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The economy is being run primarily by the banks for their own interest.

Michael Hudson

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Michael Hudson
Primarily
Banks
Economy
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More quotes by 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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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 result of this anti-classical revolution you had just before World War I was that today, almost all the economic growth in the last decade has gone to the One Percent. It's gone to Wall Street, to real estate.
Michael Hudson
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The real estate interests and banks are in a kind of symbiosis. They're the largest-growing part of the economy. This is the sector that backs the political campaigns of senators, presidents and congressmen, and they use this leverage to make sure that their people dominate the Federal Reserve, Treasury and the federal housing agencies.
Michael Hudson
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Most people think of the economy as producing goods and services and paying labor to buy what it produces. But a growing part of the economy in every country has been the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector, which comprises the rent and interest paid to the economy's balance sheet of assets by debtors and rent payers.
Michael Hudson
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When you say bank, a bank is a building, a set of computers and chairs and things. The bankers are the people running these banks. They're the chief officers, and they push the loans because they don't care if they go bad. For one thing, they may package these bad loans and sell them off to gullible institutional investors.
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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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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That's the magic of double-taxation treaties: you can shop around for the lowest taxer.
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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You have the economic vocabulary turning into vocabulary of deception.
Michael Hudson
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The world's politics are in turmoil, not to mention the Mideast, where the US has mounted attacks from Libya to Iraq to Syria, and ISIS is attacking governments in today's pipeline rivalry.
Michael Hudson
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Just like a house is worth whatever a bank's going to lend against it, an education is worth whatever the bank is going to lend the student to pay the university. So the availability of government-guaranteed student loans has vastly inflated the cost of education, just like it's inflated the cost of housing.
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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Governments create money and spend it into the economy by running budget deficits. The paper currency in your pocket is technically a government debt.
Michael Hudson
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In order to be an economist these days, you have to participate in this fairytale that somehow we can recover and still make the banks rich. And it is a fairytale.
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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The one sure mark of a con, though, is the promise of free money.
Michael Hudson
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If a lot of money goes into the stock market, it'll push up prices, making money for stock speculators. Then the insiders can decide that it's time to sell out, and the market will plunge.
Michael Hudson
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We go forward with our heads held high, but look back and remember where we come from.
Michael Hudson