Quotes from Michael Hudson

The neo-rentier objective is threefold: to reduce economies to debt dependency, to transfer public utilities into creditor hands, and then to create a rent-extracting tollbooth economy. The financial objective is to block governments from writing down debts when bankers and bondholders over-lend.

Neither money nor credit is a factor of production. Debtors do the work to pay their creditors. This means that interest is not a "return to a factor of production." Little credit is used to expand production or capital investment. Most is to transfer asset ownership.

Neoliberal enzymes aim to sedate the industrial host into believing that the financial sector is part of the real economy, not external to it and extractive. That is the first myth. Modern national income and GDP accounting formats treat tollbooth systems and other rent seeking as "output.

The starting point of the 2014 BIS report is the main theme of the present book: We are not in a typical cyclical downturn, but have reached the culmination of a long buildup of cycles. Each recovery since 1945 has added more debt, increasing carrying charges that divert spending away from current goods and services (debt deflation, as Chapter 8 has discussed).

Junk Economics is the cover story for all this. Claiming to be scientific, it is sponsored by financial interests to redistribute income and wealth upward, reversing the policies urged by the 19th-century classical economists and Progressive Era reformers. Instead of progressive taxation, this ideology advocates shifting taxes off the One Percent onto the 99 Percent.

it is possible to cause more trouble with a rouble than with a club; it is only political economy that does not want to know it. — Leo Tolstoy, What Shall We Do Then? (1886)

The financial alternative to classical economics calls itself "neoliberalism," but it is the opposite of what the Enlightenment's original liberal reformers called themselves. Land rent has not ended up in government hands, and more and more public services have been privatized to squeeze out monopoly rent. Banks have gained control of government and their central banks to create money only to bail out creditor losses, not to finance public spending.

Economics ultimately is political economy. To claim that it is "disinterested" and scientific is to cover up its political motives. The entire history of political economy has centered on the conflict between reformers seeking to free society from rentiers – landlords, creditors and monopolists – and the reaction by these wealthy vested interests to maintain their grip on the status quo that favors them.

demonstrate that taxing rent re-captures for society the natural resource patrimony and rising site value. This rental valuation is created not by landlord efforts but by society's overall prosperity and public investment in transportation systems, schools and other infrastructure that define "location, location and location.

The way societies have coped with this deepening indebtedness should be the starting point of financial theorizing. Money is not a "factor of production." It is a claim on the output or income that others produce. Debtors do the work, not the lenders. Before a formal market for wage labor developed in antiquity, money lending was the major way to obtain the services of bondservants who were compelled to work off the interest that was owed.

So we are brought back to the fact that compound interest does not merely increase the flow of income to the rentier One Percent, but also transfers property into its hands.

Today's self-multiplying debt overhead absorbs profits, rents, personal income and tax revenue in a process whose mathematics is much like that of environmental pollution. Evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson demonstrates how impossible it is for growth to proceed at exponential rates without encountering a limit. He cites "the arithmetical riddle of the lily pond. A lily pod is placed in a pond. Each day thereafter the pod and then all its descendants double

History of the Great American Fortunes uncovered how many family fortunes were taken from the public domain by colonial land grants, bribery and insider dealing – and how such fortunes quickly take a financial form.

This is the political dimension of the mathematics of compound interest. It is the pro-rentier policy that the French Physiocrats and British liberals sought to reverse by clearing away the legacy of European feudalism.

The foundation myth of pro-rentier economics is that everyone receives income in proportion to the contribution they make to production. This denies that economic rent is unearned. Hence, there is no exploitation or unearned income, and no need for the reforms advocated by classical political economy.

Financialization is the major dynamic polarizing today's economies. Its aim is to appropriate the means of production and rent-extracting privileges for a creditor class to load labor, industry, agriculture and governments down with debt. Employment, wages and capital investment cannot recover as long as the resulting debt overhead is left in place.

The aim of predatory lending in much of the world is to obtain labor to work off debts (debt peonage), to foreclose on the land of debtors, and in modern times to force debt-strapped governments to privatize natural resources and public infrastructure.

Modern creditors avert public cancellation of debts (and making banks a public utility) by pretending that lending provides mutual benefit in which the borrower gains – consumer goods now rather than later, or money to run a business or buy an asset that earns enough to pay back the creditor with interest and still leave a profit for the debtor.

Cancelling debts was politically easiest when governments or public institutions (temples, palaces or civic authorities) were the major creditors, because they were cancelling debts owed to themselves. This is an argument for why governments should be the main suppliers of money and credit as a public utility.

Eurozone financial institutions have sought to impose Latvia's "model" austerity on Ireland, Spain and Portugal – and most of all, on Greece, which is being made an object lesson of how creditor powers will treat countries that try to extricate themselves from debt, unemployment, privatization, emigration and demographic collapse.

free market required public regulation to keep predatory finance and rent seeking in check, and to keep basic infastructure in the public domain.

the Progressive Era's program of taxing rentier wealth and subsidizing public investment in basic infrastructure with a view toward lowering the cost of living and doing business. In a word, the "modern" economy a century ago was supposed to be socialist. Today's economy is moving in the opposite direction: toward a financialized neofeudalism and rent seeking, by spreading the politically soporific impression that There Is No Alternative.

Instead of restructuring economies with a clean slate to resume progress, the financial class is using today's debt crisis to vest itself as the new elite to rule the remainder of the 21st century. To consolidate their position, financiers are sponsoring a property grab – privatization

Money, endless money, is the sinews of war," wrote Cicero in his Philippics (43 BC). Not only money, but credit, too.