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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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Michael Hudson
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More quotes by Michael Hudson

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When Mr.Trump says he wants to help all Americans, he means he wants to help all Americans in the 1% by really letting Wall Street get a huge debt from the 99% of the Americans. It's just the opposite of what people believe.
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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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 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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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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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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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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No price is too high to pay to try to make the financial system go on a little bit longer. But ultimately it can't be saved, because of the mathematics that are involved.
Michael Hudson
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When there's deflation, it means that although most markets are shrinking and people have less to spend, the 1% that hold the 99% in debt are getting all the growth in wealth and income. Deflation means that income is being transferred to the 1%, that is, to the creditors and property owners.
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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Trump's junk economics is the illusion that if we cut the taxes on the wealthiest brackets, it'll all trickle down. But it doesn't trickle down.
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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There are so many currency exchange rate problems that people are buying gold as a safe haven. Right now, gold looks like a safe haven if international exchange rates break down.
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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What's bad for the frackers usually is good for the rest of the world.
Michael Hudson
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You have a choice. Either you can have more oil, or more clean water. Fracking is not good for the water supply.
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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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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In real estate you can avoid ever having to pay a capital gains tax, decade after decade, century after century. When you sell a property and make a capital gain, you simply turn around and buy a new property. The gain is not taxed. It's called preserving your capital investment - which goes up and up in value with each transaction.
Michael Hudson
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In China the largest denomination bill they have is 100 yen, and that's maybe $7. So here you have a whole economy working with only a $7 note as the largest denomination. The euro wants to get rid of the 500-euro bill just as the United States years ago got rid of the $1,000 bill because only the criminals used $1,000 bills.
Michael Hudson