Articles by Michael Hudson
We found 17 results.
Why the Banking System Is Breaking Up
Michael Hudson | Defend Democracy Press - TRANSCEND Media Service,
20 Mar 2023
15 Mar 2023 – The collapses of the Silvergate and Silicon Valley Banks are like icebergs calving off from the Antarctic glacier. The financial analogy to the global warming causing this collapse is the rising temperature of interest rates. Most media reports reflect a prayer that the bank runs will be localized, as if there is no context or environmental cause.
→ read full article
The Rentier Resurgence and Takeover: Finance Capitalism vs. Industrial Capitalism
Michael Hudson - TRANSCEND Media Service,
26 Apr 2021
Marx and many of his less radical contemporary reformers saw the historical role of industrial capitalism as being to clear away the legacy of feudalism – the landlords, bankers and monopolists extracting economic rent without producing real value. But that reform movement failed. Today, the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector has regained control of government, creating neo-rentier economies.
→ read full article
Trump’s Brilliant Strategy to Dismember U.S. Dollar Hegemony
Michael Hudson | Unz Review – TRANSCEND Media Service,
4 Feb 2019
1 Feb 2019 – A must read on US foreign policy: “The end of America’s unchallenged global economic dominance has arrived sooner than expected, thanks to the very same Neocons who gave the world the Iraq, Syria and the dirty wars in Latin America. Where is the left in all this?”
→ read full article
“Creating Wealth” through Debt: The West’s Finance-Capitalist Road
Michael Hudson – CounterPunch,
7 May 2018
Speech at Peking University’s School of Marxist Studies, May 5-6, 2018 – Volumes II and III of Marx’s Capital describe how debt grows exponentially, burdening the economy with carrying charges.
→ read full articleGovernment by Goldman: Gary Cohn Is Giving Goldman Sachs Everything It Ever Wanted from the Trump Administration
Gary Rivlin and Michael Hudson – The Intercept,
25 Sep 2017
Gary Cohn and Trump’s Wall Street Agenda – “Yet now Cohn’s in charge of the economy and talking about eliminating financial reform and basically putting the country back to where it was in 2005, as if 2008 didn’t happen. I’ve started the countdown clock to the next financial crash, which will make the last one look mild.”
→ read full articleWill Russia Reject Neoliberalism?
Paul Craig Roberts and Michael Hudson – CounterPunch,
15 Aug 2016
Paul Craig Roberts and Michael Hudson explain why hooking Russia’s fate to Western neoliberalism would doom the country’s sovereignty.
→ read full articleThe Great Ponzi Scheme of the Global Economy
Michael Hudson and Chris Hedges – CounterPunch,
28 Mar 2016
We’re going to be discussing a great Ponzi scheme that defines not only the U.S. but the global economy, how we got there and where we’re going. With economist Michael Hudson, a professor of economics who worked for many years on Wall Street, where you don’t succeed if you don’t grasp Marx’s dictum that capitalism is about exploitation. And he is also, I should mention, the godson of Leon Trotsky.
→ read full articleA New Mode of Warfare: The Greek Debt Crisis and Crashing Markets
Michael Hudson - CounterPunch,
6 Jul 2015
I’m in Germany now and have heard from Germans that the Greeks are lazy and don’t pay taxes. There is little recognition that what they call “the Greeks” are really the oligarchs. They have gained control of the old coalition Pasok/New Democracy parties, avoided paying taxes, avoided being prosecuted (New Democracy refused to act on the “Lagarde List” of tax evaders with nearly € 50 billion in Swiss bank accounts), orchestrated insider dealings to privatize infrastructure at corrupt prices, and used their banks as vehicles for capital flight and insider lending.
→ read full articleNO to Currency Slavery
Michael Hudson – TRANSCEND Media Service,
14 Jul 2014
Western support will allow more IMF and European lending to prop the Ukrainian currency so the Ukrainian oligarchs can move their money safely to British and US banks.
→ read full articleLatvia’s Economic Disaster as a Neoliberal Success Story – A Model for Europe and the US?
Jeffrey Sommers and Michael Hudson – TRANSCEND Media Service,
7 Jan 2013
Today’s most highly celebrated anti-labor success story is Latvia, where labor did not fight back, but simply emigrated politely and quietly. Latvia has a two-part tax on wages and social benefits that are near the highest in the world, while real estate taxes are well below US and EU averages. Meanwhile, capital gains are lightly taxed, and the country has become successful as a capital flight and tax avoidance haven for Russians and other post-Soviet kleptocrats that has permitted Latvia to “afford” de-industrialization, depopulation and de-socialization.
→ read full articleThe Financial Road to Serfdom: How Bankers use the Debt Crisis to Roll Back the Progressive Era
Prof. Michael Hudson – Global Research,
20 Jun 2011
At issue is sovereignty itself, when it comes to government responsibility for debts. And in this respect the war being waged against Greece by the European Central Bank (ECB) may best be seen as a dress rehearsal not only for the rest of Europe, but for what financial lobbyists would like to bring about in the United States.
→ read full articleFinancial Interests Dictate Sovereign Policy
Michael Hudson – TRANSCEND Media Service,
14 Feb 2011
“Latvia has become a testing ground for how far living standards can be depressed, how steeply an economy can be taxed while removing public social support in the face of a wealthy kleptocratic class at the top.”
→ read full articleThe Spectre Haunting Europe: Debt Defaults, Austerity, and Death of the “Social Europe” Model
Prof Michael Hudson and Prof. Jeffrey Sommers – Global Research,
24 Jan 2011
A spectre is haunting Europe: the illusion that Latvia’s financial and fiscal austerity is a model for other countries to emulate. Bankers and the financial press are asking governments from Greece to Ireland and now Spain as well: “Why can’t you be like Latvia and sacrifice your economy to pay the debts that you ran up during the financial bubble?” The answer is, they can’t – without an economic, demographic and political collapse that will only make matters worse.
→ read full articleWhy the U.S. Has Launched a New Financial World War — And How the Rest of the World Will Fight Back
Michael Hudson – Counterpunch,
18 Oct 2010
“Who Needs an Army When You Can Obtain the Usual Objectives (Monetary Wealth and Asset Appropriation) Simply by Financial Means?”
→ read full articleThe Neoliberal Experiment and Europe’s anti-Austerity Strikes: Governments must Lower Wages or Suffer Financial Blackmail
Michael Hudson – Global Research,
4 Oct 2010
Most of the press has described Wednesday’s [29 Sep 2010] European-wide labor demonstrations and strikes across in terms of the familiar exercise by transport workers irritating travelers with work slowdowns, and large throngs letting off steam by setting fires. But the story goes much deeper than merely a reaction against unemployment and economic recession conditions. At issue are proposals to drastically change the laws and structures of how European society will function for the next generation. The neoliberals are fully in control of the bureaucracy, and they are reviving Margaret Thatcher’s slogan, TINA: There Is No Alternative. But there is, of course.
→ read full articleFrom Marx to Goldman Sachs: The Fictions of Fictitious Capital
Michael Hudson - ICH,
16 Aug 2010
As published in Critique, based on a presentation given at the China Academy of Sciences, School of Marxist Studies in Beijing in November 2009, and at the Left Forum in New York City, March 20, 2010.
→ read full articleWEALTH CREATION, OR A PONZI SCHEME?
Michael Hudson,
24 Dec 2008
Last week the Good Lord evidently realized that not enough people had been reading Hyman Minsky’s explanation of how financial cycles end in Ponzi schemes – the stage in which banks keep the boom going by lending their customers the money to pay interest and thus avoid default. So He sent Bernie Madoff to dominate […]
→ read full article