black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

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

Today, people are having to spend so much of their money, to acquire a house and to get an education that they don’t have enough to spend on goods and services, except by running into yet more debt on their credit cards and other borrowings.
MICHAEL HUDSON

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

Deficit Problem Solution
More and more money is being extracted from of the production and consumption economy to pay the FIRE sector. That’s what causes debt deflation and shrinks markets. If you pay the banks, you have less to spend on goods and services.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Debt Deflation Fire Pay
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
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

Country Creating Party People
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
I don’t think that governments should permit speculation in raw materials, because they’re what the economy basically needs.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Government Needs Thinking
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.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Banker Loan Package Running Think
Nobody prefers to earn income any more, because that’s taxable. Rich people prefer to make capital gains.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Gains Income People
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
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

Heirs Income Paying Taxes
Elites play the role today that landlords played under feudalism. They levy interest and financial fees that are like a tax, to support what the classical economists called “unproductive activity.”
MICHAEL HUDSON

Financial Support Today
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

Cutting Mean Pension Plan
“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
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

Around Country Decorated Escalating Maintain
Much higher cost for all the infrastructure that he’s proposing. You could call Trump’s plan “public investment to create private profit”. That’s really his plan in a summary.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Investment Plan Proposing Summary
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
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

House Suffering Want
When I say the economy is shrinking, it’s the economy of the 99%, the people who have to work for a living and depend on earning money for what they can spend.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Gone People Shrinking
Either you can save the economy, or you can save the One Percent from losing a single penny.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Economy Losing Pennies
The United States Government has fought against creation of an international court to adjudicate the ability of national economies to pay debts.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Ability Creation Economy
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
Trump’s junk economics is the illusion that if we cut the taxes on the wealthiest brackets, it’ll all trickle down. But it doesn’t trickle down.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Cutting Illusion Junk
And then the parasites have another enzyme that takes over the host’s brain. It makes the host imagine that the parasite is part of its own body, actually part of itself and hence to be protected. That’s basically what Wall Street has done.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Actually Host Parasite Protected
If the economy is growing, people want to employ more workers. If you hire more labor, wages go up.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Growing People Wages
You have to abolish pension plans. You have to abolish social spending. You have to raise taxes.
MICHAEL HUDSON

Pension Plans Simple Thinking

Related Topics

Popular Authors

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Michael Hudson Quotes