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The price decline is a result of having to pay debts. That drains income from the circular flow between production and consumption - that is, between what people are paid when they go to work, and the things that they buy.

Michael Hudson

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Michael Hudson
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More quotes by Michael Hudson

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The one sure mark of a con, though, is the promise of free money.
Michael Hudson
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More and more money is being extracted from of the production and consumption economy to pay the FIRE sector. That's what causes debt deflation and shrinks markets. If you pay the banks, you have less to spend on goods and services.
Michael Hudson
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Normally, if someone goes bankrupt, you wipe out the debt and get a fresh start. But that's not permitted with student loans. So the effect is to impoverish many graduates with very high debts.
Michael Hudson
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When Hillary Clinton said she's going to do just what Obama does and we're going to continue to recover, most people know that we're not recovering at all. We're shrinking.
Michael Hudson
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I don't think that governments should permit speculation in raw materials, because they're what the economy basically needs.
Michael Hudson
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The concept of productivity in America is income divided by labor. So if you're Goldman Sachs and you pay yourself $20 million a year in salary and bonuses, you're considered to have added $20 million to GDP, and that's enormously productive. So we're talking in a tautology. We're talking with circular reasoning here.
Michael Hudson
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Paying debt service to banks leaves less income to buy goods and services.
Michael Hudson
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When they say inflation is bad, deflation is good, what they mean is, more money for us 1% is good we're all for asset price inflation, we're all for housing prices going up, and we're all for our stock and bonds prices going up. We're just against you workers getting more income.
Michael Hudson
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I think the Republican tax law is so bad that it almost guarantees a Republican victory, precisely because it's so bad. The seeming irony is that it's so bad that it enables the Democratic Party to think, A-ha, all we have to do is be the lesser evil.
Michael Hudson
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The companies aren't hiring, because consumers don't have enough money to buy the goods and services.
Michael Hudson
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Deflation means a slowdown of income growth. Markets shrink, new capital investment and employment also taper off, so wages decline. That is what's happening as deliberate policy in Europe and the United States. Falling or stagnant prices are simply the result of having less income to spend.
Michael Hudson
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Since 2008 you've had the largest bond market rally in history, as the Federal Reserve flooded the economy with quantitative easing to drive down interest rates. Driving down the interest rates creates a boom in the stock market, and also the real estate market. The resulting capital gains not treated as income.
Michael Hudson
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A derivative is a bet on whether a stock, or a bond or a real estate asset, is going to go up or down. There's a winner and a loser. It's like betting on a horserace.
Michael Hudson
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Most banks - with Deutsche Bank at the top of the spectrum here - have decided that they can't make money lending to barrowers anymore, so they're going to the second business plan: They lend money to casino capitalists. That is, to people who want to gamble on derivatives.
Michael Hudson
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The IMF acts as the collection agent for global bondholders. Its projections begin by assuming that all debts can be paid, if economies will cut wages and wiping out pension funds so as to pay banks and bondholders.
Michael Hudson
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The problems of 2008 were never cured. The Federal Reserve's solution to the crisis was to lend the economy enough money to borrow its way out of debt. It thought that if it could subsidize banks lending homeowners enough money to buy houses from people who are defaulting, then the bank balance sheets would end up okay.
Michael Hudson
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Stocks always go down much faster than they go up. That's why it's called a crash. People who put their money into the stocks will find, all of a sudden, that stock prices are no longer being supported by the debt leveraging that's been holding them up.
Michael Hudson
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The effect of metals speculation was to push up the prices that China had to pay to countries like Australia. This squeezed China. Once the speculative demand ended, all of a sudden the added production facilities that had been brought into production by the high prices went out of production again, and there was a glut.
Michael Hudson
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You have the economic vocabulary turning into vocabulary of deception.
Michael Hudson
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We're in a chronic debt-deflation. There's no way we can recover unless you write down the debts. And that's what the IMF basically is implying (and it was explicit regarding Greece), but its not spelling it out, because that's not what can be said in polite company.
Michael Hudson