Jim Vrettos: Welcome once again to the Radical Imagination. I’m your host, Jim Vrettos. I’m a sociologist whose taught at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Yeshiva University here in New York.

Our guest today on the Radical Imagination is Michael Hudson. He was on our March 8th show. We had such an overwhelmingly positive response to that show that we’ve asked him to return today, and he’s been gracious enough to accept.

Unlike most economists, he’s been a fierce champion and advocate for the economic rights of the poor, workers, disenfranchised and the vulnerable around the world through his scholarship and lifelong activism. His unique economic analysis has explored history’s main engine of economic exploitation – the banking, creditor and financial systems’ ever-increasing extraction of value through interest payments. The rentier class and FIRE sector – Finance, Insurance and Real Estate – have long succeeded in depicting themselves as part of a productive economy. Yet for centuries, these sectors were recognized as being parasitic.

Now with the United States losing some 10 million jobs in just the past two weeks and the world awash in debt, the total world gross domestic product is $90 trillion. The public and private debt is a mind-boggling $260 trillion. The pandemic has given this parasitic sector yet another, even more vicious opportunity to exploit and devour humanity.

As our guest puts it, the recently passed Trump “Bank and Landlord Relief” bill, mistakenly named the Coronavirus bill, starts by providing banks with an even larger giveaway of wealth than they received from Obama in 2008. Helping the banks, financial and real estate sectors in a so-called free market system is conflated with helping the industrial economy and general living standards for most Americans. The essence of a parasite is not only to drain the host’s nourishment, but to dull the host’s brain so that it does not recognize that the parasite is there.

These debt-bondage economies of Western countries are heading us down a spiral of poverty, decline, injustice and human despair.

Michael Hudson is a distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, former Wall Street analyst, a political consultant of governments on finance and tax policy, and a popular sought-after commentator and journalist. He’s devoted his entire scientific and historical work to the study of domestic and foreign debt, loans, mortgages and interest payments. His analysis and warnings are even more profoundly necessary in these pandemic days and nights. This is just the first in a series of cascading crises.

Welcome so much. Thank you for being back again here on the Radical Imagination. Michael, it’s great to see you again. How are you doing? I know we’re all trying to keep safe and well and strong. How are things going?

Michael Hudson: I just got back from a walk in Forest Park here in Queens. There was hardly anybody on the streets, but there were a good number of people in the park. I finally was given a face mask by the building’s super, and my Chinese friends say that they’ve mailed me some masks to keep me safe. They’re sending foreign aid to New York like we’re a third world country.

Jim Vrettos: Well, in a sense, we are, aren’t we? We’re turning into it for more and more people. Tell us about this so-called bill that’s just been passed. What is wrong with it in your estimation? How does it perpetuate and exacerbate the problem in your analysis?

Michael Hudson: Well, it’s sort of like Obama’s bailout in 2009 and ’10 on steroids. It’s funny when you read people like Paul Krugman and others Democrats denouncing it all as if it’s a Republican bill, but it’s identical with Obama’s bill and Obama’s philosophy. And it was unanimously passed. Chuck Schumer likened it to Roosevelt’s New Deal. So I think you should think of it as the Trump-Pelosi bill. Trump simply lifted it wholesale from his campaign backers, who basically are the same as the Democratic National Committee.

The problem is that the bill pretends that by giving money to the banks to lend more money to get the country moving again that’s going to rescue the economy. It’s not going to rescue the economy. The bill injures the economy, because the money ends up with the banks. Part of its $10 trillion – $2 trillion – goes to citizens to spend, but ends up largely being paid to the banks and landlords. Specifically, there is an enormous giveaway that makes real estate tax exempt for the next 30 years.

Jim Vrettos: What about small businesses? Are you including them in this analysis?

Michael Hudson: Most small businesses they’re rescuing are the landlords. They have received the most Small Business Administration loans, usually by going through the local political party machine. When the Republicans or Democrats talk about small business, they mean the landlords, who are the proxies for the big real estate interests and the banks behind them.

So let’s look at this: The bill asks landlords to stop evicting people for three months but let the rent accrue, and personal debts also. Let’s look at what’s going to happen when the three months are over. You’re going to have restaurants and small businesses – whose major expense is rent and credit – not having done much business during these three months. They will end up owing this major cost of doing business for three months without having their usual income. What’s going to happen by the end of the summer?

A lot of restaurants here in Queens only have takeout service. So how are these small businesses going to pay the debts that have mounted up in the last three months? Many will have to go out of business, declare bankruptcy and start all over again, because otherwise all their earnings for this year and next year – and probably the year after that – would have to go to make up the arrears to their landlords, their creditors and the banks.

So what pretends to be a coronavirus bill is going to say, “You think the virus hit you? Wait till we hit you with the financial bill.” The financial bailout aims to enable the financial sector to extract so much money from the economy and drive so many small businesses under that the big venture capital firms and private equity can pick them up at low all prices. You could call it the “Monopolization of the US economy” bill or the “Contributors to Washington politicians” bill.

There was a wish list that the banks had, the real estate interests and corporate lobbyists, that they’d been saving up for just such a crisis opportunity. The coronavirus is equivalent of 9/11. As in 9/11 when President Bush and Cheney pulled out the Patriot Act that they had in their drawer just looking for an excuse. Right now the coronavirus, the Trump-Pelosi bill gives the banks and the real estate sector an excuse to not only be bailed out as if they’re losing money, but to evict their tenants.

Jim Vrettos: To profit even more?

Michael Hudson: Not necessarily profit. Profit you have to pay income tax on. Rich people don’t make profits. They make capital gains. Only the little people make profits.

Jim Vrettos: You said this was conscious on their part, right? This is a rational way in which they think about these things. There’s no moral dilemma to all of this by the large venture capitalists and so on, Wall Street, is that correct?

Economist Michael Hudson explains how American imperialism has created a global free lunch, where the US makes foreign countries pay for its wars, and even their own military occupation.

Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton discuss the economics of Washington’s empire, the role of the IMF and World Bank, attempts to create alternative financial systems like BRICS, and the new cold war on China and Russia.

PART 2 OF 2 (Interview recorded on April 13, 2020)

Part 1: “US coronavirus ‘bailout’ scam is $6 trillion giveaway to Wall St – Economist Michael Hudson explains”

Michael Hudson’s website: michael-hudson.com

PDF of his book Super Imperialism: michael-hudson.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/superimperialism.pdf

Audio:

Transcript

(Teaser – 0:03)

MICHAEL HUDSON: The World Bank has one primary aim, and that’s to make other countries dependent on American agriculture. This is built into its articles of agreement. It can only make foreign-currency loans, so it will only make loans to countries for agricultural development, roads, if it is to promote exports.

So the United States, through the World Bank, has become I think the most dangerous, right-wing, evil organization in modern history — more evil than the IMF. That’s why it’s almost always been run by a Secretary of Defense. It has always been explicitly military. It’s the hard fist of American imperialism.

Its idea is to make Latin American, and African, and Asian countries export plantation crops , especially plantations that are U.S.- or foreign-owned. The primary directive of the World Bank to countries is: “You must not feed yourself; you must not grow your own grain or your own food; you must depend on the United States for that. And you can pay for that by exporting plantation crops.”

(Intro – 1:45)

BEN NORTON: Here at Moderate Rebels we talk a lot about imperialism. I mean it’s really the main point of this show. This program explores how US imperialism functions, how it works on the global stage, how neoliberal policies of austerity and privatization are forced at the barrel of a gun through the US military, through invasion and plunder.

We talk about it in Venezuela, Iraq, Syria and so many countries. But we often don’t talk about the specific economic dynamics of how it works through banks, loans, and bonds.

Well, today we are continuing our discussion with the economist Michael Hudson, who is really one of the best experts in the world when it comes to understanding how US imperialism functions as an economic system, not just through a system of military force. Of course the economics are maintained and undergirded by that military force. And we talk about how the military force is expressed through regime-change wars and military interventions.

But Michael Hudson also explains how the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the US financial system, banks and Wall Street all work together, hand in glove with the military to maintain that financial chokehold.

He spells this all out brilliantly in a book called Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire. He began to write that book in 1968, and then recently updated it in 2002, published again in 2003 with the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan, and kind of updated and showed how, even though the system that he detailed 50 years ago hasn’t really changed, it has shifted in some ways.

So today we’re gonna talk about how that international imperialist system dominated by the US works.

Michael Hudson, who in the first part of this talked about the scheme that is the coronavirus bailout — if you want to watch the first part you can go find that at moderaterebels.com; it’s on YouTube, Spotify, iTunes, any other platform.

Michael Hudson is an economist and he’s also a longtime Wall Street financial analyst. He is also a professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and you can find his work at michael-hudson.com, which I will link to in the show notes for this episode.

So without further ado, here is the second part of our interview with Michael Hudson.

(4:37)

MAX BLUMENTHAL: I think it’s a good transition point to talk about another kind of scam you’ve identified. There’s a really hilarious aside in the second preface to your book “Super Imperialism,” where Herman Kahn, who is, I think a founder of the Hudson Institute, which you went to work for. He was also the inspiration for the Dr. Strangelove character and Stanley Kubrick’s film.

There’s an award that the neocons give out every year named for him; Benjamin Netanyahu is a recent award winner.

But Herman Kahn was he was on a panel for one of your talks, where you laid out your theory of “Super Imperialism,” and how the United States actually gets other countries to subsidize its empire, and is able to expand and carry out this massive imperial project without having to impose austerity on its own population, as other countries have to do under IMF control.

So Herman Kahn comes up to you after the talk and says, “You actually identified the rip-off perfectly.” And your book starts selling like hotcakes in DC, I guess among people who work for the CIA, and people who work in the military-intelligence apparatus.

MICHAEL HUDSON: What he said was, “We’ve pulled off the greatest ripoff in history. We’ve gone way beyond anything that British Empire ever thought of.” He said, “That’s a success story. Most people think imperialism is bad; you’ve shown how it’s the greatest success story — we get a free lunch forever!”

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Right. So explain the ripoff you identified there, and how it is being perpetuated under the Trump administration in ways that I think are pretty amazing, including through the imposition of unprecedented sanctions on something like one-third of the world’s population.

(6:40)

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well I wrote “Super Imperialism” in 1972, and it was published exactly one year after President Nixon took America off gold in August of 1971. he reason he took America off gold was that the entire balance-of-payments deficit from the Korean War to the Vietnam War was military in character.

Especially in the ’60s, the money that America was spending in Vietnam and Southeast Asia had to be spent locally. And the banks were French banks, because it was French Indochina. So all the money would be sent to Paris, to the banks’ head offices, turned over from dollars into francs, and General de Gaulle would end up with these dollars. Then every month he would send the dollars and want payment in gold. And Germany would do the same thing.

So the more America fought militarily, it depleted its gold stock, until finally, in August 1971, it said, “We’ve been using gold as the key to our world power ever since World War I, when we put Europe on rations. So we’re going to stop paying gold.”

They closed the gold window. And most of the economists were all saying, “Oh my heavens, now it’s going to be a depression.” But I said, “Wait a minute, now that other countries can no longer get gold from all this military spending” — and when you talk about the balance-of-payments deficit, it’s not the trade deficit, it’s not foreign investment; it’s almost entirely military in character.

Facing the Covid-19 pandemic, the US Congress rammed through the CARES Act — which economist Michael Hudson explains is not a “bailout” but a massive, $6 trillion giveaway to Wall Street, banks, large corporations, and stockholders.

Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton discuss the enormous financial scam with Hudson, who reveals how the economy actually works, with the Federal Reserve printing money so rich elites don’t lose their investments.

Michael Hudson’s website: michael-hudson.com

Michael Hudson, “A debt jubilee is the only way to avoid a depression,” The Washington Post, March 21, 2020

Transcript

(Teaser – 0:03)

MICHAEL HUDSON: Just think of when, in the debates with Bernie Sanders during the spring, Biden and Klobuchar kept saying, ‘What we’re paying for Medicare-for-All will be $1 trillion over 10 years.’ Well, here the Fed can create $1.5 trillion in one week just to buy stocks.

Why is it okay for the Fed to create $1.5 trillion to buy stocks to prevent rich people from losing on their stocks, when it’s not okay to print only $1 trillion to pay for free Medicare for the entire population? This is crazy!

The idea is that only the rich should be allowed to print money for themselves, but the government should not be allowed to print money for any public purpose, any social purpose — not for medicine, not for schools, not for personal budgets, not for full employment — but only to give to the 1 percent.

People hesitate to think that. They think, ‘It can’t possibly be this bad.’ But for those of us who have worked on Wall Street, for 60 years in my case, that’s what the numbers show.

But you don’t have the media talking about actual numbers. They talk about just words, and they use euphemisms. It’s a kind of Orwellian vocabulary, describing an inside-out world.

(Intro – 1:58)

BEN NORTON: The world is suffering right now from one of the worst economic crises in modern history. Definitely the worst crisis since the 2008 financial crash. And many economics experts are saying that we’re living through the worst recession actually since the Great Depression of 1929.

Well joining us to discuss this today, we have one of the best contemporary economists, who is really well prepared to explain what has been going on in this global recession during the coronavirus pandemic. And specifically today we’re gonna talk about the $6 trillion bailout package that the US Congress has passed.

The Trump administration is basically taking Obama’s corporate bailout on steroids, and injecting trillions of dollars into the corporate sector. And today to discuss what exactly the coronavirus bailout means, we are joined by the economist Michael Hudson.

He is the author of many books. And in the second part of this episode we’re gonna talk about his book Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire. So that’ll be much more in the vein of kind of traditional Moderate Rebels episodes, where we talk about imperialism, US foreign policy, and all of that.

Michael Hudson is also a former Wall Street financial analyst, so he’s very well prepared to talk about the financial thievery that goes on on Wall Street. And he is a distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.

So Michael, let’s just get started here. Can you respond to this global depression that we’re living through right now amid the Covid-19 pandemic? And what do you think about this new bailout that was passed?

(3:50)

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well the word bailout, as you just pointed out, really was used by Obama and only applies to the banks. The word coronavirus is just put in as an advertising slogan.

Banks and corporations, airlines, have a whole wish list that they had their lawyers and lobbyists prepare for just such an opportunity. And when the opportunity comes up — whether it’s 9/11 with the Patriot Act, or whether it’s today’s coronavirus — they just pasted the word coronavirus onto an act, which should be called a giveaway to the big banking sector.

Let’s talk about who’s not bailed out. Who’s not bailed out are the small business owners, the restaurants, the companies that you walk down the street in New York or other cities, and they’re all shuttered with closed signs. Their rent is accumulating, month after month.

Restaurants, gyms and stores are small-markup businesses, small-margin businesses, where, once you have no sales for maybe three months and rent accruing for three months, they’re not going to have enough money to earn the profits to pay the rents that have mounted up for the last three months.

The other people that are not being bailed out are the workers — especially the people they call the prime necessary workers, which is their euphemism for minimum-wage workers without any job security. There have been huge layoffs of minimum-wage labor, manual labor, all sorts of labor.

They’re not getting income, but their rents are accruing. And their utility bills are accruing. Their student loans are accruing. And their credit card debts are mounting up at interest and penalty rates, which are even larger than the interest rates. So all of these debts are accruing.

The real explosion is going to come in three months, when all of a sudden, this money falls due. The governor of New York has said, “Well we have a moratorium on actually evicting people for three months.” So there are restaurants and other people, individuals, wage-earners, who are going to be able to live in their apartments and not be evicted. But at the end of three months, that’s when the eviction notices are going to come. And people are going to decide, is it worth it?

Well, especially restaurants are going to decide. And they’re going to say, “There is no way that we can make the money to pay, because we haven’t had the income to pay.” They’re going to go out of business. They’re not going to be helped.

The similar type of giveaway occurred after 9/11. I had a house for 20 years in Tribeca, one block from the World Trade Center. The money was given by the government to the landlords but not to the small businesses that rented there — the Xerox shops and the other things. The landlords took all of the ostensible rent loss for themselves, and still tried to charge rent to the xerox shops, the food shops, and ended up collecting twice, and driving them out.

So you’re having the pretense of a bailout, but the bailout really is an Obama-style bailout. It goes to the banks; it goes to those companies that have drawn up wish lists by their lobbyists, such as the airlines, Boeing and the large banks.

The banks and the real estate interests are going to be the biggest gainers. They have changed the real estate law so that the real estate owners, for a generation, will be income tax free. They are allowed to charge depreciation, and have other fast write-offs to pretend that their real estate is losing value, regardless of whether it’s going up and up in value.

Donald Trump says that he loves depreciation, because he can claim that he’s losing money, and gets a tax write-off, even while his property prices go up.

So there’s a lot of small print. The devil is in the small print of the giveaway. And then President Trump has his own half-a-trillion-dollar slush fund that he says he doesn’t have to inform a Congress or be subject to any Freedom of Information law. He gets to give to his backers in the Republican States.

Summary

After being attacked by monetarists and others for many decades, MMT and the idea that running government budget deficit is stabilizing instead of destabilizing is suddenly gaining applause from the parts of the political spectrum that long opposed MMT: the banking and financial sector, especially the Republicans. But what is applauded is in many ways something quite different than the leading MMT advocates have long supported.

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) was developed to explain the logic of running government budget deficits to increase demand in the economy’s consumption and capital investment sectors so as to maintain full employment. But the enormous U.S. federal budget deficits from the Obama bank bailout after the 2008 crash through the Trump tax cuts and Coronavirus financial bailout have not pumped money into the economy to finance new direct investment, employment, rising wages and living standards. Instead, government money creation and Quantitative Easing has been directed to the finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sectors. The result is a travesty of MMT, not its original aim.

By subsidizing the financial sector and its debt overhead, this policy is deflationary instead of supporting the “real” economy. The effect has been to empower the banking sector, whose product is credit and debt creation that has taken an unproductive and indeed extractive form.

This can clearly be seen by dividing the private sector into two parts: The “real” economy of production and consumption is wrapped in a financial web of debt and rent extraction – real estate rent, monopoly rent and financial debt creation. Recognizing this breakdown is essential to distinguish between positive government deficit spending that helps maintain employment and rising living standards, as compared to “captured” government spending to subsidize the FIRE sector’s extraction and debt deflation leading to chronic austerity.

Origins and policy aims of MMT

MMT was developed to explain the monetary logic in running budget deficits to support aggregate demand. This logic was popularized in the 1930s by Keynes, based on his idea of a circular flow between employers and wage-earners. Deficit spending was seen as providing public employment and hence consumer spending to absorb enough production to enable the economy to keep producing at a profit. The policy goal was to maintain (or recover) reasonably full employment.

But production and consumption are not the entire economy. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) was formally developed in the 1990s, with roots that can be traced by Abba Lerner’s theory of functional finance, and by Hyman Minsky and others seeking to integrate the financial sector into the overall economic system in a more realistic and functional way than the Chicago School’s monetarist approach on the right wing of the political spectrum. A key point in its revival was Warren Mosler’s insight that a currency-issuing country does not “tax to spend”, but instead must spend before its citizens can pay tax in that currency.

MMT was also Post-Keynesian in the sense of advocating government budget deficits as a means of pumping purchasing power into the economy to achieve full-employment. Elaboration of this approach showed how such deficits created stability instead of the instability that results from private-sector debt dynamics. At an extreme, this approach held that recessions could be cured simply by deficit spending. Yet despite the enormous deficit spending by the U.S. and Eurozone in the wake of the 2008 crash, the overall economy continued to stagnate; only the financial and real estate markets boomed.

At issue was the role of government in the economy. The major opponents of public enterprise and infrastructure, of budget deficits and market regulation, was the financial sector. “Austrian” and Chicago-style monetary theorists strongly opposed MMT, asserting that government budget deficits would be inflationary, citing Germany’s Weimar inflation of the 1920s, and Zimbabwe, and portraying government deficits (and indeed, active government programs and regulation) as “interference” with “free markets.”

MMTers pointed out that running a budget surplus, or even a balanced budget, absorbed income from the economy, thereby shrinking demand for goods and services and leading to unemployment. Without government deficits, the economy would be obliged to rely on private-sector banks for the credit needed to grow.

That occurred in the United States in the final years of the Clinton administration when it actually ran a budget surplus. But with a public sector surplus, there had to be a corresponding and indeed identical private sector deficit. So the effect of that policy was to leave either private debt financing or a trade surplus as the only ways in which economic growth could obtain the monetary support that was needed. This built in structural claims for interest and amortization that were deflationary, ultimately leading to the political imposition of debt deflation and economic austerity after the 2008 debt crisis.

Republican and financial sector opposition to budget deficits and MMT

If governments do not provide enough purchasing power by running budget deficits to enable the economy to grow, the role of providing money and credit will have to be relinquished to banks – at interest, and for purposes that the banks decide on (mainly, loans to buy real estate, stocks and bonds). In this respect banks are competitors with government over who will provide the economy’s money and credit – and for what purposes.

Banks want the government out of the way – not only regarding money creation, but also for financial and price policies, tax policy and laws governing corporate behavior. Finance wants to appropriate public monopolies, by taking payment in natural resources or basic public infrastructure when governments are, by policy rather than necessity, short of their own money, or of foreign exchange. (In times past, this required warfare; today foreign debt is the main lever.)

To get into this position, banks need to block governments from creating their own money. The result is a conflict between private bank credit and public money creation. Public money is created for social purposes, primarily to maintain production and consumption growth. But bank credit nowadays is created largely to finance the transfer of property and financial assets – real estate, stocks and bonds.

Opposing the logic for running budget deficits

The Reagan-Bush administration (1981-82) ran budget deficits not to pay for social spending, but as a result of tax cuts, above all for real estate.[1] The resulting budget deficit led to proposed “cures” in the form of fiscal cutbacks in social spending, starting with Social Security, Medicare and education. This aim became explicit by the Clinton Administration (1993-2000), and President Obama convened the Simpson-Bowles “National Commission on Budget Responsibility and Reform” in 2010. Its name reflects its recommendation that “responsibility” meant a balanced budget, which in turn required that social spending programs be rolled back.

Host Jim Vrettos interviews Professor Michael Hudson, Economist, Wall St. Analyst, Political Consultant, Commentator and Journalist; who offers his views in the way finance works and

Welcome, welcome once again to the Radical imagination. I’m your host, Jim Vrettos. I’m a sociologist who’s talked at John Jay College of Criminal justice and Yeshiva university here in New York. Our guest today, on the Radical Imagination, is one of only eight economists named by the financial times who foresaw the credit crisis and ensuing great recession erupting in 2008. It was conventional wisdom at the time to say that no one saw the gravity of the crisis coming, including almost every leading economist and financier in the world.

In fact, many had seen it coming. It was seen by everyone except economists from Wall Street; as our guest put it. They were ignored by an establishment according to then, the Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan that watched with innocent quote-unquote shock disbelief as its whole intellectual edifice collapsed in the summer of 2007.

Official models missed the crisis not because the conditions were so shockingly unusual, they missed it by design because the world they lived in was not a world of how finance really works. They missed it because their mathematical models made it impossible to warn against a debt-deflation recession.

Their innocent model worlds were worlds where debt simply did not exist. It’s a world that most of our economic policymakers still live in, and it’s no wonder that everyday people see most economists far removed from their practical economic concerns and interests their everyday concrete reality. Our guest today is an internationally renowned economist who’s followed a much different path of interest and concern.

Michael Hudson is a distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College, a former Wall Street analyst; political consultant to governments on finance and tax policy, a popular commentator sought after speaker and journalist.

He identifies himself as a Marxist economist. But his interpretation of Karl Marx that differs in most other major Marxists. He believes parasitical forms of finance have warped the political economy of modern capitalism. History has regressed back to a neo feudal system. He’s also a contributor to the Hudson report, a weekly economic and financial news podcast produced by Left Out.

His many books include Killing the Host, J is for Junk Economics, The Bubble and Beyond, Super Imperialism, and “… and Forgive Them Their Debts.” Michael has devoted his entire scientific career to the study of debt —both domestic and foreign, loans and mortgages, and interest payments.

In 2006 he argued that debt deflation would shrink the real economy, drive down real wages and push our debt-ridden economy into a Japan-style stagnation or worse. And just for reference, the typical American household now carries an average debt of over $137,000 up from $50,000 or so in 2000. The average American has about $38,000 in personal debt, excluding home mortgages.

The average credit card debt per U.S. household is $8,500, and outstanding student loans are at an all-time high, in 2019, of $1.41 trillion, a 33 percent spike since 2014, and a 6 percent increase from 2018. Only 23 percent of the population say they carry no debt. As Hudson presciently puts it, debts grow and grow, and the more they grow, the more they shrink the economy.

When you shrink the economy, you shrink the ability to pay the debts. So, it’s an illusion that the system can be saved. The question is, how long are people going to be willing to live in this illusion? Every day people have to face reality. Our economic policymakers urgently need to get it too.

So welcome Michael to The Radical Imagination. Thank you very, very much for coming here and being with us. Your work is so interesting; it’s so new and different. You’re a Marxist economist and yet…

[Michael] I’m a classical economist…

[Jim] You are classical, ok.

[Michael] Marx was the last great classical economist. Classical economics basically runs from the French Physiocrats through Adam Smith via John Stuart Mill to Marx.

[Jim] Along with Ricardo.

[Michael] Yes, they were all talking about the rentiers. In their time the landed aristocracy were the main rent recipients. But Adam Smith also talked about monopoly rent. And finance was the major monopoly. And today, the role of the landlords played in the 19th century of stifling industrial capitalism is being played by the banks and the rest of the financial sector. Right now the collectors of land rent, which was the main focus of the labor theory of value to isolate what was unnecessary, is being paid to the banks as mortgage interest.

[Jim] Right

[Michael] So, we no longer have a small privileged private landlord class when you have 80 percent of the European population and two thirds of the American population being homeowners. However, they have to pay the equivalent of the rental value of their housing to the bank, in the form of mortgage interest.

[Jim] To the banks, right!

[Michael] My analysis follows from classical economics, as did Marx’s analysis. So Marx is simply the last great classical economist. They were all talking about how industrial capitalism sought to free itself from unnecessary costs of production, and hence how its political fight was against the landlord class and other rent extractors. Where Marx went beyond his predecessors was in looking at the laws of motion of industrial capitalism. He saw these as leading toward socialism. Later, Rosa Luxemburg said that if it’s not towards socialism, it will be toward barbarism.

[Jim] So capitalism would evolve into the possibility of socialism.

[Michael] Yes.

[Jim] Did he foresee the sort of predatory financial system that you worked out?

[Michael] No one described it better in his time than Marx, in Volume III of Capital.

[Jim] Volume III. Ok!

[Michael] Marx analyzed the “real” economy’s circular flow between employers and wage labor buying the products they produced. But then, in Volume III, he said that rentier debt claims by the financial sector was a separate dynamic, independent from the economy of production and consumption. This industrial capitalist economy is wrapped in a financial sector composed of debt and property claims. These are external to the economy. They slow it and ultimately cause a crash. Marx was one of the first to talk about business cycles of about 11 years and the internal contradictions that led to a market collapse. He pointed out that the financial sector had different mathematics of growth – the mathematics of compound interest. These are exponential and inherently unsustainable. In Volume III of Capital and also of his Theories of Surplus Value – which was Marx’s history of economic thought and the theories leading up to him – he collected everything from Martin Luther to other analyses pointing out that debts grew so rapidly at compound interest that it is impossible to pay them.

[Jim] You have a great chart where you talk about compound interest, a penny that was invested at 5% interest from Christ’s time to 1776.

[Michael] Richard Price was an actuarial accountant. He calculated that a penny saved that at the time of Jesus’s birth at 5% interest would become a solid sphere of gold extending from the sun out to the planet of Jupiter.

[Jim] Amazing.

[Michael] Obviously, many people did save pennies at the time of Christ, and the annual interest rate then in Rome was 8 1/3%, one twelfth per year. But of course nobody has a sphere of gold extending out to Jupiter. That’s because debts that can’t be paid, won’t be.