This interview with Michael Hudson explains lots about what he has spent a career learning and trying to pass on. He also raises more questions for me than he answers.

Reshaping Christianity and the Modern State: A Journey from Usury to Fiscal Power

That’s called a Ponzi scheme. A debtor keeps solvent by borrowing the money to pay the interest and amortization falling due. I began to wonder how long U.S. banks would be able to continue financing this Ponzi scheme by lending debtor countries the money to enable them to pay their creditors.

He talks about debt forgiveness, but does not tell you important details about how it worked.

I thought that people would be more willing to accept the idea that cancelling debts was needed to avoid economic polarization and impoverishment if they could see how societies through the ages had dealt with the problem of debts exceeding the ability of large parts of the economy to pay.

This interview presents a fairly complete explanation by Michael Hudson – Barbarism or Civilization

Here is just a sampling of what is in the interview.

Western textbooks indoctrinate students to believe that neoliberalism is the best way to run an economy efficiently – by not having a government to protect self-reliance and living standards, not to regulate against predatory monopoly and financial rent seeking. The aim is to let capitalism evolve into monopoly capitalism, which is really finance capitalism, because monopolies are organized by the financial sector as “the mother of trusts.”

There is an interview with Michael Hudson that has the ironic title Perfecting Imperialism.

I learn so much from listening to a Michael Hudson interview even when I think I have learned it all. Much of the revelations to me come as the interview is winding down. His criticism of the left in the USA and the west was amazing. He explained why I am so sympathetic to his point of view. He describes his interest in the whole economy, and what works and what does not work. He does not tend to focus on any particular social group, but he looks at the entirety of how the economy can work for everybody. When I think this way, I label it as “what worksism” That’s the only “ism” that I am for.

Michael Hudson has posted this excellent video Economists as Hired Guns. On YouTube it is titled How Finance Capitalism Ruined the World – Dr. Michael Hudson & Dr. Steve Keen, DSPod 203.

How Finance Capitalism Ruined the World – Dr. Michael Hudson & Dr. Steve Keen

Steve Keen had a huge oversight which Michael Hudson failed to correct in what I have seen so far. Keen said that once money passed through the hands of the worker it ended up in the hands of the capitalists. This was better than the money never passing through the hands of the workers. He is ignoring the high tax rates of the 1950s and 1960s. The money passing into the hands of the capitalists was taxed away, and put back into circulation,

Michael Hudson has posted the article Were the Biblical Prophets Anti-Semitic?

If the prophets of ancient Israel such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Malachi and Amos were alive today, Benjamin Netanyahu would accuse them of anti-Semitism for daring to describe his government as a travesty of what the Mosaic covenant was all about.

This article is very daning of the current state of Israel, Not being an expert in, nor wanting to be an expert in the bible, I have no way of knowing if Michael Hudson is making a fair assessment.

Rokfin has the video Restructuring of the Global Economy – Michael Hudson, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen.

This is a free education handed to you on a silver platter. Most people will not understand what they are passing up when they don’t bother to watch this video. I have followed Michael Hudson for years and The Duran for a shorter time, but I learned a lot from this video. Even to the very end of the video there are things to learn. I thought I came up with the idea of being a “what worksist”, but they endorse that idea at several points in the discussion by coming close to using my very term

YouTube has the video Why does the US support Israel? A geopolitical analysis with economist Michael Hudson

A geopolitical analysis of why the United States so strongly supports Israel: Economist Michael Hudson discusses with journalist Ben Norton.

Facebook thinks this has some misonformation in it, so it tried to block the URL. Facebook’s fact checkers are very narrow minded. This video is actually more wide minded than I ever thought.

Michael Hudson has posted the article High Finance & Investment Colonialism that includes the Geopolitical Economy Hour.

Political economists Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson explain how imperialism is a product not only of the struggle between classes but also nations, and how the framework of geopolitical economy helps us understand the international relations of the capitalist world system.

It is not until the wrap-up phase that they make the necessary point that a mixed economy is the one that works best.

Rahdika Desai kept pressing the point that planning was important to make any economy work. She never talked about the harm that too much centralized planning can cause.

I believe that the emphasis on central planning is what eventually limited the communist system of the Soviet Union.

Of the two major communist powers, I think that China was the first to understand the need for some capitalist competition to complement the central planning part of socialism. Only later, with the breakup of the Soviet Union and its brief castastrophic dalliance with USA style privatization that Russia too learned the lesson that China had learned.

YouTube has the video Did the debt ceiling deal really save the US from bankruptcy?.

Economists Radhika Desai and Michael Roberts discuss the US debt ceiling deal reached by President Joe Biden and the Republican opposition, and what it means for the future of the economy

This focuses on what the government should be funding. They also seem to take leave of their senses when they talk about government borrowing. They seem to completely forget all they know about modern money theory. In discussing the private banks’ trouble with rising interest rates. they do not make clear that it is the rising of interest rates that decreases the value of the banks’ bond holdings. Many people do not know that the relation between interest rates and the value of existing bonds is an inverse relation. If you think both things rise together, you make very bad policy decisions. They also make no mention of how much the Federal Reserve Bank spends to buy Treasury securities. This throws off their discussion of government borrowing completely out of whack. May be they should talk about the whack deficit in this discussion.

I just cannot stand to watch any more of this crap. If these people cannot get the economics right, why are they even on the air? Notice that Michael Hudson is not present to try to bring this discussion back to reality.

The Geopolitical Economy Hour has the episode China builds global alternative as US-led financial order decays.

To analyze how China is building a global alternative as the US-led neoliberal financial order decays, political economists Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson are joined by economic geographer Mick Dunford.

I claim to be a “what worksist”. This was discusses in this podcast without giving it name. Several people discussed the process of trying a policy and measuring whether or not it works to improve peoples’ living standards. If Michael Hudson wants to develop an academic justification for “what worksism”, then that is something he should work on.

I include the video below from YouTube. Warning, YouTube seems to have detuned the audio volume to be sharply lower than the rest of the web. You may have to turn up the volume to hear the audio portion. Just remember to turn the volume back down before listening to other audio sources. (The turned up volume might blast you our of your seat, and stun you out of control before you can reach out to turn the volume down)