Quotes from Michael Hudson

Campaign donors buy a get out of jail pass... essentially, fraud has been decriminalized.

Indeed, warfare became financialized long before industry or real estate.

These funds are called vultures because they feed on "dead" bonds in default.Complaining that "these hedge funds who have bought the bonds at 20-30 cents to a dollar … now want to be repaid in full citing contractual obligations

The IMF also said its own analysis of the future development of debt was wrong 'by a large margin.' … The IMF had originally projected Greece would lose 5.5% of its economic output between 2009 and 2012. The country has lost 17% in real gross domestic output instead. The plan predicted a 15% unemployment rate in 2012. It was 25%.

they cannot renege on the potential cost when the risk of default becomes a reality. Default, in this context, is … a legitimate, if unfortunate, part of the game. It is not consistent to benefit from a risk-taking premium and insist on full payment in all circumstances. The legal protection extended to bondholders by Judge Griesa goes against the very nature of risk-taking.

Today's monopolization of affluence by a rentier class avoiding taxes and public regulation by buying control of government is the same problem that confronted the classical economists. Their struggle to create a fairer economy produced the tools most appropriate to understand how today's economies are polarizing while becoming less productive.

In effect, he ruled that no writedowns are legal. No government's debt can be written down if any holder disagrees, regardless of how voluntarily they may be negotiated or how reasonable they may be.

Most bank loans are not to create new means of production but are made against real estate, financial securities or other assets already in place. The main source of gain for borrowers since the 1980s has not derived from earnings but seeing the real estate, stocks or bonds they have bought on credit rise as a result of asset-price inflation – that is, to get rich from the debt-leveraged Bubble Economy.

despite "the ease with which US corporations can walk away from their creditors is breathtaking," no such leeway or adjustment exists when it comes to nations and their governments. The intent is to subordinate government power to Wall Street and London bankers.

John Locke's guiding axiom was that all men have a natural right to the fruits of their labor. A corollary to this logic was that landlords have a right only to what they themselves produce, not to exploit and appropriate the labor of their tenants:

the economic aim of debt jubilees was to restore solvency to the population as a whole. Many royal proclamations also freed businesses from various taxes and tariff duties, but the main objective was political and ideological. It was to create a fair and equitable society.

merely aimed to provide citizens with the basic minimum standard needed to be self-sustaining. Wealth accumulation was permitted and even applauded, as long as it did not disrupt the normal functioning of society at large.

East thus avoided the economic polarization between creditors and debtors that ended up imposing bondage on most of classical antiquity.

The creditors' objective is to replace the customary right of citizens to self-support by its opposite principle: the right of creditors to foreclose on the property and means of livelihood pledged as collateral (or to buy it at distress prices), and to make these transfers irreversible.

Commercial "silver" debts among traders and other entrepreneurs were not subject to these debt jubilees. Rulers recognized that productive business loans provide resources for the borrower to pay back with interest, in contrast to consumer debt. This was the contrast that medieval Schoolmen later would draw between interest and usury.

Today's mainstream political and economic theories deny a positive role for government policy to constrain the large-scale concentration of wealth.

He recognizes that the inherent tendency of history is for the wealthy to win out and make society increasingly unequal. This argument also has been made by Thomas Piketty and based largely on the inheritance of great fortunes

Yet for thousands of years, economic polarization was reversed by cancelling debts and restoring land tenure to smallholders who cultivated the land, fought in the army, paid taxes and/or performed corvée labor duties.

The basic principle that should guide economic policy is recognition that debts which can't be paid, won't be. The great political question is, how won't they be paid?

If debts are not written down, they will expand and become a lever for creditors to pry away land and income from the indebted economy at large. That is why debt cancellations to save rural economies from insolvency were deemed sacred from Sumer and Babylonia through the Bible.

A false alarm is sounded that government budget deficits will increase consumer prices — with no discussion of how private-sector credit deflates economies. The problem is that credit is debt — and paying debt service to bankers and bondholders (and various grades of loan sharks) leaves less income available to spend on goods and services. So debt deflation is today's major problem, not inflation.

Popular morality blames victims for going into debt – not only individuals, but also national governments. The trick in this ideological war is to convince debtors to imagine that general prosperity depends on paying bankers and making bondholders rich – a veritable Stockholm Syndrome in which debtors identify with their financial captors.

When the volume of debt has grown as large as national income or GDP, and when it bears an interest rate (typically 5%) above the economy's rate of growth (typically just 1% to 2%), then all the growth in national income is taken by the creditors.

In fact, they are not taught in any university departments: the dynamics of debt, and how the pattern of bank lending inflates land prices, or national income accounting and the rising share absorbed by rent extraction in the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector. There was only one way to learn how to analyze these topics: to work for banks. Back in the 1960s there was barely a hint that these trends would become a great financial bubble.