Quotes About Economy

The global economy is destroying the world; steal it all and then charge your victims for the service, abandon humanity and save the financial institutions.

Competition in the current system is at the same time too broad, too narrow, and too local.

During my travels in Iraq, Israel, Gaza, Brazil, Indonesia, Japan, Europe and all over the United States, I have seen and heard the voices of people who want change. They want the stabilization of the economy, education and healthcare for all, renewable energy and an environmental vision with an eye on generations to come.

The notion that one must know history in order to understand the present has a certain justification when applied to the history of events, but not for the structural history of society. Rather, the opposite is the case: to examine the *constitution* of a particular social and economic structure, one has to be already familiar with the *completed* structure. Only then will one know what to look for in history.

The measure of a country's prosperity should not be how many poor people drive cars, but how many affluent people use public transportation.

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.

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

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).

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)

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 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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

This unique ability of the U.S. Government to borrow from foreign central banks rather than from its own citizens is one of the economic miracles of modern times. Without it the war-induced American prosperity of the 1960s and early 1970s would have ended quickly, as was threatened in 1973 when foreign central banks decided to cut their currencies loose from the dollar, letting them float upward rather than accepting a further flood of U.S. Treasury IOUs.

Debt leveraging is a major reason why the United States and Britain have lost their industrial advantage. Debt-inflated costs for housing, education and other basic needs have priced their labor out of markets abroad and at home.