Michael Hudson famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

We go forward with our heads held high, but look back and remember where we come from.
-- Michael Hudson

#Marine #Where We Come #Looks
The one sure mark of a con, though, is the promise of free money.
-- Michael Hudson

#Promise #Mark
To the deficit commission, a depression is the solution to the problem, not a problem.
-- Michael Hudson

#Problem #Deficit #Solutions
if you increase living standards you make labor more productive. This is why Asia today is becoming more productive than the United States.
-- Michael Hudson

#Today #Asia #Becoming
The most serious problems lie in the financial sphere, where the economy's debt overhead has grown more rapidly than the 'real' economy's ability to carry this debt. ... 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.
-- Michael Hudson

#Real #Lying #Essence
So the Bush-Obama administration has taken a fiscal stance diametrically opposed to that of the patron saint of free enterprise. 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. By shifting the tax burden off property and off rent-seeking monopolies - above all, off the financial sector - this policy has raised America's cost of living and doing business, thereby undercutting its competitive power and running up larger and larger foreign debt.
-- Michael Hudson

#Running #Military #War
Debts grow and grow. And the more they grow, the more they shrink the economy. When you shrink the economy, you shrink the ability to pay the debts, so it's all an illusion that the system can be saved. The question is, how long are people going to be willing to live in this illusion?
-- Michael Hudson

#Long #People #Debt
People have to pay so much money to the banks that they don't have enough money to buy the goods and services they produce. So there's not much new investment, there's not new employment (except minimum-wage "service" jobs), markets are shrinking, and people are defaulting. So many companies can't pay their banks.
-- Michael Hudson

#Jobs #People #Shrinking
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%. When you give them more after-tax income, it enables them to buy even more control of government, even more control of election campaigns. They're not going to spend this money back into the goods-and-services economy.
-- Michael Hudson

#Government #Giving #Income
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

#Support #Today #Financial
What's bad for the frackers usually is good for the rest of the world.
-- Michael Hudson

#World
A stand in is a politician who can deliver her constituency to her Wall Street backers. That's what a politician does in America. You get a constituency; you make them believe your promises, and then you turn them over to your financial campaign backers. That's what politics has become and that's as much an art of deception as economics is.
-- Michael Hudson

#Art #Wall #Believe
Nobody prefers to earn income any more, because that's taxable. Rich people prefer to make capital gains.
-- Michael Hudson

#People #Income #Gains
Economists often define their discipline as "the allocation of scarce resources among competing ends." But when resources or money really become scarce, economists call it a crisis and say that it's a question for politicians, not their own department.
-- Michael Hudson

#Discipline #Politician #Crisis
The underlying strategy of the Fed is to tell people, "Do you want your money to lose value in the bank, or do you want to put it in the stock market?" They're trying to push money into the stock market, into hedge funds, to temporarily bid up prices. Then, all of a sudden, the Fed can raise interest rates, let the stock market prices collapse and the people will lose even more in the stock market than they would have by the negative interest rates in the bank. So it's a pro-Wall Street financial engineering gimmick.
-- Michael Hudson

#Wall #Engineering #People
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
You have a choice. Either you can have more oil, or more clean water. Fracking is not good for the water supply.
-- Michael Hudson

#Oil #Water #Choices
Money is not a factor of production. But in order to have access to credit, in order to get money, in order to get an education, you have to pay the banks.
-- Michael Hudson

#Get Money
The biggest industrial sector next to real estate is oil, gas and other mineral resources. They don't report any taxable income, because if you depict yourself as earning a profit, you have to pay a tax on it. So, it's all about what accountants choose to declare as profit.
-- Michael Hudson

#Real #Oil #Income
There are many ways to create economic suicide on a national level. The major way through history has been through indebting the economy. Debt always expands to reach a point where it cannot be paid by a large swathe of the economy. This is the point where austerity is imposed and ownership of wealth polarizes between the One Percent and the 99 Percent.
-- Michael Hudson

#Suicide #Wealth #Economic
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 - when you know what you're going to get - into just "defined contribution plans," where you put money in, like into a roach motel, and you don't know what's coming out.
-- Michael Hudson

#Mean #Cutting #Pension Plans
I think the Republican tax law is so bad that it almost guarantees a Republican victory, precisely because it's so bad. 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

#Party #Thinking #Evil
A bubble is only called that after it bursts, after the insiders get out, leaving the pension funds and small investors, Canadians and other naïve investors holding the bag.
-- Michael Hudson

#Leaving #Bags #Fund
The bank's product is debt, because the banks want to make sure that they can get paid for the debt. But ultimately the only party that can pay the debt is the government, because it runs the printing presses. So the debts ultimately either are paid by the government, or they're paid by a huge transfer of property from debtors to creditors - or, the debts are written off.
-- Michael Hudson

#Running #Party #Government
Everyone from Adam Smith, John Stewart Mill, they were all reforms. What they wanted to reform was getting rid of this parasitic landlord class that had conquered England in 1066 and it's the heirs of the military warlords who ended up taking the land and making everybody pay them and all of their descendants just for having been conquered. You can see the carry-over of this today. The rent that people have to pay, the money they have to pay the banks instead of having a public option. That's the price they still have to pay for being conquered.
-- Michael Hudson

#Military #People #Today
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. 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 Hudson

#People #House #Balance
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.
-- Michael Hudson

#Running #Thinking #Two

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