSON -
Inflation usually helps the economy at large, but not the 1% if wages rise. So the 1% says that it is terrible.
MICHAEL HUDSON -
When you say “paying the banks,” what they really mean is paying the bank bondholders. They are basically the One Percent.
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 -
You have to pay medical care, you have to pay the banks for your credit card debt, student loans. Then you only have about twenty-five or thirty-five percent, maybe one-third of your salary to buy goods and services. That’s all.
MICHAEL HUDSON -
One basic myth is that rich people get wealthy by earning income. But that’s not how most get rich. Most of the gains of the rich people since 1945 have been “capital gains”.
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 -
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.
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Mathematically, debts grow exponentially at compound interest. Banks recycle the interest into new loans, so debts grow exponentially, faster than the economy can afford to pay.
MICHAEL HUDSON -
Mr. Trump wants to turn the U.S. economy into the kind of real estate development that has made him so rich in New York.
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.
MICHAEL HUDSON -
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 -
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