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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

Most people think of the economy as producing goods and services and paying labor to buy what it produces.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Country Real Thinking
You could say that the vote to withdraw from Europe is, it’s really a vote of the British middle class, the working class, to withdraw from the U.S. neoliberalism that has been running Europe for the last ten years.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Middle Class Running Vote
Then, all of a sudden, the Fed can raise interest rates, let the stock market prices collapse and the people will lose even more in the stock market than they would have by the negative interest rates in the bank. So it’s a pro-Wall Street financial engineering gimmick.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Collapse Gimmick Interest Negative Peopel
Either you can save the economy, or you can save the One Percent from losing a single penny.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Economy Losing Pennies
Paying debt service to banks leaves less income to buy goods and services.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Debts Goods Income Paying Services
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

Mainstream People Real Running
Europe 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.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Correct Feelings Reformable Taken Thinking
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.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Country Investment People Trade
What’s the best gamble in the world, right now? Its betting that Deutsche Bank stock is going to go down. Short sellers borrowed money from their banks to place bets that Deutsche Bank stock is going to go down.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Credit Gamble Hands World
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

Debt Economy Pay
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
If you look at payments to labor as a proportion of national income or gross domestic product, you find profits going way up, investment and savings going up.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Income Investment Looks National Savings
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 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

Debt Deflation Higher Reason
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
There are two definitions of deflation. Most people think of it simply as prices going down. But debt deflation is what happens when people have to spend more and more of their income to carry the debts that they’ve run up – to pay their mortgage debt, to pay the credit card debt, to pay student loans.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Running Thinking Two

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.

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Popular Authors

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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