with Michael Hudson
Writer, Dandelion Salad
michael-hudson.com
April 9, 2014
TheRealNews on Apr 8, 2014
Michael Hudson: The financial grab for Ukraine industries is simply war by another name, as other Eastern Europe countries have experienced similar fates.
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The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a new “free trade” agreement being negotiated between the U.S. and 11 other Pacific Rim countries. Like other Free Trade Agreements, this one is basically a permanent power grab by corporations and financial companies that will make it impossible for the citizens of countries joining the TPP to choose what laws and rules they want to live under.
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by Jeffrey Sommers and Michael Hudson
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
michael-hudson.com
January 3, 2013
A generation ago the Chicago Boys and their financial supporters applauded General Pinochet’s anti-labor Chile as a success story, thanks mainly to its transformation of their Social Security into Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) that almost universally were looted by the employer grupos by the end of the 1970s. In the last decade, the Bush Administration, seeking a Trojan Horse to privatize Social Security in the United States, applauded Chile’s disastrous privatization of pension accounts (turning many over to US financial institutions) even as that nation’s voters rejected the Pinochetistas largely out of anger at the vast pension rip-off by high finance.
By Michael Hudson
Global Research
May 30, 2011
Is Iceland’s rejection of financial bullying a model for Greece and Ireland?
Last month Iceland voted against submitting to British and Dutch demands that it compensate their national bank insurance agencies for bailing out their own domestic Icesave depositors. This was the second vote against settlement (by a ratio of 3:2), and Icelandic support for membership in the Eurozone has fallen to just 30 percent. The feeling is that European politics are being run for the benefit of bankers, not the social democracy that Iceland imagined was the guiding philosophy – as indeed it was when the European Economic Community (Common Market) was formed in 1957.
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with Michael Hudson
Bonnie Faulkner
Guns and Butter
http://www.kpfa.org
March 16, 2011
Financial and fiscal austerity policies; the appeal of economic austerity to bankers; economic depression and war; post-WWII vs. post-cold war economic policy; government to government grants vs. commercial lending; the euro and dollar; privatization in New Zealand and elsewhere; social unrest; speculation and prices; criminalization of the economy; impoverishment of the US.
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by Prof. Michael Hudson and Prof. Jeffrey Sommers
Global Research
January 18, 2011
A spectre is haunting Europe: the illusion that Latvia’s financial and fiscal austerity is a model for other countries to emulate. Bankers and the financial press are asking governments from Greece to Ireland and now Spain as well: “Why can’t you be like Latvia and sacrifice your economy to pay the debts that you ran up during the financial bubble?” The answer is, they can’t – without an economic, demographic and political collapse that will only make matters worse.
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AmericanMonetaryInst | October 13, 2010
Michael Hudson: Author, Super Imperialism and Global Fracture; editor, Debt and Economic Renewal in the Ancient Near East; economic commentator for National Public Radio; distinguished Professor of Economics, University of Missouri, Kansas City, and Chief Economic Advisor to the 2008 Kucinich for President campaign. Dr. Hudson was the first to publicly identify the mechanism of “Dollar Imperialism” through the U.S. balance of payments deficits. His talk will focus on the coming momentous monetary developments in the Icelandic and Latvian crises, and their implication for future crises resolutions.
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by Michael Hudson
Global Research, September 30, 2010
While Labor Unions celebrate Anti-Austerity Day in Europe, the European Neoliberals raise the ante:
Most of the press has described Wednesday’s European-wide labor demonstrations and strikes across in terms of the familiar exercise by transport workers irritating travelers with work slowdowns, and large throngs letting off steam by setting fires. But the story goes much deeper than merely a reaction against unemployment and economic recession conditions. At issue are proposals to drastically change the laws and structures of how European society will function for the next generation. If the anti-labor forces succeed, they will break up Europe, destroy the internal market, and render that continent a backwater. This is how serious the financial coup d’etat has become. And it is going to get much worse – quickly. As John Monks, head of the European Trade Union Confederation, put it: “This is the start of the fight, not the end.”
by Prof. Michael Hudson
Global Research, July 8, 2010
As Europe’s banking crisis deepens, Greece’s and Spain’s fiscal crisis spreads throughout Europe and the US economy stalls, most discussions of how to stabilize national finances assume that only two options are available: “internal devaluation” – shrinking the economy by cutting public spending; or outright devaluation of the currency (for countries that have not yet joined the euro, such as Eastern Europe).
The Baltics and other countries have rejected currency depreciation on the ground that it would delay EU membership. But as most debts are denominated in euros – and owed mainly to foreign banks or their local branches – devaluation would cause a sharp jump in debt service, causing even more defaults and negative equity in real estate. Devaluation also would raise the price of energy and other essential imports, aggravating the economic squeeze.
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Interview with Michael Hudson
Bonnie Faulkner
Guns and Butter
http://www.kpfa.org
June 16, 2010
Economic crisis in Europe created by predatory lending; European Central Bank stranglehold on the Eurozone; the Euro; foreign banks decimate Greece’s social structure; Marx’s industrial capital versus fictitious capital; Latvia as a model for the rest of Europe; Hudson’s financial and fiscal plan for Latvia; the Cold War and its ruinous effect on progressive economic thought.
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June 08, 2010 — This time Max Keiser and co-host, Stacy Herbert, look at the scandals of financial wiseguys that ‘know nothing,’ including famed ‘value investor,’ Warren Buffett who says he knows nothing about his investments and nothing about how ratings contributed to the housing bubble. In the second half of the show, Max interviews economist Michael Hudson about the Latvian economy and real liberal economics.
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by Michael Hudson
Global Research, May 11, 2010
The Wealthy Won’t Pay Their Taxes, So Labor Must Do So
Riddle: How are the Greek rioters like America’s Tea Party movement?
Answer: Both reject government being taken over by the financial oligarchy to shift the tax burden onto labor.
The difference is that the Tea Partiers have lost faith in government. This is just what the financial oligarchy wants, of course. Giving up hope of gaining electoral control to pursue a fair fiscal agenda, the Tea Partiers have abandoned the centuries-long fight for reform to make governments better by giving them the power to check predatory finance and wealth. Sliding to the right wing of the political spectrum and acting mainly out of frustration, they have succumbed a utopian desire simply to shrink government that they see acting adversely to their interests.
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by Prof. Michael Hudson
Global Research
April 9, 2010
EU Countries sinking into Depression
Government debt in Greece is just the first in a series of European debt bombs that are set to explode. The mortgage debts in post-Soviet economies and Iceland are more explosive. Although these countries are not in the Eurozone, most of their debts are denominated in euros. Some 87% of Latvia’s debts are in euros or other foreign currencies, and are owed mainly to Swedish banks, while Hungary and Romania owe euro-debts mainly to Austrian banks. So their government borrowing by non-euro members has been to support exchange rates to pay these private-sector debts to foreign banks, not to finance a domestic budget deficit as in Greece.
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by Prof Michael Hudson and Prof. Jeff Sommers
Global Research, February 15, 2010
While most of the world’s press focuses on Greece (and also Spain, Ireland and Portugal) as the most troubled euro-areas, the much more severe, more devastating and downright deadly crisis in the post-Soviet economies scheduled to join the Eurozone somehow has escaped widespread notice.
No doubt that is because their experience is an indictment of the destructive horror of neoliberalism – and of Europe’s policy of treating these countries not as promised, not as helping them develop along Western European lines, but as areas to be colonized as export markets and bank markets, stripped of their economic surpluses, their skilled labor and indeed, working-age labor generally, their real estate and buildings, and whatever was inherited from the Soviet era.
by Dr. Ellen Brown
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
webofdebt.com
Dec 15, 2009
Europe’s small, debt-strapped countries could follow the lead of Argentina and simply walk away from their debts. That would shift the burden to the creditor countries, which could solve the problem merely by a change in accounting rules.
Total financial collapse, once a problem only for developing countries, has now come to Europe. The International Monetary Fund is imposing its “austerity measures” on the outer circle of the European Union, with Greece, Iceland and Latvia the hardest hit. But these are not your ordinary third world debtor supplicants. Historically, the Vikings of Iceland repeatedly repulsed British invaders; Latvian tribes repulsed even the Vikings; and the Greeks conquered the whole Persian empire. If anyone can stand up to the IMF, these stalwart European warriors can.
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