Michael Hudson
When you say "paying the banks," what they really mean is paying the bank bondholders. They are basically the One Percent.Collection: Mean
To save the banks from making losses that would wipe out their net worth, you'll have to get rid of Social Security. It means that you'll essentially have to abolish government and turn it over to the banking system to run, with an idea that the role of governments is to extract income from the economy to pay to the bondholders and the banks.Collection: Running
When I say the economy is shrinking, it's the economy of the 99%, the people who have to work for a living and depend on earning money for what they can spend. The 1% makes its money basically by lending out their money to the 99%, on charging interest and speculating. So the stock market's doubled, the bond market's gone way up, and the 1% are earning more money than ever before, but the 99% are not. They're having to pay the 1%.Collection: People
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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Writing
To save the banks, you would have to turn the entire Eurozone into Greece.Collection: Turns
You have to abolish pension plans. You have to abolish social spending. You have to raise taxes. You have to have at least fifty percent of the European population emigrate, either to Russia or China. You would have to have mass starvation. Very simple. That's the price that the Eurozone thinks is well worth paying.Collection: Simple
Small banks that lend to consumers are fine.Collection: Fine
On the flat tax, the more you compress the tax rates, the more you untax where the income is really made, at the top of the pyramid.Collection: Pyramids
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.Collection: Real
Either you can save the economy, or you can save the One Percent from losing a single penny.Collection: Pennies
Every government, from the Obama administration right through to Angela Merkel, the Eurozone and the IMF, promise to save the banks, not the economy.Collection: Government
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.Collection: Labor
America needs an ineffective president. That's much better than an effective president that's going to go to war with Russia, that's going to push for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, that's going to protect Wall Street, and that's going to oppose neoliberal austerity. I would much rather have an ineffective president than someone who's going to do these bad things that I fear is going to come from Hillary and the Democratic Party.Collection: Wall
Trump has said that he wants to remove the tax deductibility of interest. If he can do that, fine. But I hope that Trump knows that it's not the President that sets tax policy. It's Congress.Collection: President
Textbooks don't teach people how to avoid paying any income tax. But that's what an army of tax lawyers and corporate tax accountants do.Collection: Army
That's why Apple, Microsoft and the big information technology companies have kept so much money registered abroad (although in US dollar accounts with a nominal foreign address's owner). They pretend to make their global income in Ireland. They have an office, which could be simply a postal drop box in Ireland, and claim to make all their money there, not in America.Collection: Technology