In the mid-1980s, Soviet officials saw a need to open up their economy in hope of achieving Western-style innovation and productivity. That was the decade in which Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were sponsoring the neoliberal pro-financial policies that have polarised the U.S., British and other economies and loaded them down with rentier overhead. The...
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Ross Welcome to Renegade Inc. With China's increasing wealth, Western investors want some of the action. One of those investors is a bullish gentleman called George Soros. However, the Chinese are acutely aware that with Western investment comes inequality. So as Beijing begins to rethink how to do proper economic growth, we ask, will China...
Read MoreA Total-Returns Profile of Economic Polarization in America
Based on work with Dirk Bezemer, with charts by Howard Reed Polarization in America, 23 September 2019 Those who praise the post-2008 economy as a successful recovery point to the fact that the stock market has soared to all-time highs, while the unemployment rate has fallen to a decade-low. But is the stock market a...
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SHARMINI PERIES: It's The Real News Network. I'm Sharmini Peries coming to you from Baltimore. President Trump presented his infrastructure plan on Monday. The long-awaited plan proposes to spend $200 billion in federal funds over the next 10 years. This is to be complemented with another 1.3 trillion in spending from cities, states, and private...
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KIM BROWN: Welcome to The Real News Network in Baltimore. I'm Kim Brown. Donald Trump promised repeatedly to, "Drain the swamp," during his presidential campaign, his vow to end the cycle of corruption within the Federal government. All while touting his own experience as a businessman, as reason enough for him to be Commander-in-Chief. Yet,...
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SHARMINI PERIES: Welcome back to The Real News Network. I’m speaking with Michael Hudson, the author of, J is for Junk Economics, a Guide to Reality in the Age of Deception. Don’t miss it. We’re going to be talking about this book, and some of the misleading concepts that are out there, in terms of...
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NOTE: Readers are asking to know who, in addition to the Western-financed NGOs, are the Fifth Columnists inside Russia. Michael Hudson and I left the description general as Atlanticist Integrationists and neoliberal economists. The Saker provides some specific names. Among the Fifth Columnists are the Russian Prime Minister, head of the Central Bank, and the...
Read MoreDiscussions on the APEC, G20 and TPP meets, with key geo-political issues in the Ukraine, Germany, China and Russia investigated.
An interview with Radio Voice of Russia, World Service on Ukrainian sovereignty in the face of IMF loans, the push for fracking by US interests and how corruption lurks in the background. Is this Ukrainian pressure part of an EU fracking wedge on behalf of certain interests? According to this perspective, food sovereignty is a...
Read MoreAs first published on Truth Out “Let them loot.” That is the demand of the West when its NGO subsidiaries firebomb government buildings, murder policemen and loot the arms depots of military forts. Kiev is the equivalent of Kosovo as a Slavic city-of-origin. Are we seeing a replay? What would Dick Cheney (or President Obama...
Read MoreAs published in the latest World Economics Association digest, the Real World Economics Review The Federal Reserve’s QE3 has flooded the stock and bond markets with low-interest liquidity that makes it profitable for speculators to borrow cheap and make arbitrage gains buying stocks and bonds yielding higher dividends or interest. In principle, one could borrow...
Read MoreFailed Privatizations – the Thatcher Legacy
By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. His latest book is “The Bubble and Beyond”. This is from my book on privatization, written some 15 years ago, never published. As in Chile, privatization in Britain was...
Read MoreThe Queen Mother of Global Austerity and Financialization
We typically honor the convention to refrain from speaking ill of the recently departed. But Margaret Thatcher probably would not object to an epitaph focusing on how her political legacy was to achieve her professed aim of “irreversibly” dismantling Britain’s public sector. Attacking central planning by government, she shifted it into much more centralized financial...
Read MoreRenegade Economists interview 05.09.2012 Interview with Professor Michael Hudson by Karl Fitzgerald Listen KF: We welcome to the show Professor Michael Hudson, Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, the leading Post-Keynesian university in America. It’s been fantastic to see, Michael, that the public profile of UMKC has really taken off with Randall...
Read MoreWe all know that the world is unfair. The most useful question to ask is how much poverty is economically necessary, how much is a product of policies that can be alleviated? A related question is how financial and fiscal austerity hurts the national economic interest. This problem is especially relevant in Russia today, since...
Read MoreNovember 12, 1989, New York Times This article was published in the NYT more than 20 years ago, forecasting precisely what has happened. I attended the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington last month. When the meetings ended, I was left with the impression that no further writedowns would...
Read MoreHow Bankers are using the Debt Crisis to welcome in the Financial Road to Serfdom
Financial strategists do not intend to let today’s debt crisis go to waste. Foreclosure time has arrived. That means revolution – or more accurately, a counter-revolution to roll back the 20th century’s gains made by social democracy: pensions and social security, public health care and other infrastructure providing essential services at subsidized prices or for...
Read MoreWill Greece Let EU Central Bankers Run Riot Over Sovereignty?
When Greece exchanged its drachma for the euro in 2000, most voters were all for joining the Eurozone. Their hope was that it would ensure stability, and that this would promote rising wages and living standards. Few saw that the stumbling point was tax policy. Greece was excluded from the eurozone the previous year as...
Read MoreReplacing Economic Democracy with Financial Oligarchy
“But if a country is still not delivering, I think all would agree that the second stage has to be different. Would it go too far if we envisaged, at this second stage, giving euro area authorities a much deeper and authoritative say in the formation of the country’s economic policies if these go harmfully...
Read MoreA landmark fight is occurring this Saturday, April 9. Icelanders will vote on whether to subject their economy to decades of poverty, bankruptcy and emigration of their work force. At least, that is the program supported by the existing Social Democratic-Green coalition government in urging a “Yes” vote on the Icesave bailout. Their financial surrender...
Read MoreAnother excellent interview with Bonnie Faulkner. Topics covered: Financial and fiscal austerity policies; the appeal of economic austerity to bankers; economic depression and war; post-WWII vs. post-cold war economic policy; government to government grants vs. commercial lending; the euro and dollar; privatization in New Zealand and elsewhere; social unrest; speculation and prices; criminalization of the...
Read MoreInterview with Michael Hudson, Eleftherotypia, Sunday December 12, 2010. 1. A recent article of yours, “Schemes of the Rich and Greedy,” cites the bailouts in Europe among such schemes. What are the main faults with bailouts, and for whom are they designed? The financial sector is trying to get politicians to siphon off money from...
Read MoreProfessor Hudson appeared on the Renegade Economists radio show in Melbourne, Australia last Wednesday. Listen
What would Adam Smith have said about the Bowles-Simpson economic report last week? What a pity the great free marketer was not around to serve on the Deficit Reduction Commission. He not only would have rolled over in his grave, he would have risen up wielding an ax to the fiscal proposals that are diametrically...
Read MoreHere’s the quandary that the U.S. economy is in: The Fed’s quantitative easing policy– creating more liquidity so that banks can lend more – aims at helping the economy “borrow its way out of debt.” But banks are not lending more, for the simple reason that a third of U.S. real estate already is in...
Read Morean Interview with Michael Hudson for Counterpunch. By STANDARD SCHAEFER Since the 1980s computer technology has been promoted as democratizing leisure by lowering the production costs of knowledge and culture. Consumers were promised more free time, yet a quarter or even a third of family income for the low- and middle-income brackets now goes to...
Read Morean Interview with Michael Hudson for Counterpunch By STANDARD SCHAEFER In acknowledging the recent thirtieth anniversary of the US-sponsored coup that brought to General Augosto Pinochet to power in Chile, a number of articles and opinion pieces have appeared. The Nation recently cast the incident in somewhat sentimental terms. Such efforts to turn Salvador Allende’s...
Read MoreAn Interview with Michael Hudson for Counterpunch By STANDARD SCHAEFER During the boom of the 1990s, neoliberal economists and the financial press promoted the the high tech revolution for its ability to reduce production costs. As long as government did not interfere with markets, technology would lead to an improvement in the quality of life....
Read MoreContents Introduction Why it was regressive to fund Social Security as an autonomous system Financial engineering vs. industrial profits and employment Social Security, forced saving and Labor Capitalism What if the stock market does boom? Will that save Social Security? Introduction This would not seem to be an auspicious time to mount a campaign to...
Read MoreSpeech to the Norwegian Shipowners’ Association, August 17, 2000 by Dr. Michael Hudson, ISLET © The debate over whether to privatize Norway’s oil, telephone system and other national assets has focused on considerations of whether private management would be more efficient than government management. The discussion to date has turned more on political ideology than...
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About Michael Hudson
Michael Hudson is President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and author of The Bubble and Beyond (2012), Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (1968 & 2003), Trade, Development and Foreign Debt (1992 & 2009) and of The Myth of Aid (1971).
ISLET engages in research regarding domestic and international finance, national income and balance-sheet accounting with regard to real estate, and the economic history of the ancient Near East.
Michael acts as an economic advisor to governments worldwide including Iceland, Latvia and China on finance and tax law.
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