RSS
“The purpose of a military conquest is to take control of foreign economies, to take control of their land and impose tribute. The genius of the World Bank was to recognize that it’s not necessary to occupy a country in order to impose tribute, or to take over its industry, agriculture and land. Instead of bullets, it uses financial maneuvering. As long as other countries play an artificial economic game that U.S. diplomacy can control, finance is able to achieve today what used to require bombing and loss of life by soldiers.”
I’m Bonnie Faulkner. Today on Guns and Butter: Dr. Michael Hudson. Today’s show: The IMF and World Bank: Partners In Backwardness. Dr. Hudson is a financial economist and historian. He is President of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trend, a Wall Street Financial Analyst, and Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. His most recent books include “… and Forgive them Their Debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year”; Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy, and J Is for Junk Economics: A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception. He is also author of Trade, Development and Foreign Debt, among many other books. We return today to a discussion of Dr. Hudson’s seminal 1972 book, Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire, a critique of how the United States exploited foreign economies through the IMF and World Bank, with a special emphasis on food imperialism.
Bonnie Faulkner: Michael Hudson, welcome back.
Michael Hudson: It’s good to be back, Bonnie.
Bonnie Faulkner: In your seminal work form 1972, Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire, you write: “The development lending of the World Bank has been dysfunctional from the outset.” When was the World Bank set up and by whom?
Michael Hudson: It was set up basically by the United States in 1944, along with its sister institution, the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Their purpose was to create an international order like a funnel to make other countries economically dependent on the United States. To make sure that no other country or group of countries – even all the rest of the world – could not dictate U.S. policy. American diplomats insisted on the ability to veto any action by the World Bank or IMF. The aim of this veto power was to make sure that any policy was, in Donald Trump’s words, to put America first. “We’ve got to win and they’ve got to lose.”
The World Bank was set up from the outset as a branch of the military, of the Defense Department. John J. McCloy (Assistant Secretary of War, 1941-45), was the first full-time president. He later became Chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank (1953-60). McNamara was Secretary of Defense (1961-68), Paul Wolfowitz was Deputy and Under Secretary of Defense (1989-2005), and Robert Zoellick was Deputy Secretary of State. So I think you can look at the World Bank as the soft shoe of American diplomacy.
Bonnie Faulkner: What is the difference between the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the IMF? Is there a difference?
Michael Hudson: Yes, there is. The World Bank was supposed to make loans for what they call international development. “Development” was their euphemism for dependency on U.S. exports and finance. This dependency entailed agricultural backwardness – opposing land reform, family farming to produce domestic food crops, and also monetary backwardness in basing their monetary system on the dollar.
The World Bank was supposed to provide infrastructure loans that other countries would go into debt to pay American engineering firms, to build up their export sectors and their plantation sectors by public investment roads and port development for imports and exports. Essentially, the Bank financed long- investments in the foreign trade sector, in a way that was a natural continuation of European colonialism.
In 1941, for example, C. L. R. James wrote an article on “Imperialism in Africa” pointing out the fiasco of European railroad investment in Africa: “Railways must serve flourishing industrial areas, or densely populated agricult5ural regions, or they must open up new land along which a thriving population develops and provides the railways with traffic. Except in the mining regions of South Africa, all these conditions are absent. Yet railways were needed, for the benefit of European investors and heavy industry.” That is why, James explained “only governments can afford to operate them,” while being burdened with heavy interest obligations.[1]C. L. R. James and Revolutionary Marxism: Selected Writings, 1939-49 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 1994), pp. 133f. What was “developed” was Africa’s mining and plantation export sector, not its domestic economies. The World Bank followed this pattern of “development” lending without apology.
The IMF was in charge of short-term foreign currency loans. Its aim was to prevent countries from imposing capital controls to protect their balance of payments. Many countries had a dual exchange rate: one for trade in goods and services, the other rate for capital movements. The function of the IMF and World Bank was essentially to make other countries borrow in dollars, not in their own currencies, and to make sure that if they could not pay their dollar-denominated debts, they had to impose austerity on the domestic economy – while subsidizing their import and export sectors and protecting foreign investors, creditors and client oligarchies from loss.
The IMF developed a junk-economics model pretending that any country can pay any amount of debt to the creditors if it just impoverishes its labor enough. So when countries were unable to pay their debt service, the IMF tells them to raise their interest rates to bring on a depression – austerity – and break up the labor unions. That is euphemized as “rationalizing labor markets.” The rationalizing is essentially to disable labor unions and the public sector. The aim – and effect – is to prevent countries from essentially following the line of development that had made the United States rich – by public subsidy and protection of domestic agriculture, public subsidy and protection of industry and an active government sector promoting a New Deal democracy. The IMF was essentially promoting and forcing other countries to balance their trade deficits by letting American and other investors buy control of their commanding heights, mainly their infrastructure monopolies, and to subsidize their capital flight.
BONNIE FAULKNER: Now, Michael, when you began speaking about the IMF and monetary controls, you mentioned that there were two exchange rates of currency in countries. What were you referring to?
MICHAEL HUDSON: When I went to work on Wall Street in the ‘60s, I was balance-of-payments economist for Chase Manhattan, and we used the IMF’s monthly International Financial Statistics every month. At the top of each country’s statistics would be the exchange-rate figures. Many countries had two rates: one for goods and services, which was set normally by the market, and then a different exchange rate that was managed for capital movements. That was because countries were trying to prevent capital flight. They didn’t want their wealthy classes or foreign investors to make a run on their own currency – an ever-present threat in Latin America.
The IMF and the World Bank backed the cosmopolitan classes, the wealthy. Instead of letting countries control their capital outflows and prevent capital flight, the IMF’s job is to protect the richest One Percent and foreign investors from balance-of-payments problems. The World Bank and American diplomacy have steered them into a chronic currency crisis. The IMF enables its wealthy constituency to move their money out of the country without taking a foreign-exchange loss. It makes loans to support capital flight out of domestic currencies into the dollar or other hard currencies. The IMF calls this a “stabilization” program. It is never effective in helping the debtor economy pay foreign debts out of growth. Instead, the IMF uses currency depreciation and sell-offs of public infrastructure and other assets to foreign investors after the flight capital has left and currency collapses. Wall Street speculators have sold the local currency short to make a killing, George-Soros style.
When the debtor-country currency collapses, the debts that these Latin American countries owe are in dollars, and now have to pay much more in their own currency to carry and pay off these debts. We’re talking about enormous penalty rates in domestic currency for these countries to pay foreign-currency debts – basically taking on to finance a non-development policy and to subsidize capital flight when that policy “fails” to achieve its pretended objective of growth.
All hyperinflations of Latin America – Chile early on, like Germany after World War I – come from trying to pay foreign debts beyond the ability to be paid. Local currency is thrown onto the foreign-exchange market for dollars, lowering the exchange rate. That increases import prices, raising a price umbrella for domestic products.
A really functional and progressive international monetary fund that would try to help countries develop would say: “Okay, banks and we (the IMF) have made bad loans that the country can’t pay. And the World Bank has given it bad advice, distorting its domestic development to serve foreign customers rather than its own growth. So we’re going to write down the loans to the ability to be paid.” That’s what happened in 1931, when the world finally stopped German reparations payments and Inter-Ally debts to the United States stemming from World War I.
Instead, the IMF says just the opposite: It acts to prevent any move by other countries to bring the debt volume within the ability to be paid. It uses debt leverage as a way to control the monetary lifeline of financially defeated debtor countries. So if they do something that U.S. diplomats don’t approve of, it can pull the plug financially, encouraging a run on their currency if they act independently of the United States instead of falling in line. This control by the U.S. financial system and its diplomacy has been built into the world system by the IMF and the World Bank claiming to be international instead of an expression of specifically U.S. New Cold War nationalism.
BONNIE FAULKNER: How do exchange rates contribute to capital flight?
MICHAEL HUDSON: It’s not the exchange rate that contributes. Suppose that you’re a millionaire, and you see that your country is unable to balance its trade under existing production patterns. The money that the government has under control is pesos, escudos, cruzeiros or some other currency, not dollars or euros. You see that your currency is going to go down relative to the dollar, so you want to get our money out of the country to preserve your purchasing power.
This has long been institutionalized. By 1990, for instance, Latin American countries had defaulted so much in the wake of the Mexico defaults in 1982 that I was hired by Scudder Stevens, to help start a Third World Bond Fund (called a “sovereign high-yield fund”). At the time, Argentina and Brazil were running such serious balance-of-payments deficits that they were having to pay 45 percent per year interest, in dollars, on their dollar debt. Mexico, was paying 22.5 percent on its tesobonos.
Scudders’ salesmen went around to the United States and tried to sell shares in the proposed fund, but no Americans would buy it, despite the enormous yields. They sent their salesmen to Europe and got a similar reaction. They had lost their shirts on Third World bonds and couldn’t see how these countries could pay.
Merrill Lynch was the fund’s underwriter. Its office in Brazil and in Argentina proved much more successful in selling investments in Scudder’s these offshore fund established in the Dutch West Indies. It was an offshore fund, so Americans were not able to buy it. But Brazilian and Argentinian rich families close to the central bank and the president became the major buyers. We realized that they were buying these funds because they knew that their government was indeed going to pay their stipulated interest charges. In effect, the bonds were owed ultimately to themselves. So these Yankee dollar bonds were being bought by Brazilians and other Latin Americans as a vehicle to move their money out of their soft local currency (which was going down), to buy bonds denominated in hard dollars.
BONNIE FAULKNER: If wealthy families from these countries bought these bonds denominated in dollars, knowing that they were going to be paid off, who was going to pay them off? The country that was going broke?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, countries don’t pay; the taxpayers pay, and in the end, labor pays. The IMF certainly doesn’t want to make its wealthy client oligarchies pay. It wants to squeeze ore economic surplus out of the labor force. So countries are told that the way they can afford to pay their enormously growing dollar-denominated debt is to lower wages even more.
Currency depreciation is an effective way to do this, because what is devalued is basically labor’s wages. Other elements of exports have a common world price: energy, raw materials, capital goods, and credit under the dollar-centered international monetary system that the IMF seeks to maintain as a financial strait jacket.
According to the IMF’s ideological models, there’s no limit to how far you can lower wages by enough to make labor competitive in producing exports. The IMF and World Bank thus use junk economics to pretend that the way to pay debts owed to the wealthiest creditors and investors is to lower wages and impose regressive excise taxes, to impose special taxes on necessities that labor needs, from food to energy and basic services supplied by public infrastructure.
BONNIE FAULKNER: So you’re saying that labor ultimately has to pay off these junk bonds?
MICHAEL HUDSON: That is the basic aim of IMF. I discuss its fallacies in my Trade Development and Foreign Debt, which is the academic sister volume to Super Imperialism. These two books show that the World Bank and IMF were viciously anti-labor from the very outset, working with domestic elites whose fortunes are tied to and loyal to the United States.
BONNIE FAULKNER: With regard to these junk bonds, who was it or what entity…
MICHAEL HUDSON: They weren’t junk bonds. They were called that because they were high-interest bonds, but they weren’t really junk because they actually were paid. Everybody thought they were junk because no American would have paid 45 percent interest. Any country that really was self-reliant and was promoting its own economic interest would have said, “You banks and the IMF have made bad loans, and you’ve made them under false pretenses – a trade theory that imposes austerity instead of leading to prosperity. We’re not going to pay.” They would have seized the capital flight of their comprador elites and said that these dollar bonds were a rip-off by the corrupt ruling class.
The same thing happened in Greece a few years ago, when almost all of Greece’s foreign debt was owed to Greek millionaires holding their money in Switzerland. The details were published in the “Legarde List.” But the IMF said, in effect that its loyalty was to the Greek millionaires who ha their money in Switzerland. The IMF could have seized this money to pay off the bondholders. Instead, it made the Greek economy pay. It found that it was worth wrecking the Greek economy, forcing emigration and wiping out Greek industry so that French and German bondholding banks would not have to take a loss. That is what makes the IMF so vicious an institution.
BONNIE FAULKNER: So these loans to foreign countries that were regarded as junk bonds really weren’t junk, because they were going to be paid. What group was it that jacked up these interest rates to 45 percent?
MICHAEL HUDSON: The market did. American banks, stock brokers and other investors looked at the balance of payments of these countries and could not see any reasonable way that they could pay their debts, so they were not going to buy their bonds. No country subject to democratic politics would have paid debts under these conditions. But the IMF, U.S. and Eurozone diplomacy overrode democratic choice.
Investors didn’t believe that the IMF and the World Bank had such a strangle hold over Latin American, Asian, and African countries that they could make the countries act in the interest of the United States and the cosmopolitan finance capital, instead of in their own national interest. They didn’t believe that countries would commit financial suicide just to pay their wealthy One Percent.
They were wrong, of course. Countries were quite willing to commit economic suicide if their governments were dictatorships propped up by the United States. That’s why the CIA has assassination teams and actively supports these countries to prevent any party coming to power that would act in their national interest instead of in the interest of a world division of labor and production along the lines that the U.S. planners want for the world. Under the banner of what they call a free market, you have the World Bank and the IMF engage in central planning of a distinctly anti-labor policy. Instead of calling them Third World bonds or junk bonds, you should call them anti-labor bonds, because they have become a lever to impose austerity throughout the world.
BONNIE FAULKNER: Well, that makes a lot of sense, Michael, and answers a lot of the questions I’ve put together to ask you. What about Puerto Rico writing down debt? I thought such debts couldn’t be written down.
MICHAEL HUDSON: That’s what they all said, but the bonds were trading at about 45 cents on the dollar, the risk of their not being paid. The Wall Street Journal on June 17, reported that unsecured suppliers and creditors of Puerto Rico, would only get nine cents on the dollar. The secured bond holders would get maybe 65 cents on the dollar.
The terms are being written down because it’s obvious that Puerto Rico can’t pay, and that trying to do so is driving the population to move out of Puerto Rico to the United States. If you don’t want Puerto Ricans to act the same way Greeks did and leave Greece when their industry and economy was shut down, then you’re going to have to provide stability or else you’re going to have half of Puerto Rico living in Florida.
BONNIE FAULKNER: Who wrote down the Puerto Rican debt?
MICHAEL HUDSON: A committee was appointed, and it calculated how much Puerto Rico can afford to pay out of its taxes. Puerto Rico is a U.S. dependency, that is, an economic colony of the United States. It does not have domestic self-reliance. It’s the antithesis of democracy, so it’s never been in charge of its own economic policy and essentially has to do whatever the United States tells it to do. There was a reaction after the hurricane and insufficient U.S. support to protect the island and the enormous waste and corruption involved in the U.S. aid. The U.S. response was simply: “We won you fair and square in the Spanish-American war and you’re an occupied country, and we’re going to keep you that way.” Obviously this is causing a political resentment.
BONNIE FAULKNER: You’ve already touched on this, but why has the World Bank traditionally been headed by a U.S. secretary of defense?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Its job is to do in the financial sphere what, in the past, was done by military force. The purpose of a military conquest is to take control of foreign economies, to take control of their land and impose tribute. The genius of the World Bank was to recognize that it’s not necessary to occupy a country in order to impose tribute, or to take over its industry, agriculture and land. Instead of bullets, it uses financial maneuvering. As long as other countries play an artificial economic game that U.S. diplomacy can control, finance is able to achieve today what used to require bombing and loss of life by soldiers.
In this case the loss of life occurs in the debtor countries. Population growth shrinks, suicides go up. The World Bank engages in economic warfare that is just as destructive as military warfare. At the end of the Yeltsin period Russia’s President Putin said that American neoliberalism destroyed more of Russia’s population than did World War II. Such neoliberalism, which basically is the doctrine of American supremacy and foreign dependency, is the policy of the World Bank and IMF.
BONNIE FAULKNER: Why has World Bank policy since its inception been to provide loans for countries to devote their land to export crops instead of giving priority to feeding themselves? And if this is the case, why do countries want these loans?
MICHAEL HUDSON: One constant of American foreign policy is to make other countries dependent on American grain exports and food exports. The aim is to buttress America’s agricultural trade surplus. So the first thing that the World Bank has done is not to make any domestic currency loans to help food producers. Its lending has steered client countries to produce tropical export crops, mainly plantation crops that cannot be grown in the United States. Focusing on export crops leads client countries to become dependent on American farmers – and political sanctions.
In the 1950s, right after the Chinese revolution, the United States tried to prevent China from succeeding by imposing grain export controls to starve China into submission by putting sanctions on exports. Canada was the country that broke these export controls and helped feed China.
The idea is that if you can make other countries export plantation crops, the oversupply will drive down prices for cocoa and other tropical products, and they won’t feed themselves. So instead of backing family farms like the American agricultural policy does, the World Bank backed plantation agriculture. In Chile, which has the highest natural supply of fertilizer in the world from its guano deposits, exports guano instead of using it domestically. It also has the most unequal land distribution, blocking it from growing its own grain or food crops. It’s completely dependent on the United States for this, and it pays by exporting copper, guano and other natural resources.
The idea is to create interdependency – one-sided dependency on the U.S. economy. The United States has always aimed at being self-sufficient in its own essentials, so that no other country can pull the plug on our economy and say, “We’re going to starve you by not feeding you.” Americans can feed themselves. Other countries can’t say, “We’re going to let you freeze in the dark by not sending you oil,” because America’s independent in energy. But America can use the oil control to make other countries freeze in the dark, and it can starve other countries by food-export sanctions.
So the idea is to give the United States control of the key interconnections of other economies, without letting any country control something that is vital to the working of the American economy.
There’s a double standard here. The United States tells other countries: “Don’t do as we do. Do as we say.” The only way it can enforce this is by interfering in the politics of these countries, as it has interfered in Latin America, always pushing the right wing. For instance, when Hillary’s State Department overthrew the Honduras reformer who wanted to undertake land reform and feed the Hondurans, she said: “This person has to go.” That’s why there are so many Hondurans trying to get into the United States now, because they can’t live in their own country.
The effect of American coups is the same in Syria and Iraq. They force an exodus of people who no longer can make a living under the brutal dictatorships supported by the United States to enforce this international dependency system.
BONNIE FAULKNER: So when I asked you why countries would want these loans, I guess you’re saying that they wouldn’t, and that’s why the U.S. finds it necessary to control them politically.
MICHAEL HUDSON: That’s a concise way of putting it Bonnie.
BONNIE FAULKNER: Why are World Bank loans only in foreign currency, not in the domestic currency of the country to which it is lending?
MICHAEL HUDSON: That’s a good point. A basic principle should be to avoid borrowing in a foreign currency. A country can always pay the loans in its own currency, but there’s no way that it can print dollars or euros to pay loans denominated in these foreign currencies.
Making the dollar central forces other countries to interface with the U.S. banking system. So if a country decides to go its own way, as Iran did in 1953 when it wanted to take over its oil from British Petroleum (or Anglo Iranian Oil, as it was called back then), the United States can interfere and overthrow it. The idea is to be able to use the banking system’s interconnections to stop payments from being made.
After America installed the Shah’s dictatorship, they were overthrown by Khomeini, and Iran had run up a U.S. dollar debt under the Shah. It had plenty of dollars. I think Chase Manhattan was its paying agent. So when its quarterly or annual debt payment came due, Iran told Chase to draw on its accounts and pay the bondholders. But Chase took orders from the State Department or the Defense Department, I don’t know which, and refused to pay. When the payment was not made, America and its allies claimed that Iran was in default. They demanded the entire debt to be paid, as per the agreement that the Shah’s puppet government had signed. America simply grabbed the deposits that Iran had in the United States. This is the money that was finally returned to Iran without interest under the agreement of 2016.
America was able to grab all of Iran’s foreign exchange just by the banks interfering. The CIA has bragged that it can do the same thing with Russia. If Russia does something that U.S. diplomats don’t like, the U.S. can use the SWIFT bank payment system to exclude Russia from it, so the Russian banks and the Russian people and industry won’t be able to make payments to each other.
This prompted Russia to create its own bank-transfer system, and is leading China, Russia, India and Pakistan to draft plans to de-dollarize.
BONNIE FAULKNER: I was going to ask you, why would loans in a country’s domestic currency be preferable to the country taking out a loan in a foreign currency? I guess you’ve explained that if they took out a loan in a domestic currency, they would be able to repay it.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Yes.
BONNIE FAULKNER: Whereas a loan in a foreign currency would cripple them.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Yes. You can’t create the money, especially if you’re running a balance of payments deficit and if U.S. foreign policy forces you into deficit by having someone like George Soros make a run on your currency. Look at the Asia crisis in 1997. Wall Street funds bet against foreign currencies, driving them way down, and then used the money to pick up industry cheap in Korea and other Asian countries. This was also done to Russia’s ruble. The only country that avoided this was Malaysia, under Mohamed Mahathir, by using capital controls. Malaysia is an object lesson in how to prevent a currency flight.
But for Latin America and other countries, much of their foreign debt is held by their own ruling class. Even though it’s denominated in dollars, Americans don’t own most of this debt. It’s their own ruling class. The IMF and World Bank dictate tax policy to Latin America – to un-tax wealth and shift the burden onto labor. Client kleptocracies take their money and run, moving it abroad to hard currency areas such as the United States, or at least keeping it in dollars in offshore banking centers instead of reinvesting it to help the country catch up by becoming independent agriculturally, in energy, finance and other sectors.
BONNIE FAULKNER: You say that: “While U.S. agricultural protectionism has been built into the postwar global system at its inception, foreign protectionism is to be nipped in the bud.” How has U.S. agricultural protectionism been built into the postwar global system?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Under Franklin Roosevelt the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 called for price supports for crops so that farmers could earn enough to invest in equipment and seeds. The Agriculture Department was a wonderful department in spurring new seed varieties, agricultural extension services, marketing and banking services. It provided public support so that productivity in American agriculture from the 1930s to ‘50s was higher over a prolonged period than that of any other sector in history.
But in shaping the World Trade Organization’s rules, the United States said that all countries had to promote free trade and could not have government support, except for countries that already had it. We’re the only country that had it. That’s what’s called “grandfathering”. The Americans said: “We already have this program on the books, so we can keep it. But no other country can succeed in agriculture in the way that we have done. You must keep your agriculture backward, except for the plantation crops and growing crops that we can’t grow in the United States.” That’s what’s so evil about the World Bank’s development plan.
BONNIE FAULKNER: According to your book: “Domestic currency is needed to provide price supports and agricultural extension services such as have made U.S. agriculture so productive.” Why can’t infrastructure costs be subsidized to keep down the economy’s overall cost structure if IMF loans are made in foreign currency?
MICHAEL HUDSON: If you’re a farmer in Brazil, Argentina or Chile, you’re doing business in domestic currency. It doesn’t help if somebody gives you dollars, because your expenses are in domestic currency. So if the World Bank and the IMF can prevent countries from providing domestic currency support, that means they’re not able to give price supports or provide government marketing services for their agriculture.
America is a mixed economy. Our government has always subsidized capital formation in agriculture and industry, but it insists that other countries are socialist or communist if they do what the United States is doing and use their government to support the economy. So it’s a double standard. Nobody calls America a socialist country for supporting its farmers, but other countries are called socialist and are overthrown if they attempt land reform or attempt to feed themselves.
This is what the Catholic Church’s Liberation Theology was all about. They backed land reform and agricultural self-sufficiency in food, realizing that if you’re going to support population growth, you have to support the means to feed it. That’s why the United States focused its assassination teams on priests and nuns in Guatemala and Central America for trying to promote domestic self-sufficiency.
BONNIE FAULKNER: If a country takes out an IMF loan, they’re obviously going to take it out in dollars. Why can’t they take the dollars and convert them into domestic currency to support local infrastructure costs?
MICHAEL HUDSON: You don’t need a dollar loan to do that. Now were getting in to MMT. Any country can create its own currency. There’s no reason to borrow in dollars to create your own currency. You can print it yourself or create it on your computers.
BONNIE FAULKNER: Well, exactly. So why don’t these countries simply print up their own domestic currency?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Their leaders don’t want to be assassinated. More immediately, if you look at the people in charge of foreign central banks, almost all have been educated in the United States and essentially brainwashed. It’s the mentality of foreign central bankers. The people who are promoted are those who feel personally loyal to the United States, because they that that’s how to get ahead. Essentially, they’re opportunists working against the interests of their own country. You won’t have socialist central bankers as long as central banks are dominated by the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements.
BONNIE FAULKNER: So we’re back to the main point: The control is by political means, and they control the politics and the power structure in these countries so that they don’t rebel.
MICHAEL HUDSON: That’s right. When you have a dysfunctional economic theory that is destructive instead of productive, this is never an accident. It is always a result of junk economics and dependency economics being sponsored. I’ve talked to people at the U.S. Treasury and asked why they all end up following the United States. Treasury officials have told me: “We simply buy them off. They do it for the money.” So you don’t need to kill them. All you need to do is find people corrupt enough and opportunist enough to see where the money is, and you buy them off.
BONNIE FAULKNER: You write that “by following U.S. advice, countries have left themselves open to food blackmail.” What is food blackmail?
MICHAEL HUDSON: If you pursue a foreign policy that we don’t like—for instance, if you trade with Iran, which we’re trying to smash up to grab its oil—we’ll impose financial sanctions against you. We won’t sell you food, and you can starve. And because you’ve followed World Bank advice and not grown your own food, you will starve, because you’re dependent on us, the United States and our Free WorldÓ allies. Canada will no longer follow its own policy independently of the United States, as it did with China in the 1950s when it sold it grain. Europe also is falling in line with U.S. policy.
BONNIE FAULKNER: You write that: “World Bank administrators demand that loan recipients pursue a policy of economic dependency above all on the United States as food supplier.” Was this done to support U.S. agriculture? Obviously it is, but were there other reasons as well?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Certainly the agricultural lobby was critical in all of this, and I’m not sure at what point this became thoroughly conscious. I knew some of the World Bank planners, and they had no anticipation that this dependency would be the result. They believed the free-trade junk economics that’s taught in the schools’ economics departments and for which Nobel prizes are awarded.
When we’re dealing with economic planners, we’re dealing with tunnel-visioned people. They stayed in the discipline despite its unreality because they sort of think that abstractly it makes sense. There’s something autistic about most economists, which is why the French had their non-autistic economic site for many years. The mentality at work is that every country should produce what it’s best at – not realizing that nations also need to be self-sufficient in essentials, because we’re in a real world of economic and military warfare.
BONNIE FAULKNER: Why does the World Bank prefer to perpetrate world poverty instead of adequate overseas capacity to feed the peoples of developing countries?
MICHAEL HUDSON: World poverty is viewed as solution, not a problem. The World Bank thinks of poverty as low-priced labor, creating a competitive advantage for countries that produce labor-intensive goods. So poverty and austerity for the World Bank and IMF is an economic solution that’s built into their models. I discuss these in my Trade, Development and Foreign Debt book. Poverty is to them the solution, because it means low-priced labor, and that means higher profits for the companies bought out by U.S., British, and European investors. So poverty is part of the class war: profits versus poverty.
BONNIE FAULKNER: In general, what is U.S. food imperialism? How would you characterize it?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Its aim is to make America the producer of essential foods and other countries producing inessential plantation crops, while remaining dependent on the United States for grain, soy beans and basic food crops.
BONNIE FAULKNER: Does World Bank lending encourage land reform in former colonies?
MICHAEL HUDSON: No. If there is land reform, the CIA sends its assassination teams in and you have mass murder, as you had in Guatemala, Ecuador, Central America and Columbia. The World Bank is absolutely committed against land reform. When the Forgash Plan for a World Bank for Economic Acceleration was proposed in the 1950s to emphasize land reform and local-currency loans, a Chase Manhattan economist to whom the plan was submitted warned that every country that had land reform turned out to be anti-American. That killed any alternative to the World Bank.
BONNIE FAULKNER: Does the World Bank insist on client governments privatizing their public domain? If so, why, and what is the effect?
MICHAEL HUDSON: It does indeed insist on privatization, pretending that this is efficient. But what it privatizes are natural monopolies – the electrical system, the water system and other basic needs. Foreigners take over, essentially finance them with foreign debt, build the foreign debt that they build into the cost structure, and raise the cost of living and doing business in these countries, thereby crippling them economically. The effect is to prevent them from competing with the United States and its European allies.
BONNIE FAULKNER: Would you say then that it is mainly America that has been aided, not foreign economies that borrow from the World Bank?
MICHAEL HUDSON: That’s why the United States is the only country with veto power in the IMF and World Bank – to make sure that what you just described is exactly what happens.
BONNIE FAULKNER: Why do World Bank programs accelerate the exploitation of mineral deposits for use by other nations?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Most World Bank loans are for transportation, roads, harbor development and other infrastructure needed to export minerals and plantation crops. The World Bank doesn’t make loans for projects that help the country develop in its own currency. By making only foreign currency loans, in dollars or maybe euros now, the World Bank says that its clients have to repay by generating foreign currency. The only way they can repay the dollars spent on American engineering firms that have built their infrastructure is to export – to earn enough dollars to pay back for the money that the World Bank or IMF have lent.
This is what John Perkins’ book about being an economic hit man for the World Bank is all about. He realized that his job was to get countries to borrow dollars to build huge projects that could only be paid for by the country exporting more – which required breaking its labor unions and lowering wages so that it could be competitive in the race to the bottom that the World Bank and IMF encourage.
BONNIE FAULKNER: You also point out in Super Imperialism that mineral resources represent diminishing assets, so these countries that are exporting mineral resources are being depleted while the importing countries aren’t.
MICHAEL HUDSON: That’s right. They’ll end up like Canada. The end result is going to be a big hole in the ground. You’ve dug up all your minerals, and in the end you have a hole in the ground and a lot of the refuse and pollution – the mining slag and what Marx called the excrements of production.
This is not a sustainable development. The World Bank only promotes the U.S. pursuit of sustainable development. So naturally, they call their “Development,” but their focus is on the United States, not the World Bank’s client countries.
BONNIE FAULKNER: When Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire was originally published in 1972, how was it received?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Very positively. It enabled my career to take off. I received a phone call a month later by someone from the Bank of Montreal saying they had just made $240 million on the last paragraph of my book. They asked what it would cost to have me come up and give a lecture. I began lecturing once a month at $3,500 a day, moving up to $6,500 a day, and became the highest-paid per diem economist on Wall Street for a few years.
I was immediately hired by the Hudson Institute to explain Super Imperialism to the Defense Department. Herman Kahn said I showed how U.S. imperialism ran rings around European imperialism. They gave the Institute an $85,000 grant to have me go to the White House in Washington to explain how American imperialism worked. The Americans used it as a how-to-do-it book.
The socialists, whom I expected to have a response, decided to talk about other than economic topics. So, much to my surprise, it became a how-to-do-it book for imperialists. It was translated by, I think, the nephew of the Emperor of Japan into Japanese. He then wrote me that the United States opposed the book being translated into Japanese. It later was translated. It was received very positively in China, where I think it has sold more copies than in any other country. It was translated into Spanish, and most recently it was translated into German, and German officials have asked me to come and discuss it with them. So the book has been accepted all over the world as an explanation of how the system works.
BONNIE FAULKNER: In closing, do you really think that the U.S. government officials and others didn’t understand how their own system worked?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Many might not have understood in 1944 that this would be the consequence. But by the time 50 years went by, you had an organization called “Fifty Years Is Enough.” And by that time everybody should have understood. By the time Joe Stiglitz became the World Bank’s chief economist, there was no excuse for not understanding how the system worked. He was amazed to find that indeed it didn’t work as advertised, and resigned. But he should have known at the very beginning what it was all about. If he didn’t understand how it was until he actually went to work there, you can understand how hard it is for most academics to get through the vocabulary of junk economics, the patter-talk of free trade and free markets to understand how exploitative and destructive the system is.
BONNIE FAULKNER: Michael Hudson, thank you very much.
MICHAEL HUDSON: It’s always good to be here, Bonnie. I’m glad you ask questions like these.
I’ve been speaking with Dr. Michael Hudson. Today’s show has been: The IMF and World Bank: Partners in Backwardness. Dr. Hudson is a financial economist and historian. He is president of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trend, a Wall Street financial analyst and Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. His 1972 book, Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire, a critique of how the United States exploited foreign economies through the IMF and World Bank, the subject of today’s broadcast, is posted in PDF format on his website at michael-hudson.com. He is also author of Trade, Development and Foreign Debt, which is the academic sister volume to Super Imperialism. Dr. Hudson acts as an economic advisor to governments worldwide on finance and tax law. Visit his website at michael-hudson.com.
Guns and Butter is produced by Bonnie Faulkner, Yarrow Mahko and Tony Rango. Visit us at gunsandbutter.org to listen to past programs, comment on shows, or join our email list to receive our newsletter that includes recent shows and updates. Email us at faulkner@gunsandbutter.org. Follow us on Twitter at #gandbradio.
Notes
[1] C. L. R. James and Revolutionary Marxism: Selected Writings, 1939-49 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 1994), pp. 133f.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
Holy Cow! This was published on June 26, and nobody has commented on this? This is one of the best interviews I’ve ever heard. The UNZ readership is obviously hopeless and is as intellectually vapid as it appears in most of the comments I’ve read.
Very complicated jewing.
“The Confessions of An Economic Hitman,” come to mind.
The nose meets with the foreign nation, offers “Funding to finance infrastructure.”
Nation says yes, takes the money, has to do what the nose says from then on.
Nation says no, fuck you nose. Nose sends in the jackals to overthrow the government.
Nose always wins because nose has no scruples.
Note to low voltage….the comments at UNZ are probably some of the biggest brained comments you will ever see. Most other sites have been jewed beyond recognition.
Hudson writes as it the Wall St banks function as a homunculus pulling the strings of the US in accordance with a master plan for its own benefit. However, it is interesting that he ends with an account of how the US bankers paid him to explain to them the mechanics of how they went about looting the wealth of the world. So it would seem that they did not understand what they were doing, and consequently could hardly have been as calculating as he makes them sound. These kinds of large scale complex systems have emergent qualities such that they run without the participants being in control. One would think that the nation-state is an example of such a system.
Unfortunately Hudson is a thoroughgoing internationalist who cannot see anything but venal elites who are the same the world over. For example he thinks that Puerto Ricans leaving for the US is something that US bankers are behind. While debt is doubtles part of it, and there was a hurricane, there is an global exodus underway, and development economist Paul Collier who has first hand knowledge of Africa has pointed out, migration will accelerate as people can afford to leave their country. Puerto Rico being a place that natives would uniformly prefer to America is a challenging concept, but from Hudson’s perspective one should describe all this as if it was conscious conspiracy. Yet much of his attribution of ulterior motives behind loans is discredited by those same bankers not quite realising what they were doing. They paid him handsomely to explain it, perhaps where he got into the habit of framing his historical narratives as if they were describing the unfolding of a conscious conspiracy by and for the benefit of piratical financiers.
I have been reading some of Michael Hudson’s stuff for many years. It makes good sense. It is amazing that those actually putting into effect these policies don’t really understand how it really works. You can get his books on Kindle cheaply.
However, I think those at the IFC (the private loan sector end of the World Bank) know very well what is going on.
If you look at their current home page, you will see that they are financing the export of raw crops from Ukraine – but the shops in Ukraine are full of French cheeses, yoghurts, chocolates and so on. All the local food/beer producers have been bought out by Carlsberg, Danone etc. Part of this fantastic “deal” with Europe is that the Ukrainians can only import food products and export raw materials.
Tomorrow’s Harvests Fund Investments in Ukraine’s Farms. With crop receipts, future harvests qualify as collateral—so farms can remain productive when money is tight.
https://www.ifc.org/wps/wcm/connect/corp_ext_content/ifc_external_corporate_site/home
This must have been first published at guns and butter June 26th and on unz the evening of July 5th.
With China, Russia, and others revolting, the U.S.-Europe financial hegemony is eroding and the military threats expanding, stupidly, such as the Orange-utan’s threat of “obliteration” against Iran. Hold onto your knickers, folks, because the rebels ain’t backing down. I’m “Rootin’ for Putin.”
I haven’t had time to read that. But is it too OT to ask Michael Hudson how you would run a welfare state without modern finance capitalism? Isn’t the biggest rich bludger on the financial system by far the government?
In Australia the question looms large and uncomplicated because it’s marvellous standard of living generously spread round (ask you average fly in Chinese professional beggar) is so obviously paid for by the approx 1 per cent who more or less directly do good business with East Asia before India and the Adani mine step up to help.
The subsequent interview is also good:
De-Dollarizing the American Financial Empire – Dr. Michael Hudson, #408
Other topics are also interesting:
Let’s save the honour of the UNZ commentariat and explain to Low Voltage that Michael Hudson is not their preferred blue-eyed boy. He has been accused of being “Communist” which, for most here, means roughly a “Democrat” or “lefty” or something they don’t understand what. Don’t laugh! I’ve read here that the Nosey US is a communist government!!!
At least the crackpots can see some light.
Back to Michael. What he proposes here is a theory of capitalist financial imperialism whereby the World Bank and IMF work in tandem to keep most of the world as colonies to extract their raw materials and expropriate their internal savings as interest for debts imposed on those countries for building the infrastructures needed for their exploitation. Well, that’s a double whammy! Those poor countries are paying for the privilege of being robbed.
Something similar was done to Russia in the 1990s, a country which did not have a foreign debt then. The Harvard boys were parachuted there with their “Manual for Plunder and Wealth Transfer”, whispered in Yeltsin’s year that large amounts of $$$ from WB and IMB were needed to restructure the Russian economy, used that cash to buy for pennies the immense industrial sector and now their friend oligarchs are reaping the profits transferred to tax havens while the Russian people were left with the burden of paying off the debt. Makes my face redder with rage!
I came across the same plunder tactics at the time when I was doing a case study on the other side of the continent, Portugal, in 1994. The Harvard boys landed there too with their other tome “How to Ruin a Country”, invited by their gang fellow, then the prime-minister, to report on the master plan for the modernization of the local economy. The report recommended that the agriculture sector should shut down completely, except wine production, and the whole territory transformed into an eucalyptus plantation. And the lackey idiots there followed the orders with the result that a country that was food self-sufficient since ever now has to import most of it.
Not only that, eucalyptus being an invasive exotic import, has destroyed the local flora and causes uncontrollable forest fires every year with great economic waste and loss of lives.
Even I, an outsider, could see that the recommendation/order was a receipt for disaster but their fellow economist gang member was the chief puppet (forgot the name).
Hudson can sling it pretty convincingly, without ever having descending to ethnic dog whistles that often haunt the subject… (that’s a nonstarter for some of the usual bunch!).
One of the best points was when he claimed:
That’s for sure. I was going to attend Econ 1B at community college, so waiting for the first class to assemble I began to read from the text finding them horribly written. I thought I’ll just ask this teacher to paraphrase one of these and see what kind of reaction I’ll get. He simply read it and recited back it verbatim with no recapitulation or sense of the obtuse style of it. So I said that’s a run on sentence stringing unnecessary modifying adjectives and convoluted complexities and the whole book is more of the same, what gives? So he said lamely: “Well, Economics isn’t for everybody”. So I marched straight back to the used book store and returned the pile of pulp and cut the class.
So, it’s pretty refreshing to hear Michael Hudson tell the truth about it, but for real, the reason Economics majors were so popular with the corps was their ability to be so adaptive, and dedicated to putting on a sham, that’s a real accomplishment. It demonstrates the main required feature that is to be able to take courses and more courses of BS and learn to talk and think and everything fully… and then regurgitate the BS and the best of ’em can go on TV! and make millions!
Obviously a failure with the renewal of coal mining, shale gaz and oil mining, pollutions, aging infrastructures, etc.
Too serious an interview to rouse the gallery, possibly.
Thanks for the transcript, it’s essential for non-native English… readers.
you read all that stupid bs???
Best article I’ve ever read on Unz.com. If you really want to understand U.S. foreign policy, Hudson is your man. Nobody comes close. Thank you for posting this eye-popping interview!
Aaah, so this explains why our cuckerment (violent death be upon them) deliberately keeps crop prices low.
Oh well, looks like that we have to wait this one out. Then organize a khmer-rogue tier genocide of everyone involved, because some things have to be punished.
Imagine the amount of beating required so that our diaspora (who recently has a tendency to be pozzed) returns to a normal way of thinking. Not to mention they probably have assimilated and have to be kidnapped (violently, of course). A lot of money is lost.
It also makes me realize why everyone tries to exterminate us from WW1 to now – we Serbians can’t be tricked that easily into national suicide
Michael Hudson says: “When we’re dealing with economic planners, we’re dealing with tunnel-visioned people. They stayed in the discipline despite its unreality because they sort of think that abstractly it makes sense. There’s something autistic about most economists, “
This just in:
‘Truth is, actually, when you’re dealing with “economic planners”, you are dealing with trained morons. 🙂
Fact:
Nearly all of modern modern mainstream economic and investment theory is based on mathematics, and the use of mathematically based models to “plan” and “predict” how the economic/financial future would supposedly work.
The only school of economic thought that has, from its beginnings in the 1870’s, systematically and vociferously rejected methodological reliance on mathematics and mathematically derived, supposedly predictive “economic” models for economic planning , is the free market Austrian school.
The Austrian school , most recently “led” by the likes of Von Mises, Hayek and Rothbard, is the only school to point out the inherent fallacies, social destructiveness and impossibility of any/all mathematical model based, centralized [via governments] economic planning [ ie the economic calculation problem : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Calculation_Problem
Centrally controlled [via governments] so-called economic planning is, coincidentally, the very same centralized economic planning that all statists/socialists/ fascists/ communists worship and insist on as being essential to their own glorious “systems”, because it would supposedly ensure economic prosperity for all, when in fact, in the real world such “planning” only ensures the exact opposite, increased poverty for the masses , as history very clearly demonstrates whenever/wherever wholesale central economic planning via governments is enforced.
Regards, onebornfree
Recommended reading: “The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science” by Ludwig von Mises : https://mises.org/files/ultimate-foundation-economic-sciencepdf-0
where can one find an amerikun english translation of this rant?
Hudson “… If there is land reform , the CIA sends in its assassination teams and you have mass murder , as you had in Guatemala , Ecuador , Columbia …” If only Americans knew what their country was up to , however they are controlled and kept in the dark by the propaganda and lies spewed by the mass media which itself is controlled by the CFR and other such agencies of the pathocracy .
October 23, 2008: A Day that Should Live in Infamy:
Video Link
Alan Greenspan: “I do not understand how it happened . . .”
Waxman: “Do you feel that your ideology caused you to decide the way you did?”
Greenspan: “I found a flaw in the model that I perceived was a critical functioning structure of how the world works. I was shocked because I’d been going for 40 years, with considerable evidence, on the perception that it was working very well.”
https://www.c-span.org/video/?281958-1/federal-regulation-financial-markets
—
Q: “When does debt become a concern?”
Greenspan: “Sooner rather than later, but only when consequences begin to emerge (will people take notice) because the political system does not respond when confronted with the choice of cutting spending or increasing taxes . . .”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02r-HxzNNNU
Video Link
Bankers Hate Peace
The SECOND BANK OF THE UNITED STATES was chartered in 1816 for a term of 20 years
The time limitation reflected the concerns of many in Congress about the concentration of financial power in a private corporation. The Bank of the United States was a depository for federal funds and paid national debts, but it was answerable only to its directors and stockholders and not to the electorate.
http://www.ushistory.org/us/24d.asp
Jan 7, 2017 We’re ALL Debt SLAVES – Here’s Why
Video Link
The Global Debt Clock
Our interactive overview of government debt across the planet. The clock is ticking. Every second, it seems, someone in the world takes on more debt.
http://www.economist.com/content/global_debt_clock
Indeed it is puzzling to see no comments on this highly informative interview with Dr. Hudson whose book ” killing the Host” is one that dwarfed any economics book I had read including Joseph Stiglitz’ ” The Price of Inequality”.
That people are generally more interested in political rather than economic issues is proof that people fail to understand that the primary aim of politics is economics and the distribution of the economic pie. The misery that the United States economic policies have brought upon the world as well as its own population makes it clear that it is a government by the 1%, for the 1%.
If people have still not understood this sorry state of affairs despite all the misery in the world and in America where 43% of families cannot secure $ 400 for an emergency and where close to 78% live paycheque to paycheque, what then would make them grasp the futility of the current system of governance called “representative democracy” short of a famine. Until such a calamity materialises, the sheeple will go about their voting routine while allowing the elite to play their games of divide and conquer.
I will use hubris and answer in Michael’s stead: (Michael may disagree and he can weigh in if so.)
Assumptions and definitions:
Mixed economy = Welfare State.
Finance Capitalism = Channeling of Corporate Bank Credit into finance sectors. Finance then controls industry.
Industrial Capitalism = Channeling of State Credit into Industry
Monetary History:
Modern examples of mixed economies using Industrial Capitalism+ Mixed Economy
1) Canada 1938-1974
2) Germany under Bismark and Hitler
3) Australia up to post WW2
4) U.S. 1868 to 1913
5) Fascist Italy
6) Japan early on (learned it from Frederick List) up until Plaza Accord.
7) China post wall coming down (1985 or so till now)
In all of the above cases, the economies were/are mixed, which means government injected state credit into industry and the commons. This is a requirement for proper running mixed economies. Mixed economies are the only kind shown by history to work.
Hudson cut his teeth on balance of payments, so he notices when things get out of balance and when “sectors” of the economy start taking for their own benefit. This is a subset of rents and usury, of which he is an expert.
The commonality of above four examples was either State Banks or Treasury injecting state credit into money supply. This type of money is under control of the polity, and is intended to CHANNEL in such a way that it has net benefit. For example, Canada building continent spanning rail and highway using debt free money, and said debt free money then going on to become wages and savings for Canada’s people. Channeling in this way, infrastructure is left behind that is net benefit to the commons.
WW2 and post WW2 order was finance capitalism inserting itself.. Finance Capitalism started and won both wars. Finance Capital (private bank credit) especially as it emanates from London and Wall Street wants to be the source of money for the world. In other words, a SECTOR of the economy wants to take rents and self aggrandize. This sector has to come under control, or it will grow like a tumor. In industrial capitalism, finance is only a small sector of the total economy, it is a tool rather than a tumor.
The answer: It is easy to run a modern “welfare state” and there are examples of it in history, but you have to cast off this hypnotic trance that corporate bank credit is the only kind of money. In the “west” we have been duped to not emit credit from Treasury or state banks, but instead we must emit at public/private debt to private banking corporations.
If you are a developing country and need some sort of new industry to develop your economy and people, then don’t fall for the siren call of “international banking.” Look behind the curtain for banker motivations, whether it be profit taking, or if they are in thrall to false ideology. For example, who are the string pullers at IMF and World Bank? This question is what Hudson is answering for us.
In industrial economies examples above, the countries did it themselves, with their own internal credit for the most part, they did not borrow from international money centers or use “foreign investment.” Japan had a policy from very early on to do it themselves, even after Commodore Perry’s black-ships attempted to open up Japan to American goods.
Hjalmar Schacht’s methods (Nazi Germany) of using trading banks especially upset the “international money centers” as said money centers were cut-out of taking usurious rents on world finance. Industrial Capitalism often enrages the finance class, who then maneuvers behind the scenes for war.
Man is a rent seeking animal, and some (((tribes))) have evolved rent taking to an art form. Usury and rents are the modern equivalent of alchemy, converting cheap lead to monetary gold. The bad guys want to steal the life energy of others, to take rents and usury. The schemers can be very sophisticated.
There are episodes, where intelligent men have controlled the polity to the benefit of their people.
So, even before Austrialia can re-introduce industrial capitalism/mixed economy, you have to identify the rent-seekers who are taking for their own self aggrandizement, and eject them from the levers of power. This will take an aware/intelligent population and controlled violence. Oligarchies never let go willingly.
Hudson does us a signal service by re-introducing classical economy and language, so people (and countries) can understand how they are being mounted and abused.
Australia can sell its minerals and resources to China, but it is better to take the increment of production for yourself. Russia circa 90’s is a good example of what not to do; to be a drawer of water and hewer of wood for some other economy. Use your own minerals, and your own labor to fashion goods and services, to benefit your own people.
All economies have to be as autarkial as possible, and only trade for those things it cannot acquire or do on their own. After international trade is done, imbalances in the form of debts have to be erased legally, or consummated with goods flow (not money flow that originates as more debt).
There are rules in monetary science, and monetary history displays those rules in abundance.
The World Bank and the IMF are traps for any country taking their loan baits and once they have taken the money they are on the path to destruction, kind of like what the zionist owned FED is doing to America and in every case the end result is destruction of the host country, that is what zionists do, they wreck and destroy both the country and humanity and zionists control the banks and money world wide!
Agree.
A great interview by Michael Hudson, which lays out in simple, uncomplicated language that even dummies should be able to understand, exactly how the post-WWII international “system” has been working. Bravo to Mr. Hudson!
Don’t expect the “U.S. patriotard” slugs, brainwashed Pavlov’s-dog “anti-socialist/anti-communist” cretins and Western “librul-progressive” degenerates to learn, understand, or care about any of this vital stuff, though…
I think the piece only appeared on unz.com within the past 24 hours.
I agree, this is an extremely informative review.
As Hudson says in the interview, the people who set up the global economic system in 1944-5 may not have fully understood the effects of what they were doing, but they had ample opportunity to observe those effects in the succeeding years.
Well said. And it was a pity that this interview wasn’t conducted by a sharp interviewing panel as if Hudson was trying to sell his lines to a well briefed Senate committee. Not that there aren’t lots of intriguing assertions to follow up, as for example, those about assassinations.
Perhaps to get something out of Hudson and to keep the brain in trim one should try reverse engineering what he would have prescribed for Bongo Bongo Land which had, say, the size and resources of Rwanda in 1965. Some might start with a large subsidised gift of condoms to the country, but their demographic problems aside, would Hudson be recommending that they wait till they have accumulated enough savings in local currency to pay for capital developments that found industries or economic activities which can grow unconfined by the country’s small size and other limitations to bring about a modern standard of living?
Economics is the modern-day equivalent of theology: the reigning ideology that justifies the existing system. That it doen’t make sense is a feature, not a bug, as it’s a good wsy to identify and select those conformists who repeat back the desired shibboleths.
If you and Hudson got into a debate the only way one of you could win would be to have the louder voice.
July 6, 2018 LIVE: D.C Free Speech Protest
Video Link
Interesting about Portugal. But I wondered about the significance of the 1190s advice. I still wonder as the articles turned up by Googling make it clear that planting eucalypts outside Australia goes back 250 years and the Scandinavians were planing blue gums for paper pulp in Portugal in a big way as far back as the 70s. Australian enthusiasm for the screw top wine bottle has probably helped destroy the possibility of reviving the cork oak forests…..
Thanks for trying. However my first reaction is that it is as if Ricardo had never lived. Do you really fancy the chances of Malawians or Luxemburgers living well under attempts at autarky?
Then there is that “debt free money” that you found in Canada building railways. My mind has been overboggled.
Oops! 1990s advice.
Yet those lazy, unproductive countries keeping voting for the leadership who are accepting these loans. As they say, ‘It beats working’.
Nothing quite like other peoples money. Communists like All Talk Hudson never hold the lazy & unproductive accountable for their behavior.
If the lazy & unproductive truly don’t like it, then they should do something about it.
What’s your point here? Do you see me as some kind of defender of the Fed, and Greenspan?
Regards onebornfree
Maybe I am missing something, but unless you are calculating markets via Basel arrangements, your analysis is ignoring a huge factor and are bound to be amiss.
A US economy is simply not the closed system it once was. The article in my view doesn’t dissect the issues as cleanly as I would like. In short managing debt financing is what the fed regulates because debt financing ensures money flow throughout the system.
I don’t buy it, but that is essentially their position, debt itself is merely a normal state that ensures economic sustenance.
Here’s a novel idea — suppose states seeking funding simply refused to take IMF/WB money. I would be curious of any such state being invaded because they chose to reject said funding or accepting said funding minus the clause to hire developed nation firms.
China is seeking to get off the dollar standard . . .
Yannis Varoufakis, have you read this great article by Michael Hudson? I’d love to see your comment.
What if political parties were held to account by keeping records of their net spending while in office? Is it any wonder that we have seen an unending parade of government debt disasters when a party in power can simply max out the credit card and then hand off the mess to responsible adults when they finally lose an election or the IMF needs to be called in? Creating a long term accounting system would force politicians to behave in long term not short term interests.
It is extremely difficult to understand how $50 trillion of global government debt could be predicated on such weak logic. Nobody would give their teenagers a credit card without some basic rules that would ensure responsible use. Populations around the world should demand that governments are held to a higher standard of accountability of their often flagrantly inappropriate spending. If this were not to be addressed, citizens might simply consider the debt that has been accumulated in their name to be essentially invalid: odious debt.
Comments about balance keeping for political parties would be greatly appreciated.
I didn’t pay attention to WHO wrote comment #15 but only to the mention of models –> “ideologies”.
October 23 should be a National Day of Remembrance — that there are forces that the majority of Americans do not understand that are shaping our financial well-being, and in at least that one instance, a dangerously flawed ideology permeated 40 years of our collective lives — and still does.
Frankly, I’m not even close to smart enough to differentiate between the Austrian model; the concepts Hudson explains (and explains well, without jargon), and whatever “ideology” informs Greenspan’s thinking.
nothing personal.
Pearls of relevant (not) wisdom from the Wizard of OT.
So far, everything I have seen that Michael Hudson has written and said (also in interviews after the 2008 fiasco) has been brilliant.
Why doesn’t any candidate give him a central policy role?
Tulsi, are you caught up on Hudson? Have you met with him?
I think one of the main takeaways is to try to force open the idea—force it on the public— that the IMF and the WB are engaging in *central planning.* As Hudson points out, a la the “Commies,” the Fascists, and others.
Regarding commenting, I don’t think this interview has been up at UR for very long. I did see it posted earlier at ICH. Speaking of commenting, even though many UR commenters are pretty lame, verging on obnoxious, many of them are not, and at least the comment function is operational and provides many additional insights. Tom Feeley unfortunately basically neutered his site by comment castration. Significantly reduced the interest of ICH.
https://www.unz.com/article/when-china-leads-the-world/?highlight=Asian+Infrastructure+Investment+Bank+%28AIIB%29+i#p_1_14
Looks like the Chinese have created a new Bretton Woods
So few are aware of this action and now you can help others know what they currently don not with this video.
Oct 1, 2016 RISE OF CHINA – China’s Yuan / RMB
Joins Elite Global Reserve Currency Club Currency’s entry into IMF basket a milestone in long march to international acceptance Renminbi joins U.S. dollar, euro, yen, and British pound in SDR basket Change represents important milestone for IMF, SDR, and China Move recognizes and reinforces China’s continuing reform progress.
Video Link
The Bank of Canada became a “Crown” bank when Ministry of Finance (MOF) acquired all the shares.
MOF would direct BOC to issue debt free into the commons. This structure ended in 1974, when our (((friends))) from BIS made a visit, and bribed parliamentarians. Canada is now debt spreading similar to the U.S. and England, and of course, Canada is becoming another failed state.
Island nations and small countries do not have the resources for autarky. Since when is that an argument against national economy and sovereignty? It is a straw man argument.
There is room in the world for small island nations and other economies to receive material resources from resource rich zones. Do you think Africa, with its “human capital” will ever be able to use its material properly?
Your type of thinking gives cover and sanction for the “international” as if all nations are to be subsumed under one world government, to then protect the small and defenseless. When in reality, the one world government is a jack boot on the neck of humanity forever.
The World Bank, IMF, as well as the US Federal Reserve, the ECB and many more national central banks, are all privately owned, and the ownership heirarchy traces back to the same group of people.
These people are the beneficiaries of the operation, not the US. We are just one of their victims. Our role in their financial empire is to fight their wars of colonial expansion for them, and pick up the tab for the privilege.
For more info see: “All Wars are Bankers’ Wars” by Mike Rivero
Video Link
You need to understand that in America there is and was not a single elite consensus or cabal which controls everything–control is at the highest levels only. See Carl Oglesby or Carroll Quigley, they explain how America since the end of WWII had been led by “the eastern establishment” which are the old money dynastic families connected to the big banking, wall street, big oil, elites (Rockefeller-Morgan-Kuhn Loeb-Brown Brothers Harriman Bush-etc) That was the group which set up the system to take over the world which is talked about above. There arose another political group in America to challenge that group–they were newer money based more in Texas, California, Florida and the west in general. They made fortunes in real estate, mining, oil and gas, aviation, military industry (Howard Hughes, H.L. Hunt, The Kochs, for examples). They were and are a different breed from the east coast establishment, these were the people who supported the John Birch Society, Barry Goldwater, and the rise of the “conservative movement” in the 1960s till today. They were the ones paying Hudson to learn “the truth” from him. See ‘The Yankee Cowboy War’ at archive dot org by Carl Oglesby for this history–Yankee in the title refer to the old money liberal eastern establishment wall street banking elites; Cowboys=conservative new money from the west and southwest. Murray Rothbard sums it up:
July 6, 2019 Obama: Front Man for Washington’s Imperialism
A current example is Jeremy Kuzmarov’s assessment of Obama, Obama’s Unending Wars. The forty-fourth president comes across as a successful front man for corporate rule and Washington’s imperialism.
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/07/06/obama-front-man-for-washingtons-imperialism/
The real problem is that money and economics are almost incomprehensible. I’m a PhD engineer and I’ve devoted some time to trying to understand it and have pretty much failed. It’s all smoke and mirrors and it is very difficult to find something concrete enough for an engineer to understand ! Perkins makes it simpler (pay off the wealthy to sell a country loans that will generate big bucks for the creditor), and so does Hudson (loan to create export but not internal development and independence) but when he starts talking about manipulation of currency values a note of uncertainty and mystery appears for me. I became interested following the 2008 crash which was attributed to derivatives, currency swaps, and other intangibles …. and now the trade is these products dominates financial markets (as I understand) to the tune of trillions of $$$ per day (e.g Derivatives traded on exchanges hit a new all-time record in 2018 of more than 30 billion contracts, according to statistics from the Futures Industry Association (FIA).) So, I don’t think this article or a similar article appearing every six months is sufficient to the subject.
Why does your heart bleed so much? Bongo Bongo land is responsible for its own destiny. Their people are sovereign and are responsible for themselves. You are not responsible for them.
Money’s true nature is law. Ergo, you don’t extend your money past your law.
In other words, you don’t extend your money past your borders. This means that nations are sovereign and independent.
This is an iron law. Predators want to crack open foreign markets through war, or other economic hitman techniques, to then put bongo bongo’s into debts, to then take their resources. It is rent seeking behavior, being clothed by fake morality.
Your altruism is misplaced. Some “tribes” of people should be living in their niche, as evolution has adapted them. This idea that they need to be yanked out of their environment to be in the first world, or that “we” have to fix their environment for them, is misplaced altruism. It is a peculiar white man’s disease, usually an implanted memory hoax from the owned media.
Who owns the media to then program people with erroneous narrative?
As an engineer, your logical mind is capable of understanding. Keep going, don’t give up.
Yes, the money power fraudsters do indeed use smoke and mirrors to confuse and obfuscate.
With regards to derivatives, they are synthetic “finance paper” or instruments that make claims on the money supply.
Most derivatives are insurance rate swaps. If you do a loop equation (you are an engineer), then the money path is from taxpayers, to municipalities, to TBTF banks. TBTF banks are often primary dealers (part of the FED system).
If interest rates go up too far, then the derivative gamble goes the other way. TBTF banks have to pay municipalities.
Municipalities in turn, took out interest rate swaps in order to protect their muni bonds, as they don’t want to go back to the voters for more money in future. The scheme is sold by wall street aligned finance as if it is insurance.
If TBTF banks end up paying municipalities (if interest rates go up and the swap reverses), then banks will do a bail in.
A bail in is the private bank SWAPPING their stock for your cash (M2 or other fungible assets held at said bank), with the promise of paying you back later.
Yes, it is a shell game. Remember this, private banksters want to own the money power, and that power includes SWAPS of unlike kinds. Swaps of unlike kinds is yet another subset of usury and rents.
Man is a rent seeking animal, and the money power must be put into a constitutional box, and then guarded by vigilant citizens with guns. The law will code for morality, and if said law doesn’t, it is easy to examine.
We see first hand what the criminal minded can do privately, as they hide in smoke filled rooms, and promulgate con’s on the unwary and trusting.
Most derivatives are some sort of paper pretending to be an asset, and also making claims.
Since we are “international” finance now, then finance claims can have a domino effect on the international banking system, causing widespread contagion.
I suspect — don’t know for sure but suspect — that it’s not nearly as mysterious as it seems.
The process is indeed complexified — just as the con man in Times Square moving the walnuts around has numerous exotic and complex moves to distract and confuse — similarly, the process is not that complicated: the best Floor Men working the bonds floor at Chicago Board of Exchange were football jocks: it takes muscle and animal spirit more than brains.
I certainly can’t figure out how to unwind the insidious process, I’m neither as smart as the King Con behind the walnut conmen nor the jocks on the CBOE, but I have to believe that exposing what is known to the extent that it is known, and gradually more and more WILL become known — will perforce shut down the crooked game and drive the conmen out of business, or at least out of business in this particular venue.
And given the ubiquity of the www, if people like Michael Hudson and the admirably disciplined Bonnie Faulkner continue to do what they do and expose the con, the next Mark will be forewarned.
Saggy says: “The real problem is that money and economics are almost incomprehensible. I’m a PhD engineer and I’ve devoted some time to trying to understand it and have pretty much failed. It’s all smoke and mirrors and it is very difficult to find something concrete enough for an engineer to understand ! “
Actually, its very easy to understand the basic principles, if you read the right books.
However, mainstream economic theory is deliberately made to be almost incomprehensible . Most of it is sheer “scientific” “egghead” gobbledygook designed to confuse the innocent layman.
A famous example of incomprehensibility is Keyne’s “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” upon which [ironically enough] most modern mainstream economic theory is based. It’s basically garbled gibberish, and deliberate obfuscation to disguise post-Marxian claptrap.
The incomprehensibility is designed to confuse the layman, not enlighten him/her. The layman is thus awed into thinking he is not intelligent enough to understand the great distinguished economist , or simply becomes bored to death, and does not pursue the matter further.
I recommend you try Henry Hazlitt’s “Economics In One Lesson” :https://fee.org/resources/economics-in-one-lesson/ , before you completely give up on the subject.
He also put together :
“The Failure of the ‘New Economics’: An Analysis of the Keynesian Fallacies”, and “The Critics of Keynesian Economics” , both excellent analyses of Keynes moronic post -Marxist blather.
Regards, onebornfree
Hudson considers Lolbertarian Austrian theory to be junk economics.
J is for Junk.
“International Monetary Fund “is just an anodyne way of saying Rothschild, as is “Federal Reserve.”
The reason that the National Socialist regime was so demonized was because its own monetary and economic policies posed a direct threat to the Rothschild City of London/Wall Street condominium.
Any country that seeks independence and sovereignty is a threat to the international bankers, because the concept of sovereignty absolutely implies monetary independence.
SolontoCroesus says: “Frankly, I’m not even close to smart enough to differentiate between the Austrian model; the concepts Hudson explains (and explains well, without jargon), and whatever “ideology” informs Greenspan’s thinking. “
Well, if you boil it all down, all you need to do to be “smart enough” to understand “the Austrian model” is to understand that the present financial system, as embodied in the Fed, is a system of legalized [ie government protected] robbery and extortion, and that the Austrian school has consistently , from its inception [1870’s], pointed out that very fact, although not quite in those terms. 🙂
This is the primary reason for the exclusion of Austrian theory from “serious” economic and financial policy discussion – its conclusions [and solutions] are too dangerous for the mainstream to consider, as the whole system as it stands depends 100% on the continuation of the legalized robbery and extortion that government protected, centralized, fractional reserve banking enables, via the deliberate creation of ever more, fake money by the Fed.
Notice how even Mr Hudson omits [ unless I missed it] directly connecting the activities of the World Bank and IMF to the Federal Reserve system – when in fact both of these organizations are mere extensions of it, and therefor of the very same legalized robbery and extortion that government protected [ie “legalized”], centralized, fractional reserve banking enables, via the Feds creation of ever more, fake money.
Regards, onebornfree
Michael Hudson is a national treasure and his Super Imperialism is a MUST READ for people who want to understand the system of international pillage by finance that is killing our planet and pillaging 99% of its inhabitants to serve the insane greed of the very few.
HOWEVER, I do have one bone to pick with this talk. Hudson describes “backing family farms” as “American agricultural policy.” My understanding is that American agricultural policy backs agribusiness industrial farming which, like industry generally, is owned by big finance, and that this policy has almost driven genuine “family farms” from the fields of America. The main beneficiaries of American agricultural exports are not American farmers, but investors in agribusiness and farm mortgages and, especially, the grain brokers, whose American market is dominated by THREE CORPORATIONS.
So I’m curious to know what Michael Hudson thinks he means when he says “backing family farms like the American agricultural policy does.”
The unconstitutional and zionist privately own FED and IRS were both fastened on America in 1913 and they can be abolished if enough Americans were to realize that we were sold out the zionist banking kabal by Wilson and a corrupt congress, we need to return to having the currency created by the US government, this is the only way we can ever be free of these zionist banking bastards who have kept us in war and in debt ever since 1913!
Either that, and then it is just one big accident that the US an EU got rich by robbing poor countries from their resources giving them loans they could never pay back, or Hudson was used as a cover-up.
Reminds me of John Rawls who was invited a number of times to the White House by Bill Clinton, to explain what a ‘juist society’ would look like. Bill really wanted to know this you know: John Rawls explained all about what just was. And then Bill introduced NAFTA.
C/ you are stupid to think that the government is stupid. The government is very clever, and succesful in its cleverniss as Michael Hudson just showed here
Lolbertarianism is junk economics because it doesn’t understand debt mechanics, it doesn’t understand rents, it doesn’t understand usury, it doesn’t understand unearned income.
It also says that money is metal, and not law.
Hudson is a classical economist, which is 180 degrees at variance with Austrian economics.
That there is some overlap between the two doctrines, does not make Austrian economics accurate. A clock is correct twice per day.
A real economic doctrine is correct almost always. Monetary history is the laboratory, and classical economists don’t cherry pick history, or make up theories a-priori, to make their case.
But, I’m sure that even when corrected, you will continue to shill for Austrianism. Please consider that Rockefeller gave succor to Austrian’s when (((they))) immigrated to America.
and end up like Venezuela, Cuba or Honduras (there is a reason why people vote for ‘strong’ politicians (like Bolsonaro in Brazil) as they hope that with that vote they can prevent that their country ends up like Venezuela or Cuba)
MEFOBILLS says: “Hudson considers Lolbertarian Austrian theory to be junk economics.”
I’m not surprised 🙂 .
All that indicates to me is that he is, at the very least just another useful idiot who rails against the very monetary system he actually unknowingly endorses, if truth be told.
He appears to be entirely unaware of the fact that the Fed is a fake money creation racket that is a legally protected monopoly [via the Federal Reserve Act 1913: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Act , ], and that ultimately the World Bank and the IMF are merely extensions of the Federal Reserve’s counterfeiting system, which is “merely” a system of direct [and indirect] robbery, extortion and coercion designed to impoverish the average, all too trusting [and therefor ignorant], “common man” via the “legal” issuance of fake money
You [like most here] appear to be pretty much in the same camp as Hudson. Good luck with that.
Such is life. And so it goes….. 🙁
“Regards”, onebornfree
And taking on debt is what allows those who cannot afford whatever it is that they want to buy outright, immediately, to buy it via an extension of credit now.
I see nothing wrong with that. It allows people to make purchases now for items that they would otherwise have to save to purchase later. That’s a good deal. And of course, no one is forcing them to buy anything.
However, if those who make choices to buy ‘on credit’ by agreeing to higher interest rates then they later determine to be unreasonable then too bad. They have the purchased item, they made the choice, they should pay their bills.
Of course there’s always going to be some leftist who will say that those who make their own choices are somehow not responsible for the outcomes.
And that is indicative of so many of today’s problems, where no one is responsible for their own choices & actions, especially if you’re black or brown and whites are the ones to foot the bill in the long run.
said:
“Here’s a novel idea — suppose states seeking funding simply refused to take IMF/WB money. I would be curious of any such state being invaded because they chose to reject said funding or accepting said funding minus the clause to hire developed nation firms.”
Indeed, logic would indicate that as a course of action.
But then why would any lazy & unproductive country go to the bother when they can keep getting IMF / IMB money without ever paying it back?
I Will answer that for Yanis (as his comments cost 60 000 euro per show, even more than Hudson received to ‘explain’ his book to Wall Street, I don’t think Yanis will reply).
Yanis will fully agree with Michael Hudson and explain that it is such a ‘tragic’ accident how the worldbank and IMF work. It is not that those who work for these organisations do not know what they are doing, it is just that they cannot do anything about it, you see. Same reason why Dr Schauble could not save Greece from the EU. It could just not be done. Poor Dr Schauble!
And after Yanis explained that to you, he will dedicate this comment to the great Christine Lagarde from IMF.
Seems unbelieveable, but this is what the economic rock star did in his hundreds of pages thick book ‘adults in the room’, an inspiring book that shows that the more illogical a proposition is, the more entertaining the outcome will be!
” My understanding is that American agricultural policy backs agribusiness industrial farming which, like industry generally, is owned by big finance, and that this policy has almost driven genuine “family farms” from the fields of America. ”
Some “family farms” may actually now be basically franchise operations.
I saw a documentary on a family that ran a chicken farm for Perdue.
Well, it was actually a smallish factory farm. The “farmer” and his wife had to follow all of Perdue’s prescriptions as to exactly how to run their chicken-feeding and -fattening and I suppose -slaughtering operation. More or less like McDonald’s has very specific protocols to be followed by each one of its franchisees. Don’t get creative with toppings or serving size!!
I don’t know whether other branches of “farming” in the USA operate on such a model.
Even when an agribusiness operation is genuinely owned and run by a family (who may have hung on to their land in, say, Iowa), the *way* they are obliged to run their farm is determined not by them but by the larger agribusiness universe or even by their specific customer who buys their crop; They may, actually, be growing potatoes specifically for McDonald’s or Burger King. In addition, they must take out loans to buy certain large machinery, they must get their seeds from certain sources, etc. etc.
When it comes to independent dairy farmers, many of them have been driven out of business if they refused to use hormones to beef up milk volume. That is, if they actually had feelings of empathy for their cattle.
It would be interesting to see a technical definition of “family farm” and find out how many there are. There definitely is a movement to revive genuine farming and family farms, but if you don’t have one in your family it may be hard to purchase or lease any land that is close to markets, and get financing to get started.
Indeed not wisdom and it is odd of you to bring up the concept. Just gentle insertion into the conversation of additional detail on Portugal’s eucalypt problem which you hadn’t insisted was too OT to mention by Parfois 1.
It was you who brought up autarky.
Hudson knows that the FED is a private stock owned corporation.
If you actually listened to him and read his books you would know that.
Wikipedia is not a reliable source…
Good luck with your shilling.
Would you protect their “sovereignty” by
1. refraining from insisting on the modern world’s often arbitrary ideas of national boundaries and letting the primitives fight it out amongst themselves?
2. Keeping not only our financiers out of them but also NGOs such as the Bull and Melinda Gates Foundation – and of course Christian missionaries and George Soros?
So Mrs Lagarde will be the president of the European Union? the FED and City of London will use Europe and the French connection in Canada (Québec) to make the ”link” between Europe and Latin America (e.g. the EU Mercosur FTA with the friends of the British Chamber of commerce in Mexico). Canada, I,e, the French connection Québec will also be used to make the connection between NATO-occupied Europe (12 new NATO military bases to ”counter the Russian influence” violently or economically using the IMF) and the United States.
See the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (ERDB) site: Goldman Sachs and friends are now in Makedonia and in Kosovo with renewables such as wind farms.
Anyway, the IMF is already embedded in the Canadian dollar (the Yuan as well).
This will help the Anglo US bankers launch their ”new” US dollar integrating the Yuan, the IMF, and create their world currency and rule the world!
It is also interesting to remember the following : International Telecommunication Regulations (Dubai, 2012) Extract from the publication: Final Acts of the World Conference on International Telecommunications (Dubai, 2012) (Geneva: ITU, 2013)
3.2 Determination of the amount of payment 1/26 3.2.1 The amount of the payment in the selected currency, as determined below, shall be equivalent in value to the balance of the account.
1/27 3.2.2 If the balance of the account is expressed in the monetary unit of the IMF, the amount of the selected currency shall be determined by the relationship in effect on the day before payment, or by the latest relationship published by the IMF, between the monetary unit of the IMF and the selected currency.
1/28 3.2.3 However, if the relationship of the monetary unit of the IMF to the selected currency has not been published, the amount of the balance of account shall, at a first stage, be converted into a currency for which a relationship has been published by the IMF, using the relationship in effect on the day before payment or the latest published relationship. The amount thus obtained shall, at a second stage, be converted into the equivalent value of the selected currency, using the closing rate in effect on the day prior to payment or the most recent rate quoted on the official or generally accepted foreign-exchange market of the main financial centre of the debtor country.
International Telecommunication Regulations (Dubai, 2012)
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, the delegates of the Member States of the International Telecommunication Union named below have, on behalf of their respective competent authorities, signed one copy of the present Final Acts in the Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish languages. In case of discrepancies or dispute, the French text shall prevail. This copy shall be deposited in the archives of the Union. The Secretary-General shall forward one certified copy to each Member State of the International Telecommunication Union. Done at Dubai, 14 December 2012.
search.itu.int/history/HistoryDigitalCollectionDocLibrary/1.42.48.en.101.pdf · PDF file
International Telecommunication Regulations (Dubai, 2012) Extract from the publication: Final Acts of the World Conference on International Telecommunications (Dubai, 2012)
“Lolbertarianism is junk economics because it doesn’t understand debt mechanics, it doesn’t understand rents, it doesn’t understand usury, it doesn’t understand unearned income.
Yeah right, sure, if you say so 🙂
The very fact that you try to discredit/name-call/put down via the employment of a non-existing [ in the real world] moniker dragged from the “depths” of your own shallow imagination shows your childish ignorance , which, [ if you are in fact referring to Austrian theory] only further helps to magnify the ignorance of the rest of your statement concerning debt, rent usury etc.
The only junk I see here is you and your ignorant assertions. But that’s OK, carry on by all means ! Every now and then I need a good laugh here 🙂
“Regards”, onebornfree
I generally agree with your argument but would debate the soundness of your conclusion at the beginning that a “mixed economy” is the solution for man’s ills, unless it is qualified or quantified.
Your sample of mixed economies (say, German, Italian, Japanese) are not what one would expect of models to be followed, hence the lot of them; and in all cases, they are band-aid type economic tweaks governments implement for short periods of stress until full-fledged capitalism is restored.
You see, as we understand the world, the economic model shapes the political system (you see it more clearly than ever in US now); the more money you have the greater the political power you wield. Therefore all those “mixed economies” eventually succumbed to the inexorable law you mention on the quote above.
Even the more doctrinarian communists (e.g. Lenin, Stalin) recognized the fact that sometimes the economic system needs some adjustments (New Economic Policy) and put on that band-aid for a time but, eventually, Capitalism would resume its dominance based on the capitalist pecking order. And that’s why Stalin stopped NEP before it reached that stage.
More could be said about “mixed economy” for another occasion.
Fully agree. The Nosey USA is the best example I can think of: unproductive, lazy and the sheeple keep voting for the clowns who borrow from the Federal Reserve Bank. The last time I checked the debt is a staggering 22 trillion and you pay about 500 billion interest yearly.
Where are those revolting Americans?
Thanks Stranger for your timely reminder. Indeed, the indebtedness of the whole world ends up in the pockets of the banking cabal as an ocean of profit taking. After all, that’s why globalization is so handy and the NUSA the enforcer.
And the idiots here bleat: “Is the communists”.
He did not omit it, although it was implied rather than stated. I understood that particular connection and mentioned it in a one-paragraph abstract above. They work in “tandem” but separately to confuse/hide the connection.
Uh oh. Good article, lots of facts, critical of capitalism… brain dead right wingers don’t like facts, or criticism of their capitalist overlords.
Mr. Hudson didn’t blame the RADICAL LEFTIST COMMUNIST MARXIST JEWS! or the NIGGERS! so this goes against everything the geniuses here believe to be true.
Not good.
My ignorance isn’t shallow. Lolbertarian junk economics does not codify, define, or use the concepts I outlined above in any of its doctrine. Only classical economics has the concepts and language to properly understand political economy. Why do you think Hudson wrote a book, J is for Junk Economics. Language has been so perverted by rent seekers that there was not a common way for people to discuss things, except for talking past each other. The book reintroduces classical economics and terms/ideas people need for understanding.
Lolbertarian and randian hypnosis is dangerous. It captures the young, turns them into ideologues, and channels them into cul-de-sacs of bad thought.
Our (((tribal))) friends are masters of dialectic. You’ve been captured and ensnared.
Really? All of them were forced by war or duplicity to give up their form of economy.
Even Japan’s Industrial Capitalism post WW2, which used credit guidance windows, was undone by BOJ running a gambit against the economy with a housing bubble in the 80’s. Behind BOJ was (((Stanley Fischer))) rubbing his hands together gleefully.
In the case of WW1, it was Zionist England going berserk over Germany, because the “international” was losing control. England went bezerk also over Nazi Germany, as Germany reintroduced Industrial Capital as Reichsbank was under control of the Chancellorship.
When anybody says “capital” they need to define their terms. Capital can be plant and equipment, it can be money, and further money can be of different types.
Finance capital, especially private bank credit has different properties than other types of money such as debt free, or treasury money.
In 1926, Mussolini nationalized the private banks. Banksters who were in charge of voting stock, were swinging the economy and taking rents on the up and downswings. In other words, a small cadre of banker elites were swinging the so called free market by controlling corporate voting stock.
Fascist Italy in 1926 converted from finance capital, to industrial capital. The nature of the money itself changed. It took war to convert Italy back.
With regards to Bolsheviks, that was wall street and london stock market capital (especially Kuhn and Loeb) funding a wall street bank and inserting itself into Russia.
Then the looting began.
Classical Capitalism at work at the lower level of the pyramid, franchising. The individual or subsistence farmer is absorbed into a higher order (and pays for the privilege) whereby his production is effectively taken over and he becomes subservient to one buyer. Extending the franchise is equivalent to concentration and, once established, the franchisee (owner) is eventually taken over by a financial conglomerate.
The Hamish – blessed their souls – could teach us a few things about the meaning of independent life. And they are prospering with high fertility!
Would you please elaborate on the legal argument for calling them all “privately owned”. And if you are not referring to legal ownership would you please explain what you mean by “privately owned” and how it applies to those institutions?
I’ll oblige Wiz. Indeed Eucalyptus as well as Acacias varieties were brought to Europe quite early and, by 1850s sown in large private estates, but not in commons or crown land as plantations.
What happened in the 1990s in Portugal after the Harvard boys’ visit was a massive plantation all over the place including alluvial lands used previously as paddy fields and former nature reserves in rugged mountain regions. The local agriculture was literally decimated. First the State built the access roads, then the tree planters came in. The last I heard is most of the timber is bought by a single multinational.
What that has to do with the USSR?
If there was ever a country insulated against the international financial cabal it was the USSR. There was only one government bank and currency issuer and NO SHAREHOLDERS, domestic or international. Anybody who professes any idea about financial independence (including the multitudes who claim the Nosey FED is daylight massive robbery) should praise the Soviet banking system. But not here: they put their ideological blinkers on and all they see is BOLSHEVIKS!
Your ignorance about the USSR is shattering, to say the least.
Your telling me that at some stage Canada just printed money made my mind wander to Douglas Social Credit and my memories (I was only a young man at the time of course) of the Social Credit Party government elected in Alberta i, as I have just checked, 1935. If your mind is limbered up but not fully in gear I recommend the Wikipedia entry on Major C.H.Douglas, a Cambridge educated engineer who took a systems approach to the economy as he parted company from classical economists (though Keynes only granted him the status of private, certainly not general, in the army of heretics). Indeed I would require every Economics 101 student after the final exams to spend three days writing an assessment of Douglas’s contribution to economic thinking based on that article.
Back close to topic. Were you writing of actions taken in Canada under the influence of Social Credit doctrines?
The money men cannot control the state, they thought they had bought Caesar but were proved wrong.The stingy Averell Harriman preceded free spending (his and taxpayers’ money) Nelson Rockefeller as governor of NYC, I don’t really think they embarked on a political career for any ulterior motive. David Rockefeller was notorious for making bad loans to foreign governments, he ran Chase into the ground.
It is not really clear that the Rockefellers were very different to the Hunts, not just because of the nautical first names. The Rockefellers’ Chase were syndicator for Iran’s Eurodollar deposits 40 billion in a single year, and were a major force in getting the Shah admitted to the US, with disastrous consequences for them and America. It also drew a lot of attention to David Rockefeller, who unlike his brother avoided publicity. Different personalities.
Nelson Bunker Hunt was the richest man in the world, then Gaddafi simply nationalised Hunt’s oil field rights in Libya. Hunt later tried to corner the silver market but the US government just changed the rules on him and he lost everything.
The state can do anything it likes. It can draft you into the army and send you off to die in war. Trump was opposed by all the interests you cite, but he won because there are other powers such as the common people who sometimes show the necessary sense. With the help of banks and free trade deals China was on course to overtake America. The people bestirred themselves and the correction was made. So no, there is consensus at the highest levels as to what should be done, but the the elite can easilly be overridden when they get out of their box and start using their control for selfish class interests. That is not to say the class interests of the common people are the same as the national interest, and the bankers are just venal parasites in the way Hudson seems to suggest. No, all interests are required to have input. There are always personalities floating about to articulate criticism of the elite, and be the tribune of the people.’ Cometh the hour, cometh the man.’
What shoddy doctrine you are trying to preach? And the use of blatant lies as examples. Harriman was the son of a railways tycoon, the apex of the Capitalist class.
Besides, whether the incumbent is wealthy or not is totally irrelevant. What matters is the system, the structure where his role fits in.
The fraudulent US political system is the proof that it is dominated by the moneymen who invest in their politicians to reap the reward of policies in their favour and kickbacks in contracts and sinecures.
One has to be a malevolent liar or shameless Jewish apologist to come up with such brazen lies. The political system is so corrupt that only Zionist-approved candidates need to apply.
“However, if those who make choices to buy ‘on credit’ by agreeing to higher interest rates then they later determine to be unreasonable then too bad. They have the purchased item, they made the choice, they should pay their bills.”
Your changing the direction here. My comments are not the standard process of borrowing via fixed or variable interest rates. The real issue here as indicated by the article is essentially predatory practices on a global scale that feeds the developed world’s businesses and financial systems while keeping the borrowing nations in bondage to the same. That is a different issue, except when this happens on a scale commencerate with regional and local practices in country.
Here the financial systems have no defense, they hid those balloon payments. They manipulated the payment system. They instituted practices that disguised the actual values of homes. But that isn’t what is at play here. We are talking about a forced market global gambit in which countries in debt have few or no alternatives and the system is so bent that it bars competition for said loans. And then when loans are made they are contingent on using outside suppliers which send their profits outside of the countries, hindering growth, development and any real ability to repay the loans.
“And that is indicative of so many of today’s problems, where no one is responsible for their own choices & actions, especially if you’re black or brown and whites are the ones to foot the bill in the long run.”
I am going to eschew the office color baiting here — as inconsequential and sidelined by the fact that those populations have been held to a higher standard of accountability against there stead. But I suspect you know this and are leaning on that system to scapegoat them and defend the financial system — I am a capitalist and one aspect of capitalism that is mandatory is honest and fair dealings . . . best practices, etc.
I think the answer to your final observation rests in the cycle described in the interview and numerous complaints about the IMF and World bank practices and policies. I don’t think we are talking about lazy countries. Because those loans come with guarantees and expectations and obligations. I am surprised the article did not discuss Greece. Not taking those funds has pragmatic consequences for the state. And unless a country prepares they are overwhelmed and pressured against the same – they do have populations they have expectations.
correction: they do have populations that have expectations. failing to meet those expectations causes stress that can become unmanageable and lead to riots, political instability and eventually regime change.
Hence the value of the west’s control over both the IMF and the world bank. So if I am a head of state and I am looking down the barrel of suffering through those stressers and potential revolution and internal damage to my population against a long term financial readjustment. excuse me but laziness is not really an option. Laziness would suggest one might allow the process to play put until it reaches an equilibrium, thereby providing a state a look at it actual value as opposed to the value added on b y borrowing, funds it cannot repay because said investments flow outside the country.
I am not sure how many countries such as Greece could withstand long term rejection of borrowing m minus those extreme consequences a state seeks to avoid. Think Iran and the tightening of the country’s liquid assessts that eventually led to essential basic shortages in food and medicines – those stressers were the cause of the protests (to which the government over responded with violence which in turn eventually fueled greater protests. Any government looking down the barrel of said consequences of social disruption of such maginitude to violent revolution and internal damage —-
frankly is going to be inclined to take the money.
Interesting. People keep calling me ignorant?
Communism was imposed on Russia by the Bolsheviks, and said bolsheviks were installed by their (((cousins))), wall street capital.
I have to assume there is a rudimentary understanding of historical events among UNZ readers.
Stalin had Trotsky killed, and THEN Stalin nationalized the bank.
As an aside, unware UNZ readers may remember that a wall street bank was installed in Libya within weeks of western invasion. Pay attention to the money.
By 1944, Russian communism had morphed from being “international” and was on its way to “national.”
My ignorance of the USSR is not shattering, that is an ad-homiem intended to deflect.
Your comment about USSR new economic plan does not impress. I am going to say it again: In all cases, industrial capitalism with mixed economy NEVER FAILED DUE TO INTERNAL CONTRADICTIONS.
Marx was wrong. In all cases, it was due to malign influence by finance paying bribes or maneuvering the politics, or it due to war being imposed by external actors.
The world is not a dialectic of finance capital vs communism. There are intermediate types of economy.
Anybody who is caught up in a two pole dialectic… you are being played. The world is not black and white.
I touch on this earlier with oneborn free, who has been similarly hoaxed. His dialectic is randian austrian economics vs evil government (in his mind).
People want to pick sides, pick their team, and then demonize anybody not on their side. Reality is grey, not black and white.
Alberta’s social creditors were beaten by Mammon. (No Jews were involved – I try to be even handed. Or, at least none that I could find, but then I wasn’t there.)
However, Douglas social creditors may have had influence. One of the actions of BOC was to inject credit into households, especially teenagers.
If you were 16 you were given a monthly stipend, and you had to work or do something useful. Picking up trash along the roads, or helping a neighbor.
Douglas social credit is an excellent type of economy, and yet the people here at UNZ for the most part do not know what it is. It is also a form of sovereign money.
Canada ran a pseudo sovereign economy from 38 to 74. That had a state bank that injected debt free credit. Below is some data that might help some of you wake up and take the red pill:
____________
In Canada from 1938 to 1973 there was little to no price inflation. Canada had a sovereign-like money system, where the Crown bank spent debt free into productivity channels.
A graph of Canada’s debt position is at link below. Take note of the years in question:
Private bank emissions of credit were limited to four year loans only @ 6%. Canada’s state bank was incorporated in 1935, and became a Crown bank in 1938. What is a crown bank?
Bank of Canada (BOC) was a crown bank, meaning its stock shares were wholly held in a Trust by Minister of Finance (MOF). In other words, BOC was originally an incorporated private bank, but its shares then became wholly owned by the trust, with MOF as trustee. BOC morphed from being a private bank to a State Bank when the bank shares became owned by the public. BOC then worked for its public and not private shareholders.
It is true that this is a weak arrangement that can be easily usurped, and that is exactly what happened in 1974, when the Bank of International Settlements came along and demanded Canada return to a private credit money system.
Prior to 74, MOF would tell BOC Governor to create money debt free. This debt free would be spent by injection into the commons on productivity modes. Commons are those things that everybody uses to improve productivity for whole, like roads, rail, ports, and telecommunications.
These are things Canada did from 38 to 74: Canada’s small population of 11M built out third largest Navy in WW2 as well, by using debt free of money. In 38 Canada had only 11M people, and by 1974 they had 22M. Building out continental scale railroads, highways, waterways, and all of the other things this population did is astonishing.
Private Banks are ordered to remove their banknotes from circulation in 1945, and only use tangible bills issued by bank of Canada.
1) Almost Free Education, especially for returning WW2 Veterans. Improving labor in this way improves productivity. Colleges and Schools had their buildings built with debt free, thus lowering access costs for the general population.
2) Business loans.
3) Land Grants. (Land Grants are a way of keeping land from being grabbed by monopoly forces. This was easy in Canada given the amount of land they have.)
4) St Lawrence Seaway was dredged and improved by adding locks. (Note that Canada spends into their commons, as all governments should.) St. Lawrence Seaway is something like Panama Canal and a significant engineering feat. It allowed an inland seaway to go from Montreal to Lake Ontario, thus improving the shipment of goods and services. Ocean going vessels could then travel from the Atlantic to Great Lakes.
5) Welland Canal is another waterway link between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. It is eight locks and lifts ships 326 feet over Niagra Escarpment.
6) Trans-Canada Highway was built, about 4,000 miles.
7) Universal Health Care. Since economy was efficient, health care could be afforded. Only after 1974 did Canada’s Health Care System go bad.
8) Pensions and Direct Injections
• This is a sort of Social Credit Theory. These direct injects are debt free money being collected in taxes, and then re-spent (injected) back down into the base of the population, usually at the family level. This creates a pumping action, and the money goes on to create consumption and wealth. It also overcomes losses from waste in industry, so labor can buy their output. (Wages never equal the actual value of production as waste and overhead is captured in prices.) Canada probably did not understand that injections are proper economics -and needed, as shown by Social Credit Gap theory.
• Family Allowances: This is another direct injection, usually for kids up to age 16, about $5 in the 1960’s per month.
9) Private Banks are Restricted to four year loans only.
o This is private creation of bank credit. A four year loan at 6% interest means that the interest does not go exponential. Note: In 1974 BIS coerced and removed these restrictions, so Banker could make usurious profits. His profits are parasitical after 74, and also change the composition of Canada’s money supply, making it more bank credit and less debt free. In this case, think of the debt free money as originating not at private banks, but instead at the State Bank. This is analogous to Lincoln’s emission of Greenbacks (from Treasury) during America’s civil war.
• Canada provided housing mortgages by using TRUSTS. Trusts are a collection of people’s savings, similar to savings and loans in the U.S. at that time. Savings and loans would loan out existing money, not creating new credit. Canadian Trusts would issue a GIC, or what Americans call a CD. This CD would be for five years or so, and only have a percent or two of interest. Remember, they were loaning out existing money, not creating new credit. The interest channel would be back to the savers, and non- usurious. (Usury is a power relation, where the weak are silently robbed by predatory schemes. Usury can be taken with sophisticated monetary schemes. But, here mortgage housing loan interest payment would go to saving elderly, who would then buy the product of the young.)
o When BOC no longer had restrictions on their private banks, e.g. four year loans at 6%, this allowed Canadian private banks to directly compete with the Trusts (similar to savings and loans). Again, trusts would take existing money, what formerly was debt free, which then became people’s savings, and loan it out. When the trust loaned it out, they would add a percentage of interest, effectively a FEE. This is how money supplies should work, where the money is stored wealth and not credit.
Banks can create excess credit by loaning out many times their reserves. This allows them to create too much credit per unit time. Effectively, since they can create without limit, they were able to take over the trust industry. Banks could also issue more of their shares, to thus put more reserves in their reserve loops, to then fractional reserve much more credit. The movie “It’s a wonderful life” captures the effect of this mechanism where banks overtake savings and loans.
A major country, Canada, ran a Sovereign money economy from 1938 to 1974 to good effect.
Today, we have to listen to hypnosis at variance with actual history and reality. “There is not enough money to improve the commons, etc.” Or, we have to “borrow” the money to get things done, when history teaches us something different.
The “robbing of poor countries” and everybody else — and the destruction of western civilization from within — is a true calling of the mega-banksters and corporate filth:
https://americans4innovation.blogspot.com/2019/01/so-you-thought-rhodes-scholarships-were.html?m=1#rhodes-200-year-
Making the sausage:
Thievery of intellectual property by the scoundrels in the highest echelons of the US government:
https://americans4innovation.blogspot.com/2019/01/so-you-thought-rhodes-scholarships-were.html?m=1#rhodes-200-year-
“The function of the IMF and World Bank was essentially to make other countries borrow in dollars, not in their own currencies, and to make sure that if they could not pay their dollar-denominated debts…”
— Case in study — Ukraine.
“How Christine Lagarde, Clinton and Nuland Funded a Massive Ukrainian Ponzi Scheme,” https://russia-insider.com/en/how-christine-lagarde-clinton-and-nuland-funded-massive-ukrainian-ponzi-scheme/ri27390
The context: “IMF ranks Ukraine as Europe’s poorest country,” https://www.intellinews.com/imf-ranks-ukraine-as-europe-s-poorest-country-150301/
This criticism is quite correct. The ORIGINAL 1933 AAA favored family farming. Today, the great beneficiaries are agribusiness. Farmers face a monopoly of marketing companies that dictate their price. I should have made this evolution clear. Agribusiness has become monopolized. That’s why farmers are leaving in today’s rural exodus.
You’re in the wrong place to understand how things work unless you came to have your opinions molded. Economic hit man Hudson has been simple and repetitious since the deep state increased his acting roles following the 2008 staged disaster. Results on readers are only obtained with limited complexity, very few points, and a constant harping on these same slogans in every piece that’s posted. Consider the MMT cult which features Hudson as a leading confusion inducing voice. This wide reaching psyop has some of the sheep talking about tally sticks, the fish, the loaves and of course Jesus. “Abundance is at hand! – maybe if you vote for the right person. ”
Why would anyone trust the word of a career CIA agent? If any one person is broadcast all over the internet with millions of viewers that message is coming from an agent.
Stranger: Sure: Here’s the ownership hierarchy for one of those institutions: the Federal Reserve Bank group in the U.S. ___
__The 12 Federal Reserve Banks are PRIVATE corporations. Their shares are not listed on any exchange. Who owns the shares is not public knowledge. Nevertheless, some researchers have sleuthed it down. See this chart ..
[[Ownership-hierarchy chart of the 12 Federal-Reserve Banks]]
https://www.scribd.com/document/6155111/Chart-of-Who-Owns-the-Federal-Reserve
.. and see that it all traces back to “N.M. Rothschild , London – Bank of “, regardless of all the intermediate steps.]]
How it happened:
1913 was a busy year in the financial colonization of America.
TIMELINE:
• Feb 3, 1913 The 16TH AMENDMENT passed. Right to levy an income tax established.
• Oct 3, 1913 THE REVENUE ACT (INCOME TAX ACT) passed.
• Dec 23, 1913 The FEDERAL RESERVE ACT passed. Congress unconstitutionally delegated the currency-issuing power to private banks, and pledged income-tax revenue as collateral to borrow the banks’ new private currency.
The income tax was earmarked to pay the interest on the private counterfeit currency the government thenceforth would borrow.
• 1914-2019 Nothing but trouble.
MORE INFO:
“Jekyll Island The Truth Behind The Federal Reserve” —- by Bill Still
There is always hierarchy. Any complex system has hierarchy, most especially civilizations. You are not onebornfree, but instead you are born into a hierarchy, or a system that was in place before your birth.
Your degrees of freedom are a function of the law. Law is also force.
Money’s true nature is law.
Also, if you are an individualist (as most white men are), then wake up and notice that “group dynamics” will beat individualism every time.
It is the case that in-groups will form, that monopolists and self serving types will band together to then usurp government. They will try to change government to feather bed their interests, often at the expense of the general population.
It is also true, that since money is law, a SOVEREIGN can change the law, and hence disenfranchise power groups.
There is NO contradictions here.
The only real question is how to put a benevolent king into position within the hierarchy. This king also has to release debts as they will grow inexorably.
Hudson talks on this in his latest writings… And forgive them their debts, where the kings in ancient near east were god kings beholden to their people.
In the modern era, the closest the West came to benevolent kings, was probably Hungary. Hungary had a constitutional kingdom that lasted almost 1000 years. (I don’t know yet how they dealt with debt…..sorry. Obviously they dealt with it somehow.)
There was no universal suffrage voting (women didn’t vote) and their population was mostly homogeneous. Even Jewish ethnic networking was unable to take-over.
So that explains why you live on your Mom’s couch in the US.
https://www.focus-economics.com/blog/the-largest-economies-in-the-world
Oops!
We curiously don’t see your beloved Venezuela , nor your relic Cuba, nor your lazy dumb ass Greeks on that list. Not to mention any country in ultra dumb ass Africa.
said:
“The last time I checked the debt is a staggering 22 trillion and you pay about 500 billion interest yearly.”
Bingo, we PAY our own money on what we borrow.
Of course our giving free money to lazy, unproductive, low IQ basket cases certainly drives up that debt.
Good job.
Addition: ALL OF WILSON’S PROGRESSIVE ERA ACTS, were designed by the money powers. Even the election of 1912 was funded by the Morgan interests, who in turn were Rothschild agents. The election was split with Bull Moose Party (brought into existence for the explicit goal of siphoning votes away from Taft.) Remember, Taft would not sign the Aldrich amendment, the forerunner of Federal Reserve.
Please, don’t forget about the 17’th amendment, easily the most pernicious of all.
It is in the first articles of the constitution, that SENATORS are to be sent by their State Legislatures. They are not to be VOTED into power by the general population. Senators are not to be populists. Senators are to be above the political fray, and the “greatest deliberative body on earth.”
By making Senators populists, then said senators can be controlled with bribe money. Senators need the money to become popularly elected. In other words, Senators are not beholden to their states, but instead to monied interest groups.
Who makes the money?
I’m glad some of you are figuring things out. It makes me smile.
Note that Federalism was murdered by money powered in-groups, and yes definitely (((our friends))) were heavily involved.
The counter argument is “Well you let me get away with it, and stop me before I murder again. It is your fault because you didn’t stop me.”
I am for expulsion of people’s and groups that ethnically network to take rents and parasitize hosts.
“Lies” and it’s cognate are not helpful to civilised discourse and their misuse is bad for the credit of the perpetrator. Where is the slightest sign that Sean is deliberately, knowingly, peddling something factually untrue?
You should know by now that I think democracy is a sham, and that some sort of Kingdom is required, ideally a Constitutional Kingdom.
Also, since money is law, then money itself is under control e.g. it is sovereign.
After that, you can do anything you want, including going to war and erasing national boundaries, and absorbing primitives into your population. But why would you do that, the people themselves are primitive and become a source of friction and drag.
You forget something important. Virtually all wars are to take resources and erase debts.
Even the wars between Persia and Greece were due to debts. Sparta had borrowed talents of gold and could not pay back the interest in gold. Sparta then attacked Athens and stuck the debt onto Athenians. Sparta’s ships were built with borrowed Persian money.
Hudson is trying to instill into your heads that DEBTS MATTER. I also am pounding this same drum, because it is exactly correct.
If debt instruments are held within a state bank or held by the sovereign, they can be easily erased.
The ancient near east economies were balanced, and hence did not have the impulse to conquer to then pay debt claims, especially when said debts are growing exponentially.
The ancient near east kings DID have to worry about internal threats, where oligarchical families would try to take over.
If we modern humans are not smart enough to understand a simple compounding interest curve, and its effect, then maybe we deserve to go extinct.
I agree with the following part of Parfosi1’s
I happen to think that irrespective of whether they are democracies or not, states react in the same predictable ways in relation to foreign policy. So it makes very little difference if Jews control everything or monopoly state capitalists or whatever, you will get wars when a country miscalculates or when or correctly calculates war is the least bad option for it.
The world is not a mutual aid society and foreign loans and investments may be profitable or otherwise, such as Rockefeller’s bad loans or Hunt’s bad investments to sovereign states (hunt blamed Rockefellers for Libya nationalisation) depending on the judgement of who makes them, and the judgement of the leaders like Gaddafi.
The contending powers of the domestic system system correct and keep the country domestically stable in the long term. Hudson seems to want there not to be an unconditional obligation to pay debts. Moral duty might work for a while but it would cause a vast amount of trouble down the line. Money would start going into commodities instead of productive investment.
Thank you. Do you suppose there’s a reason why these facts are so little known?
There is no unconditional obligation to pay usurious debts.
There is no unconditional obligation to pay debts that were created by fraud.
There is no unconditional obligation to pay monetized debts, when there is no money to pay them.
(Usually a usurious swap during monetary depression is in order, where the bad guys want your land, patents, or your wife in a swap to erase debt.)
YOU have been conditioned by evolution to pay your debts. YOU and other humans evolved in small tribes, where you knew everybody, and hence debt relations were known and could be dealt with.
In a large monetized “international” system, where debts mount unnaturally and make exponential claims on the earth, then these types of debt cannot be paid. It is a mathematical certainty they cannot be paid.
On the other side of debt claims are bond holders and Oligarchy.
Are you OK with parasites living high by sucking up your life energy? Oligarchy is happy that you are hypnotized to such a degree that you willingly submit to their schemes.
Let’s also not forget, that debt instruments and their credit pop into being from nothing at the moment of hypothecation. This sort of debt is NOT part of your evolutionary heritage, so don’t make claims that they are equal.
Of course. I’m going to defer to Hudson once again:
The money powers, or “oligarchy” fought back and won. They also almost made classical economy disappear down the memory hole.
Monetary history isn’t even taught in economic curriculum, or if it is, it is a truncated version – and that version is often full of errors.
If you are a college, and receiving flows of money out of wall street, are you going to do wall street’s bidding or not?
Don’t you think that rent seekers and usurers enjoy their life of easy privilege? They simply divert some of their revenue stream into usurping the polity, buying out media, and buying out politicians.
The most successful political systems have leadership that doesn’t put up with the crap, and the bad guys are killed or put in jail.
Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore was in this mold, which is why Singapore is successful despite it being multi-cultural.
(multiculturalism is not a strength)
Hi MEFOBILLS! Good comment! I researched the topic some more.
I found the link you got your chart from. https://qualicuminstitute.ca/federal-debt/ But the text differs. Is the text your own spin? If not where did it come from? Either way do you have a link to it.
Here’s the problem: I am getting conflicting opinions on whether …
(1) The Bank of Canada remains a government-owned corporation, but the Canadian government just ignores it and borrows money from other, privately-owned, banks.
OR
(2) The Bank of Canada is now privately-owned and the government borrows from it anyways.
I need definitive links on this.
Thanks!
My question was facetious but your reply is apropos nonetheless.
Yes to all this, BUT — usury is not debt. Usury is fraud. And, as Aquinas comments, contra naturam — anti-ecological.
The world — meaning Nature — IS a “mutual aid society” — this is a fundamental fact of ecology — and, WE’RE IN IT.
Sometimes you can find a researcher on the back pages of a blog.
It is within the realm of statistical probability.
The text differs because it is my own research.
Thanks for the response.
To your question, I’m not sure about 1 or 2 the same as you.
BOC is definitely not issuing debt free anymore, and private banks are running wild…. we can see that in the debt charts.
The economic profession is a shambles, and data is hard to find.
And the church came down on the “schoolmen” like Aquinas, because they were following Greek thought and Aristotle too closely.
Humans can regress in thought. For example, for over 2000 years during the gold coin era, people confused metal as if it was money.
Yes, usury is not debt, but debt mechanics can be usurious.
For example, only at the moment of hypothecation are credit and debt instrument mirrors.
Credit and Debt then begin to diverge with time, where debt instrument can begin to make outrageous usurious claims.
Other schemes include issuing new debts and absorbing old debts into principle. The old instrument has interest that becomes principle in the new instrument. This is usury plain and simple, as the claims on the future go exponential outside of nature.
It is a complicated subject, and we probably need new schools to educate people, otherwise they will see with blinkered eyes. Our current system is failing as can be seen in some of the comments here.
Hudson described the Greek mechanism, with IMF loans. A debt hook was thrust into the mouth of Greek’s while the credit went on to pay German and English debt holders (supposed creditors).
These German and English (and maybe French) debt holders were private banks elsewhere in the EU.
Usury and Rent Seeking abounds because it has become a state sponsored religion.
Stranger: Thanks MEFOBILLS! I’ll just keep the file open
Stranger: Agreed! I think info is hard to find by design!
“hen Facebook was about to be forced to give Zuckerberg’s 28 Harvard computers and emails.”
Give them to whom?
I don’t know the history here.
Holy Cow! Did you comment on the 26th? If not, why not? I have never seen this ( as always, Hudson’s excellent ) article until this AM and have been too busy to read it til now.
Anyway, back to the article’s content. I found it interesting that J Gutierrez, on another thread, wrote something similar regarding shutting down indigenous producers and making the country dependent on importing food from the US. Enraging tactics by the usual goon classes, while the American rubes blame the victims and call them lazy.
No doubt a handful of the big bosses knew exactly what they were doing; the rest, maybe not so much. That’s partly how bureaucracies work.
Tell us about it. Some of us have been doing battle with a couple over on another thread, and it’s absolutely hopeless.
Please support your assertions with some credible sources or they’re garbage. And you really ought to try and find out how your rulers function. Hint: There are plenty of clues in the article.
You are so wrong. Please go back and reread his book.
That’s exactly the opposite of what he tried to explain. His complaint was that they refused to rectify the situation , not that could not do anything about it. In fact the people of Greece voted for people who knew what to do, (that’s how Varoufakis got voted in) but in the end they, (Varoufakis excluded) betrayed the electorate; they sold out to the extortionists.
Whole populations are held in bondage by disgusting thieves with politicians in collusion.
Yes, idiots do bleat that, but those who have a clue say, it’s the Wall Street Reds (Communists, not communists) who profit from said indebtedness, just like “Stranger” says. They also profit from chaos, Ponzi schemes, special privilege, and drug peddling too.
I’ve explained that too many times than I care to mention. Forget it, it’ll never sink in and if it did, it would never be admitted.
The ones calling you ignorant are as clueless as they come.
Well, I for one, am so happy that you take the time to comment. So refreshing to have someone of your caliber and knowledge explaining things. Every one of your comments is superb so please continue, and thanks.
Sweet.
And it just happened somehow. Magic! Wink, wink! 😉
That’s guru speak. It should at least get you a gig at anagram, or maybe would have 35 years ago. Still, to take that contribution to dialogue seriously perhaps I should ask whether you wouldn’t adjust your diagnosis if you were looking at a society where legally all businesses were co-operatives whose constituent documents made mutual aid a purpose but operated indistinguishable from the limited companies in the neighbouring polity.
Once they quickly establish a hierarchy though dominance interactions, social insects work together. Wolves do too. But they cooperate within their own hive or pack all the better to fight against other hives or packs. What would we think of a pack of wolves that decided to eliminate conflict domestically and/or externally? But of course, the preaching of non aggression is merely another move in a dominance interaction.
I thank you, and others, who take so much trouble responding. I haven’t had a chance to absorb it all but do want to clear up what you mean by “debt free money”. On the face of it you seem to be saying that there was a body in Canada which could and did, at the direction of government, issue paper that would be universally accepted as legal tender to persons who could spend it but had no obligation to repay it. If that is not right, where is it wrong? If it is right it is obvious that it could not be used in a very big way without devastating effects on the economy and, in easily imaginable circumstances, trust in government. Some exception to those caveats might be made where Keynes’s burying cash and employing people to dig it up would be justified (if you couldn’t eventually arrange a nice full employment war effort).
My first optional economics subject was Currency and Credit but I don’t think I understood till much later, when M1, M2…. M6 were part of the jargon (btw, where are they now?) that most of the gold bugs and anti-Fed fanatics simply failed to recognise how easily and flexibly money could be created in good (enough) times. Whatever enough relevant people trust enough to treat it as negotiable is money. Not that you get the same consumption effects from banks expanding real estate development loans as you do from handing out cash at the welfare centre.
Perhaps you would agree that Qantitative Easing has been a sophisticated equivalent on a large scale to your debt free money from donors/issuers as I have understood it. After all making money available at virtually zero interest until recovery in the value of assets makes it possible for the central bank to be repaid is functionally the same is it not? (And of course invites the question why debt relief was not focused on home buyers with big mortgages and why government didn’t take most of the equity gains in banks and others it bailed out).
Fair and square, credit where credit is due. I know you have your iron in the fire and so do I, yet I recognize a good sport when I see one.
I’ve repeated endless times that the Jews are not the cause of our ills: we, those who live in the “free world of democratic capitalism” are either the perpetrators or the enablers of the police states we are in, the acquiescent by-standers of state-enforced robbery of the people for the dominant wealthy ruling elite, the foot-soldiers of imperial wars waged in our name to subdue and plunder other peoples. It is our collective crime that we try to conceal from ourselves and project it in others – the Jews, the Huns, the Bolsheviks, the Blacks, or any other convenient scapegoat du jour.
The Jews have become the ugly mug of capitalist states because they are the visible on-your-face portion of it, and many of the Jew-haters direct their ire to them instead of the of the politico-economic system that sustains their power and greed. The Jews did not invent Capitalism, they are the beneficiaries of it because it is the best system from which they can profit (as it was in the Mercantilism age) and they are very proficient at it beating the old industrial tycoon capitalists.
Of course, it helps the Jews when their ideological underpinnings match those of Capitalism: selfishness and greed.
The human species began with egalitarian social structures and economies — the organization of families and extended families, bands, clans, tribes. All over the planet hunter=gatherer societies are still based on mutual aid and non-hierarchical social relations. This structure persists also into small agricultural villages. With larger forms of socio-economic organization, where human and economic relations are no longer all one-on-one, where bullying and fraud and other forms of abuse are all immediate and obvious and dealt with as such by society, forms of covert bullying, especially economic and “political”, begin to emerge and to subvert our human species heritage of egalitarian behaviors.
The science behind these statements is laid out in Christopher Boehm, The Hierarchy In The Forest (1999). It’s a key text to understanding “human nature” and the situation, condition, and problematics facing our species now.
Usury thrives because it is one of the key forms of “rent seeking” by which the 0.1% oligarchy, the 160,000 families that own 28% of America, acquires and keeps its power.
This oligarchy usurped control of American government by increments from First World War onward and secured a stranglehold on it between 1963 and 1971.
Like mortgages, wages, land rent, property in land, and most other fundamental economic practices of Europe and the Americas, usury originated in ancient Mesopotamia. Michael Hudson is the regnant expert on this subject. His scholarship has totally revamped this field, demolishing numerous myths along the way — e.g. the origin of money in barter, the origin of interest in ‘gift-economies,’ the origin or rates of interest in ideas of return on investment … If he had done nothing else, still his contribution to this field alone is brilliant and permanent
The economies of the societies of ancient Mesopotamia were not, as you claim, “balanced.” They repeatedly devolved into debt peonage, sometimes to be rescued by Jubilees (debt forgiveness), sometimes to be subverted instead by wars of conquest and war debts. Michael Hudson’s scholarship in this field witnesses these facts.
The ancient society that was balanced and stable — the only one — and that pursued balance and stability (rather than “growth” etc.) as a matter of policy, was Egypt, which was a theocratic kingdom, comprising a vast peasantry whose harvests were concentrated under the management of the pharoahs, and a small priesthood to manage it. Egyptian peasants lived well. They — and not slaves — built the pyramids, which were (whatever else they were) public works projects that worked in the agricultural off-season, provided nice working conditions and paid well.
Marxist Jews did not create World Bank and IMF; Henry Morgenthau, JR, and his Communist spy sidekick Harry Dexter White, did:
That’s the same Morgenthau that crafted the plan to starve Germany out of existence in the post-war period. The Morgenthau Plan was implemented for a period of about 3 years.
The first point is true and the second part is true but only partially. Your claim assumes that the entities in question act rationally, when in fact, they do not always. In other word, wars are without a doubt often caused by crazies acting in ways that suit them. Rational people may start wars for “practical” reasons, but it seems clear that paranoids, pleonectics, and psychopaths abound in positions of power and they start wars for irrational reasons.
The Boltons, Cheneys, McCains, Hillarys, tRumps and Netanyahoos of the world are prime examples of those irrational actors who’re keys in agitating for war. As long as we allow crackpots in positions of power we’ll never have peace or freedom.
A big reason why Jews are in the news is because many currently occupy positions of power and many are as crazy as they come. Get rid of them and some other nutcases fill the void. Repeat.
Pretty good comment there, but at least one of your scapegoats is not a scapegoat and capitalism is neither good nor bad. It’s merely a tool and a useful one at that, but then enter “bad” actors, crackpots mostly.
Same goes for communism. Just a tool and can be employed for good or evil or more likely both in varying degrees depending on the actors. Like MEOFBILLS (I think it was), we have to stop thinking in dichotomies if we want to progress or even begin to understand what’s going on.
True and true.
They not only try but all to often succeed in changing the rules to favor their interests and then their power tends to increase like the proverbial snowball rolling downhill and then the fun begins.
“Deep thinkers” then scapegoat capitalism and imagine that the cure is some other form of tyranny, “benevolent,” of course.
Obviously it’s just as often a “mutual destruction society” as well. Nature abhors vacuums and vacuums represent imbalances. Too bad Mom Nature sometimes takes her sweet time in restoring the balance or maybe she asks, “what’s the hurry,” since chaos will eventually and invariably upset the whole thing anyway.
For the most part, true but not invariably so.
While I’m not a wolf ethologist, I understand that such things, in fact, happen at times and though the decision may be an individual one and not the pack’s per se, sometimes the results are deadly.
But never mind, G-d luvs us all…! 😉
Morgenthau’s memorandum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgenthau_Plan
Sounds like veritable genocidal policies. And who was this subhuman and major war criminal? https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/henry-morgenthau
Yes, this forum doesn’t lend itself to book-like long explanations. Also, people won’t read very long, especially the latest generation reared on video.
The principle is that if you are balanced in all things then this balance removes a lot of the impetus for war and other extremes. All of human history is messy due to human animals, even my favorite example of Hungary had episodes that weren’t so pretty.
It is on us to figure out what our ancestors did wrong, and what we are doing wrong, and Hudson is doing us a signal service in that regard.
Nice comment, and I would like to add:
Egypt used a demurrage system for their money. Shards of clay had numbers written on them, and the numbers represented grain in the silo.
As mice and rats ate the grain, the numbers on the clay shards would decrement. The money wasn’t allowed to expand unnaturally.
For external trade outside of Egypt’s borders, they used gold hoops. These hoops would also be worn as Jewelry.
Egypt’s money was kept in balance with goods, and in this case goods were dominated by grain.
I would like to have been a fly on the wall and observe how our (((friends))) managed to take control of Egyptian grain – if that bible story is true.
Henry M. SENIOR was ambassador to Ottoman Empire at the same time that Baron Rothschild and Chaim Weizmann were working on Alfred Balfour to sign over Palestine to Jews.
Under Robert Morgenthau’s reign over New York court, lawsuits were brought against international corporations and banks for the crime of doing business with Iran, in violation of sanctions and policies created by (Jewish) Stuart Levey in the US Treasury Department.
Those sanctions and the Office of Terror Finance that Levey created were in furtherance of the numerous rounds of sanctions imposed on Iran, beginning most notably in 1995, when Bill Clinton signed an Executive Order prohibiting trade with Iran.
According to former AIPAC official Keith Weissman, AIPAC wrote that executive order as well as the subsequent legislation, the D’Amato Amendment / Libya – Iran Sanctions bill.
Other than those tiny little coincidences, though, Jews have had no influence over financial dealings of the USA.
To say otherwise is, you know, antisemitic.
A double entry ledger is a bit mind twisting, but modern money mechanics cannot be understood absent the ledger.
QE is the importation of a finance “asset” into FED’s ledger. After this asset is attached to the ledger, the FED can then issue a liability.
Double entry ledgers always have assets and liabilities, they are the “double.” These two things offset each other mathematically … supposedly, but that is a lie. The assets and liabilities grow differently over time. The ledger doesn’t comprehend time… but I am getting off track.
Imagine this: 1) FED imports TBills from its member banks. 2) TBill is attached to FED ledger as an asset to the FED. 3) Fed issues its liabilities in the form of new Federal Reserve Notes FRN’s. 4) FRN’s move to the member bank that lost its TBill.
What happens at the member bank?: Member bank looses an asset TBill, and gains an asset FRN’s.
This swapping of assets at member bank is something like you swapping money from savings account to your checking account.
Your net position does not change. Private bank’s net position did not change.
QE is not money printing, it is a double entry swapping operation.
FED’s ledger expanded, and Banks ledger changed composition.
This composition change has knock on effect in the economy:
1) TBill prices are held high as FED money is chasing said TBills.
2) T Bill price high means dollar exchange rate is held high.
3) TBill price high means interest rates low.
The point of QE was manifold: a) make interest rates low, so YOU will go to a private bank and take out a new loan, maybe refinance your mortgage. b) Swap bad finance paper like MBS for FED cash, thus propping up banks bad debts on fraudulent MBS.
Virtually all money in the supply is BANK CREDIT created at moment of hypothecation. The FED is a creation of the private banking system, as FED is used to backstop private banks. The FED is not the dog, it is the tail on the dog.
So, if you want to fill up your money supply with something other than bank credit, then it has to be done outside of private bank double entry mechanics.
This outside is exogenous (meaning outside of the system) and it is money printed up without an attached debt instrument, hence the term “debt free.”
Bankster’s don’t like debt free in the supply, because it makes their debt instruments decrement, and hence is a form of jubilee.
Private corporate banking business model is to create debt instruments, and then take fees and interest as profits. Interest on a house over 30 years, can double or triple the principle.
(I try to keep my comments sort, but this is a complicated subject, and if you learned economics in college, you were hoaxed.)
Think of it this way, if you had magic glasses, when you viewed debt free notes, they would have a different color than bank credit notes. Debt Free notes have to be recalled in taxes, or they are recalled to a banker ledger as a doppelganger for bank credit.
Remember this always: Bank credit is created from nothing and returns to nothing. Credit and the debt instrument disappear when principle is fully paid down.
Balance comes from a dynamic equality in the correlation of forces on each side: an arms race.
The only way to get debt forgiven is to get conquered by America as happened with Cuba.
Civilization is a collection of laws and norms, it is not nature.
Balance is something we create. Jubilees are a way of creating balance, as debts will grow outside of nature.
Also, land and production is usually claimed in 50 year cycles. You can overlay statistics on M1, M2 (easily accessed money) vs commodity prices.
Commodity prices fall low when M1,M2 drop low. This is a time of destitution, and war tends to break out. People are not borrowing money into existence, oftentimes because land has already been grabbed.
When money becomes available, then it is a peaceful time of expansion with growing money supply and commodity price increases.
Ancient Venice, before our (((friends))) were invited in, would examine creditor and debtor relations BEFORE a deal was made.
For example, if you were going on a fishing expedition then the creditor (who loans the money) would have skin in the game, while debtor would also have skin in the game. If the ship came back with a large catch of fish, then both creditor and debtor would split their gains in accordance with preset conditions. If the ship came back with no catch, then once again, both parties would lose accordingly.
In today’s world, if debtor does not catch fish, then he has to give up his boat to the bank. Said boat is probably attached to the ledger as collateral. It is a heads I win tails you lose proposition, and hence is out of balance.
Another example: A widow is made as her husband dies. She then tries to take a loan against her house. The money lender offers usurious terms as (((he)) knows that she cannot pay back said loan. Within a short time, the widow is out on the streets along with her children. The usurer is sitting fat and happy having done little actual work to gain said home as his asset.
You can argue that the widow should have known better, but that is not how a “king” would see things. The king would see the ignorant and vulnerable being taken advantage of by sharks.
In this case, the loan would NOT have been allowed. The greater good would be the widow keeping her home and her child clothed and housed. Venice, for a time, kept things in balance.
Good on you Annamaria – that sounded like a slap in the face of the strawman.
The Truth in Money Book by Thoren & Warner sums this up neatly in the DUM Equation:
Debt = Usury + Money
where Usury (U) is the difference between the Monetized Debt (M = the Money Supply) & the Total Debt (D). In other words, the Usury component of the formula is the “unmonetized” portion of the total debt. Or to put it another way, there is not enough money in circulation to service the debt (only the principal is lent into circulation) w/o creating more debt to service the old debt. As the Usury component of the Total Debt overwhelms the Money Supply, the system grows increasingly insolvent until the bubble bursts when the bankers contract the money supply (or its rate of growth) before the system collapses entirely. This leads to the inscrutable business cycle (the Debt Expansion & the Debt Contraction) which you won’t find explained in economic textbooks.
Murray Rothbard called the whole scam (Fractional Reserve Banking) a Ponzi scheme, but this privatized debt-based money creation is more accurately called USURY (the Original Fraud), which has been condemned since time immemorial. For the curious, an excellent definition of Usury can be found on pp. 89-90 of The Truth in Money Book. You might even find the book in your local library, as I did.
It cannot be overemphasized that this demonic system is NOT Capitalism but MAMMONISM!!, and it is only as the Usury (U) component of the formula above overwhelms the Money Supply (M) that Capitalism no longer functions organically and the Mammonic component (U) of the equation parasitizes the whole productive side of the economy. Is it any wonder that the economists (minions of Mammon) eschew all discussion of this phenomenon!? As Christ said, “Ye cannot serve God and mammon.”
How does the Money Power keep this mammonic system going? They search the world for new “solvent” debtors (new markets), who don’t stay solvent for long, to inject more money into circulation (after all, money only comes into circulation as debt to the bankers) and for new sources of cheap labor to generate the cash flow to service the debt. Ultimately, the Usury payments to the bankers (Usury not interest) must come out of the hide of labor, so the money power works indefatigably to drive wages toward a subsistence level.
The Money Power also is waging the same war against the U.S. by opening up the borders to limitless immigration, dramatically transforming the nation’s demographics to a non-White proletariat, and justifying the whole racket post hoc with fraudulent arguments about the virtues of Multi-Culturalism & the evils of White Racism. As the West is being eviscerated, it’s not hard to see that the Money Question lies at the heart of the Civilization Question.
Now a lot more could be said about the connection between international trade and foreign loans, but suffice it to say that much of the trade is debt-induced, and has little or nothing to do with “comparative advantage.” The “law” of comparative advantage (authored by the Jewish stockbroker David Ricardo) was designed to justify the bankers’ avarice, and has little relevance in the real world. In like manner, the “labor theory of value” was designed to falsely justify gold as universal money. As Stephen Zarlenga said in The Lost Science of Money, “…economists serve an evil deity and the fruits of their theories grow monotonously bitter.”
Note Zarlenga’s felicitous allusion to the Garden of Eden, where Satan jealously guarded his Monetary Law (Usury) from the innocent eyes of Adam & Eve, and replaced the Tree of Life with his Tree of Death (the fruits of Usury for the Chosen Few). It’s not a coincidence that Gold, the ultimate “precious” resource of the Usurer, makes it’s first appearance immediately prior to this in chapter 2 of Genesis. This is a story for another day.
Henry Morgenthau as U.S. Ambassador at Istambul was also the probable source of a false report of a German “war council” supposedly convened by the Kaiser (it wasn’t) a week before commencement of hostilities, which was used as part of the propaganda claiming that Germany started the First World War — it didn’t; Russia did, instigated by France, whose financiers were very heavily invested in the czarist regime. See Harry Elmer Barnes, The Genesis of the Great War, on these facts.
Gaddafi came into power as preaching all that stuff and he practiced it too for quite a long while, but human nature–especially men’s nature–being what it is, anti-capitalism in a poor country is just a way to establish oneself as leader, get ahold of resources, and use them to have a lot of women, meanwhile dominating the hapless majority with military force. Mao, Castro and Gaddafi turned their respective countries into dictatorship that rejected international capitalism, yet impoverished the people. It also enabled them to have the most beautiful young women in the country, multiple ones a day. We are an alliance of genes that make do stuff like claim to be altruistic all the better to reproduce them, as individuals we join groups to help us with the aforementioned stuff and those groups make up nation states. Genes are, like classes and nation states, in a state of permanent rivalry and that conflict is fruitful.
Donald Trump is an example of the way capitalism draws on the most dynamic ambitious men (sharks) to build a strong economy through business rather than the military and politics. He got to be rich and have lots of women before he became leader of his country. The “men without chests” of the outsourcing elite were overthrown by Trump who having already satisfied all the appetites that politics is usually a means to an end for, simply wanted to give vent to his open ‘megalothymia’ which is a lust to dominate in the most ostentatious and spectacular ways possible. But his swashbuckling willingness to take the risk of betraying his class enabled Trump to take up the cause of the little people and bulldoze his way to a position that no one (except Francis Fukuyama) ever dreamt he could occupy.
Hudson complains that the US under Trump is not playing fair with China and the class war within America is the real conflict. It is real enough but winning it his way would entail a free and fair economic competition with China, which is one America might well not win. Hudson is an internationalist, never forget how he sees counties as something imposed by the ruling class and always led for it’s benefit. Trump is not explicable in that framework. It is not the US government , but individual like Paul Singer who buy sovereign bonds cheap, then dun countries for debts they thought they had got away with. Singer and his fellow vulture capitalists are also responsible for the lack of improvement in pay and conditions by making shareholding value the objective.
The fact is Saddam Hussein’s Iraq took out massive loans, and once America had overthrown the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the US then tried to get those debts forgiven by Iraq’s creditors which included America itself. In the end the loans to Iraq were repaid at a reduced rate and mainly in bonds rather than cash. Even though America insisted Iraq’s loans were ‘odious debt’ in the end Iraq paid them off–sort of–and restored their credit. Hence Iraq has access to capital to rebuild their country and there is a democracy there. The people simply cannot remove people like Saddam, who initially appear as wanting only to introduce an egalitarian system. You ask the average Syrian if the Assad Alawite regieme which came to a position of power because it seemed to be from a sect to0 small for dominance can be removed without US help. So there has to be war and a lot of people killed in a country and US invasion, for that country to throw off a tyrant and his odious debt.
One different analysis of the Federal Reserve that ends with the question of what happens to money that seems to mysteriously disappear from identified accounts maintained by the FRBNY is at https://thedailycoin.org/2018/08/16/a-look-at-the-federal-reserve-through-a-different-lens/
I don’t ascribe to your worldview, things aren’t that simple.
Gaddafi forced a bunch of tribalists to get along. Otherwise Libya would never be a unified state that could stand for its own interests. Is Libya better off today without him, now that it is has been invaded and forced to become part of globo-homo world government? The first thing the “rebels” did when invading Libya, was to install a wall street bank, and of course later Libya’s gold was stolen.
International capitalism is finance capitalism and globo homo. If you read my comments, you will know that I am for INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM. International Capitalism is rule by banksters who take usury on populations. They move their capital about to find out sized gains, and then they import peoples from the third world to take wage arbitrage on their life energy. The world is rejecting globo homo finance “international” capitalism.
Generally people that are caught up in false dialectics have a two pole world view. Capitalism good and strong men bad is your worldview. What kind of strong men? What kind of capitalism?
It actually depends on the strong man.. Russia nearly self destructed in the 90’s under turbo finance capitalism, where (((Oligarchy))) took what it wanted at the people’s expense. Under strong man Putin, Russia is doing much better.
Sorry if facts are inconvenient. Everybody should let reality and data inform their worldview and don’t become that dupe who is hoaxed by Teevee or false narrative dialectics. Go with what your eyes see, and use your brain. God gave you the ability to discern, use it.
Trial, you are really going to trigger some people. Enjoyed your comment.
Silvio Gesell noted the usurious relation of gold. He called it a power relation, and I agree with his definition.
Usury is a power relation where somebody is taking something for nothing. I consider Rent’s as part of the same thing, where a rent seeker is also taking something for nothing.
In the case of gold, it does not rust or go bad. Gold as money exchanges for rusting and degrading goods. For example, you are selling your goods and wares – say milk and eggs: A depression occurs, and this happens regularly with gold as money. The holder of the gold coin can then retreat and wait for seller of wares to lower prices. Gold holder can wait an infinite amount of time as his coin stays shiny and does not rust. Meanwhile the perishable wares are going bad, and the seller is desperate, and will take the lowest price, even maybe to the point of giving said goods away.
The protocols say that gold has been very good to them.
Money’s true nature is law, and the role of money is to divide down at the moment of transaction. This division allows commerce to become lubricated and easier. People that want to store money as wealth are confused. Get out of money and buy a weight of gold as an asset, or buy a painting, or buy a business. If somebody shills for making gold as money, that is the forcing of the King to stamp the gold coin with King’s stamp of law, they are confused. The bad guys want gold as money so they can go back to their old con games.
The (((goldmen))) noticed they could ride their credit on top of gold, and they took gains on their credit. Creating money from nothing is pretty close to alchemy, as you can then demand goods and service from the “animals,” while doing nothing.
Taking something for nothing.
Clear explanation of mono-ethnic system (Jews, Arabs, don’t impose usury on co-ethnics) of benevolence vs. exploitive multi-cult inter-ethnic lending:
Clear illustration of why we can no longer tolerate our (((hostile elite))):
See post 139 by SolontoCroesus and post 145 by J. Alfred Powell. The sub-humanness was familial.
Note that Morgenthau Jr. was quick to demand reparations from the bombed and bloodless Germany. Compare his “righteousness” with the current tragic situation in the Middle East (in which Morgenthau Sr. was directly implicated). Compare the ignominy of the Jewish State behavior towards the native Palestinians with the still-running farcical and profitable schema of holohoax “survivors.” The Jewish State and Israel-supporting Jewish “diaspora” have lost any vestiges of moral ground. It’s tragic that a tribe that aspired to have nationhood, ended up with a reputation of a cynical, subversive, and heartless entity. There are many great individuals among Jewish people, but they are swamped by the obnoxious supremacist lot unable to respect and feel for “others.”
Turnabout is fair play. They gamed our money to acquire status, and money system can be used to expel them.
Our hostile elite are usurers, rent seekers, and have become finance oligarchy.
They use various rent schemes to steal life energy and industry from laboring populations.
Of course there are shabby goys in alignment with the tribe, and not all tribesters are part of the con. It is the case though, that tribesters are over-represented as agents of mammon.
A sovereign money system is required to fund removal of the bad guys, to expel them from consensual civilization.
You are right, we can no longer tolerate them. The kind way to do it is to pay them to leave, while we work in future to rid ourselves of said parasites in the now; otherwise the future will scream down through the ages at our generation.
(Credit has future attributes, so you issue a form of credit for expulsion, thus improving the future.)
It all begins and ends with the money. Money is part of the law, and a law change is required. Unfortunately, the bad guys captured Congress, so maybe the tree of liberty is due watering.
Once a problem has been identified, then solutions can be formulated.
http://www.sovereignmoney.eu
Gaddafi impoverished his people? — This is a nice propaganda line from Obama-Clinton State Dept., which is easy to expose: https//borgenproject.org/tag/muammar-gaddafi/
“Libya: Ten things about Gaddafi they don’t want you to know:” https://www.globalresearch.ca/libya-ten-things-about-gaddafi-they-dont-want-you-to-know/5414289
The attempts to create an African currency linked to gold had sealed Gaddafi’s fate.
By the way, do you know where is Libyan gold?
“Libya: From Africa’s richest state under Gaddafi, to failed state after NATO intervention:” https://www.globalresearch.ca/libya-from-africas-richest-state-under-gaddafi-to-failed-state-after-nato-intervention/5408740
A trading gold standard works pretty well.
Trading gold standard forces trading nations to adjust their exchange rate if goods flow becomes UNBALANCED. There is that word again.
In other words, gold flows move to re-mediate imbalance.
Example: China is mercantile, which means they sell more goods than they buy. America is in trade deficit to China. The imbalance is made up by America losing its Gold. The loss of Gold then triggers a dollar exchange rate adjustment. The dollar is made weaker to then make American goods cheaper as viewed from China. This then stimulates the buying of American goods to return gold back to America.
The trading gold standard isn’t money, but it is a mechanism for settling trade. The trading gold standard was killed by Nixon/Kissinger, and Hudson’s book “Super Imperialism” discusses the ramifications.
Keyne’s Bancor system at Bretton Woods was thwarted by the (((usual))) crowd including Dexter White and Henry Morgenthau.
Why did our dual shitizen friends push for the trading gold standard instead of Bancor? Oops sorry, the dual citizen schtick came in the 60’s due to maneuvering congress. Maybe because of the tribe’s “hoards” of gold stored and held from previous centuries of pillage?
In case of Africa, said African’s would have been able to get a better exchange rate deal on their minerals and resources with a gold trading standard. Internal currencies of African countries would have been linked to gold, thus stabilizing African economies.
Gold Dinar scheme would have been dangerous to the Petrodollar/TBill international banking cabal as it is now constituted. Why? Because other Muslim nations of the mid east would soon convert as well, and the 1973 Kissinger/Saudi agreement to price oil in dollars would fail.
Hudson has to avoid touching the third rail and hence ignores malefactors like White and Morgantheau. You dare not speak (((their))) name in academia.
true, true, true, but also let us not forget the plan for the Bolshevick revolution started before the first Zionist 1897 congress in Switzerland.. (but was plan b in the object of the congress to acquire for the banksters nation state power somewhere in the world ); when at Salonika, the Bankster attempt to defeat the Ottomans and take their oil happened, and the Ottoman burned them out (half to NYC and half to St. Petersburg Russia went the whole clan) plan B was pressed into place<=that plan was to activate the Jews in the East into a weapon, called immigration, and to mount an invasion into Palestine, the place chosen because that was where all of the oil was at.. .. The half at NYC changed the voting majority in NYC and produced a congress and president that forced America into WWI two treaties, one the same year as the Zionist congress 1897 (France w/Russia) and the 2nd, the next year (France and UK with USA) both kept secret. Each reported on by Professor Roland Greene Usher in his 1913 book Pan Germanism and by Kaiser Willam II himself in his book "MY Memmoirs, 1878-1918 published in 1922.. The whole thing was the result of planning that resulted in coordinated manipulation.
EXACTLY THE HEART OF OUR DILEMMA!
It’s the white man’s individualism (evolved probably from individual free choice in wife selection as far back as history records) which enables his unique/unparalleled sense of curiosity that fuels his adventuresomeness driven by his irrepressible desire to know/find out, then to have the freedom via the individualist culture of his people to go off on his own adventuring to learn/discover.
So like the “Winkelvi” twins we innovate/build but are left ISOLATED against the tribe of thieving Jews enabled by our Sanhedrin Jewdiciary to suffer severe repercussions including loss of family via Bolshevik (((Jo)))o-Fault Divorce laws for daring to strive beyond the role of wage slave.
Who’da guessed?
I guess Iran won’t be completely crushed until that gravy train runs out of steam.
Thanks for the insights!
Do you write columns?
You write some terrific stuff!
That’s essentially what happened to Greece and a lot of other small countries, yet the victims get the blame. They even know that they’re getting stuck with even more debt, and try to vote in decent governments, but they are invariably betrayed.
Thank you Sally. I always wondered about what went on in Thessaloniki back then but never had time to get into it. I suspect that your explanation does a good job of covering it.
I took a grand total of 3 Econ courses in college and aside from sensing that I was being hoaxed, I was bored beyond description. All the economics I know comes from being a cheapskate, a master detector of bullshit, and experience with “street” economics. The basics are easy to understand, and guys like you and Hudson make the intricacies understandable, so thanks.
As much as I loathe the usurers, I have to admre their persistence and thoroughness. Those cats have every angle covered.
That certainly can be one aspect of it. Another would be an equality in the ability to mobilize capital; a capital race.
The depth of your insight into this problem and its solution seems so unique I’m taking the liberty to rearrange the order of your sentences (adding a solitary editorial comment) in your invaluable comment delineating the hows and whys of the necessary action:
#redeploy/destroyShabbatGoy