It thought that if it could subsidize banks lending homeowners enough money to buy houses from people who are defaulting, then the bank balance sheets would end up okay.
MICHAEL HUDSONThe 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,.
More Michael Hudson Quotes
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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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
While escalating war in Afghanistan and maintaining over 850 military bases around the world, the administration has run up the national debt that Smith decried.
MICHAEL HUDSON -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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