Michael Hudson
Michael Hudson
europe russia germany
The natural geopolitical arrangement is for Europe to be part of Eurasia, especially for Germany to develop trade and investment relationships with Russia.
corner forces lebanon others seriously sufficient supporters turn unlikely
Certainly, anti-Syrian forces in Lebanon feel on the defensive, nervous, frightened, depressed. The Syrians may be out in one way, but in others they're always right around the corner and have sufficient friends and supporters in Lebanon that make it unlikely it will turn into a seriously anti-Syrian place.
simple leader slavery
You'll have to have the governments sell off all of their public domains; sell off their railroads, sell off their public land. You'll essentially have to introduce neo-feudalism. You'll have to roll the clock of history back a thousand years, and reduce the European population to debt slavery. It's as simple a solution as the Eurozone has imposed on Greece. And it's a solution that the leaders and the banks are urging for responsible economists to promote for the population at large.
isis iraq government
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.
labor-force worry people
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.
fairytale rich economist
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.
worry people risk
People are putting their money into treasuries because they worry that the risk of putting their money into the bond market, the stock market or even the money markets is very high.
technology government engineering
The other dynamic keeping the stock market up - both for technology stocks and others - is that companies are using a lot of their income for stock buybacks and to pay out higher dividends, not make new investment,. So to the extent that companies use financial engineering rather than industrial engineering to increase the price of their stock you're going to have a bubble. But it's not considered a bubble, because the government is behind it, and it hasn't burst yet.
talking oil cost
Oil now, as a result of the Saudi production, is priced so low that there are not going to be new fracking investments made. A lot of companies that have gone into fracking are heavily debt-leveraged, and are beginning to default on their loans. The next wave of defaults that banks are talking about is probably going to be in the fracking industry. When the costs of production are so much more than they can end up getting for the oil, they just stop producing and stop paying their loans.
cost-of-living helping economy
Actually, high housing prices don't help the economy. They raise the cost of living.
ukraine america chocolate
I guess the main thing that came out of the Panama Papers was that Ukrainian President Poroshenko had promised to divest of his chocolate company and instead, he simply moved it into an offshore account. And on the very day that he was increasing the attacks on the eastern Donbass region of Ukraine, the export sector, he was signing documents to conceal his own money offshore. So the exposé of the Panama money laundering has hit some of the dictators that America is protecting and promoting.
wall engineering people
The underlying strategy of the Fed is to tell people, "Do you want your money to lose value in the bank, or do you want to put it in the stock market?" They're trying to push money into the stock market, into hedge funds, to temporarily bid up prices. Then, all of a sudden, the Fed can raise interest rates, let the stock market prices collapse and the people will lose even more in the stock market than they would have by the negative interest rates in the bank. So it's a pro-Wall Street financial engineering gimmick.
government availability house
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.
writing shrinking debt
Basically, unless you're willing to write down debts and save the economy, you're going to have deflation and a steady drain in purchasing power - that is, shrinking markets.