When you say “paying the banks,” what they really mean is paying the bank bondholders. They are basically the One Percent.
MICHAEL HUDSONThe problem is indeed that one party’s debt finds its counterpart in some other party’s savings. Not paying debts therefore involves annulling some other party’s financial claims on the debtor.
More Michael Hudson Quotes
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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.
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Junk economics denies the role of debt and denies the fact that the economic system we have now is dysfunctional.
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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 -
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.
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The one sure mark of a con, though, is the promise of free money.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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I think I’m just going to move out and buy a cheaper house.” So it’s very risky when you have only a 3% or 3.5% equity for the loan. The bank really isn’t left with much cushion as collateral.
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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The essence of the global financial bubble is that savings are diverted to inflate the stock market, bond market and real estate prices rather than to build new factories and employ more labor.
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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.
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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 -
That’s the “magic” of double-taxation treaties: you can shop around for the lowest taxer.
MICHAEL HUDSON