Quotes from Michael Hudson

The one sure mark of a con, though, is the promise of free money.

If a lot of money goes into the stock market, it'll push up prices, making money for stock speculators. Then the insiders can decide that it's time to sell out, and the market will plunge.

As you have to pay more interest and amortization on what you owe, you're left with less and less money to buy goods and services - unless you borrow even more and go further into debt.

We go forward with our heads held high, but look back and remember where we come from.

The world's politics are in turmoil, not to mention the Mideast, where the US has mounted attacks from Libya to Iraq to Syria, and ISIS is attacking governments in today's pipeline rivalry.

Every government, from the Obama administration right through to Angela Merkel, the Eurozone and the IMF, promise to save the banks, not the economy.

I don't think that governments should permit speculation in raw materials, because they're what the economy basically needs.

Europe is creating the flight of refugees that's tearing it apart politically, and leading rightwing nationalist parties to gain power to withdraw from the Eurozone.

Basically, unless you're willing to write down debts and save the economy, you're going to have deflation and a steady drain in purchasing power - that is, shrinking markets.

I think the less fracking there is, the better it is for the economy and society.

If the economy is growing, people want to employ more workers. If you hire more labor, wages go up.

Trump has said that he wants to remove the tax deductibility of interest. If he can do that, fine. But I hope that Trump knows that it's not the President that sets tax policy. It's Congress.

The ideological foundation of today's business schools is that economic control should be shifted out of government hands into those of financial managers - that is, Wall Street.

John Stuart Mill was called a Ricardian socialist because classical economists were moving toward reforms they themselves characterized as social – and hence, as socialist. Most reformers referred to themselves as socialists of one kind or another, from Christian socialists to Marxist socialists and reformers across the political spectrum. The question was what kind of socialism "free market" capitalism would evolve into.

finance was to become a public utility, situated in the public domain or at least alongside a public banking option. Instead, the past century's expansion of predatory credit has been reinforced by de-taxing interest, land rent, financial speculation, debt leveraging and "capital" (asset-price) gains.

The secret of life is sincerity and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.

These acts recall the 1971–72 "Chicken War" between America and Europe, and the grain embargo that quadrupled wheat prices outside of the United States. It was this embargo that inspired OPEC to enact matching increases in oil prices to maintain terms-of-trade parity between oil and foodstuffs. The "oil shock" was simply a reverberation of the U.S. grain shock.

Private investors traditionally had been obliged to take losses when debtors defaulted, but it became apparent that the U.S. Government was not about to relinquish its creditor hold on the Allies. This intransigence obliged them to keep tightening the screws on Germany.

But instead of U.S. citizens and companies being taxed or U.S. capital markets being obliged to finance the rising federal deficit, foreign economies were obliged to buy the new Treasury bonds being issued. America's Cold War spending thus became a tax on foreigners. It was their central banks who financed the costs of the war in Southeast Asia.

These rules meant that, unlike Britain, the United States was able to pursue its Cold War spending in Asia and elsewhere in the world without constraint, as well as social welfare spending at home. This was just the reverse of Britain's stop–go policies or the austerity programs that the IMF imposed on Third World debtors when their balance of payments fell into deficit.

The United States is in deficit on raw materials account, but is unwilling to limit its industrial expansion correspondingly. It is in surplus on farm products account, but is unwilling to limit its agriculture accordingly. The peoples of developing countries therefore are to be turned into the instrument through which the otherwise untenable U.S. economic process is perpetuated.

It thus was historically logical that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara should become president of the World Bank upon leaving his position as architect of America's war in Southeast Asia.

Staff members accused the IMF of violating its rules by making bad loans "to states unable to repay their debts," simply to pay bankers and bondholders.

this sounds like a Ponzi scheme it is because it is the mother of all Ponzi schemes. A merry go around of Ponzi Austerity which, interestingly, left both the insolvent banks and the insolvent Greek state a little more… insolvent