Quotes About Economics

IMF is really designed to protect creditors not debtors.

Todos los estados-nación modernos están construidos sobre la base del gasto deficitario. La deuda se ha erigido en tema central de la política internacional. Pero nadie parece saber exactamente qué es ni qué pensar de ella.

Modern bankac?l?k sistemleri de ilk önce savaÅŸlar? finanse etmek üzere oluÅŸturulmuÅŸtur.

If we have become a debt society, it is because the legacy of war, conquest, and slavery has never completely gone away.

Still, the ground was only really prepared for capitalism in the familiar sense of the term when the merchants began to organize themselves into eternal bodies as a way to win monopolies, legal or de facto, and avoid the ordinary risks of trade.

If money is a just a yardstick, what then does it measure? The answer was simple: debt.

It is no coincidence that the new phase of American debt imperialism has also been accompanied by the rise of the evangelical right, who—in defiance of almost all previously existing Christian theology—have enthusiastically embraced the doctrine of "supply-side economics," that creating money and effectively giving it to the rich is the most Biblically appropriate way to bring about national prosperity.

money has no essence. It's not "really" anything; therefore, its nature has always been and presumably always will be a matter of political conten­tion.

for one measure of economic power was the ownership of sports teams—the Tigers had been owned by the Briggses, an old manufacturing family for whom the baseball park had been named, and the football team by William Clay Ford, Henry's brother—and in the early eighties the two newest owners, of the Tigers and the hockey Redwings, were pizza franchisers.

For Marx, capital is not a thing, but a process—a process, specifically, of the circulation of values.

This boundless drive for enrichment, this passionate chase after value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.

the labour-time necessary for the production of labour-power is the same as that necessary for the production of those means of subsistence; in other words, the value of labour-power is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of its owner.

Barriers to accumulation are perpetually dissolving and re-forming around the issue of so-called natural scarcities and on occasion, as Marx might put it, these barriers can be transformed into absolute contradictions and crises.

The difficulty," he says, "lies not in comprehending that money is a commodity, but in discovering how, why and by what means a commodity becomes money" (186): What appears to happen is not that a particular commodity becomes money because all other commodities universally express their values in it, but, on the contrary, that all other commodities universally express their values in a particular commodity because it is money. (187, emphasis added)

The facts of the Great Depression made a dominant economic theory that denied the possibility of generalized crisis untenable.

The British imperialist logic that led to the Opium Wars reflected this: there was a lot of silver in China, so the idea was to sell Indian opium to the Chinese, get all that silver out in that lucrative sale, and thereby pay for all the goods that were being produced in Manchester and sent to India. When the Chinese resisted opening their doors to the opium trade, the British response was to knock them down with military force.

Finance capital increasingly looked abroad for higher rates of return.

Volcker, Reagan, Thatcher, and Deng Xaioping all took minority arguments that had long been in circulation and made them majoritarian (though in no case without a protracted struggle).

This is what the bourgeois political economists have done: they have treated value as a fact of nature, not a social construction arising out of a particular mode of production. What Marx is interested in is a revolutionary transformation of society, and that means an overthrow of the capitalist value-form, the construction of an alternative value-structure, an alternative value-system that does not have the specific character of that achieved under capitalism.

It is no longer the case, if it ever was, that capitalism can be construed as a peaceful, lawful, and non-coercive system.

But Hayek is also one of the handful of social scientists who (along with his teacher Ludwig von Mises) demonstrated more than sixty years ago why the socialist system could not work and, thus, why it would eventually collapse, as it did in 1989.

Avarice, the spur of industry.

Where the riches are engrossed by a few, these must contribute very largely to the supplying of the public necessities.

A major expression of that fear is the need to earn money to live.