Quote

A stand in is a politician who can deliver her constituency to her Wall Street backers. That's what a politician does in America. You get a constituency you make them believe your promises, and then you turn them over to your financial campaign backers. That's what politics has become and that's as much an art of deception as economics is.

Michael Hudson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Michael Hudson
America
Politician
Constituency
Much
Promise
Deliver
Believe
Wall
Deception
Make
Turn
Promises
Stand
Campaign
Politics
Economics
Art
Street
Become
Financial
Backers

More quotes by Michael Hudson

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Paying debt service to banks leaves less income to buy goods and services.
Michael Hudson
Image
When we say people worry about inflation, it's mainly bondholders that worry. The labor force benefitted from the inflation of the '50s, '60s and '70s.
Michael Hudson
Image
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
Image
Nobody prefers to earn income any more, because that's taxable. Rich people prefer to make capital gains.
Michael Hudson
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
We go forward with our heads held high, but look back and remember where we come from.
Michael Hudson
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The economy is being run primarily by the banks for their own interest.
Michael Hudson
Image
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
Image
Debtors will seek to cancel their debts. Creditors will try to collect, and the more they succeed, the more they will impoverish the economy.
Michael Hudson
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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