Economists Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson discuss de-dollarization, the global drive to drop the US dollar, and the transition away from financialized neoliberalism toward a new economic system.
Finally they start to discuss what will replace single currency hegemony. It is going to take some people a long time to even imagine what they are talking about. I think really scientifically minded people are always contemplating things that have not yet been discovered, so it is easier for them to imagine economic systems that are different from what now exists in most of the world.
We get a first look at the new book by renowned political economist Michael Hudson on the age-old battle between creditors and the real economy. Ancient Rome refused to adopt the practices of debt forgiveness and land redistribution previously understood to be essential. Instead, they instituted a rigid pro-creditor legal system, assassinating anyone who remotely threatened it–including Tiberius Gracchus, Julius Caesar, and Jesus. The empire devolved into a rentier economy, ultimately collapsing from within. Today’s neoliberal establishment increasingly defends this failed state framework, even as the same disastrous dynamics intensify.
I was getting tired of hearing interview after interview with Michael Hudson about his new book “The Collapse of Antiquity”, but I was pleasantly surprised by this interview. The interview which is only the first half of two, gets further into the book than I am in reading it. Michael Hudson gets to make a lot of points that I have not got to yet. The few comments on the interview do not seem to have gotten the message right. The comments extol some of the points that Hudson decries.
Here is an excerpt from Michael Hudson’s book that I just read last night.
This does not sound like an endorsement of Socrates’ brand of logic.
28 April, 2023 addition of Part 2. The may be the most startling part if you have been raised in a Western culture.”
In part two, Michael Hudson discusses his new book “The Collapse of Antiquity.” Hudson challenges the traditional beliefs about the fall of the Roman Empire, arguing that it was caused by a financial crisis brought on by excessive debt, wealth inequality, and the concentration of economic power. Hudson draws parallels to modern-day economies and highlights the dangers of financialization and wealth concentration.
I have fallen out of like with Scott Ritter, so I have not been paying much attention to him lately, but this video deserves to be seen widely. He expresses my wonderment at Jews around the world who are taking up for the Ukrainian Nazis as opposed to Russia. I can understand Russia phobia with the USA corporate and official propaganda that is rampant, but I cannot understand picking Nazis instead.
Economists Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson discuss Russia’s economic transition away from the neoliberal West and integration with what it calls the “World Majority” in the Global South.
Somewhere along my viewing, I was thinking that the inflation of the USA dollar ought to make it easier for countries to pay off the dollar denominated debt. As I was going to explain this to Sharon, I realized that USA dollar inflation was having the opposite impact on these indebted nations. I came to realize what was going on.
Our inflation of the dollar should make it easier for countries to pay their dollar denominated debt if these countries didn’t try to out inflate their currencies relative to ours. They do their inflation because they do not want to have foreign trade deficits with the USA. If they could sell more to Russia, China, India, Brazil and the global south, they wouldn’t have to worry about trade with the USA.
I think the implication is that debtor nations who owe a debt to the USA should redirect their trade away from the USA, and let our dollar inflation lower the value of their dollar denominated debt to an infinitesimal value in terms of their own currency. This is what happened to my college debt, such as it was. I accumulated that debt in the early 1960s. As the dollar inflated after the 1960s, my salary kept up with inflation, but my student debt stayed constant (except for the fact that I was paying it off). Paying off that debt became a smaller and smaller part of my inflating budget.
A lecture for the Kadir Has University, Department of Economics, Istanbul.
Post modernity is what the USA and Western economies are suffering from.
In the Q&A session there was a persistent questioner who could not let go of the idea that China would some day fight an economic war the way the USA is now doing. Michael Hudson tried to explain why that was not likely. He missed the opportunity to explain that if China starts economic wars in the future, then the rest of the world should resist. We have to resist the idea that if the USA is prevented from conducting economic war, that we can’t use the same tactics to prevent others from taking up that war.
I missed this episode when it first came out. It’s now 3 weeks old.
I don’t know if you think this is important, but it is starting to change my investment thinking. I haven’t decided exactly how I will change my strategy, but now that I have been so forcefully jolted, my mind will be more receptive to new ideas.
It is beginning to dawn on me that my investing success over the last 40 years has depended on the financialized fiction that I have been trying to avoid, The places to hide are shrinking.
