I recently was reminded of this video that I posted on December 30, 2020 as A Hard Look at Rent and Rent Seeking with Michael Hudson & Pepe Escobar.

An interactive discussion on wealth inequality and the “Great Game” on the control of natural resources.

In this webinar organized jointly by the Henry George School and the International Union for Land Value Taxation, Michael Hudson and Pepe Escobar will unpack one of the most destructive features of our economic system and the many different ways it drives wealth inequality.

I will embed the video here again.

I learned so much from watching this again. Maybe because I have grown my understanding in the intervening years. There is an education here about why the western media cannot give you an accurate report on any of this. What China and Russia are trying to do is so far from western concepts of how the economy ought to work that people steeped in western economic ideas cannot conceive of what China and Russia are trying to accomplish. I do not know how many western viewers can let go of what has been taught to them to get as much out of this video as I have.

Naked Capitalism has posted the article Michael Hudson on Student Debt Relief, Inflation, Ukraine Disaster Capitalism, Petrodollar Challenge. It has a transcript of the interview below.

Economist Michael Hudson joins Multipolarista host Ben Norton to discuss partial student debt relief in the US, inflation and the Fed, disaster capitalism in Ukraine, and China’s challenge to the petrodollar.

As a fan of both Michael Hudson and Fadhel Kaboub, this interview was a powerful reminder of the one area where I disagree with Fadhel Kaboub and strongly agree with Michael Hudson, I think Michael Hudson’s view of the inflation battles of the 1970s and 1980s is much closer to reality than Fadhel Kaboub’s explanation. Fadhel, being originally from Tunisia, has a view of the 1970s and 80s that is constrained by affairs of the middle east. Michael Hudson’s views are much more focused on the events in the USA’s military adventures in the far east, particularly surrounding the Vietnam War. I wish I could get Fadhel to pay more attention to what Michael Hudson has to say. Even in this interview, Michael Hudson had some surprising (to me) clarifications of some economic history.

Michael Hudson posted an interview he did recently – The Big Context.

I have noticed a change in Michael Hudson’s interviews. He isn’t mincing words anymore. He is openly airing his full pessimism. Here is the shortest excerpt that I could come up with that gives a hint as to his current thinking.

The US economy cannot recover its industrial power. Its debt is too high, its cost of medical care, 18% of GDP is too high, it’s the rent is so high, 48% of income. There’s no way in which the United States can grow again. Every business recovery since 1945 has started from a higher and higher and higher level of debt, and now it’s reached the limit. A year ago the Federal Reserve said that half of Americans could not raise 400 dollars in a crisis. The recent increase in interest rates have raised credit card rates and debt service by about 450 dollars per average American. So here are people who couldn’t raise it.

All of a sudden they are shifting their consumption patterns to downsizeable. The dollar stores’ spam is now in short supply because people are moving from expensive meat on to that. So Americans are going downhill. So what is it that Russia and China and India represent? They’re countries that are industrializing and moving forward. The American economy and American society is run by the financial sector; they’ve shifted planning away from government to the financial sector which lives in the short run, and essentially the growth of the one percent is shrinking the ninety-nine percent.

Naked Capitalism has republished the article Michael Hudson: American Diplomacy as a Tragic Drama. The original, American Diplomacy as a Tragic Drama, is on his web site.

Confronted with China’s industrial prosperity based on self-financed public investment in socialized markets, U.S. officials acknowledge that resolving this fight will take a number of decades to play out. Arming a proxy Ukrainian regime is merely an opening move in turning Cold War 2 (and potentially/or indeed World War III) into a fight to divide the world into allies and enemies with regard to whether governments or the financial sector will plan the world economy and society.

What is euphemized as U.S.-style democracy is a financial oligarchy privatizing basic infrastructure, health and education. The alternative is what President Biden calls autocracy, a hostile label for governments strong enough to block a global rent-seeking oligarchy from taking control. China is deemed autocratic for providing basic needs at subsidized prices instead of charging whatever the market can bear. Making its mixed economy lower-cost is called “market manipulation,” as if that is a bad thing that was not done by the United States, Germany and every other industrial nation during their economic takeoff in the 19th and early 20th century.

The Saker has published the article Michael Hudson: The End of Western Civilization – Why It Lacks Resilience, and What Will Take Its Place.

Michael Hudson’s Major Lecture at the Global University in China on July 11th, 2022 – and posted with Dr Hudson’s permission

Micheal Hudson has laid it all out in blunt terms in a single lecture. I have selected a few excerpts to give you some idea of what is in this lecture.

The lesson of history is thus that a strong government regulatory power is required to prevent oligarchies from emerging and using creditor claims and land grabbing to turn the citizenry into debtors, renters, clients and ultimately serfs.
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The U.S. Federal Reserve Bank monetized $8 trillion to save the financial elite’s holdings of stocks, bonds and packaged real estate mortgages instead of rescuing the victims of junk mortgages and over-indebted foreign countries. The European Central Bank did much the same thing to save the wealthiest Europeans from losing the market value of their financial wealth.

But it was too late to save the U.S. and European economies. The long post-1945 debt buildup has run its course. The U.S. economy has been deindustrialized, its infrastructure is collapsing and its population is so deeply indebted that little disposable income is left to support living standards. Much as occurred with Rome’s Empire, the American response is to try to maintain the prosperity of its own financial elite by exploiting foreign countries. That is aim of today’s New Cold War diplomacy. It involves extracting economic tribute by pushing foreign economies further into dollarized debt, to be paid by imposing depression and austerity on themselves.
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NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine against Russia is the catalyst fracturing the world into two opposing spheres with incompatible economic philosophies. China, the country growing most rapidly, treats money and credit as a public utility allocated by government instead of letting the monopoly privilege of credit creation be privatized by banks, leading to them displacing government as economic and social planner. That monetary independence, relying on its own domestic money creation instead of borrowing U.S. electronic dollars, and denominating foreign trade and investment in its own currency instead of in dollars, is seen as an existential threat to America’s control of the global economy.

U.S. neoliberal doctrine calls for history to end by “freeing” the wealthy classes from a government strong enough to prevent the polarization of wealth, and ultimate decline and fall. Imposing trade and financial sanctions against Russia, Iran, Venezuela and other countries that resist U.S. diplomacy, and ultimately military confrontation, is how America intends to “spread democracy” by NATO from Ukraine to the China Sea.

YouTube has the video A Philosophy for a Fair Society (Part I) | Michael Hudson & Jonathan Brown

Welcome to the Shepheard Walwyn podcast and a two part interview with Michael Hudson, perhaps to the world’s most influential (but rarely acknowledged) economist. Michael has had a remarkable career starting off as a practical or reality-based economist working for a variety of institutions looking and how banks really behave.

He looked at the balance of payments economics for David Rockefeller at Chase Manhattan Bank; worked for Herman Kahn at the Hudson Institute, and advised the US State Department on how they could fund the Vietnam War when the gold was running out. He now advises the Chinese Government on how to maintain an industrial economy and avoid the traps the US Finance economy has fallen into.

Michael’s most famous work is Super Imperialism, the Economic Strategy of American Empire but has also written extensively on ancient economies in the Near East.

He is one of our longest running writers having co-written the soon to be re-released eBook, A Philosophy for a Fair Society with Kris Feder and the late GJ Miller and. Incidentally, this book is a great introduction to his whole body of work so do check it out!

In this first episode we looked at how economics got corrupted from industrial economics where people made money by making things, to a finance economy where a small elite group makes money by manipulating financial instruments. There’s some meaty topics but I promise it’s worth your time.

Michael Hudson goes into details that I have never heard before in any of his writings. There are a couple of places where he talks about things happening in the 1980s and 1990 when he actually means 1880s and 1890s.

Here is the second part of the interview.

The links to the two halves of the interview are published on Michael Hudson’s web site as Economic Rent and Exploitation

YouTube has the video The Return of Inflation – Michael Hudson.

On May 13, 2022, Michael Hudson spoke a panel discussion entitled “The return of inflation: Realities, Perceptions, Politics. You can watch the entire event at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBtGIA4urDE&t=0s‘

Nobody has mentioned yet that if we can get a high enough inflation, business can start paying $15/hour in cheaper money in order to maintain the status quo.

The Multipolarista channel on YouTube has the video Economist Michael Hudson discusses the decline of the US dollar, the sanctions war on Russia, his concept of “free-trade imperialism,” and financial parasitism..

We talk about these concepts explored in his new book “The Destiny of Civilization: Finance Capitalism, Industrial Capitalism or Socialism.”

The book is to go on sale on May 11,2022.

At this point, I don’t know whose predictions will turn out to be more correct. Only time will tell. Meanwhile we are all hostage to what our government will bring to our future. Are you going to do anything to protect yourself, or are you all-in on the USA?

Moderate Rebels has the podcast Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire with economist Michael Hudson.

Economist Michael Hudson discusses the update of his book “Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire” and the financial motivations behind the US new cold war on China and Russia.

Hudson has published a new, third edition of his book Super Imperialism that updates his analysis for the 21st century, discussing the new cold war on China and Russia and the ongoing transition from a US dollar-dominated financialized system to a “multipolar de-dollarized economy.”

Hudson explains how the strategy of US economic hegemony has evolved since World War One.

I have read this book recently. This interview gets to the heart of the book rather well. The only thing more I would like to hear is a discussioin of how Modern Money Theory (MMT) relates to this discussion. Michael Hudson is also a strong proponent of MMT. However, MMT focuses on the independence of a country that is sovereign in its own currency. The USA has the strongest monetary soevereignty that there is, yet “Super Imperialism” discusses the arm twisting the USA has to do to make it sovereignty stick in the international theater. I would like to hear Michael Hudosn address these aspects in a single interview.

Naked Capitalism has the video Joe Lauria Interviews Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff on Consortium News.

And I’m sure what it brings with that, is all that voters can do is keep throwing throwing the rascals out of power. But they’re the same rascals, basically. So the United States doesn’t seem to have much of an opportunity to have a real alternative.