Naked Capitalism has the post Polarisation, Then a Crash: Michael Hudson on the Rentier Economy.

Allied with landlords and monopolists, the finance sector is extracting economic rents from the economy that’s impoverishing US government, industry and labor says Michael Hudson discussing the chokehold of pro-finance, pro-rentier capitalism reaching into the present COVID-19 crisis.

This is something that neither the right nor the left of politics seems to understand. If the left understood this, they would stop calling for the destruction of (industrial) capitalism.

Hudson is partially wrong in his assessment of China. In reading the book Trade Wars are Class Wars, I come to realize how China is shortchanging the workers too.

Naked Capitalism has a post that features the interview Michael Hudson on Financialization and Deindustrialization.

Yves here. Michael Hudson provided a pre-election take on how Trump policies haven’t changed the trajectory of America’s decline as a manufacturer. We’ve stressed that achieving that goal would take a long term commitment to what amounts to industrial policy…something that America is officially allergic to but in fact practices all the time, witness huge explicit and tax subsidies to favored sectors like real estate, finance, higher education, medicine, and of course armaments.

I wish this had come to my attention before the election. It puts the lie to many of what Trump bragged about as his accomplishments. It also has cautions for people who call themselves Capitalists or Socialists. In this interview you can also see the tendencies of Paul Jay to insert his own interpretations to muddy the message of the interviewee. There is so much packed into this interview, that it might be hard for a newcomer to the topic to digest. All I can advise newcomers is not to be discouraged. If you keep at it, you will eventually understand more and more.

Naked Capitalism has published the article Michael Hudson: How an “Act of God” Pandemic Is Destroying the West: The U.S. Is Saving the Financial Sector, Not the Economy.

When reading this article always remember that Hudson is talking about private debt owed by money users. This does not apply to public “debt” owed by money creators like the Federal government. In the USA, there are no money creators like the Federal government. Only the federal government can create money.

China is using an age-old policy common ever since Hammurabi and other Bronze Age rulers promoted economic resilience in the face of “acts of God.” Unless personal debts, rents and taxes that cannot be paid are annulled, the result will be widespread bankruptcy, impoverishment and homelessness. In contrast to America’s financialized economy, China has shown how natural it is for society simply to acknowledge that debts, rents, taxes and other carrying charges of living and doing business cannot resume until economic normalcy is able to resume.

What angers our oligarchs so much about China is that China can figure this out, but our oligarchs hate this solution because it works.

If we can’t take our blinders off to see the obvious, our downfall is nobody’s fault but our own.

Okay, here is the real OMG post for this decade. Of course Michael Hudson has been saying this for years, but Paul Jay gave him an interview where Hudson could explain this all in terms that financially astute people can understand. The future does not look bright if either Trump or Biden gets elected.,

FED’s $10 Trillion Defends Assets of the Rich – Michael Hudson. This is the kind of interview that has been missing from the public discourse since The Real News Network staged a coup to get rid of its founder, Paul Jay.

Naked Capitalism has posted an extensive transcript titled Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton With Michael Hudson: US Coronavirus “Bailout” Is a $6 Trillion Scam.

MICHAEL HUDSON: No, the Federal Reserve was given special powers to create 10 times as many loans or swaps as others. The Federal Reserve represents the commercial banks and commercial investors.

Now here’s the problem: a lot of companies were issuing junk bonds. They were going way down in price, especially junk bonds for the fracking industry. The Federal Reserve says, “We’re going to be backed up by the Treasury. We can just create — as you know, Modern Monetary Theory — we can just create money on a computer, and swap. So we will, say, ‘Give us your poor.’ It’s like the Statue of Liberty: ‘Give us your poor, your oppressed,’ or Aladdin’s old lamps for new: Give us your junk bonds, and we will give you a bona fide Federal Reserve deposit.”

Here are the audio/video/transcript source from the original Transcript – US coronavirus ‘bailout’ scam is $6 trillion giveaway to Wall St – Economist Michael Hudson explains.

YouTube has the video Debt And Power – With Michael Hudson.

In this post we discuss debt in the current context, and consider where the very high levels of debt will take us. And as importantly, who wins and who loses.

If you really wanted to know what the 2020 Presidential contest is all about and the stakes involved, you would watch this interview. The trouble is that most people think interviews like this are too tough sledding to make it through. I started listening to talks like this over 5 years ago, and I am still learning. I am a slow learner, but given the opportunity, I persist.

We’ll probably have to have our 30% unemployment before people have enough spare time to learn enough about this stuff. I am trying to do my best. Any suggestions for doing better would be much appreciated.

RT has the episode of the Keiser Report Trump: Easy to read (E1463).

In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max and Stacy discuss the former top trade negotiator for China, who claims that dealing with Trump is great that he is so easy to read, thanks to his non-stop tweeting. They also discuss Venezuela’s president, who is holding up a bitcoin hard wallet, just a year after the UK refused to return his country’s gold. In the second half, Max talks to Dr. Michael Hudson of michael-hudson.com about repo markets, national debt, China, trade wars, and more.

Max and Stacy go crazy over bitcoin again. I have always hoped that Max would have a conversation with Michael Hudson who could straighten out Max’s bitcoin mania.

Max did a great job of papering over Michael Hudson’s opinion of bitcoin. Hudson did manage to sneak in a subtle criticism of bitcoin, but Max carefully steered the conversation to make sure that the criticism was suitably subtle. Max just cannot seem to accept that a “currency” created out of nothing, like bitcoin, is just a non-government fiat currency. When he has to resort to baseless claims about human nature, you know he is getting to the point of desperation.

Bitcoin may remove the ability of a single entity from deciding how much of that currency is in circulation, but there are pros and cons to this difference. A straight up conversation around this between Keiser and Hudson would be great.

November 18, 2019

An interview by Laura Flanders popped up on my Facebook Timeline – Monopoly Capitalism: At The Breaking Point?.

Toward the end of the Michael Hudson segment he was able to tell Laura Flanders what he thought of BitCoin that he didn’t dare say to Max Keiser.

Laura Flanders: Some people talk about BitCoin and these other kinds of currencies. They were seen as radical at one point.

Michael Hudson: I don’t think so. It’s Fictitious money. It’s tax avoidance. It’s really criminal money. …

Naked Capitalism has the post Michael Hudson: U.S. Economic Warfare and Likely Foreign Defenses.

The American promise is that the victory of neoliberalism is the End of History, offering prosperity to the entire world. But beneath the rhetoric of free choice and free markets is the reality of corruption, subversion, coercion, debt peonage and neofeudalism. The reality is the creation and subsidy of polarized economies bifurcated between a privileged rentier class and its clients, their debtors and renters. America is to be permitted to monopolize trade in oil and food grains, and high-technology rent-yielding monopolies, living off its dependent customers. Unlike medieval serfdom, people subject to this End of History scenario can choose to live wherever they want. But wherever they live, they must take on a lifetime of debt to obtain access to a home of their own, and rely on U.S.-sponsored control of their basic needs, money and credit by adhering to U.S. financial planning of their economies. This dystopian scenario confirms Rosa Luxemburg’s recognition that the ultimate choice facing nations in today’s world is between socialism and barbarism.

I have skimmed the article, but I’ll have to go back and read it more carefully.

Naked Capitalism has published the article Michael Hudson: Trump’s Trade Threats are really Cold War 2.0

Trump’s trade tantrum is that other countries are simply following the same economic strategy that once made America great, but which neoliberals have destroyed here and in much of Europe. U.S. negotiators are unwilling to acknowledge that the United States has lost its competitive industrial advantage and become a high-cost rentier economy. Its GDP is “empty,” consisting mainly of the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) rents, profits and capital gains while the nation’s infrastructure decays and its labor is reduced to a prat-time “gig” economy. Under these conditions the effect of trade threats can only be to speed up the drive by other countries to become economically self-reliant.

If Trump could get what he wished, we could take control of China’s economy. China’s only logical reaction is to try harder to protect itself from the possibility of having to succumb to such coercion. There is a reason why China has been willing to take our money and just leave it in the bank while selling us goods cheaply. USA money in the bank is the safeguard against USA economic threats.

Naked Capitalism has the article Michael Hudson: The Shape of the Venezuelan Economy, from Chavez to Maduro and Beyond.

There is no way that’s Chavez and Maduro could have pursued a pro-Venezuelan policy aimed at achieving economic independence without inciting fury, subversion and sanctions from the United States. American foreign policy remains as focused on oil as it was when it invaded Iraq under Dick Cheney’s regime. U.S. policy is to treat Venezuela as an extension of the U.S. economy, running a trade surplus in oil to spend in the United States or transfer its savings to U.S. banks.

Wow, this connects the dots you didn’t even know were there. Is Trump about to end the dominance of the USA in the world by causing an uprising of other countries?

The U.S. has overplayed its hand in destroying the foundation of the dollar-centered global financial order. That order has enabled the United States to be “the exceptional nation” able to run balance-of-payments deficits and foreign debt that it has no intention (or ability) to pay, claiming that the dollars thrown off by its foreign military spending “supply” other countries with their central bank reserves (held in the form of loans to the U.S. Treasury – Treasury bonds and bills – to finance the U.S. budget deficit and its military spending, as well as the largely military U.S. balance-of-payments deficit.

Knowing how much of a devotee of Modern Money Theory that Michael Hudson is, it is hard to digest his talk of how our military and deficit spending is financed by other countries holding Treasury securities. There is a parenthesis missing in the above quote which would have clarified some of what he meant. The parenthesis is missing from the original publication on Michael Hudson’s web sit in the article Venezuela as the pivot for New Internationalism?

The only thing I can think of is that MMT does seem to depend on the continued acceptance of the USA dollar as a world reserve currency. If that stopped being true, there would certainly be major ramifications on the economic policy options we have.

Whenever I read about the policy options MMT says that the USA has, I do think that we had better hurry up and take advantage of those options before we fritter away those possibilities. By destroying the status that the USA dollar enjoys in the rest of the world, we could no longer depend on getting the rest of the world to supply us with cheap imports in exchange for our dollars.