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 HUDSONWhen economists speak of money, they neglect that all money and credit is debt. That is the essence of bookkeeping and accounting. There are always two sides to the balance sheet. And one party’s money or savings is another party
More Michael Hudson Quotes
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When we say “people worry” about inflation, it’s mainly bondholders that worry. The labor force benefitted from the inflation of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s.
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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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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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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.
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The problems of 2008 were never cured. The Federal Reserve’s solution to the crisis was to lend the economy enough money to borrow its way out of debt.
MICHAEL HUDSON -
Somehow most people believed they could get rich by going into debt to borrow assets that were going to rise in price. But you can’t get rich, ultimately, by going into debt. In the end the creditors always win.
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The ideological foundation of today’s business schools is that economic control should be shifted out of government hands into those of financial managers – that is, Wall Street.
MICHAEL HUDSON -
Junk economics denies the role of debt and denies the fact that the economic system we have now is dysfunctional.
MICHAEL HUDSON -
You have to abolish pension plans. You have to abolish social spending. You have to raise taxes.
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 -
Deflation is a leakage from this circular flow, to pay banks and the real estate, called the FIRE sector – finance, insurance and real estate. These transfer payments leave less and less of the paycheck to be spent on goods and services, so markets shrink.
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These $100 bills aren’t meant to circulate. They’re not to spend on goods and services. They’re a store of value. They’re a form of saving.
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The bankers are the people running these banks. They’re the chief officers, and they push the loans because they don’t care if they go bad. For one thing, they may package these bad loans and sell them off to gullible institutional investors.
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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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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