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When 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

Michael Hudson

Since 2008 you’ve had the largest bond market rally in history, as the Federal Reserve flooded the economy with quantitative easing to drive down interest rates.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Gains Income Real
You have to have at least fifty percent of the European population emigrate, either to Russia or China. You would have to have mass starvation. Very simple. That’s the price that the Eurozone thinks is well worth paying.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Country People Population Think
The financial time frame always has been short-term. Projects with long-term paybacks are cut back, because CEOs and financial managers simply want to take their money and run. That is the financial mentality.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Cutting Financial Money Project Running
Every government, from the Obama administration right through to Angela Merkel, the Eurozone and the IMF, promise to save the banks, not the economy.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Administration Government Promise
One of the big problems in America’s economic polarization and shrinkage is that pensions can’t be paid. So there are going to be defaults on pensions here, just like Europeans are insisting in rolling back pensions. You can look at Greece and Argentina as the future of America.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Country Pension People Rolling
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.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Force Labor People Worry
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
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

Balance House People
To the deficit commission, a depression is the solution to the problem, not a problem.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Deficit Problem Solution
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
On the flat tax, the more you compress the tax rates, the more you untax where the income is really made, at the top of the pyramid.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Flat Income Pyramids Tax
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

House Loss Payments People Promoting
The seeming irony is that it’s so bad that it enables the Democratic Party to think, “A-ha, all we have to do is be the lesser evil.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Enable Evil Lesser
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.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Estate Fire Pay Real Train
“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
Wages for the ninety-nine percent have gone down, steadily, since 2008. They’ve gone down especially for the bottom twenty-five percent of the population.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Blue Mean Nine Ninety
If the bank goes under, they get to keep all of these salaries and options – and the government will bail out the bank. These guys will take their money and run, which is pretty much what they’re doing now.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Bank Goverenment Guy Mrun
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
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

Financial School Wall
That’s the “magic” of double-taxation treaties: you can shop around for the lowest taxer.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Magic Taxation Treaties
The economy is being run primarily by the banks for their own interest.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Economy Interest Running
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
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
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

Fairytale Order Rich
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
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

Cards Credit Fall Loan Mean People
Either you can save the economy, or you can save the One Percent from losing a single penny.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Economy Losing Pennies

When 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

Related Topics

Popular Authors

When 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

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Michael Hudson Quotes