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Trump’s Trade Policies: A Fast Track to Economic Ruin
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NIMA ALKHORSHID: Hi, everybody. Today is Thursday, April 3rd, 2025, and our friends, Michael Hudson and Richard Wolfer back with us. Welcome back. Let’s talk about the Liberation Day and the new tariffs on each and every country on this planet. And here is what the press secretary, the White House press secretary said about the tariffs. They’re not going to be wrong. It is going to work.

Video Link

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Speaker 2: And the president has a brilliant team of advisors who have been studying these issues for decades. And we are focused on restoring the golden age of America and making America a manufacturing superpower. And again, Peter, I would point you to the investments that have already trickled into this country.

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NIMA ALKHORSHID: And yeah, let’s let’s put the main question right now is what is the main economic fallacy that President Trump is perpetuating regarding the U.S. trade deficit? Michael, go ahead.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, the fallacy is the way in which he’s calculated his statistics. And the fallacy is somehow that tariffs are going to re-industrialize the United States. The way that he’s structured them, he has not taken into account that a very large share of U.S. imports are from foreign affiliates of American firms. And these affiliates, all of a sudden, that have made foreign investments and not only in Canada and Mexico, but in Asia and Vietnam and other countries, are now going to have their costs very sharply increased. The result of the tariffs are actually going to be causing, as we’ve discussed before, vast instability and destabilization. I think Richard and I have talked in two of your shows about tariffs. And the fact is, I don’t think we expected this to happen. We thought that the United States, like other countries, were going to act in its self-interest. And, of course, you realize that this self-interest is that of the corporate elite and the big financial investors in Trump’s donor class. But they didn’t expect any of this either. And that’s the big surprise. The stock market yesterday actually rules throughout the day, as people thought, well, he can’t really mean it. And this plunge so quickly after a speech. And this morning, it continued to plunge. It opened with the Standard & Poor’s down 4%, and the Dow Jones losing, I’m sorry, 1,500 points by 3.5%. These are gigantic plunges, and Japan was hit even harder. So now we know why he timed his announcements to 4 p.m. That’s when the stock market closed. If TV viewers of his talk were able to see it during stock market hours, they’d see him talking on the one hand, and the split screen would show the stock market plunging. In other words, this is big capital. This is the corporate sector. This is what the bulk of investors think the effect is going to be on the stock market, and they think it’s a disaster. There’s been, I don’t know how much money’s been wiped out just in the first hour of trading, but it’s been gigantic. So this shows the degree to which corporations and investors thought, well, this is all bluster. And in a way, I think it is bluster. And we’ve seen that by what’s happened with what Trump has been talking about for the last month, and that’s the tariffs on Canada and Mexico. He, if you look at the tariffs, the threats that he had, 25% tariffs, he’s backed down on just about everything. He, the mainstream press, you know, is talking about a Mar-a-Lago accord of a new plaza accord, referring to the 1985 agreement with Japan that ended up pushing that economy into 30 years’ depression. But that was part of a negotiated G7 agreement, where the U.S. brought everybody together. But this is different. Trump is acting unilaterally, and his strategy is to divide and conquer. He’s going to negotiate with each country separately and agree to soften his tariff if they give America something of value. For instance, in China, I’m sure he wants to say, you’ve got to sell TikTok to U.S. investors. You’ve got to do whatever the neocons are insisting that he tells them to do. So the right to buy out any key industry or real estate is what other countries are doing. Basically, what Trump did yesterday is these disruptions that he’s threatening are so large that he’s going to destabilize other countries unless they give in to what turns out to be a shakedown. I just want to talk about the details of Canada because they’re not, they were not made clear yesterday. He’s left out, he’s already said, well, in terms, there’s not going to be a tariff on auto parts, at least until May 3rd. That’s a month from now. So, and there’s going to be a partial exemption for cars made in Mexico and Canada that meets the terms of the NAFTA agreement. After all, there’s been a huge breakdown in all of this on vehicles. He’s only going to try to tax the foreign made parts that are in these vehicles, but that’s still a threat. And the question is whether this is going to prevent General Motors, which has a very large proportion of its autos made in Mexico and Canada for the auto parts. Is this going to prevent them from making a profit? And suppose it looks like the head of General Motors may have called Trump in the last month and said, look, if you’re going to impose the tariffs the way you threaten to do, then we’re not going to be able to make a profit.

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And if we’re not able to make a profit, what are we going to do? Are we going to lay off the labor force? Suppose Mr. Trump, that I, head of GM, went to and threatened to make a public announcement, we’re putting GM up for sale. There’s no way we can make a profit any longer under the way in which Trump did the profit, the tariffs. We’re going to tell our labor, we may have to lay you off.

Maybe a foreign auto company will want to buy us, but we’re being prevented from making a profit unless we raise the price of American cars so high that Americans can’t afford it as the economy is moving into the depression that Trump is driving it into. We’ll have no recourse to do that, and other industries may follow suit. Look at Apple in China. It’s another multinational company importing the parts for its iPhones and computers. One hundred percent of U.S. oil imports are made by U.S. oil companies. The same is true of much of the mineral trade. So the question is, why aren’t U.S. corporate leaders speaking up more verbally than they have? You remember back in the 60s, General Motors famous head Charlie Wilson said, what’s good for General Motors is good for the country. Well, the new motto is, what Donald Trump says is good for the country is bad for General Motors. It’s still going to be one of the hardest auto companies hit because of its proportion abroad. So where is the power elite in all of this?

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Richard, it seems that Donald Trump believes that the deficit is the outcome of unfair trade practices. But in your opinion, does trade deficit reflect a country spending more than it produces or saving less than it invests?

RICHARD WOLFF: Okay, there’s so much noise and chaos around this that we are in danger. And that may be Mr. Trump’s area of wisdom, manipulating the noise level and distractions and claims. You know, you made a joke, and I understand it, about Liberation Day. But that’s a very important part of the story he wants us to come away with.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: So we can go at it in a number of ways.

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RICHARD WOLFF: I’m going to choose two, but then, you know, you take it where you think it should go, Nima, in setting this up. First, the notion that we have been victimized by foreigners. This is the largest nonsense I’ve heard in a long time. You know, it reminds me of the kind of conversation you get with a white supremacist who explains and whines that white people are at the wrong end of discrimination in this country. The attempt to snatch from the black and brown people who’ve actually suffered centuries of repression from white people, to try to erase all of that by telling some story that makes it all reversed. It is preposterous, it is outrageous, and it is a manipulation by demagogues who use the difficulties white people have. And those are genuine economic difficulties for whites have been serious. But to blame victimization at the hands of black and brown people is a spectacular effort to shift to the right what is a problem with American capitalism and has been from the beginning. The notion that the notion that the people of Vietnam, who got a tremendous increase in their tariff, are oppressing the United States, are foreigners oppressing, is catastrophic in its misunderstanding. The last 50 years were times in which Americans lost jobs, that’s correct, but the reason they did was the profit-maximizing strategy of American corporations who left. The Chinese couldn’t have done it by themselves, they’re over there, no one held a gun to anyone’s head and said, close your factory in Cincinnati and open it in Shanghai. That was done because the American corporations saw a gain, they could pay workers a lot less, and they’d be located in the fastest-growing market on earth. The United States couldn’t compete on either one of those things, and so is lost. But the agent of the change was corporate America, the very industries. It’s fantastic to have a leader like Mr. Trump suggest that the blame for that falls on the foreign country. What a strange effort to get the corporate leaders of America, who made the key decisions, off the hook. They’re not part of the story. It’s liberation from the evil, and who’s the evil? Foreigners. This is as old as Methuselah. It is really BS of the first rank, liberating us. The whole rest of the world has been working for two or three centuries to liberate itself from imperialists and colonialists like the United States. And here he is, turning it around. We’re going to liberate from them, just like a white supremacist. We have to be liberated from the pressure of black and brown people and their allies. Nobody should be fooled by this, number one. Now, number two. Tariffs are not new. Tariffs have been used by countries, including the United States, at various points in their history. There is a huge literature, books and articles. Courses are taught in every economics department called international trade or international economics, and they have a segment of the course on tariffs. I’ve taught the courses. I know what I’m talking about. Mr. Trump clearly doesn’t. What does the literature teach us? The impact of a tariff depends on the circumstances in all of the countries affected by the tariff. You cannot know in advance it will have this particular outcome. Why not? Because it depends on interest rates, on exchange rates, on monetary movements, on whether or not the countries retaliate. And if they do retaliate, how will there then be a response on the United States part? Secretary of the Treasury made a statement yesterday that he hopes no country retaliates. And when the reporter asked him why, he said, because then there’ll be escalation, as if what Mr. Trump has just done isn’t escalation. The level of BS here is overwhelming. Mr. Trump cannot know what the consequence will be. Will there be an inflation? Probably. Will it be hard and terrible? Will it be mild? Could be. You know, there is no way to do this. The important thing here is that this is a declaration of desperation, not liberation. This is an economy that has to now attack the whole world. That’s it. That’s what it’s doing. It’s making difficulties for every other country. It’s and it’s now holding the gun to every country. As Michael just explained, it now is going to say we will negotiate bilaterally, one by one. And we will play with these tariffs in order to squeeze you for some other agenda that we have or will develop. We want a peace of this mind. We want you not to pass that law. We want you to give us this money or maybe give us Greenland or whatever else he has in mind. But let me clarify, every country now understands that the United States has changed. It is not going to administer an empire of the whole world, keeping the peace and having everyone rely on it doing that. It is just like Mr. Trump sometimes says, we’re throwing all of that out the window. We are now going to weaponize our remaining assets. We’re no longer the biggest economic bloc in the world. That’s China and the BRICS. But we’re big enough that we can threaten and weaponize and force the rest of the world to give us a portion of its wealth. You know what that means beyond a change of the last 50 years economic policy? It means the United States is advertising itself as the new number one rolled nation in this world. Even China, Japan, and South Korea announced they’re getting together. Those three countries have a history of tension and conflict and bitterness. All of that was put aside. They’re meeting together, and I quote, to coordinate their response to Mr. Trump. Europe, who could never unify and therefore gave up the ghost as an economic powerhouse when they were allied with the United States, may, by result of Mr. Trump, be able to unify against the United States. I admit, it’s a long shot, disunity in Europe is intrinsic to that poor continent. But that’s the reality. No one should be fooled. The isolation of the United States is what we are watching big time.

MICHAEL HUDSON: I want to get into the nitty-gritty of the details because that’s where the devil all of is. Michael, let me ask you the question, which is so important.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Why will Trump’s tariffs fail to close the U.S. trade deficit? Are the tariffs addressing the root causes of the trade deficit?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Because the trade deficit is a result of the deindustrialization that we’ve been talking about on your show for the last few months. There’s no way that tariffs can suddenly, within one week, one month, or five years, create a domestic ability to produce these products. What there’s no mention of is if you impose the tariffs in order to produce here the autos, parts, and all of the manual labor that we’ve been importing from Southeast Asia, It takes five years to organize a factory, to make the planning, to organize the labor force, to raise the money, to organize the marketing distribution.

Trump believes that in one week, we can suddenly re-industrialize. He’s leaving out the time element. If you’re going to re-industrialize the United States, you’re going to have to build factories here. And as we’ve discussed in the past, I really don’t want to go over the past shows that we’ve done, except to do what Richard has done and sort of set, describe the setting. But suppose we set up factories here to make the higher labor, to do the manual labor, to make the toys and all of the kinds of consumer goods that Walmart has been importing from China. You’re going to have to pay, you’re going to have to raise the tariffs by, I’d say, about 300%. You will have to raise the cost of doing a consumer price index by maybe 40%.

Because if the Americans produce these, how are you going to hire labor that you have to provide with health insurance, that you have to provide with enough money to buy housing that’s rising, medical costs that are soaring. And the cost of employing labor in the United States has been escalating, partly because of the privatization that’s occurred, of public services that hitherto were provided at subsidized rates so that corporations did not have to pay high enough wages because the government was taking care of a lot of basic needs. All of this has made America a high-cost economy. All of this has made America a high-cost economy, but I really would like to talk about what Trump’s specific strategy is within all of this.

RICHARD WOLFF: Could I just add something before Michael? Go ahead. There is another thing. Everything Michael said is right. I just want to add something. Mr. Trump’s. Mr. Trump’s herky-jerky behavior, the Canada-Trump, the Canada-Mexico tariff, go up, then it goes down, then it is modified, then it is adjusted. And now we are told that he’s willing to negotiate with all of the other tariff victims to get this from this one, to get that from this. Here’s what that means. It means that none of these tariffs are a certainty.

No planning corporation can say, okay, this is the new level of expenses I have with the tariff being what it is, so I’m going to compare when I decide where to build my next factory, all my options. He can’t do that, because the tariff that he’s counting may not be there next month, may not be there next year, in which case the enormous expense, that’s why it’s so important what Michael just said. It takes years and a lot of money to move a production facility from one place to another, or to reorganize your supply chain, because instead of building in this country over the next 10 years, as you had planned, you’re going to have to move your new factories.

And that means you have to rearrange your supply chain, all of that is enormously expensive. No corporation is going to undertake those expenses, only to discover, after having spent $2 billion, that the $5 billion project is now to be abandoned, because the tariffs were changed on your supplier, on you. He can’t do what you can’t do what you can’t do what you can’t do, it’ll mean that corporations are hesitant, will hold back on these decisions, will delay them. And as every undergraduate student in economics learns, in capitalism, we are all held hostage to corporate plans about investment. The working class gets money and spends it, end of conversation, not interesting. The corporate sector earns profits, and then decides whether or not to invest them, if it’s profitable. If it isn’t, they’ll lend it to the United States government, or put it in some other non-productive activity. And that will cause us depressions, recessions, delays, all kinds of stuff. No one talks about this. Mr. Trump wants the freedom. He likes the deal to be made. Yeah? Well, no one explained to him. None of his advisors, who all have PhDs, or many of them do, from fancy universities, just like Michael and me. But they didn’t explain to him, you can’t do that, as if it had no effect. The United States isn’t the overwhelming powerhouse that it was in the second half of the 20th century. That’s the empire that’s over. And this is the desperate, largely blind, desperate gesture of a government that cannot admit where it is, and fantasizes that it can do all these things as if they’re automatic. They aren’t. Now let’s go and let Michael explain that in the most important statistical focus.

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MICHAEL HUDSON: When you look at the statistics and how, in Trump’s explanation, you realize how really goofy all of this is. And the goofiness is something new that we haven’t, neither Richard, nor I, nor anyone else could have imagined, would have come up. Commentators have been puzzling over, how did Trump come up with these charts explaining how other countries were exploiting us with tariff and trade policies of enormous magnitude, far above their actual tariff rates? How is it that we can impose tariffs of 50% or 40% because they’re punishing us with 100% tariffs and 80% tariffs? These are goofy figures. Nobody, it took people, I got calls last night from former presidential candidates and research foundations asking me, what do these numbers mean? And it took me hours to figure out how goofy they all were. And so it’s worthwhile taking a minute. It’s actually going to take about 10 or 15 minutes to explain how Trump calculated these tariffs. At first, look, it seems like he wants just to beat up the poorest and weaker countries like Myanmar, Burma, Bangladesh. That’s what bullies do. And he wants to cut out Chinese proxy factories in Vietnam. But when one looks at his numbers, you see the deception of the work. He explained that the tariff rates attributed to other countries against the United States were not merely the official tariff rates that we all look at, but some countries are attacking us in two ways. Some are buying US dollars by holding their reserves in dollars. They do this to recycle their dollars to the United States to prevent their currencies from rising. This is what enabled America to get a free lunch by blocking other countries from buying gold and depleting America’s gold stock and forcing them to use their economic and trade surplus to lend to the US Treasury. Trump says that instead of recognizing that that’s been the key to America’s financial imperialism, that’s been an attack on us. And the other problem that they’ve been attacking us is being too poor to buy as many exports from us as we’ve been buying from them. So Taiwan is accused of a 60%, 64% tariff. China, 67% tariff. India, 52% tariff. Vietnam of 90% tariffs. And in addition to Vietnam, there are Laos and Cambodia with 49% tariffs. Thailand and Indonesia are imposed tariffs of 36% and 32%. Who would have thought that these are the countries that are leading an economic war against the United States to take advantage of us? This seems bizarre at first sight. As Richard pointed out, South Korea and Japan are singled out. Many of the imports from them are from affiliates of US multinationals or there are allies. Well, Trump claims that other countries are recycling their export earnings into buying dollars. That’s artificial. That’s currency manipulation.

And if they didn’t buy US Treasury bonds, if they didn’t buy US stocks, then their currencies would have gone up and presumably made American industrial exports more competitive if we had in any industry to produce these exports, which we don’t anymore. So, I think what’s upside down here is that it’s not that other countries have fought to manipulate their currency, it’s that the United States dollar has risen against every other currency in the world in the last decade. And this began with Obama’s resolution of the junk mortgage fraud in 2008. The solution of the Obama administration was for the Federal Reserve to come in and pursue a zero interest rate policy that caused an enormous amount of gain for the stock market. And the biggest bond rally in history has resulted from lowering the price of credit of bonds, you know, from 5%, 6% all the way down to 0.1%. Well, if you look at the distribution of wealth in America, the bottom 50% haven’t increased their wealth at all. It’s a teeny little sliver of their stock market holdings and wealth since 2008. All of this increase in wealth has accrued to the top 10% and almost entirely in stock and bond and real estate prices. So, the United States dollar has been soaring against other countries. It’s not because we’re exporting more, because we’re deindustrializing. It’s not because of our budget moving into surplus, because we’ve been running a budget deficit of huge proportions. And we’ve been spending military money all over the world. How is it that America, deindustrializing huge military spending with a huge budget deficit, has been raising the dollar’s exchange rate, that has attracted speculative investment capital from all the other countries. The reason for these exchange rate shifts has nothing to do with trade. It’s all about the financial sector. And not a word about that from Trump. And it turns out…

RICHARD WOLFF: Michael, let me just add. Let me break in and add just very quickly.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Please. The phony or goofy numbers that are being put out here.

RICHARD WOLFF: If you get these crazy tariff rates that have been imposed on the United States by counting in, in this bizarre way, the deficits. I want to remind people that the trade deficit, that the fact that we send out dollars to buy tons and tons of stuff. That’s what puts the dollars in the hands of the countries from which we buy. And why do we do that? Because the American companies moved over there. There’s also local companies over there and French and German and British. But the American companies are a very large part of why we send all those dollars over there. Now, what do they do with the dollars? Let’s be real clear. They lend them back to the United States. They buy treasuries. And let’s be clear what that means. Is that an oppression of the United States? Of course not. Here’s what it has made possible. The United States has been able to fight the Vietnam War, the Afghanistan War, the Iraq War, and the Ukraine War. Last week, the New York Times published how big the United States has been in that war from the beginning. And we were able to do that without taxing the American people. You know why? Because all of those holders of dollars lent the money to the United States government to pay for the war. Patriotic Americans ought to be grateful. We got them to pay for those countries, many of whom, let me make it clear to you, are on Russia’s side, like China, lent money to the United States to fight a war against Russia. And we are wanting to claim now they oppressed us. Those foreigners oppressed us.

Believe me, if the American people had been taxed to pay for those wars, if they were taxed today to pay for the war in Ukraine, the war in Gaza, and all the other things they’re paying for, these wars would have stopped. So this recalculation to fit into the crazy narrative that Mr. Trump wants to put forward is really bizarre. And the last point, the rest of the world has not been dumping on us. We have tariffs that have been in place for 50 years. And I keep wanting to remind Americans, over 50 years ago, we imposed a tariff on European makers of pickup trucks. A big, fat 25 percent tariff. It’s been in effect for the last 50 years. Americans are not in love with pickup trucks because they make men feel manly.

The advertising that made men feel that way came once it was profitable to produce a pickup truck and you needed to convince Americans to buy that thing rather than a car, which has only a 2 percent or 2 and a half percent tariff on it. The United States has been wielding tariffs. Last point. We used to call tariffs, justified tariffs, as the way you teach it in a university, because it has something to do with an event we call infant industry. The idea here is when you’re a poor country, when you’re just coming out from being a colony, for example, like the United States once was, and you want to build up your industry, you have a hard time competing against those who’ve been doing that industry for 50 years.

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So there is a notion, temporarily you put a tariff just to get your infant to maturity, then you take away the tariff because you want the benefits, so-called, of competition. That’s the story told in every textbook. Well, we’re not a little country with an infant industry. That’s what all those other countries are, like Bangladesh and Vietnam. They have a reason and a justification. We don’t. This is turning all of it on its head.

We’re all supposed to believe now that 200 years of economic theory, 50 years of experience in free trade, which the United States benefited from, and the solution is to throw it all out the window and go with that stable genius of economic policy, Donald Trump. Donald Trump, you must be kidding.

MICHAEL HUDSON: So you’re saying that we’re protecting decadence, not infant industry. I love it. Yeah. But you also mentioned that when we import, we provide countries with money. Countries with money. But this is exactly the imbalance that Trump, how this worked out from what the government announced. For every country, they took the trade deficit with that country, and they divided it by that country’s export to us. So if we have an 18 billion dollar trade deficit with Indonesia that supports and its exports at 28 billion, then if you divide 18 by 28, that’s 64%. That’s where that crazy number for Indonesia came. And he claims that that’s the tariff rate that Indonesia charges us. It’s not a tariff rate. It’s a measure of the imbalance of trade.

And of course, the imbalance of trade is largest with the poorest countries in the world because they can’t afford to pay very much, largely because of the polarization of the world economy that the United States created after World War II. So, of course, we import from Vietnam low-wage products and from Iraq and raw materials exporters on the list. They’re too poor to buy the United States, and that has zero to do with tariffs at all. There’s a rationalization for this treatment, and that’s what I want to talk about because that’s so crazy. And I mentioned briefly in summary what that was before. If a country’s exchange rate falls against the dollar, that’s considered an attack on the U.S. economy against what Trump is responding in kind. So, let’s look at the most guilty. Again, Myanmar, Madagascar, 93%, Lesotho, 99%, Serbian, Botswana, 74%, Guyana, 76%. How can these poorest countries that are running a trade deficit being aggressing to the United States?

Well, the answer is either that they’re poor or that their exchange rates are plunging or that they’re recycling money that they earn into loans to the U.S. Treasury because of the dollar’s exorbitant privilege of what used to be what I’ve called super-imperialism. That’s not trade aggression. And Trump has even, in separate talks for the last month, talked about charging a financial tariffs for other countries to buy U.S. securities, Treasury securities or stocks. In other words, if they buy stocks, they’ll have to pay a 5% penalty or tariff to recycle their money. Well, that means that the money that has been reflowing into Treasury securities is going to stop. What’s it going to do? Five percent is a huge amount on Treasury securities that are earning less. In other words, either they lose money on Treasury securities or they buy something else. What’s happening? I didn’t mention it, but gold prices are way up. Trump is driving other countries out of the dollar into gold, and he’s driving it together, other countries together, to create their own mutual holdings of each other’s currencies.

But Trump says that if other countries, if the BRICS countries get together and find an alternative to the dollar and buy their currencies, then that’s another form of trade aggression against the United States, and he’s going to retaliate them to prevent them from having an alternative to the dollar. So what he wants to do is lock them into the U.S. dollar, losing money where the interest they get on the dollar will be less than the trade penalty, the investment penalty they have to pay. And that is an unprecedented form of financial exploitation, this financial tariff for buying companies, buying U.S. securities. That’s something entirely new.

The whole rest of the world is supposed to be turned into a tributary economy to the United States, based on blocking them from having an alternative to the dollar, but making them lose money on every stock, bond, or Treasury security that they buy. That’s the big picture that he’s trying to impose, and he’s saying that if you don’t submit to this, we’re going to wreck your economy by interrupting your exports. What’s going to happen to all your factories and the labor that’s working in these factories? Now, you can’t make money exporting them to the United States unless we raise our consumer prices by 10 or 20% this year. Well, the result is they are going to continue exporting because the United States doesn’t have an alternative to these exports because it takes time to build the factories. And as Richard pointed out, how are you going to take the time to build the factories if the tariff terms are going to be renegotiated every year or so by Trump? It’s chaos. That’s the plan. Somehow, chaos is going to save the United States and be able to protect our deindustrialized decadence.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Richard, what I’m understanding from you both that the contribution of America’s corporate ruling class and fiscal irresponsibility, which is the budget deficit caused by the tax cuts for the wealthy and the spending on wars and the excessive budget of the militaries. How is that going to influence? Are they the main reasons for the budget deficit, which finally leads to a trade deficit?

ORDER IT NOW

RICHARD WOLFF: Well, the way to understand this is to understand that we have a very peculiar political economy in the United States. Think of it this way. We have the 3% of our population that are employers. That’s the top of our economic system. And that becomes the self-reproducing group of people. They make all the decisions whether or not to invest the money. They’re the ones who set the prices we pay, and they’re the ones who pay the wages or not that we depend on. So we are controlled by the 3% of the employer. That’s the way capitalism is set up. Okay? They long ago understood, the people at the top, what they have to do, because we have a political system that is a little odd to go with a top-down economic system. In our political system, we have universal suffrage. Everybody gets one vote. Well, the vast majority of people, 97%, are not employers. Three percent are. It would be easy to mobilize a majority of the 97% to limit the wealth of the 3%. In fact, you would expect that to happen, because the 3% are the ones with all the money, and the 97% are the ones who control the majority in the voting. So what did the ruling class of 3% do in America? They bought the government, of course. That’s how they protect their situation in a world of universal suffrage. And how did they do it? They did it with two political parties. Each of them depends on the 3% for their money, the donor class, if you like, the 3%. And now they divide. Half of them go to the right and mobilize in mass support, you know, for things like guns and white supremacy and against abortion and all of that. And the other ones, they go for more liberal, progressive, social welfare, all of that, and minorities and women. And so we have two parties, both of whom control the mass of the vote. Now the punchline. What the system does is it goes to the rich people, says you’re the donors, so we won’t tax you. Then it goes, each party to its mass base, we’ll take care of you, we’ll give you this, we’ll give you that. Here’s the problem. You can’t buy the mass of people unless you tax where the wealth is. But there is a way out in the craziness of capitalism. You don’t tax the wealthy. You do provide for the mass of people. And the way you do it is you go to the wealthy and you say, since we didn’t tax you, you have all this money, please lend it to us. We’ll give it back to you after a few years, plus pay you interest while you wait. That’s called the deficit. And the reason we have a deficit is a deference to those at the top to not tax them to pay for the masses. I’ll give you one simple example. Elon Musk, the last I looked, has

250 billion with which to solve social problems. And you know who would be better off if we solved the social problems with his money? Mr. Musk. He would live in a less conflicted society. He would be less at risk from angry poor people, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It is irrational. And what you’re watching with Mr. Trump in the Rose Garden is the irrational effort to deal with an irrational problem whose irrationality you dare not admit. So you’re going to now do what? Punish the rest of the world. You know what that reminds me of? Every now and then here in the United States, a city, New York, Philadelphia, any, tries to solve its economic problems, once again not taxing the rich, by taxing commuters. New York has famously toyed with that idea.

The people of New Jersey get enraged because a government, not of them, another state, New York, is solving its problems in part on the back of people that are not New York voters, have no say in any of this. And so it usually comes to grief. You can’t do that. Because it risks blowing the United States apart. And you know what Mr. Trump is doing? He’s risking not blowing the world apart. It’ll stay. But making the United States the isolated, rogue nation that this looks like to the rest of the world. beware. That is a very large danger that will come back and bite this country in places I don’t even want to think about.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, Richard’s quite right in shifting the focus from tariffs to taxes, because Trump’s whole focus on tariffs is, as he said, to idealize the Gilded Age of President McKinley. And until 1913, the United States didn’t have an income tax on rich people. The U.S. government budget was funded mainly by tariff revenues, but also by land sales of the land that it seized from the Native Americans, including my ancestors. And so no income tax at all. And Trump says, look, there was a Gilded Age in which the rich people weren’t taxed. And then what happened to Trump? Trump said it was a disaster. 1913, you had an income tax. And the income tax fell almost entirely. Only 2% of the American population had to pay an income tax. The richest 2%. There were the financial sector, the real estate, the monopolists, and the property owners. Economic rent is what was taxed. Not labor, not industry very much.

And so Trump says, what I want to do is roll back history and reverse it to make history run backwards to the time when we can restore tariffs as a tax on labor and on industry and leave all the economic surplus in the hands of the financial class, the monopolists, and the real estate sector. The rentier sector. That’s his big plan to essentially reduce the whole dynamic of industrial capitalism that Richard and I have been talking about for the last half year back towards the kind of feudal ideal where you had a rentier sector receiving unearned income, economic rent, land rent, monopoly rent, and financial interest. That’s basically the kind of world that he wants to restore. And he said, look how rich it was. But it was the most unequal distribution of wealth and income in American history. That’s why it was called the Gilded Age. In the rest of the country, you had the growth of the populist parties fighting and saying you have to have a reform.

It was the populists of the Western states and the Midwestern states that tried already in the 1880s to get an income tax and to support the eight-hour day and to support labor unionization and to make federal laws against companies calling in strike breakers to violently break up attempts by labor to unionize. That is the, if you look at how that world was, the great Pullman strikes and the massacres and the terrorism that was taking place and the absolute corruption of government, that is the ideal that America, that Trump wants to present, prevent as making America great again is rolling back history to before the whole century and a half of democratic reform.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: What you’ve just mentioned is all about the federal budget deficit, which would be reflected in the trade deficit, isn’t it, Richard? Yes, those two are linked very closely because in order to run a deficit, you have to issue treasury securities.

ORDER IT NOW

RICHARD WOLFF: And in order to sell the treasury securities, you have to have the rest of the world because America can’t buy back its own treasury securities at the level that need to be sold. So you have this problem. You have this problem. That’s how the American empire organized itself. Now that that empire is declining, it is dissolving its own organization. It’s very internal to what is going on. If the United States were still a superpower, it wouldn’t need to do this. That’s why Obama didn’t. That’s why Bush didn’t. That’s why Clinton. It’s not that they’re any less smart than Mr. Trump or any less committed to making America number one. They didn’t need to. We supported free trade for the last 50 years because the United States did real well for the people that matter in this country and dribbled off enough to the rest to keep them quiet. They can’t do it anymore. So they now want, as Michael says, tributary, a tributary economy. You better give us tick tock. You better give us the Panama Canal. You better give us Greenland. You better give us your minerals. Look at the deal they’re imposing on Mr. Zelensky, etc., etc. This is now thievery, open and undisguised the way it had been before. But it’s a sign of desperation. You don’t want to do this. Let me tell you where this is going to go. Because Americans have a stunning inability to imagine that other people have the same understanding they do. The people of the world are understanding the United States has become their enemy. Look at the numbers. Canadians are not coming here as tourists anymore. European governments are telling trans people around the world it’s not safe to travel to the United States. Well, that anger and that bitterness will now be enhanced by the governments there who are wanting to get out of the blame for the difficulties this is going to cause. If Germany cannot sell its BMWs and its Mercedes in this country anymore because of these whopping tariffs and they have to lay off large numbers of German workers, that’s going to be explained to the German people. That’s Mr. Trump. The Americans are doing that to you. Now, guess what? Angry people around the world are going to, here we go, stop buying American. Look at what has happened in the last three months to the Tesla automobile. Nobody will touch it. Mr. Musk is discovering that there are real costs to prancing around the stage with a chainsaw celebrating how he’s firing tens of thousands of workers. Well, guess what? They have a way of getting back at him, whether it’s damaging a Tesla car or anything. So, American goods in the rest of the world, they’re not going to all be wearing jeans because Americans are. They’re going to find a new pair of pants not produced in the United States and the jeans market will dissolve. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg here. Mr. Trump is telling a story, a fanciful story, about these wonderful things that are going to flow from what he’s done. He doesn’t tell you even the most elementary honesty of all the things that could go wrong here. And the notion that none of them will happen, that’s so preposterous, he can’t afford to be honest. He has to be a huckster, an advertiser. Remember what an advertiser is, a person who figures out real and imagined good things about his client’s project and product, and he makes disappear all the bad ones. This can only help you. It won’t hurt you. It’s the mentality of the advertiser. Only this person is now the leader. And he’s telling us desperate stories because his client is an empire going down.

MICHAEL HUDSON: I’m glad you mentioned tourism and demographics because that is a very major contributor to the U.S. balance of payments, especially from Canada. Tourists going into the snowbirds, they call them going into Florida. But also students. Universities in America are very largely, increasingly reliant on students from China and other countries that pay the whole

75,000 tuition a year. Now, all of a sudden, with ICE arresting students that talk out and say we’re against genocide in principle, you know, we think that the Gaza Palestinians shouldn’t be killed. They’re all of a sudden seized and deported. Now, this has had a paralyzing effect on other countries sending their students here. The Canadians have already canceled their reported to be canceling many of their travel meetings that they’d planned for the summer to the United States and for the winter. There’s the non-trade elements of the U.S. balance of payments in the form of tourism, students, is another damage that is going to push the U.S. deficit even further. And the United States is blocking other countries from financing this deficit by buying treasury bills. So you can expect a very sharp decline in the dollar. And that means that foreign goods are going to be much more expensive.

There’s going to be a very large inflation here that’s going to squeeze the wage-earning class that already is falling behind in its home loans, in its student debt, in its credit card debt, in its bank debt. The worry of the stock market is there’s going to be a break in the chain of payments, defaults, and unless you can bring Obama back in to say we’re going to foreclose on the poor people and kick them out of their houses like he kicked out 8 million homeowners that were victimized by junk mortgages. So unless you can repeat Obama’s class war, you’re going to have polarization in the United States that may actually lead other people to begin discussing the kind of alternative that Richard and I have been talking about.

RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah, I think it’s very serious. I do think if you’re looking for a way to hold in your mind the complexity of all of this, coupled with all the noise around it, it is beginning to make clear what MAGA means. It wants to go back to the end of the 19th century to an economy utterly controlled by a private capitalist elite that was much bigger then because our industries weren’t so concentrated. Now, you know, many companies have become many fewer companies, so the ruling class is much more condensed, much smaller, much able to coordinate a little bit better, and they want to run the show. They’re convinced that private enterprise, namely them, are better than anything else, so they’re going to privatize, and they’re going to go after poor people in this country. Look at the efforts to cut Medicaid that are now getting some traction in Congress, coupled with these efforts to smash down the poorest countries on Earth. Can you imagine? Myanmar had one of the worst earthquakes in history a few days ago, and he still went ahead and included them in it. Look at the mentality. You are destroying the poorest people, blaming immigrants.

Among the poorest people who have ripped themselves out of Central America where they were poor to begin with, grabbing the stuff on the back that they can carry with their children and their elderly, coming to the United States and making a big, proud effort of expelling them. A country that claimed it owed its greatness to being a melting pot for immigrants is now not melting in the old sense. It’s melting by literally killing these people in terms of what it’s doing to them. Extraordinary way to make your own country healthier economically on the backs of the poorest of the poor. And to think you can keep doing that without retribution coming is an amazing act of stupidity.

MICHAEL HUDSON: And without immigrant labor, who’s going to make all of the toys and the textile and the Walmart consumer goods that are being made by foreign labor? You’re going to have — it’ll be a labor shortage here because it’s very unlikely that you’re going to have college graduates or high school graduates or, let’s say, the American-style labor performing the kind of duties that the Asians have been. But careful.

RICHARD WOLFF: When I talk to those people, here’s what, you know, I use their idioms so I don’t frighten them. They will explain to me, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That’s what AI is for. AI is going to substitute for all of the world. We’re going to be able to do all of this because robots will be doing everything. And then I say to them, and what happens to the millions then who have no job? And they look at me and they say, the honest ones, we will wait for them to die off. We’re living in a country where this is becoming the humane way to cope. You cannot criticize the economic system, so you have to welcome mass death. Wow. That’s a commitment to an economic system that shows above all that that system needs to go.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael, so the budget deficit is primarily due to the due to tax cuts for the rich, reckless military spending and the interest payments on the growing national debt, not waste in civil servant salaries.

ORDER IT NOW

RICHARD WOLFF: Of course, civilians, let me do that quickly. Just again, to remind civilian labor force of the federal government, two and a half million people. The other two and a half that the federal government pays are the military. I’m going to put them aside. So two and a half million people are federal government. If you wanted to have efficiency, you would look at the federal government. But we have two other levels of government, state government and local government. And they’re much bigger. State government across 50 states is 5 million civilian employees. And local government, 15 million. So state and local is 20 million. Federal government is one tenth, two and a half million. If you’re interested in efficiency, why would you go after the smallest one? That’s stupid. But here’s the stupidity even worse. In the 1960s, if you look at the list, the government’s federal civilian employees, two and a half million. Here we are, a half-century later, our population 100 million people bigger, and we still service them with two and a half million civilian federal employees. You know what economists call that? Efficiency. Two and a half million are servicing 100 million more. That’s the last place then you would go and cut. If you’re interested in government efficiency, have a program to deal with state and local. If you actually, this is all fake. This is all foolery. Or if you like, advertising. He’s advertising. Look at me. I am hoping that no one knows what I just told you. But that is the reality. I didn’t make these numbers up. And you’ll never hear those numbers from the spokespersons because of what they obviously tell you. which is this is a talk about Mr. Trump’s fake news. He’s generating fake news at a speed way ahead of all of those he criticized for that over his lifetime.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: So, Michael, what are the broader implications of Trump’s trade and fiscal policies for the United States and the global economy? It seems that the United States could make the US the enemy of the world by harming both domestic and global economies.

MICHAEL HUDSON: We’ve just explained that the purpose of tariffs is to protect decadence, not an infant infrastructure. What you’d have to roll back is the whole transition of the United States into a post-industrial, financialized, rent-seeking economy. But the rentiers have cannibalized industry, and there is no political party that is supporting an alternative. That’s what we’ve also been speaking about on your show. Not the Democrats and not the Republicans. There’s no populist party today as arose in the 1880s and 1890s. There’s no William Jennings Bryan to say, “Don’t crucify labor on the cross of gold,” which is now the cross of debt, personal debt that they can’t pay, local debt, corporate debt, government debt. There’s none of that even being discussed. So part of this, at least in the Gilded Age, you did have alternatives being discussed, and you had the populist party representing between a quarter and 40% of Americans voters in the 1880s. Where are they today? There’s nowhere. There’s no sign of them emerging. There’s no academic alternative as there was in the American School of Protectionist Economics. The industrialization, the whole logic of industrialization in the 1890s, including under the Democrats, Grover Cleveland as well as McKinley, said if America is going to get rich and become the industrial power, we need high-wage labor. High-wage labor can drive out pauper labor. We need to raise living standards, and we don’t want the corporations to have to pay high wages.

So we’re going to have the government provide all sorts of public services so that industrial corporations can employ labor that is raising its productivity, raising its living standards because of public investment, government railroads, education, healthcare, communication, parks, urban improvements. None of that, all of that has become privatized and thatcherized. We’re really ruling history back in time without any understanding of the time we’re returning to as an idealized autocracy, a time only for the wealthiest ruling class, not for the agriculture and the industry that was being so highly exploited in what Trump considers to be the Gilded Age.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Richard, it seems that programs like Medicaid, Social Security, Medicare, are at risk of being cut to fund additional tax breaks for the real estate. I don’t know if the Congress would go along with Donald Trump if that happens. Yeah, that’s the only question.

RICHARD WOLFF: The Democrats will be the ones who do all of this kind of stuff more slowly, and they will appeal to their base as they always do. Now that you’re suffering from what the Republicans are doing to you, wouldn’t you prefer if this were done more slowly? They won’t say it quite like that, but most people will know. Remember, half the American people have figured out that this is silly and don’t bother voting or paying attention, even if they do vote. They vote for other reasons, but not out of an engagement with the material which is denied them. It’s not their fault. It really isn’t. Appealing to them to vote and making it absurd to do so is a bad combination. But I think we’re not anymore in the Tweedledum, Tweedledee game. That’s what those parties will do, because that’s what they’ve always done. And they don’t have the competitor, as Michael just pointed out, that would make that risky. For that to happen, you have to have an upsurge of a new and an independent political movement that puts their feet to the fire and exposes what this Tweedledum and Tweedledee have done to the United States. Mr. Trump inherited from Biden. Biden inherited — and you can go backwards — they’re all complicit in this game. They’ve all been playing it. All that Mr. Trump is doing is correctly surmising that people are getting sick and tired, so he decided to be a more extreme version of the Republican Party. But that’s all he is. He is taking us back to what Republican employer class mentality has always wanted. Everything should be done by the private employer. He should not be regulated by the government. He should not be taxed by the government. Because if the government gets out the old laissez-faire nonsense, well, then everything will work. Well, the last time we tried that, it eventuated in the greatest crash of capitalism in its history, 1929. If we allow that to happen again, the world is very different then. The United States had no serious economic competitor in 1929. He’s got one now, and the whole world is different, and abusing the world as we go into the risk of a crash or even a recession is terribly stupid.

And would only be done by people who no longer can see any other way to hold on to the notion that the best thing this country needs is to damage the poor, restrict the working class, and do everything possible to protect the people at the top. But then again, come on, folks, you all know enough about history. When the empires of the past, Greek, Roman, Persian, any of them, when they go down, you know what always happens? The people at the top, the richest and the most powerful, use their position to be the last ones to lose as the empire goes down, to hold on to what’s theirs. And that means the costs of a declining empire are offloaded from them on to the rest of us. That’s what’s happening. Yep.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Thank you so much, Richard and Michael. Great pleasure as always. Okay. Take care. you Thank you.

(Republished from Dialogue Works by permission of author or representative)
 
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  1. Tariffs & Taxes & Trump

    Video Link

    • Replies: @John Dael
    , @JR Foley
  2. question says:

    Trump’s tariffs are making a high cost economy even more high cost, as he tries to stimulate a revival of industry that requires, depends on a low cost economy.

    Epic fail.

  3. Trump has to try to undo the trade policies of the past that have left American as net debtors.

    When a country finacializes its markets, like most western nations did during the “greed is good” era what your signalling to the world is ” the party has started!”

    The party has to end some time, for the West its ending now. The generation who squandered everything on toys and the big market casino are coming to an end (boomers) what is left is empty beer cans (Detroit and other such industrial towns) and the hang over.

    What can Trump do? If America continues to live beyond its means then sooner or later the American dollar will become monopoly money.

    What Trump has to do is wind down the military and its world bases to stop the bleeding, failure to do so shows that he isn’t serious about fiscal rectitude and is only throwing a tantrum and blaming everyone else for the punch bowl being empty.

    So Trump tariffs are a first strike at evening the ledger, what else are you going to do about the largesse of military spending?

    You cannot fill a bucket that has too many holes in it Donald!

    • Thanks: mark green
    • Replies: @meamjojo
    , @TitusAlone
    , @Gkruz
    , @JM
  4. meamjojo says:

    “And the fallacy is somehow that tariffs are going to re-industrialize the United States. ”

    If there IS any “re-indutrialization” here, it will be primarily robot operated, dark factories that will create relatively few, if any, additional blue-collar jobs.

    The Commerce Secretary says so himself below. The ludicrous part of his rantings was that he thinks that blue collar workers can be taught “how to be robotics, mechanics, engineers and electricians for high tech factories”.

    Where have I heard this before? Oh yeah, the idea of training out-of-work truck drivers and other blue collar workers to be web developers, programs, etc. [rotflol]

    Tech jobs, robots are Lutnick’s vision for America’s “manufacturing renaissance
    Sareen Habeshian
    3 Apr 2025

    Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Thursday touted the use of robotics in his pitch for an American “manufacturing renaissance.”

    The big picture: While President Trump’s tariffs are meant to boost American manufacturing and jobs, U.S. manufacturers will likely hurt from these tariffs, at least in the short run. Whether they lead to more jobs in the long term remains an open question.

    What he’s saying: Lutnick made the case in several TV interviews this week that tariffs will bring jobs and factories back to the U.S., saying they’ll utilize robotics to make American workers “more efficient.”

    • Speaking on CNBC, he said that with the use of robotics, factories are “going to see the greatest surge in training for what we call trade craft — teaching people how to be robotics, mechanics, engineers and electricians for high tech factories.”

    https://www.axios.com/2025/04/03/tech-jobs-robots-lutnick-manufacturing-renaissance

    • Agree: Christoph88
  5. meamjojo says:
    @Mr-Chow-Mein

    “You cannot fill a bucket that has too many holes in it Donald! ”

    Hank Williams Sr. – My Bucket’s Got A Hole In It

    Video Link

  6. BrooLidd says:

    …it reminds me of the kind of conversation you get with a white supremacist who explains and whines that white people are at the wrong end of discrimination in this country. The attempt to snatch from the black and brown people who’ve actually suffered centuries of repression from white people, to try to erase all of that by telling some story that makes it all reversed. It is preposterous, it is outrageous…

    Richard Wolff, according to Wiki a Marxian economist born in Germany in 1942, in his first vicious salvo conflates Trump’s tariff policy with white supremacism!

    Who is Richard Wolff?

    To escape Nazism, Wolff’s parents, both German citizens, emigrated to the United States during World War II…

    He is a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a visiting professor in the graduate program in international affairs of the New School. Wolff has also taught economics at Yale University, City University of New York, University of Utah, University of Paris I (Sorbonne), and The Brecht Forum in New York City.

    Wikipedia

    Wolff’s wife is a ‘practicing psychotherapist.’

    Well, do we know who Mr. Wolff is now?

    According to Mr. Wolff, Trump bases his tariff policies on the claim that the US is being ‘oppressed’ by foreign countries. He uses the word ‘oppressed’ repeatedly and deceptively, inverting its meaning, as a means of ridiculing and humiliating Trump and whites.

    Does that technique remind you of anyone, of any group? Have you witnessed such machine-gun-style maelstroms of twisted verbalese before?

    Enough. This is sickening.

    99.99 percent of American men my age did their utmost to prevent the gutting of American manufacturing. We said as loudly and as forcefully as we were able that once it leaves the country it will never come back.

    Congress and the executive branch of the federal government were stone deaf. It was as if we didn’t exist. They had been bought off, every single one of them, by the 2.4 percenters, by the hidden hands, by the Richard Wolffs.

    And now the Richard Wolffs are holding us up to derision, are rubbing our noses in the dirt, as if we were responsible for the ruination of the country. Whose fault is it? It’s whitey’s fault they say.

    This is intolerable!

    The chickens have come home to roost. They’ve come home and roosted really hard.

    And the chicken coops are still owned by the same 2.4 percenters.

    And the slaughter houses, too.

  7. I am relieved that MICHAEL HUDSON think this is bad.

    Because it means that this was the right decision to take.
    Congrat Mr Trump.

    • Agree: SteveK9, Half Norwegian
    • LOL: radicalcenter
    • Replies: @Pythas
    , @Sarah
  8. xyzxy says:

    There’s enough economic meat in the article to make it worthwhile. Unfortunately, the social gristle, especially coming from Wolff, makes it a tough and unpalatable chew. His idea that men pretending to be women won’t be visiting the US because they are somehow ‘afraid’, and that will somehow affect the global economy is unserious, and it’s hard for serious people to take him seriously over it.

    And PS to Wolff– East and SE Asians don’t consider themselves black or brown. When I was living in China, they called themselves ‘yellow’, whenever they recognized racial color. Except for the women, who liked their skin to look as white as possible, cosmetically. Probably an unwitting throwback to the Chinese opera? LOL

  9. @question

    Orange Man is trying precisely what Keynes warned against after WWI
    (I wonder how that played out? 🤔).

    • Agree: Christoph88
  10. May I remind you that a tariff is a tax on consumption and for most part voluntary, while the income tax is a tax on a part of your life and since most people have to work to make money to have the basics of life, is NOT voluntary!

  11. (((Wolff)))

    I’ll pass.

    • Agree: Passing by
  12. question says:

    One of the major culprits in our economic problems is the zoning/construction/development mafia.

    Housing, shelter, is kept in a state of artificial shortage, forcing prices to exorbitant levels in conjunction with FIRE sector activity. Century old homes are between 500k and 1m!

    The FIRE sector concept needs to be expanded, have an inclusion of the zoning development cartels, because the FIRE sector is not solely responsible for the artificial shortage and price bubble.

    My opinion for industrial resurgence in America is an industrial policy targeting expansion of housing by forcing zoning and development policies that would circumvent or break up the strangle hold of the development cartels/mafia at local levels. Incentives for affordable high quality housing expansion.

    Housing starts are at 1960 levels. There is plenty of suitable land in America.

    Every construction worker has an additional ~8 workers in feeder industries, so there is a healthy leverage there. Where would the workers come from if we are at high employment? Well, employment stats are BS, + all the bullshit jobs, as David Graeber described them. Unemployment is a real problem.

    Interest rates are not the exclusive answer, as the zoning and development thugs need to be ‘persuaded’ to get with the program. Targeting interest rates alone just results in bubbles with no improvement in affordability.

    So that’s my take on making America accelerate, an expansive industrial policy aimed at increasing housing supply and getting the prices inline with production costs. We need to get costs down, and housing is one of the biggest surcharges in the economy.

    Next on the chopping block, health care costs, and the health care cartels. Get the costs down, cut the surcharges. We don’t need a capital intensive health care sector.

    We need a low cost economy. Make America low cost again.

    • Replies: @Spider Monkey
  13. BrooLidd says:
    @BrooLidd

    Interview with this classic, evil example of (((those people))).


    Video Link

  14. BrooLidd says:
    @BrooLidd

    He could have been born in US, shortly after his parents’ immigration. Wiki doesn’t specify birthplace.

  15. Pythas says:
    @Anonymous19

    This wasp Hudson is one dumb SOB…He no’s nothing about how the world has been working for the past 50 years…Ya you white American dolts outsource all your manufacturing to 3rd world countries or a least they were 3rd world countries 40+ years ago and you Americans produce nothing, make nothing, invent nothing, manufacture nothing and we will manage the world. What an imbecile.

    • Replies: @DanFromCT
  16. As always, the combination of Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff provide for the most enlightened and informative discussion on geopolitical economic impacts than any other source. When I see these two gentlemen together I always save a hard copy of their interaction and analysis for long term storage and as a reference for “I told you so” in the future.

    Despite their obvious intellectual brilliance, what these two gentlemen do is boil down all the inherent complexities of the macro economic global environment into layman’s language that anyone with average intelligence can easily grasp. This is their brilliance and I just want to thank them, and Nima Alkhordhid, profusely for their enlightening synthesis of what may happen as a result of the Empire falling apart.

    I am a graduate of the Industrial & Systems Engineering program of Dalhousie University in Canada (Distinction 1988) and I was so impressed to learn that one of Michael Hudson’s mentors was also an Industrial Engineer from New York. We have some crossover in mathematics and statistics for sure so I always very much enjoy both Dr Hudson’s and Dr Wolff ‘s analyses of this very important topic.

    Thank you so much for explaining all the ridiculous lies of the administration and for exposing this “protection of decadence” of the crumbling American Empire. Brilliant analysis and commentary from both and skillful mediation by Nima.

  17. “Oy vey the tariffs are like HITLER I tell ya! It’s like the shoah all ova again! The tariffs put babies in the oven and made my grandpa into a lampshade.” -Mr Richard Wolffbergsteinwitz

  18. I usually appreciate most of what Mr. Hudson and his colleagues have to say, and I generally defer to their vast expertise on economics. However, I am disappointed by the shortsightedness on display here.

    Mr. Wolff’s hysterical whining ‘the sky is falling’ and ‘white supremeacy’ and ‘poor immigrants’ over and over is so tiresome that I won’t even dignify it with a response.

    Mr. Hudson falling back on the ‘these are jobs Americans won’t do’ argument is very revealing (and evil):

    “And without immigrant labor, who’s going to make all of the toys and the textile and the Walmart consumer goods that are being made by foreign labor? You’re going to have — it’ll be a labor shortage here because it’s very unlikely that you’re going to have college graduates or high school graduates or, let’s say, the American-style labor performing the kind of duties that the Asians have been.”

    So, you want to keep importing helots to perform this work?

    As you know, mass immigration is a giant vice that exerts downward pressure on workers’ wages at the bottom (service industry, construction, and low-skill trades) and at the top end (high tech). But most of the immigrants *are not even working*–their tax-subsidized consumption artificially inflates the GDP–and yet most new jobs *still* go to immigrants. This indicates that the number of people coming to the US (and in western Europe) is such that at any other time in history it would have been considered an invasion of epoch-making proportions.

    Of course, you probably think that Americans don’t deserve a home at all, because “genocide” “stolen land” “colonialism” “slavery” “white supremacy” etc., etc., according to some Howard Zinn-esque narrative of hate. So, then, why should you care if they suffer? After all, most homeless people are white men.

    The solution is obviously a massive skilled trades training program, which requires a complete re-wiring of secondary education. I thought you socialists liked to think big.

    Yet Hudson, again:

    “But also students. Universities in America are very largely, increasingly reliant on students from China and other countries that pay the whole 75,000 tuition a year. Now, all of a sudden, with ICE arresting students that talk out and say we’re against genocide in principle, you know, we think that the Gaza Palestinians shouldn’t be killed. They’re all of a sudden seized and deported. Now, this has had a paralyzing effect on other countries sending their students here.”

    Has it really? I haven’t seen any indication of that. You are just speculating. No, the universities are filled to the brim with foreign students with no signs of stopping. Even if some tiny fraction were deterred as you are suggesting, it wouldn’t make a dent. Our universities, now corporate military/chemical/drug research farms full of Chinese and Indian students, have been globalized just like the corporations.

    You seem to think our Universities exist for their kids, but not for our own. Oh, right, because they weren’t built by our ancestors for their progeny. Somehow slaves and immigrants get credit for everything good in America, and white people blamed for everything bad. So tiresome.

    When you say things like this, people who care about Americans as a people, a historic nation, are really turned off. This is when I am reminded that you are all internationalist socialists. You would like to dissolve nations altogether. So, this is where we part ways.

    Because the tariffs imply long-term structural changes and short term pain, therefore you declare we mustn’t use them. But you don’t suggest any alternatives except to simply maintain the status quo (globalized financial capitalism) which was the problem in the first place.

    The only way back from globalism is to nationalism. China, Russia, India, and others are already doing this. You guys are the ones who are desperate, clinging to the status quo and waiting for some kind of global workers revolution that takes place in the distant future after all the nations have been dissolved into gray goo.

    You decry the financialization and globalization of capitalism, but at the same time, you don’t want Americans to build things again (and grow their own food), based on what you are saying. Are you letting the perfect (total communization?) be the enemy of the good (protectionism)? Of course Trump’s plan isn’t perfect, is full of holes, will backfire in various ways, produce chaos, and so on. It is still on the right track if for no other reason than it points the way back from globalism.

    Perhaps you are horrified at the thought of autarky cos it means turning off all the international welfare spigots. And, ultimately you want whites (and only whites) to get demographically swamped and wiped out, don’t you?

    Personally, I don’t really care if the *entire global economy* falls apart, as 1) I am already at the bottom and 2) I am future-oriented. Many people will suffer, yes. But we are already suffering!!!

    But you seem to forget that your ‘saintly poor’ in this country (and in Europe) have been culturally and socially degraded for decades. They are on all kinds of drugs, eat garbage food, mutilate their bodies, and live on public assistance. These are the ones still living in apartments, in public housing, in cities.

    And there is another, invisible section of the poor who have given up entirely on the system, who live in giant homeless camps both inside the city and even bigger camps deep in the woods. These people, whether they realize it or not, are actually taking the first step towards the future. “Collapse now and avoid the rush,” as the Archdruid says.

    • Agree: BrooLidd
    • Replies: @Triptolemus
    , @obwandiyag
  19. @Triptolemus

    I meant to say, “mass immigration is a giant *vise*,” but I suppose it is also a vice.

  20. Chris Moore says: • Website
    @meamjojo

    If there IS any “re-indutrialization” here, it will be primarily robot operated, dark factories that will create relatively few, if any, additional blue-collar jobs.

    The Commerce Secretary says so himself below. The ludicrous part of his rantings was that he thinks that blue collar workers can be taught “how to be robotics, mechanics, engineers and electricians for high tech factories”.

    Where have I heard this before? Oh yeah, the idea of training out-of-work truck drivers and other blue collar workers to be web developers, programs, etc. [rotflol]

    You’re an Israel First, Golden Calf Ponzi Voodoo hebroid who believes the “Chosen Race” will run the Global Fiat Ponzi out of Israel in perpetuity, and all goyim “truck drivers and blue collar workers” are worthless cattle who should be liquidated in perpetuity.

    In short, you’re a Zionist parasite and a shill for a crumbling Global Fiat Ponzi scheme, as are all members of the Judas Class.

    Is Trump, as well? Mixed verdict. Whenever he’s accused of “antisemitism” or being a fool by Ponzi mooches, parasites, and psychopaths, he’s doing something right.

    Now there’s a growth industry: liquidating anti-Christ voodoo gang-bangers, ponzi schemers and killers with the blood of Abel on their hands.

    • Thanks: meamjojo
    • Replies: @radicalcenter
  21. Unz is peddling garbage now?

  22. I would say tariffs wouldn’t work if we were talking about a small to mid size economy…but the U.S is a big market and can drive it’s own economy internally like Russia is doing.

    What Trump has to do is divert the river of money emptying into the military sea and use it to drive down energy costs for industry, look at lowering land taxes and offering rent holidays as incentives to re-industrialize Detroit and the rust belt.

    It can be done if Donald starts moving instead of just headlines.

    And Donald stop supporting Israel’s genocide it makes you look like Adelsons’ poodle. And why are these people like Adelson in America when their allegiance is elsewhere?

  23. twerp says:

    We’ve been waiting 10 years for Trump to do something, anything vaguely America First.
    And when it arrives, his new jewish backers are not pleased.
    That only makes it sweeter.

    • Replies: @Christoph88
  24. maxamir says:

    the most objective view of all possible angles,


    Video Link

    • Agree: Notsofast
    • Replies: @nokangaroos
  25. @maxamir

    Of course it´s a commercial, and slightly optimistic, but by and large on the spot;
    the Orange One´s handlers are telling us the squaring of the circle is possible –
    her mention of Bretton Woods is very à propos: It is not just
    manufacturing and infrastructure that are rotten – they have allowed public education
    to go down the drain since Brown v. Education; who needs smart kids?
    Brain can always be imported (-> Paperclip) – all that raving and ranting about
    Chinese spy kids is theater (contrary to Hudson Australia is dependent
    on Chinese tuition but for the US it is not a major factor – like all zombies it´s
    the brain they cannot do without).
    Bref: The MIC and the dollar are propping each other up, backed by
    literally nothing any longer, and they are the direct, proximate and inevitable
    cause of all the malaises enumerated – but when they are gone,
    the cities will burn.

    • Replies: @Notsofast
  26. So lets understand exactly what is happening? All America’s so-called allies are in shock so lets put them straight.

    America was the driving force behind globalisation, as long as the natives were drinking rum and Coca Cola and working for the Yankee dollar all was fine in the world…but the native became entrepreneurs themselves and started to outcompete the Americans, the natives started beating the Americans at their own game, the natives threw away the shot glasses and opium pipes and started winning.

    They made a great mistake… they’re not allowed to win!

    So Trump is getting his team back on the bus and taking his bat and ball with him, he isn’t going to play globalisation anymore.

  27. China’s reciprocal tariffs on US ag products are going to destroy what’s left of US small(and mid-sized?) farmers and then Blackrock and Howie Lutnick will buy up tens of millions of acres of foreclosed Midwest farmground with freshly printed jewbucks.

    • Replies: @Cloudwalker
  28. dimples says:

    I seems that tariffs for the purpose of re-industrializing Fatmerica is inevitably only going to cause inflation. That’s because grunt jobs moved to Fatmerica are going to be high paying jobs at Fatmerican rates, not at cheapskate Vietnamese rates. Otherwise if hi-tech jobs, AI and robotics are to do the grunt work at the same low prices then there is no need for the tariffs in the first place, so high tariffs will simply encourage the use of grunt labor instead.

    So if Fatmericans don’t mind paying 100% higher prices for crap ‘Made In America’ goods like they did up until the 1990s, then Schlumpstein may be on a winner. A not inconsiderable side benefit is that trans-men mutants will be afraid to emigrate to Fatmerica. Looks like the Empire is going into a crazy spin, or is it crazy like a fox? Break out the peanuts there’s a new TV show in town.

    • Troll: Gvaltar
  29. John Dael says:
    @AmericaOnly

    Chaos is coming to America because whatsoever a man sows that he shall reap.

    http://biblicisminstitute.wordpress.com/2014/07/17/is-america-cursed/

    • Agree: Christoph88
  30. GMC says:

    One look at how the Panama Canal take back was done, and it’s easy to see what Trump’s doing in regards to the US economy and the take down of America.

    The Panama Canal – Ya, it’s ours , We built it , It’s American made and We want it back for America.

    Blackrock was the first International Company to walk in and put the bid in to buy at least 2 ports in Panama and a couple dozen more from the Asian conglomerate and the Li Family. So, did America get the Panama Canal back – NO – the huge Multi National Corporations got it back and I’m sure Trump got a big payday on that one by threatening Panama nd China with the US Military – Hello Smedley Butler ! This same Mafia tactic will be used on Americans and the BlackRock’s will end up running or owning everything from your kitchen sink to your Pension plan. Nationalise every natural resource and make the huge Corporations pay 30% into the Domestic Fund and get America back on track or watch it Die.

    • LOL: Gvaltar
  31. Rambling, incoherent, contradictory gibberish, with Socialism and woke progressivism thrown in. We have learned absolutely nothing about Trump’s tariffs or his tactics.

    • Agree: SteveK9
  32. Personally, I agree with the general thrust of Trump’s tariffs. Debts have to be paid off somehow, and they may as well fall on those with the most money to buy foreign imports. In my country, New Zealand, we are trying to pay down our self-inflicted Covid lockdown debt by taxing the crap out of the working class. This means high GST on everything, high fuel taxes on those satantic fossil fuels, and the most regressive income taxes in the UK Commonwealth. The result is a nasty recession and useful manual workers fleeing to Australia.

    Similarly, free trade has always been more fashionable rhetoric than reality, since some countries may have lowered tariffs, but in most cases they still have big production subsidies and non-trade barriers. Only a few small developed countries are actually sincere about free trade.

    The part I question with the Trump tariffs is the tariffs on countries that don’t have a trade surplus with the US. For example, Indonesia and Brazil don’t have big trade surpluses and are pissed off with Chinese overproduction as well (who isn’t). Why not give them a break and try to form a united front against the hyper mercantile Chinese.

    • Replies: @Gerry Bell
  33. anon[128] • Disclaimer says:
    @xyzxy

    Nein. The Chinese like white skin because suntans imply low level agrarian status

    • Agree: Christoph88
  34. IronForge says:

    Too soon, PhDs. You’re better off taking apart the actual Schemes and the Formulary that cans up with those numbers; and challenging the Cabinet.

    We won’t get all mfg jobs overnight; but just as some plants shipped their machinery from Murica to Mexico, China, or Vietnam – certain plants can be refurbished and brought online Stateside.

    I’ve been on the Industrial Production/Engineering Mgmt with the MIC; and I find this Plan appealing – though I am concerned that Trump may overplay his hand…

    This is for the pleasure+usage for Murican Consumer, Corporations, and Public Administrations;

    Energy is cheaper and in relative to the €URoGarten;

    Murica didn’t have enough jobs to sustain their population in the first place;

    If the handling of Personal Financial Data are brought back here – it may be better protected compared to an offshore location that don’t have protective laws.

    I’d like to see how his team came up with other Countries’ Tariff Rates. One question would be if/where/how the PPP differentials were applied.

  35. What a load of crock. Well, a socialist, you know, people who have brought to ruin every country they’ve run, and a Jew, you know, people who have brought to ruin every country they’ve run. That said I read only the first third of the article. A time of my life I will never get back.

    • Agree: BrooLidd
  36. Chaskinns says:

    Just USian yammer about more of nothing.

    Onward and downward

  37. eah says:

    >Economic Ruin

    Idiotische Panikmache.

    This whole discussion is more evidence that the parasite ‘pundit’ class in the US is way too large and has way too much influence.

    Here is a map showing states with the highest overdose death rates (‘deaths of despair’): Opioid overdose death rates per 100k population

    Here is a map of the area of the country commonly called the Rust Belt: Rust Belt

    Note the significant overlap — this is one result of the policy known as ‘free trade’, which these eggheads are apparently defending.

    Whatever might be the result of these tariffs, at least Trump is promoting recognition and awareness of the consequences of America’s trade policies over the last half century or more.

    • Agree: Thomasina
    • Replies: @eah
  38. @question

    For anyone running business would know,

    High cost/Low return environment are meant to fail against Low cost/High return (China)

  39. Really a waste of time. Wolff is smug anti white a hypocrite who kissed big pharma’s rosy rear and trump’s for that matter during Covid throwing the working class under the bus and encouraging them to stick the mRNA needle in their veins and accept working class and small business destruction via lockdowns and mandates.

    Hudson tosses a few nuggets of decent analysis but he’s jargonistically verbose.

    And note the contradiction: both accurately say ‘well, we don’t how these tariff policies will be tweaked down the line….’ and at the same time analyze everything as if they won’t be tweaked, and more than tweaked, who knows?

    Will lobbyists from Apple beg for and get an exemption for their imports? Possibly. Why not?

    Will X capitalist from X country get a deal if they agree to invest X dollars in the USA rather than X or Y or Z country? Why not?

    Will Trump go full on national socialist and promote a Rooseveltian Trump flavored Born Again New Deal of job training and infrastructure investment? Who knows?

    The point being, it’s impossible and a waste of time to try and analyze this tariff bullshit at this point. The stock market went down. So what? Pump and Dump? The dollar went down, so what? Pump and Dump? As with most political and economic analysis these days, it’s all prophecy for gluttons who love the prophetic sugar. Here’s reality: prophecy is bunk. Quit eating it, it’s bad for you.

    • Disagree: radicalcenter
  40. PapaP says:

    I knew Wolfe and Hudson were Communists, but open Trotskyists⁈
    Such concern for the Workers of the World economic wellbeing (at a domestic worker’s expense no-less).
    So I guess Neoliberalism also had infected Communism™ as well.

    Anywho, if anyone isn’t seeing the writing on the wall: a lot of white collar service jobs will be obsolete in the next few decades as AI gets pushed out regardless of sloppiness (profits > performance). The US is at the forefront and seeing it before everyone else (25%+ of the tech industry getting permanently laid off over the past few years was a quiet headline that few noticed without much bearish fanfare (obviously)).

    Re-industrialization needs to happen or else it’ll be economic anarchy as economists don’t have a solution to the consumption problem of what happens when people increasingly can’t participate in economic activity as the ability for labor to compete with capital bottoms out. Will it happen? It has to. They’ll make it a Potemkin Economy buttressed by UBI subsidies from the tariff slush fund if they have to. But it has to because we [humans] are becoming economically obsolete overtime and the data backs this up. We can’t make the labor force for 100% Uber Eats drivers!

    Going back to our communist friends Profs. Wolfe & Hudson, instead of focusing their ethical focus on the reality of labor losing all value, they should focus on how to remove all value from capital-holding/rent-seeking as well to balance out the equation. That would be a useful pursuit of their collective time and intellect.

    Otherwise everyone’s pissed but who cares, if it works, it works. The US was never morally obligated to be the Eucharist for the world the feast off. Perhaps this new Autarkic model will foster a more sustainable world than this over/interconnected mess.

    • Thanks: BrooLidd
    • Replies: @Thomasina
  41. I feel that after the first term he realised how treacherous and corrupted everyone is, this time he said fuck it I’ll do whatever the fuck I want. Hes also 81. I

  42. @Mr-Chow-Mein

    Detroit is 91% black now. During its heyday it was 91% white. There will be no re-industrialization of Detroit. No way, no how.

    • Agree: BrooLidd
  43. Trump just f@ up transfer-pricing inside MNCs.
    Going to have serious Balance Sheet impact as we used to know FASB 52

    I wonder how GM will handle that Chevrolet brand from Korea coming into EU ?

    It looks like Digital Services Tax will go into force against Anti-Virus and Viruses like Microgrift big time and US streaming services.

    Be hard for US to export those Mercedes and BMW models from S Carolina to EU

    Next thing will be cancellation of F-35 orders unless planes are built in Europe

  44. Joe Webb says:

    Endless wandering around. No major points with conclusions provided. No paragraphs that help organize the mind…both writer and reader.

    Personally, as an ex-leftie and very familiar with left wing themes and obsessions, I have tried to read these leftie economists. They are hard for me to read. Mostly I don’t bother anymore.

    I am not brilliant but I am smart (MA Berkeley Poli Sci Dept. 1965).
    What these lefties need is an editor with a hatchet.

    Also the leftie writers here believe in Racial Equality, the spectacular failure to understand Race and Intelligence. The fundamentals of Race and Intelligence starts with the Global North and its cold selecting for smart people and the global South not selecting for intelligence because it is too easy to stay alive in warm areas, especially Africa.

    The poverty of the Left and its concomitant wishing for Peace and Love…. womanishness, day dreaming.

    Where is the editor??? What is the Conclusion? 300 words tops.

    Joe

    • Agree: Crush Limbraw
    • Replies: @Salus Populi
    , @nokangaroos
  45. PapaP says:
    @blackelkspeaks

    Detroit has the ekistics of a donut: it’s hollow in the center with all the richness around it where the Fair-folk flew off to (aka Metro Detroit).
    All the real manufacturing capacity exists in this ring around the grim black-hole-of-a-meme that is Detroit.

  46. @xyzxy

    Except for the women, who liked their skin to look as white as possible, cosmetically. Probably an unwitting throwback to the Chinese opera? LO

    In the West, suntan = “I can afford to have a tropical holiday”.

    In China, fair skin on women = “I can afford not to toil in the sun like a peasant”.

    In India, fat married women = “I can afford to feed my wife well”.

    • Replies: @Passing by
  47. 迪路 says:
    @xyzxy

    It’s a matter of sun protection.
    For example, my face was as white as milk when I was about 14.
    But after a hot sun baking my face will easily turn yellow.
    This shift is hard to reverse unless you bring an umbrella and sunscreen with you every time you travel.
    For example, there are clear layers of yellow and white between clothed and unclothed skin.

    • Replies: @xyzxy
  48. @littlereddot

    I’ve spent my quota of “agree/disagree/etc” reactions but LOL, so true.

  49. Thomasina says:
    @PapaP

    “Such concern for the Workers of the World economic wellbeing.”

    I always remember this Scottish hedge fund manager (Hugh Hendry?) trying to sell to a British reporter that the West has an obligation to develop the rest of the world, that offshoring of jobs was a good thing because then the Far East can rise up. There was a long pause from the reporter, as I could tell he wasn’t buying it, and then he said something like, “Doesn’t your concern have more to do with windfall profits for the big corporations than it does with lifting up poor countries? And what about the jobs of the domestic workers?” The hedge fund manager looked embarrassed and, to his credit, actually agreed with the reporter. He knew.

    All these people coming out of the woodwork now could give a crap about workers of the world. They’re being paid by someone (China?), or they’ve been profiting somehow and they don’t want to give that up.

    But the saddest thing of all is they couldn’t care less about the poor domestic workers, their own neighbors, the people in their communities. I guess they’re all just supposed to flip burgers and sleep under an overpass.

    Trump is going to make a lot of mistakes, but at least he’s on the right track.

    • Agree: Verymuchalive
  50. eah says:
    @eah

    >the consequences of America’s trade policies

    X — Senator Eric Schmitt to Larry Kudlow: ‘America isn’t a strip mall with an airport attached to it. America is a place. It’s our home. It’s our people. People deserve to live meaningful lives with meaningful work. They don’t deserve to have all those jobs shipped overseas.’

    Kudlow is another member of the parasite pundit class.

    Unfortunately, what I imagine Schmitt means by ‘our people, i.e. the US population, has changed dramatically since ‘free trade’ policies were enacted decades ago — and regarding Schmitt’s comments, while I agree with someone who said ’10 years ago, remarks like that would’ve been unheard of’, the truth is that Schmitt still won’t mention another obvious aspect of this: the reason ‘free trade’ was allowed to do so much damage was that the victims were primarily working class Whites in what’s derisively called ‘flyover country’ — they were the ones who suffered the consequences — who they are was the reason the job loss etc was largely ignored by the ruling class — and today they have to listen to talk about ‘white privilege.’

    • Replies: @M Phillips
    , @anonymous
    , @eah
  51. @Mr-Chow-Mein

    Trump shows no sign of winding down the military. He seems willing to enter new conflicts.

    I even wonder if this economic fracas is a diversion from a looming war against Iran. We will all be watching Wall St, when the B52s take off. This is far fetched… but still …

  52. @xyzxy

    Yeah, I usually like hearing what Hudson has to say. He has some Trotskyist presuppositions that are stupid, but they don’t color his viewpoints too excessively and are easy enough to ignore if you know what they are. He ends up being more right than wrong. These co-interviews he does with Wolff are just annoying, though, especially the constant interjections from Wolff to drop some boring 2010s-era libtard boilerplate. The interviewer will ask Hudson some economic question, then Wolff is like, “before you answer that, Michael, let me cut in here to go off topic talking about trannies and the threat of white supremacy.”

    It was better when Hudson was doing these things with that Indian (or whatever she was) woman.

    • Agree: xyzxy, Crush Limbraw
    • Replies: @Spider Monkey
  53. 1951 says:

    ” Basically, what Trump did yesterday is these disruptions that he’s threatening are so large that he’s going to destabilize other countries unless they give in to what turns out to be a shakedown.”

    This is an excellent, excellent article. Thank-you!

  54. xyzxy says:
    @迪路

    You are right of course, although personally I like the Chinese opera explanation, (I was attempting a bit of humor, yet really there is nothing as coordinated, expressive, and beautifully symmetrical in Western theater.)

    I admit to being a naive cultural bumpkin back then. Surprised to encounter women using an umbrella in the sunshine, with no rain in the forecast. And while probably not in China, where such a thing would be discouraged, in Japan women assassins can hide their sword inside an umbrella handle, like Lady Snowblood.

    • Replies: @迪路
  55. Trump only wants to punish China, a creation of Wall Street, not the rest of the world. And now that Xi has barked back with retaliatory tariffs, the war is on so let best man win.

  56. @meamjojo

    If there IS any “re-indutrialization” here, it will be primarily robot operated, dark factories that will create relatively few, if any, additional blue-collar jobs.

    The Chinese are doing this so why not the US? Anyway I believe in reciprocity and treating others the way they treat you. If others have tariffs and import duties on your products then slap them with the same. All those countries had a long time to cut their own tariffs and import duties but they didn’t do f..k them. Trump did the right thing.

  57. Notsofast says:
    @nokangaroos

    destroy the dollar and destroy the debt in which it is denominated. this is what bitcoin is really about. this way the big boys can protect their liquid assets by jumping into bitcoin, as the dollar crashes and burns, they will drive the price of cryptocurrencies up to astronomical levels, doge coin to the moon.

    the dollar, as you say is backed by nothing other than i.o.u.’s in the form of t-bills. bitcoin is completely free to reach what ever ridiculous levels they can push it to. they can still easily convert it to any fiat currency they need to transact trade, this is the checkmate for the middle class, that will keep the great unwashed masses, from moving into their gated communities. homeownership will be out of reach for millions of wage slaves that will also be rentier slaves permanently. they will own nothing and just have to like it.

  58. @twerp

    Howie Lutnick is literally never more than an arm’s length away from the Orange Puppet making sure that Donny Boy sticks to the script and yet we’re supposed to believe that the Tribe isn’t stil totally calling the shots. The Trump cultists are so incredibly naive.

  59. @Joe Webb

    Also the leftie writers here believe in Racial Equality, the spectacular failure to understand Race and Intelligence. The fundamentals of Race and Intelligence starts with the Global North and its cold selecting for smart people and the global South not selecting for intelligence because it is too easy to stay alive in warm areas, especially Africa.

    Yes, Wolff bangs on about the efficiency of mass public transport, and the need to bring it into the USA, along with all vehicles being publicly owned, which could be rented and returned by users as required…. with absolutely zero recognition of the racial and ethnic realities that would make such high-trust schemes completely unworkable in the USA.

    Meanwhile, Hudson makes excellent points about rentier economies, and the need to definancialise etc etc, but when he comes to naming the source of this malaise, he blames… the Catholic Church. Now I’m no Catholic, and have no religious axe to grind, but blaming the Catholics for usury and oligarchic high finance stinks to high heaven (as well as being historically inaccurate), though this strategic pivot obviously makes him kosher certified (as well as YouTube friendly).

    The Bank of England is famous for its Catholic directors. As is known, the list of shareholders of the Bank of England is classified information, but one can bet that the famous Catholic dynasty, the Rothschilds, often seen frantically praying to Mary over their rosary beads as they ponder the fate of their punt on the Ukraine, are heavily invested.

    I say all this solely to say that while my mind is open to the wisdom of the tariff question, I would not trust this duo as far as I could throw them. Certainly, the fact that the policy is making the right people kvetch (including, hilariously, Ben Shapiro) is inclining me to think that there must be method in Trump’s madness.

  60. @Christoph88

    Would suggest SWest and MidWest start negotiating with China on a possible Reunification,

    Sounds crazy but it’d benefit millions in a win-win situation, and the only losers guess who?

    int. jewry and their lackey

    Dire time requires creative method – SunZu

  61. @Joe Webb

    It´s a freaking transcript fer Chrissake – and I for one find Nima´s
    format outstanding;
    of course both are essentially Marxists so their analysis centers on falling
    profit rates, Hudson as usual plagiarizes Mein Kampf a little 😁
    The lip service seems to be de rigueur nowadays, an AI-powered “ignore”
    function is only a question of time.

    • Replies: @Joe Webb
  62. fgjdjr says:

    Trump’s tariff positions or bargaining chips can do a lot for the economy. However, he can save the dollar and federal debt position, if he tanks the real estate sector and taxes the elite at higher rates. Offer high prices for goods, no doubt, but the economy can then also supply cheaper housing and reduced med costs. If illegals are gone housing and rents will decline in price. America has no housing shortage,just illegals willing to live ten to an apartment.

  63. ITs amazing how many LEFTOID Marxist are here ‘Cheering a Communist’ like Richard Wolff; A con artist — no Different than Demagogues like Al Sharpton.

    Wolfs is the modern day pointer dog, like ‘John-the-Baptist’ urging you to look at the Fire, not caring what Meal is cooking and who its for. He’s the character “Dathan” from the 10 commandments… the Rabble rouser who’s only mission is ATTENTION and Power. THIS IDIOT wants to be your leader but is a Sheep in Wolfs clothing.

    How many here are smart enough to see through his ploys ?

  64. Anonymous[147] • Disclaimer says:

    The Communists are agitated. So Trump might even be right for once.

  65. @Alt Right Moderate

    I notice NZ is surprisingly exempt from Trump’s trade war…

  66. @Notsofast

    Something is definitely afoot, and it is digital; what I doubt is
    whether they can pull it off without another world war;
    were I a little younger I might consider VVP´s offer 😁

    • Agree: Notsofast
    • Replies: @Notsofast
  67. Since when has Amerika ever abided by the rules of so-called free trade anyway? Their agricultural sector has been propped up forever by covert state subsidies and ‘aid’: which is to say tariffs by the backdoor. Not that the rest of the world hasn’t noticed and applied the same hypocrisy to the running joke that is unimpeded supply and demand. It comes as no surprise that they eventually decide to drop the pretence and to simply announce an all-out trade war. They think they can divide and rule in this? I wouldn’t bet on it. Brazil, China and India (the core of BRICS) will have other ideas.

  68. Some unanswered questions:

    And if we’re not able to make a profit, what are we going to do?

    So the question is, why aren’t U.S. corporate leaders speaking up more verbally than they have?

    Are there any reputable economists anywhere who have praised Trump’s tariff rate proposals? The criticism and condemnation has been universal. Spontaneous disruptions to industrial production logistics throughout the various supply chains take a long time toi re-adjust to new circumstances. If Trump is not making a foolish gamble one could get the impression that his intent was to crash the markets in order to create a stock buying opportunity for his privileged investor buddies.

    A plausible and detailed argument for why imposing such high tariffs on other countries would benefit most Americans has not been made. Surely there must be numerous prominent international academic economists from different camps who amongst each other may quibble about various topics but would unanimously agree that Trump’s chosen approach is flawed and could constructively present alternative suggestions in a public Op-Ed that might serve as a basis for public discussion or debate.

    • Replies: @Nadim
  69. Mefobills says:

    Wolf is one of those Jews who blame shift on whitey. It is pretty disgusting stuff, and typical.

    You know, it reminds me of the kind of conversation you get with a white supremacist who explains and whines that white people are at the wrong end of discrimination in this country. The attempt to snatch from the black and brown people who’ve actually suffered centuries of repression from white people, to try to erase all of that by telling some story that makes it all reversed. It is preposterous, it is outrageous, and it is a manipulation by demagogues who use the difficulties white people have. And those are genuine economic difficulties for whites have been serious. But to blame victimization at the hands of black and brown people is a spectacular effort to shift to the right what is a problem with American capitalism and has been from the beginning.

    Yes, white people are at the wrong end of discrimination. They are going extinct in the countries they founded. So much for supremacism.

    The attempt to snatch from the black and brown people who’ve actually suffered centuries of repression from white people, to try to erase all of that by telling some story that makes it all reversed. It is preposterous, it is outrageous,

    So, now the Jew gets to speak for white people, when Jews invented corporatocracy and finance capitalism. What Hudson calls the dollar creditocracy, was creditocracy invented by Amsterdam’s Jews. It was these Jews who codified “banks of issue” at debt and at hypothecation. It was these Jews who pushed by intrigue and war, a parasitic system inimical to the welfare of white, but good for the parasite. Clown world is Jewish. A smaller fraction of whites went along with their new system, typical deformed creatures in any population, but it was Jews at the head.
    https://www.michael-hudson.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Hudson_Valdai116.pdf

    I hate rubbing Hudson’s nose in his own poo, but here it is:

    https://michael-hudson.com/2011/12/democracy-and-debt/

    Matters changed with the Dutch democracy, seeking to win and secure its liberty from Habsburg Spain. The fact that their parliament was to contract permanent public debts on behalf of the state enabled the Low Countries to raise loans to employ mercenaries in an epoch when money and credit were the sinews of war. Access to credit “was accordingly their most powerful weapon in the struggle for their freedom,” notes Ehrenberg: “Anyone who gave credit to a prince knew that the repayment of the debt depended only on his debtor’s capacity and will to pay. The case was very different for the cities, which had power as overlords, but were also corporations, associations of individuals held in common bond. According to the generally accepted law each individual burgher was liable for the debts of the city both with his person and his property.”[2]

    The financial achievement of parliamentary government was thus to establish debts that were not merely the personal obligations of princes, but were truly public and binding regardless of who occupied the throne. This is why the first two democratic nations, the Netherlands and Britain after its 1688 revolution, developed the most active capital markets and proceeded to become leading military powers. What is ironic is that it was the need for war financing that promoted democracy, forming a symbiotic trinity between war making, credit and parliamentary democracy in an epoch when money was still the sinews of war.

    At this time “the legal position of the King qua borrower was obscure, and it was still doubtful whether his creditors had any remedy against him in case of default.”[3] The more despotic Spain, Austria and France became, the greater the difficulty they found in financing their military adventures. By the end of the eighteenth century Austria was left “without credit, and consequently without much debt” the least credit-worthy and worst armed country in Europe (as Steuart 1767:373 noted), fully dependent on British subsidies and loan guarantees by the time of the Napoleonic Wars.

    Finance accommodates itself to democracy, but then pushes for oligarchy

    Also, who do you think was behind the creation of corporate cities? One guess? It was the Jews who were expelled from Spain, who brought with them their “tons” of gold captured across the centuries at usury on the trade routes. (Silver fetches 3X the gold in India).

    The Jews are the inventors of creditocracy (corporations of banks that spread new debts at interest). Hudson even knows that debts mount and must be erased by authority. Jews are against any authority other than theirs, and they won’t work for the general welfare, they work for their in-group.

    But to blame victimization at the hands of black and brown people is a spectacular effort to shift to the right what is a problem with American capitalism and has been from the beginning

    Pot calling the kettle black much?

    American capitalism from the very beginning was industrial capitalism. The general welfare clause in the constitution is an echo of the industrial capitalist colonial system. The physiocrats DID NOT INVENT industrial capitalism, it was the Colonials. The Colonials also invented the first sector approach to economy, basically the “roads” or tubes that the physiocrats claimed as channels are sectors.

    The U.S was continually hoaxed, and the proximate blame goes to the finance capitalists in London, who at the time of the revolution had already become a corporatocracy. (Bank of England in 1694) This city of London was already converted into the cousinhood, a corporatocracy identical in structure to the Jewish corporate cities near Antwerp and Amsterdam.

    I like to ask this question of normies. Did the colonials channel their sovereign money toward the Atlantic slave trade? When John Winthrop was creating Pine Tree Shillings (PTS), did he say to the citizens, I would like some of my new pine tree shillings to go get me some negroes in Africa?

    Nope. That would be Jews and their sociopathic cousinhood, who hypothecated new credit at debt, in their new finance corporatocracies of London and Amsterdam. These new debts were speculative finance capital, created in back rooms, in the dark, with the intent to take sordid gain.

    At the very beginning America was INDUSTRIAL capitalist. It was converted over time to finance capitalism. And yes, the usual hook nosed rogue characters are always present in the murder of America and then blame shifting onto whitey. Sovereign money is created by law, and in the “sunshine” where it can be examined, and then channeled for the general welfare. Jews don’t want that, the want to blame shift, and keep their pea and shell game going for their own in-group benefit.

    • Agree: nokangaroos
    • Thanks: Salus Populi
  70. Yes-no-maybe……dealing only with tariffs – without addressing Immigration/Repatriations-Real EstateBubble-Medical Mafia-War Games Monopoly-etcetc – will be irrelevant. Trump needs to address DaWholeEnchilada….or go home – game’s over!

    Yesterday I posted:
    Will Trump REALLY DO IT? Fulfill His Promises? Why Do I Ask?

    A couple of days ago I read Karl Denninger’s “Trump Has Done — And Will Do — It All”

    https://crushlimbraw.blogspot.com/2025/04/will-trump-really-do-it-fulfill-his.html?m=0

    After I read it all, including the comments…..and was reminded it was April Fools Day! Ouch!

    Yet today – “He Wasn’t Kidding” – by KD

    But consider what might be in store – when you read KD’s April 1 article, here’s what’s next: Immigration, Medical Mafia, Energy, Housing… just for starters. You really should read it all – WHY?

    Consider – in order for MAGA to become REALITY – America and President Trump have to get serious – NOW! There will be no second chance – this is it. It is truly ironic – what Denninger laid out – and he has been doing it for weeks or months now – is what is necessary to restore our country as a whole. Piecemeal is DEAD!

    And it all might have come together as an April Fool Joke!

  71. TKK says:

    Among the poorest people who have ripped themselves out of Central America where they were poor to begin with, grabbing the stuff on the back that they can carry with their children and their elderly, coming to the United States and making a big, proud effort of expelling them. A country that claimed it owed its greatness to being a melting pot for immigrants is now not melting in the old sense. It’s melting by literally killing these people in terms of what it’s doing to them.

    (Emphasis mine)

    Literally killing them.

    Only Americans are expected to take on the untenable economic and emotional cost of being responsible for everyone in the world. Wolff’s stance is histrionic, false and frankly – sociopathic.

    It’s gaslighting on a global scale. Americans, according to Wolff, cannot be solely concerned with their own welfare and the success of their own country. They must sacrifice and suffer for every single stranger who wishes to get a food stamp card and free health care.

    Americans must give up their own security and peace because…..because…..other people are poor?

    This is at the heart of what Trump is digging at- that somehow, Americans are villains for wanting financial prosperity ….but other peoples are noble and true for wanting to “get more stuff” off our labors.

    It’s madness. It’s antithetical to human nature. Would Wolff make the same sacrifices he is asking American worker bees to make? Would he drain his saving for me because I want a brand new F250?

    If that sounds insane , go back and read his musings. That is exactly what he is asking us to do.

    • Thanks: BrooLidd
  72. Gkruz says:
    @Mr-Chow-Mein

    Figures the Jew would lead off with an anti-White rant instead of staying on topic….scumbag Marxist…

  73. Trinity says:
    @blackelkspeaks

    I had to do a search on that one because I couldn’t believe even Detroit was that black. Detroit is 77.7% Black if you trust the figures while Whites are only 10.3%. Gawd, I feel for those Whites to have to live in the city of Detroit. Detroit was one of a handful of cities that put America on the map like NYC, Baltimore-Washington, Philly, St. Louis, New Orleans, Boston. Whites make up the majority in NYC at 31.3% ( are Arabs considered “white”, we know they lump kikes as white) in a majority minority city, Hispanics of any race 28.4%, over 10% are mixed race, Blacks are 20.2%, Asians 15.6% (does that include dot heads), those of White European decent are probably more like 25%. Even one of the Whitest major cities, at least on the East Coast, Boston is only 47.8%. EVERY one of these historic major cities ( at least at one time they were major cities) did so much in building America, all the history there and now every single one of them, even Boston is less than 50% White. Detroit, Baltimore/Washington, New Orleans, Philly, St. Louis and Detroit are OVERWHELMINGLY Black.

  74. Servenet says:

    Just a few minutes listening to this Wolf lunatic and he’ll turn you off with his evident slavering weirdness.

  75. Servenet says:

    Personal attacks and gratuitous insults are not acceptable and this author will ban such commenters.

    Can you believe this mentally ill kind of crying?

  76. Before the ‘great sucking sound occurred’, most White Americans supported Newt Gingrich’s self-serving NAFTA pushing ass, all while spewing know-it-all bullshit pablum out both sides of their mouths, and guffawing at Ross Perot’s appearance and accent as he tried to warn everyone exactly what would happen, then Slick Willy’s perverted ass got in and sealed the fate of the American workforce.

    God bless the White High IQ. Maybe it will come in handy when hunting for diseased rats or fighting starving coloreds over boxes of fucking Friskies and expired cans of 9 lives.

    Anyone who has paid any attention to all the ‘food recalls’ over this past year, up until this present day and time, would understand that those recalls are planned, intentional, food diversions into deep underground military bunkers. The ones who knowingly piped piper’ed the 99%’ers into the coming hell have no plans to join in on the upcoming ‘alley cat chowder jamborees’ of the masses, but will instead eat well and laugh at the idiot public who allowed them to jitterbug all of us over a cliff.

    • Replies: @Trinity
  77. Nadim [AKA "anani"] says:
    @Been_there_done_that

    If Trump is not making a foolish gamble one could get the impression that his intent was to crash the markets in order to create a stock buying opportunity for his privileged investor buddies.

    Thank You. Trump is a Jewish BOY who is exactly doing that to make the criminal tribe rich enough to have the upper hand. The Mafia tribe became the richest family in Europe during the Battle of Waterloowhere the mafia tribe spread LIES that Britain has lost to buy the best stocks.
    This site censors whoever exposes Trump as one with NO BRAIN under influence of his superiors to do exactly what he is doing to benefit the mafia tribe. It is shameful.

    • LOL: JM
  78. Mefobills says:

    More from the odious Jew:

    We’re all supposed to believe now that 200 years of economic theory, 50 years of experience in free trade, which the United States benefited from, and the solution is to throw it all out the window and go with that stable genius of economic policy, Donald Trump. Donald Trump, you must be kidding.

    Free trade theory is a hoax. Finance capital wants to debt spread its finance instruments, and it also wants fungible labor. That means “international debts” and “international man.”

    Do I need to repeat how finance capital is the “sinews of war” from above?

    Debts are national, they are created by law, and laws are proximate to a nation, not to some sort of nebulous clown world internationalism. Money is law, not international private corporate banks issuing their credit, and hosting nations; especially turning white nations into their golem.

    The first thing George Washington did, was inject sovereign credit from the first state bank, into channels – meaning canals, and other things good for the general welfare. This is the lesson of the Colonials, including Pennsylvania colony, where they also built roads, bridges, and the commons to improve labor’s productivity.

    Unfortunately, Hamilton allowed the camels nose into the tent, when he allowed rogue characters to own stock. Yes, some of the rogue characters had hook noses and were from the usual suspect places. Hamilton, had provided a sinking fund to return first bank to treasury. Basically, the stock of the bank not already owned by Treasury would be bought out by the sinking fund, and the bank would be “un-privatized.” I don’t have proof, but this is the deal that won Hamilton’s argument over Jefferson’s argument. Washington assented to Hamilton’s view. So, Hamilton was not a Jew, but was simply naïve, and his mistake of allowing privateers owning stock, helped open the door for America’s conversion to finance capital, and to ultimately become the nexus for clown world/jew world.

    Free trade theory emanated from an island country (England), and by this time in history, the square mile had already overturned the king system.

    This island country bartered, trucked, and shipped goods about their “maritime roadway” taking the increment of production for themselves, and also taking rents as highwaymen.

    This bartering, trucking, and shipping is IDENTICAL to the international Jew highwaymen, the Aiparu/Haibaru/Hebrew, who controlled the overland routes in previous centuries. The merchant Jew has always been for free trade, because that is their system. The Aiparu/Haibaru were ensconced in entrepot cities ringing the Mediterranean, and the first maritime nation the parasite attached themselves to was Greece.

    Free trade is NOT OF AMERICAS FOUNDING. American industrial capitalist of the American System of Economy, wanted “American Credit” from a state bank, issued by law, into the commons and American industry.

    Trump doesn’t know these things, but since when does a president in democracy hoax system know things?

    The Jew loves his democracy:

    Finance accommodates itself to democracy, but then pushes for oligarchy

    • Thanks: JM, Lurker
    • Replies: @ThreeCranes
  79. Agent76 says:

    Apr 2, 2025 President Trump Unveils World-Shaking Reciprocal Tariffs At ‘Liberation Day’ Event

    President Trump holds an event at the White House to unveil his “Liberation Day” tariffs.


    Video Link

  80. 迪路 says:
    @xyzxy

    Actually, I’ve done something similar.
    Take an umbrella in the sun.
    Some days the sun is just too powerful.
    I don’t think we actually mind having umbrellas in the sun.
    We should be okay with women holding umbrellas.
    At most, people will think somebody are not manly.

    As for Chinese drama or Chinese opera…
    I don’t think I’m qualified to comment on that. The main problem is that I don’t understand these things, and Chinese opera itself has a very high threshold of appreciation, and also has local characteristics.
    For example, you have to be proficient in classical Chinese, and you have to be local.
    Classical Chinese is a hell simply in terms of its progressive challenges.
    If the content of a vernacular article can fill one A4 sheet of paper, the English version may require two A4 sheets of paper, and the content of the classical Chinese version will condense the content of the vernacular into a quarter of the A4 sheet.
    I think, in this case, it is better to watch Chinese TV series… After all, there are many actors in Chinese TV series who are originally from Chinese drama.
    If you want to watch good Chinese TV series, I can recommend some…

  81. @BrooLidd

    Watch the video “The Great Taking” by David Rogers Web (easy to find).
    Notice that Rogers claims that the current military of the “WEST” is only possible by printing money.
    (I would add that the social welfare system including social security is also only possible by printing money (pretending to borrow from grandchildren).

    Stop the printing (falsely labeled borrowing) and the entire temple will collapse including the 700 military bases in foreign nations.

    A few years back Jim Stone posted a list of new autos for sale in Mexico for around 10,000 dollars. His website was attacked.
    See
    Voterig.com

    Biden put a block on electric cars from China coming to America. Knowing that the Chinese EV’s will be manufactured in Mexico (so exempt) and retail for around 10,000 dollars in America.

    A new Chevy truck is 50,000 dollars and a scrape of the front bumper can easily hit 9,000 to repair with camera, airbag sensors, ect.. .

    So globalism provides relatively good vehicles in Mexico for the price of repairing a truck bumper in America.

    If the stock market goes down by X because of tariffs then were the companies correctly valued to begin with?

    We have 2 economies, main Street and Wall Street. One makes a profit by producing goods and services and employees the citizens.
    The other makes “capital gains” by speculation and manipulation (inevitable in a capitalist model).
    But the Wall Street economy (grift) has become too large by percentage of
    the overall system.

    Not sustainable and will eventually crash. Team Trump steps in and forced the inevitable but hopefully in a way that benefits main Street over “wall street”.
    (Obviously just my opinion.)

  82. Stogumber says:

    Basically, Hudson and Wolff want to keep up the American Empire as it was, well, as the lesser of two evils. As all socialists they are good at criticizing, but have no constructive ideas other than that “the state” (i.e. they themselves as governors) shall organize all financial transactions and the re-industrialization and, of course, a redistribution of money (as long as there is something to redistribute). And, as a European, I definitively hate the way they pamper European enemies of the U.S. – as if Europe were at least half as free and as democratic as the U.S.

  83. Mefobills says:

    Mining the odious Jew’s comments is depressing, but not unexpected. Jews are consistent gas-lighters, blowing smoke up our ass. I can say this; I really don’t like it when people piss on my head, and blow smoke up my ass.

    Well, the way to understand this is to understand that we have a very peculiar political economy in the United States. Think of it this way. We have the 3% of our population that are employers. That’s the top of our economic system. And that becomes the self-reproducing group of people. They make all the decisions whether or not to invest the money. They’re the ones who set the prices we pay, and they’re the ones who pay the wages or not that we depend on. So we are controlled by the 3% of the employer. That’s the way capitalism is set up.

    The peculiar political economy came into being in stages, and was not of the founding. There were three windows that opened up for parasite to jump through. The first window at the Constitutional Convention, where sovereign money did not make it into law. IT WAS LAW, in the articles of confederation. The second window was Hamilton’s mistake. The third window, was allowing “free-dumb of religion,” a bad idea, when a known parasite system was operating in the world.

    The first thing the Jews did upon expulsion from Spain, was agitate for freedom of religion in the lowlands (Holland). They got that, and then their hoaxing was amplified, ultimately leading to their corporate towns, which ejected the Dutch from being sovereign peoples. Jew creditors became the king. It took about 70 years of kvetching and using their usury blood money, but they got their way, and then the West was on its way to becoming Jew world we enjoy now.

    We have the 3% of our population that are employers. That’s the top of our economic system. And that becomes the self-reproducing group of people. They make all the decisions whether or not to invest the money.

    The communist Jew leaves out of account, how national socialist Germany solved this problem. Oh wait! Frederick List transmitted the colonial system to the Kaiser, and then Hitler and his economists resurrected it.

    Sovereign money in the form of Oeffa Bills and MefoBills, nearly identical to John Winthrop’s money in Mass Bay, resurrected Germany. Oeffa Bills channeled for the general welfare, and mefo bills channeled into the military. Why? Germany was being surrounded by golem western countries, string pulled from behind by international finance capital. Bolshevik Russia was funded by finance capital, especially Kuhn and Loeb.

    Germany’s 1933 dividend act, prevented corporations from taking more than 6% profit. Any profits above that had to be recycled into industrial improvement, or barring that, purchase of government bonds. Oh wait, I thought fascism = evil. Sounds pretty reasonable to me, to limit greed and bend corporations to the general welfare.

    Germany’s method was the only proper use of government bonds. If Wolf was an honest man (and Jews are almost always gaslighters), he would expound on how TBills were used by finance crowd to export America’s jobs.

    Hint: T bill price high, interest rate low. You make the Tbill/bond price high by having fake demand. The fake demand was recycled dollars. The second fake demand was quantitative easing. QE is an endogenous swap, held only within the private banking system, but it DOES signal to TBills price = high, due to fake demand.

    The finance crowd convinced compromised senators, that it was good for China to buy TBills. Buying Tbills instead of American goods was free trade! Never mind that Senators became dupes and clowns with the 1912 election, funded by the usual suspects. There are no senators who understand how money works, the last one being Kucinich, and he was redistricted out of a job.

    This criminal method of hoaxing via free trade redounded to finance capital’s gain, and is another form of usury. For example, China bought TBills with their deficit won dollars, rather than American goods, because Chinese are for Chinese labor. Finance Capital (Jew World) is not for American Labor, they are for their own selfish and in-group interests.

    China has not allowed international finance capital to penetrate their economy. They don’t want a red white and blue now Jewish dick screwing their people with rents and unearned income. China was happy to take American jobs exported by free trading Jew clown world apologists.

    Tariffs are good (read Hudson’s American Protectionist Takeoff). But, the tariffs must be accommodated by industrial policy.

    It is industrial planning and sovereign money that China uses, which is what the founding of America was all about. But, if you listen to Bolsheviks and Jews, you would not know that. China only has a communist party, but they can better be assigned the national socialist label, and they use industrial capitalism/mixed economy. China has state banks, what George Washington wanted.

  84. As FDR said, if anything happens in politics you can bet it was planned , Trump is a convert to Judaism according to reports in 2017 and he is carrying out the destructive policies and agenda of the zionists who are destroyers on nations and humanity and these messianic zionist demons want to destroy the world and they have just the man to do it, aka Trump.

    According to reports zionist Trump is a member of the radical Chabad Lubavitch cult and these messianic zionists want to destroy the world, as they believe this will bring their messiah aka satan to earth to rule over a world on messianic zionists, free of gentiles and muslims and Trump is carrying out their plan, it is baked in the cake, and part of this plan is the coming attack on Iran, which will bring in the nuclear war that the messianic zionist want.

    • Disagree: TKK
  85. @eah

    You just touched on an overlooked point.

    I saw an interview with a Mexican woman 2 years ago. She was in charge of immigration policy in Mexico.

    She was giving out too much truth for the TV interviewer about Mexico basically following dictates from the Biden administration on immigration.
    When asked about Fentanyl deaths she went scorched earth.
    Pointing out that the basic chemicals to make it are needed for many other products. Mexico cannot ban those chemicals.

    Then she dropped a bombshell.
    She said drug overdose deaths are America’s problem. Mexicans are not overdosing on fentanyl. Hardly any other
    nation have so many drug overdoses.
    You need to find out why so many American kids are taking drugs.

    • Replies: @eah
  86. Trinity says:
    @ServesyouallWhite

    Is that you AGAIN, (((Rachel.))) How is your make believe friend ((( cry baby White man))) doing, Shlomo?

    IGNORE this (((troll))) everyone. Real head case. Like Buffalo Bill from The Silence Of The Lambs. LMAO 😜

    • Troll: ServesyouallWhite
    • Replies: @ServesyouallWhite
  87. TyrsHand says:

    Another Progressive ‘economist’ speaking out against tariffs, strengthening my position in favor. This guy’s father was an actual Trotskyist, while his own credentials range from Far Left to Farther Left.
    Perhaps I have a mistaken idea of the intention of this website, but the anti-Trump and anti-America themes are beginning to chafe. Read Ha-Joon Chang’s “Kicking Away the Ladder” if you want some idea why tariffs are a good idea at the moment. Or, you can keep slurping Zionist swill right here at the trough.

    • Replies: @Mefobills
  88. Mike Tre says:

    All this recent hysteria over protectionist tariffs smacks of thinly veiled pro Chinese propaganda.

    • Replies: @mulga mumblebrain
  89. @RJ Macready(Antarctica)

    “this time he said fuck it I’ll do whatever the fuck I want. Hes also 81”

    And the judges will decree that our President cannot do anything – unless it harms or merely annoys white men of normal sexuality. Note well our sacred judges’ collective silence in response to Trump’s tariffs: why no four-year preemptive injunctions? Because the anointed believe the tariffs harm white men. I suspect they are correct.

  90. Boulder says:

    I think no one here understood!
    The rich 3% has betrayed USA!
    And now they continue with new tricks, the poorest will pay for.
    No wonder your country is going down the drain, with stupid commentators like this.
    Trump gives 1/2 trillion to let you be governed by Ellison et al.

  91. At 11:00, Richard Wolf is doing his Jewish commie speech, talking about “white supremacists”.

  92. @BrooLidd

    Who is Richard Wolff ?

    ((( Richard Wolff ))), next to the quote you provided at the beginning, is everything you need to know.

    Lying, scheming, two-faced, dishonest, truth-inverting, Trump-Derangement-Syndrome-suffering financial fraudster, conman, anti-White racist and Zionist-supremacist scumbag. About 15 different occurrences of “Mr Trump” in the short portion of the article I bothered to skim-read. Not ONE single occurrence of “President” – because being a democratically-elected President is completely meaningless to a Trump-hating Jew who wants to see him gone. And he also wants to see any slightest trace of White initiative towards financial intelligence, probity or health smothered at birth.

    ((( Every. Single. Time. )))

  93. @Mr-Chow-Mein

    You just touched on an overlooked point.

    I saw an interview with a Mexican woman 2 years ago. She was in charge of immigration policy in Mexico.

    She was giving out too much truth for the TV interviewer about Mexico basically following dictates from the Biden administration on immigration.
    When asked about Fentanyl deaths she went scorched earth.
    Pointing out that the basic chemicals to make it are needed for many other products. Mexico cannot ban those chemicals.

    Then she dropped a bombshell.
    She said drug overdose deaths are America’s problem. Mexicans are not overdosing on fentanyl. Hardly any other nation have so many drug overdoses.
    You need to find out why your kids are doing so many drugs.

    • Replies: @Jay Fink
  94. question says:

    Professor Hudson, if you’re reading comments, please consider getting Steve Keen on Nima’s podcast with you.

  95. eah says:
    @M Phillips

    >You need to find out why so many American kids are taking drugs.

    It isn’t ‘kids’ who are overdosing and dying — most ‘kids’ are satisfied with smoking a joint, as marijuana is a lot more potent today than it used to be.

    The problem isn’t as simple as ‘kids’ fooling around with dangerous drugs and making fatal mistakes — drug/opioid use, addition, and overdose deaths occur primarily among older adults — obviously I agree we need to ‘find out’ why these people use and get hooked on such risky drugs, but I think ‘deaths of despair’ explains a lot of it — normal people who feel they have something to live for don’t allow their lives to crater like that.

    Drug Overdose Deaths in the United States, 2003–2023

  96. anyone that listens to these two clowns ought to have their head examined. hudson means well at least, but wolfe is just a big jewish douche that just can’t help but hate on whitey. fuck him.

  97. Foto Matt says:

    There’s no way that tariffs can suddenly, within one week, one month, or five years, create a domestic ability to produce these products.

    Well, nobody said it was only going to take a week or a month. As for five years, yes, we could be well on our way to rebuilding domestic industry if we keep tariffs high for five years.

    And as for Trump’s “herky-jerky” behavior, that is just the method to his madness. If he had proposed a modest, 10% tariff, you would still be complaining and Congress would probably block it. But by proposing crazy, outrageous tariffs, you are taking the bait and then will feel vindicated when “cooler heads” step in and we have lower, more targeted tariffs.

  98. anonymous[354] • Disclaimer says:
    @eah

    You invited ((Kudlow’s tribe)) into America thinking they would become “Good Americans” who would serve the budding empire instead of cancerous parasites. Then, when the truth dawned on you, you didn’t have the guts to fight back. Americans should be stuck in Gaza and Palestinians should be living in NY penthouses.

    • Replies: @Mefobills
  99. Mefobills says:
    @TyrsHand

    Another Progressive ‘economist’ speaking out against tariffs, strengthening my position in favor. This guy’s father was an actual Trotskyist, while his own credentials range from Far Left to Farther Left.

    Hudson is speaking out about tariffs being used as a blunt instrument, when they should be a scalpel.

    He wrote this book:

    https://annas-archive.org/md5/4ca91fe0af5412dbaac5e9032e719bfb

    America’s protectionist takeoff, 1815-1914 : the neglected American school of political economy

    America used protectionism to takeoff, and that was industrial policy AND TARIFFS. Hudson wrote that book.

    The real question is why is Hudson aligning himself with odious Jews. Jews are always for free trade, or some sort of rent scheme, so they as a tribe can move about un-hindered. If you are a parasite, feasting on others, you want access to the others.

    Earlier in Hudson’s life, he was in close association with Herman Kahn. Hudson came clean, and called him the character in Dr. Strangelove. Kahn was also the architect of the open air prison camp in Gaza.

    Hudson did write the below shown in italics, the first mention of industrial capitalism. The odious jew in this article just says “American Capitalism” and not defining his terms. The Jew is doing blame shifting, yet Hudson just sits there like a lump.

    And so Trump says, what I want to do is roll back history and reverse it to make history run backwards to the time when we can restore tariffs as a tax on labor and on industry and leave all the economic surplus in the hands of the financial class, the monopolists, and the real estate sector. The rentier sector. That’s his big plan to essentially reduce the whole dynamic of industrial capitalism that Richard and I have been talking about for the last half year back towards the kind of feudal ideal where you had a rentier sector receiving unearned income, economic rent, land rent, monopoly rent, and financial interest.

    If you purse you lips just right, and torture your brain, you can see how tariffs in the first cycles ARE A TAX ON LABOR. It makes the prices of goods go up, especially if you don’t have domestic industry (which was off shored by finance capitalism).

    Tariffs are not a tax on labor. They are a tax on consumption. Perhaps I need to pull up a quote by Paul Craig Roberts saying that? If they are luxury goods, they especially should be tariffed.

    The best analysis of America today, is that it is an Oligarchy… especially a finance oligarchy (of for and by Jews, as well as other sociopaths in wall street), and also other associated rogue actors like the MIC. They are consuming the host.

    Another set of Oligarchs has arisen, the Tech Oligarchs. The tech oligarchs are now in a pitched battle against finance oligarchs.

    Only the tech oligarchs are also idiots when it comes to how money works. They imagine it. They think bitcoin is god. Steve Keen has a series of utube videos out trying to explain to Musk’s pea brain how it really works. Musk was brainwashed in the first year of school, with his first economics class. Public sector debts do not crowd out the private sector.

    Really, this level of ignorance is astounding, mostly because clown world doesn’t want its secrets exposed.

    China actually has it right. They don’t allow an Oligarchy of any type to arise, and then try to take over. Remember the fin tech gambit of the the moron Jack Ma? Xi smashed him. Where’s Jack Ma?

    Money belongs to the Sovereign King. Say it isn’t so. It is so.

    The tech oligarchs are actually trying to create a bitcoin world, and this way of thinking leaves debts out of account, as if they don’t exist. Tech oligarchs don’t even know that banks create credit, they think credit is intermediated.

    Maybe if Musk takes Keen’s models and stuffs them into Grok, Musk might get a clue – and then he can tell clueless Trump how it works.

    It will remain a shit show and clown show, as long as we have this fake and gay democracy system, populated by morons.

    There is the tiniest bit of hope, if the tech oligarchs are able to pull head out of ass, and if they don’t become parasites.

  100. Mefobills says:
    @anonymous

    You invited ((Kudlow’s tribe)) into America thinking they would become “Good Americans” who would serve the budding empire instead of cancerous parasites. Then, when the truth dawned on you, you didn’t have the guts to fight back. Americans should be stuck in Gaza and Palestinians should be living in NY penthouses.

    Hey anonymous dumbass. The “tribe” was banned from America in the 1923 immigration act.

    The parasite worked his way back in through stealth, by compromising weak and ignorant people. Think of it like the devil on your shoulder, exhorting you to do sin – it feels goooood!

    This is true of all people groups, so trying to pin the blame on Americans for not standing up to the parasite is blame shifting.

    The only way, is a sovereign king, or some sort of wise authority. These types have to be selected and then elected. Even better, trained then selected then elected. The founders did not provide for a selection process. Average normies are not capable, and that is true everywhere.

    Maybe you didn’t live through Covid, where hysterical women were running around trying to enforce the rules, like good school hall monitors? There is no way these sort of people can ever be reasoned with, which is why it also has to be a patriarchy. Normies vote their sexual, racial, and religious desires, not what is good for the country. White women don’t vote their race, they suffer from pathological altruism, and should never vote. White women are defectives, and their defect is only beneficial in all white societies.

    Here is a quote from Lee Kwan Yew, being prophetic about America’s future. Singapore was clowned by the British, when the Brits created a multi racial society.

    [MORE]

    https://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/08/lee-kwan-yew-on-democracy-vs.html

    SPIEGEL: During your career, you have kept your distance from Western style democracy. Are you still convinced that an authoritarian system is the future for Asia?

    Mr. Lee: Why should I be against democracy? The British came here, never gave me democracy, except when they were about to leave. But I cannot run my system based on their rules. I have to amend it to fit my people’s position. In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion. Supposing I’d run their system here, Malays would vote for Muslims, Indians would vote for Indians, Chinese would vote for Chinese. I would have a constant clash in my Parliament which cannot be resolved because the Chinese majority would always overrule them. So I found a formula that changes that

    There’s so much romanticized worship of the Ellis Island immigration these days that it’s heretical to mention the obvious fact that massive European immigration was a blow to democracy at the local level in America. It’s hard to run a multiethnic city without venal machine politics. Chicago, for example, remains a one party town all the way into the 21st century

    Let’s decode that shall we. The immigrants to Ellis island in the late 1800’s, were Jews and East Europeans. The word KIKE came from Kikel, because they refused to put an X on the forms at Ellis island. The X being too much like the Christian Cross.

    These Jew parasites soon started agitating for bolshevism and zionism, wanting their own state (Montana). Give it to me!

    Chicago especially was targeted by Jews (and also New York). Why? It was the seat of stock exchange, and Jews always festoon onto the levers of power and profit.

    The University of Chicago economic department especially became a voice for Jewish bank theory and finance capitalism.

    The U.S. got clowned in stages, and the Federalism of the founders failed. Democracy failed, not the American people. Average normies are not capable in any society. Democracy cannot work, especially in multi racial societies.

    I suppose you also blame the Slavs in Russia for being clowned by the Bolsheviks? That maybe the Slavic death camps were Russia’s fault for allowing Jew entry into their lands?

  101. Mr. Grey says:

    No matter what happens in the world, one can always count on both Wolff and Hudson to predict doom and disaster.

    • Replies: @mulga mumblebrain
    , @Sarah
  102. Notsofast says:
    @nokangaroos

    i think they realize how badly they would lose that world war. as a result they have determined that crashing the world economy, would allow them to vacuum up all of the assets of the western world, using their magical invisible coins. just today the great pumpkin proclaimed, it’s a great time to get rich, but i don’t think he’s talking about us.

  103. eah says:
    @eah

    Speaking of the parasite pundit class: Those arguing against the Trump tariffs are all members of the intelligentsia who earn their livings at a keyboard and/or a microphone. … No one with calloused hands who watched their families descend into despair and fentanyl as manufacturing industries fled their communities opposes what Trump is doing.

    • Replies: @Anon
  104. Joe Webb says:
    @nokangaroos

    a transcript…..I would not send out a transcript of my remarks without an edit. All barely coherent stuff….and the arrogance of the writers is astonishing….let the reader figure it out!

  105. Sarita says:

    😂🤣

    Someone in Twitter called the greatest Empire ever:

    The United Slaves Of Jewmerica

  106. @BrooLidd

    The fact that these expert economists won’t speak about how we got to this point and why a reversal of economic policy and protective tariffs might be needed is pretty telling.

    They refuse to discuss the deindustrialization, offshoring, and financialization of our economy. It shows what side they are on and gives the game away.

  107. Joe Webb says:

    Trumpstsein…..Gaza Don as he will be known for Finishing The Job in Gaza and Iran, combines the genetic mental traits of a , pardon me, capitalist pig with the genocidal reflex of OT Jews…kill them all.

    Trumpstein is a hybrid Jew and one-dimensional Money Only Protestant grifter.

    The only bright side of all of the Trumpstein/Jew scheming is that the Palestinians will be avenged….I hope and the Jews exposed for what they genetically are, homicidal maniacs.

    • Replies: @Anonymous 1
  108. @Trinity

    This is not the place to vent over the fact that you’re on Day 9 of wearing the same yellowed Depends man-diapers, nor does anyone here want to see your tantrum over the Gofundme cancellation of your ‘Jimmy Savile-edition’ tour of asian orphanages.

    Ignore Trinity folks, nigrahs must have stolen his tax refund of .80 cents.

  109. Sean says:

    I am afraid Professor Hudson has a track record of underestimating the resilience of the US economy; if I remember rightly he predicted a property collapse after the pandemic.

    Not a single political commentator thought Trump would become president. The economists are on a par with the pundits: clueless. Anyway, the threat to bring everything down has always been Trump”s signature move in getting the deal he wants from the begining of his property developer career. So creating chaos is a negotiating tactic for him.

  110. Anon[220] • Disclaimer says:
    @eah

    Those arguing against the Trump tariffs are all members of the intelligentsia who earn their livings at a keyboard and/or a microphone.

    This is Jewish ponzi scheme that creating a seemingly profitable system that inevitably collapses when new investments dry up where ONLY Jews and their Mafia members BENEFIT. This is their signature to bring the system down, then the Rich Jews buy the best stocks very cheap to bring Trillions of dollars wealth, like what they did in 10th century and with the Soviet Union in 1990, robbing them. Now it is the time to ROB the genocidal Americans who have invaded many countries to kill, rape and rob their victims in LARGE number to wipe out the indigenous population in Palestine using GENOCIDE, like what they did in the stolen land of America. Americans voted for criminals like Biden and trump to carry out these crimes against humanity. Now, the jews are going to rob them and tell them how stupid they are. The world does not have any sympathy for them.

  111. Never interrupt the enemy, of humanity, when it is making a mistake.

  112. @Mr. Grey

    The world is within decades of complete ecological collapse, if economic chaos and/or thermonuclear war do not occur first. Doom and gloom?

    • Replies: @Mr. Grey
  113. @Mike Tre

    Scratch a Sinophobe, find a moron.

  114. question says:

    Midterms. Trump is risking it, any prolonged pain, and the house and senate are gone.

    Trump can’t rejigger global supply chains and re-industrialize America because he can’t do anything about the high costs of shelter and health care. The industry and jobs will stay overseas just like his backers and campaign contributors want.

    • Replies: @V. K. Ovelund
  115. Mefobills says:

    More on the Odious Jew:

    Here’s the problem. You can’t buy the mass of people unless you tax where the wealth is. But there is a way out in the craziness of capitalism. You don’t tax the wealthy. You do provide for the mass of people. And the way you do it is you go to the wealthy and you say, since we didn’t tax you, you have all this money, please lend it to us. We’ll give it back to you after a few years, plus pay you interest while you wait.

    YOU NEVER BORROW YOUR OWN CREDIT! It is one of the iron rules of money. Jefferson wanted one do-over at end of life, and that was to prevent the U.S. government from borrowing its own credit.

    Why is it that very smart and moral men become Jew aware? But, usually too late, at end of life. We need special schools for the Goyim. Oh wait, Hitler Schools already did that.

    Also, the Jew is doing the same schtick again, just saying the word “capitalism” rather than defining the terms. This is the act of an ideologue, not somebody who wants to bring clarity.

    Taxes are to only land on rents and unearned income. Please lend it to us? Really? When the government has the law in its hand, and money is law? All sovereign nations have this power, and should not be gaslighted by the Jew.

    Hudson is sitting there like a lump, again, and not countering this Jew fool. Hudson was with Kucinich and is familiar with HR2990.

    Its wonky, but HR2990 converts Federal Reserve Notes into U.S. Dollars. All the U.S. dollars are to be created at Treasury, returning the money power where it belongs. No need to borrow Jew bucks from privateers and oligarchy.

    Private banks remain private corporations, but are forbidden from hypothecations.

    If you go to a bank for a loan, and if said bank does not have vault money, they simply turn to Treasury and treasury provides the credit. During conversion period, after HR2990 becomes law, requires all FRN (federal reserve notes) to be converted upon return. You don’t know it, but you return your FRN’s to the bank when you pay down loan principle. When paying down principle, the FRN’s, now US notes are destroyed. What comes from nothing returns to nothing.

    Pay attention now gas-lighters, and especially finance Jews. When China returns its TBills for redemption, Treasury gives them U.S. NOTES. (No more federal reserve private banking syndicate credit/debt money).

    Then Treasury tells the Chinese, go ahead and buy some U.S. goods. Oh, and by the way, you cannot buy more TBills/Bonds (government debt). We don’t do that anymore, we don’t need money from the private sector (except for the dividend act I explained earlier, that Germany employed in 1933). See how this creates demand for U.S. goods? American’s simply work their way out of former debts, while stimulating industry.

    This is actually how you do it, not just Tariffs. It requires taking on the wall street finance class, and the most elegant way is HR2990, which HUDSON is fully aware of.

    Jesus Christ, the stench that emits from this odious Jew is overwhelming. I’m surprised Hudson doesn’t fall over gasping for air. But, then again, why is Hudson associating with this type? He looks bad by association.

    • Replies: @question
  116. @BrooLidd

    Wolf is a loon, and has ZERO understanding about running a business.

    • Replies: @V. K. Ovelund
  117. Grant says:

    the bit not said is all those corporate profits made by moving offshore, or a huge amount of it, has gone to the executive class and tax havens. it hasn’t remained in the US, and it hasn’t gone to the US worker or citizen. They have become poorer. This is an attack on the corporate class, the globalist, to take a haircut and bring skilled manufacturing ‘home’. I’m in Oz, so no such future for us, yet.

    • Agree: Brad Anbro
  118. I spent three years living in China. There is nothing resembling socialism in China right now , even in its bizarre Maoist forms. The working class labors in a way only convict factories do in America. Much of the country only get to see their children once a year on New Years. Workers get cheated all the time,

    Some Chinese do accumulate enough through capitalist investment to buy an apartment and educate their children abroad, but there are no jobs or future for them. This is the ”lying down generation” who have decided to not marry, not buy and spend their life in bed. Party officials are notoriously corrupt. There is a huge economic crisis centered on housing and domestic demand. Birthrates are rapidly falling.

    The hope placed in Russia and China building a sustainable international trading platform, contrary to the hopes of many political influencers on the Net is grossly misplaced

    • Thanks: Half Norwegian
  119. Demonstrations breaking out across the US with homemade signs. Good sign.

  120. Some day people will realize that anarchism is the only solution for the world and that we need don’t need governments anymore (which are really legalized mafia cartels)

  121. @blackelkspeaks

    The blacks were brought to America so you have to give them something to do otherwise you get what you have.

    If you throw a bunch of knives into the chimpanzee cage at the zoo don’t be surprised if they cut each other and the keepers.

    You can have a car industry in Detroit again, you can have one group undoing wheel lugs and another group doing them back up for a wage, whats the alternative?

    Most people left to their own devices find trouble, this will be a lot more costly and damaging to society than a job of some description.

  122. anon[144] • Disclaimer says:

    Certainly interesting to watch it or listen to it, but to read it… Too long so I didn’t finish, but I noted important points.

    One important and spot on point:

    “unless we raise the price of American cars so high that Americans can’t afford it as the economy is moving into the depression that Trump is driving it into”

    Trump is not the ‘savior’ he pretends to be, the ‘populist’ elected after having fought 8 years of election fraud and political trials. There is truth in it but Trump was part of all of this.

    Trump is an establishment creature, he is a billionaire for God’s sake! Who can seriously believe that a billionaire would serve the interests of the people before other billionaire’s interests?

    Trump has been chosen to further an agenda.

    Remember 2020? He was the one under which watch the ‘covid’ operation took place, he launched ‘warp speed’, he was very proud of the unsafe, untested and harmful fake ‘vaccine’ his administration forced on people.

    “”unless we raise the price of American cars so high that Americans can’t afford it “…

    As for the covid coup, the new Trump & co takeover seems to match the globalists agenda that the WEF called the ‘great reset’: “by 2030, you’ll have nothing, and you’ll be happy (sic).

    So Americans won’t be able to afford cars thanks to Trumps’ tariffs. What better than a recession to make sure people ‘will have nothing” (only lobotomized people will be happy about it though).

    The second important point is: “It’s making difficulties for every other country. It’s and it’s now holding the gun to every country.”

    This is what Trump is doing at home and abroad: holding the gun to everyone’s head or rather to everyone his zionist masters have decided to eliminate.

    Trump and his uniparty team partner Biden are not waging a ‘war’ in Palestine, they are perpetrating a genocide. Palestinians have no army, no navy, no warplanes, this is not a war, it’s a fucking genocide! Most of the people murdered by Trump/Biden and their israeli accomplices are civilians, women and children. They bomb hospitals, they bomb schools, they bomb aid trucks, they specifically target civilians and civilian infrastructures. And Trump announced before the genocide resumed that he will unleash a genocide, this is therefore premeditated.

    I let any lawyer appreciate the extent of Trump calls for genocide and ethnic cleansing.

    Trump’s economic policy is as his other policies: menaces, bullying, aggression, attacks, blackmail racket, extrusion, and effectively putting guns on other leaders and countries heads.

    If he wanted to make the US the main target of a global alliance against it he wouldn’t behave otherwise.

    Trump behaves like a malevolent mafia boss, calling for other mafia bosses to unite to take him down.

    How stupid is that?

    Or rather, what is the real goal behind all these insane moves?

    Trump is a controlled creature. We know the Jews and zionist Jews are his main handlers and “his foreign policies” are decided in tel Aviv.

    What about his internal policies? Whose agenda is it to create a global economic crisis?

    Who generally manufacture this kind of agendas? While at the same time pushing for a world war on multiple fronts from the Middle East to Asia to Europe. Who in history always had a vested interest in triggering these global conflicts?

    The answer is not difficult to find. They use their 78 years old lunatic, most likely senile sock puppet to create the global chaos they need to impose their new world order.

    • Agree: Half Norwegian
  123. @Richard Samson

    I read somewhere that if Trump were to completely replace income taxes with tariffs (as he has talked about doing), the blanket tariff rate would have to be around 500%. And the thing about tariffs is that the other country has to be willing to sell you something in order for you to collect the tariff. If tariff rates get too high, other countries will just simply stop selling stuff to us.

    • Replies: @anonymous
    , @trevor
  124. Duggle says:

    More economic hardship: that’s what all the Trump supporters are getting for their trouble. How many more times are we willing to go through the two-party charade? When are we going to admit that “representative democracy” always works against us, and that solutions proffered by the State are always punitive?

    Are we willing to suffer indefinitely? Is that the miserable existence to which we’ve resigned ourselves? Goddamn.

  125. If jew vermin Sachs and retard commie Hudson are crying, it must be good. Fuck them both for making me side with Zognald.

    • Replies: @arbeit macht frei
  126. MICHAEL HUDSON: And without immigrant labor, who’s going to make all of the toys and the textile and the Walmart consumer goods that are being made by foreign labor?

    Foreign labor is still going to make most of these things. A tariff on these things will be paid into the Treasury and the consequent tariff revenue will be used to finance the elimination of taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security. I do not see this as a net loss for the American worker. Do you?

    You’re going to have — it’ll be a labor shortage here….

    But, Dr. Hudson, is a labor shortage not precisely what you want? What surer way to force U.S. wages to rise?

    It seems to me that, when you say, “It’ll be a labor shortage here,” you are admitting that Trump’s tariffs are going to work.

  127. kiwk says:

    Why is it okay for other countries to tariff the US but the US cannot tariff other countries without causing a lot of frothing mouths and tds?

    • Agree: arbeit macht frei
    • Replies: @Eric135
  128. @interesting

    Wolff is a loon, and has ZERO understanding about running a business.

    Wolff might be wrong, but is obviously not a loon.

  129. @question

    Midterms. Trump is risking it, any prolonged pain, and the house and senate are gone.

    What good are the House and Senate to Trump’s voters if the House and Senate never deliver Trump’s priorities?

    Trump must risk it. If he does not, then of what value will his administration be to you and me, except as entertainment?

    • Disagree: question
  130. Voltara says:

    Chinese economy has become world’s leading manufacturing economy in 20-30 years with 30-50% tariffs on imports

    • Agree: V. K. Ovelund
  131. DanFromCT says:
    @Pythas

    Based on a statistically uncertain study this afternoon by me watching the several thousand hate-Trump protestors in Sarasota marching by screeching about no more MAGA; pathetic lesbians and old, gray-haired women yelling about my body, my something or other; etc., it follows that if these mental cases are against the Trump tariffs, the tariffs will do as intended and reshore our industry and technological know-how.

    The protestors, by the way, didn’t appreciate my asking them—I’m standing there with my dog—why they weren’t wearing masks as they were when they were burning down America’s cities a few years ago. My less than scientific survey suggests that about 75% were of a certain ethnicity probably heading to the bagel shop after the protest.

    At least the cops watching thought the protestors’ crazed responses, such as getting in my face to take my photo with their phones, giving me the finger, etc., were quite funny. The funniest part of the afternoon was all the signs saying “No More Hate” from people who chief trait, beyond paranoia, is hatred of everything good and decent about this great nation.

    • Agree: V. K. Ovelund
  132. Organic says:
    @xyzxy

    Yeah, I was picking that up too, we should adopt their economic rational however we must appreciate that it comes with hating whites and idolizing trannies. Whites are not the problem, the elites screw us as much as everyone else. Isn’t that the Woke Ideology we were so happy to be rid of and why Trump won in the first place? So isn’t what they are preaching a form of woke Bidenomics?

    Agree the system is rotten, and agree it needs a rethink, but why does that require that we again submit to Transgender Story Time for our kids and that the WEF puppet Carney in Canada is somehow the good guy in all this. In what way is Canada not also an economic mess? Really?

    Used to like these guys but don’t they see that preaching woke idiocy makes them also part of the problem? More controlled opposition?

  133. question says:
    @Mefobills

    Wolff doesn’t know what the deficit is, and he doesn’t know the wealthy;

    Taxing the wealthy (within reason) doesn’t hurt the wealthy, because the money comes right back to them.

    The wealthy own the commanding heights, the choke points, means of production and distribution, so that money leaving their hands (within reason) always comes back to them, without any effort.

    Working people are in a totally different situation, money does not come back to them, they are currency users, that must work to get money. Working people have to work for everything they get.

    • Replies: @Mefobills
  134. Mr. Grey says:
    @mulga mumblebrain

    The world is within decades of complete ecological collapse

    Yeah I’ve been hearing that since I became an adult in the 1980’s. It’s a schtick people like Wolff have perfected.

  135. Rob Misek says:

    It looks like Trump is going to make the world great again as it excludes America in trade.

    • Replies: @V. K. Ovelund
  136. @Half Norwegian

    HAHA Zognald that’s a good one i have to remember that lol.

  137. Anon[409] • Disclaimer says:

    Yeah don’t worry, the Dems astroturfed another middle-class Easter Parade to complain about all the same shit they put up with when Biden did it.

    https://www.metafilter.com/208302/Hands-Off-Across-America

    Cancer research is the funniest hands-off. Bourla caused more cancer than Big Pharma ever cured. These dupes are demanding more ruinous drugs to cure the tumors from the plastic stuffed up their ass.

    Fucking tools. It cracks me up when they drop dead from their shots.

  138. anonymous[365] • Disclaimer says:
    @Hapalong Cassidy

    If tariffs get too high it is not that “other countries will stop selling” it is that you will stop buying.

  139. The country running a trade deficit always wins a tariff war against the country running the trade surplus.

  140. @Rob Misek

    It looks like Trump is going to make the world great again as it excludes America in trade.

    Once the shock wears off, the nations of the world will trade with America when trade suits them and will not trade when it doesn’t—just as the nations of the world have always done. Watch. As long as the Fed authorizes sufficient liquidity to forestall any underlying deflation, it will be all right. You will see.

    • Replies: @Rob Misek
  141. @blackelkspeaks

    Back in its heyday Detroit was referred to as the “Paris of the West”.
    Now you could call it “Liberia of the West”.

  142. Eric135 says:

    Wolff (an obvious Jew): ” … it reminds me of the kind of conversation you get with a white supremacist who explains and whines that white people are at the wrong end of discrimination in this country. The attempt to snatch from the black and brown people who’ve actually suffered centuries of repression from white people in this country …”

    Stop complaining goy! You shouldn’t complain about being shoved to the back of the line behind brown people who illegally entered the US yesterday! And where’s our shekels? We need more money from you for Israel. We need to build another wall to keep brown and black people out …

    Should have stopped reading there, but I went a little further:

    “It’s fantastic to have a leader like Mr. Trump suggest the blame for [the US trade deficit] falls on foreign countries.”

    Trump hasn’t blamed them. He’s said they’re smart and he would have done the same thing in their position. So, not even respect for basic facts from this crew — these “great thinkers” whose ideas have been such a benefit to our country – not.

    Don’t waste your time. Gaslighting here is off the charts these days …

    • Replies: @mulga mumblebrain
  143. The USA project is at a across roads, either use tariffs to continue to fund an international army to protect the dollar hegemony or cut the USA government deficit by greatly reducing military expenditure.

    A smaller USA army is not acceptable for the typical jew.

    In summary, every four generations or so Jewish greed and financial cheating results in out of control inflation and the goyim react by exiling all the Jews. Get ready for another pogrom soon.

  144. @Voltara

    Chinese….. 30-50% tariffs on imports

    That is a extraordinary claim.

    What are your sources? Have you fact checked them?

    • Replies: @JR Foley
  145. Eric135 says:
    @kiwk

    “Why is it okay for other countries to tariff the US but the US cannot tariff other countries …?”

    Because white supremacy, the Hollowcost, and stuff like that.

  146. @Richard Samson

    Buying more-affordable foods, clothing, appliances, furniture, medical devices etc. from abroad is “OPTIONAL”?

    No.

    Especially if you’re trying to provide for a family and you’re not rich.

    You can readily avoid excise taxes on alcohol, marijuana, and tobacco by exercising self-restraint and not indulging in those habits / vices. Tariffs on food, clothes and much of the rest, not so avoidable, realistically.

    • Replies: @kiwk
  147. JM says:
    @Mr-Chow-Mein

    Agree.

    Trump seeks to put the genie of Finance-Capital initiated Globalisation back in the bottle. With that went a radical restructuring of the previously normal and successful world economic protection system, relatively and absolutely. All the screams from economists (including complicit ‘marxists’ like those above) and the middle class are fitting because they supported and engineered the details of it. Both were relatively speaking, beneficiaries at the expense of the working class and their “good Middle Class (lol!) jobs”.

    The only thing at issue is Trump’s capacity to pull it through.

  148. @Chris Moore

    You mock voodoo, but believe that God sent … himself and/or his son … down to earth as a human being (kinda) … because he HAD TO BE tortured and murdered “so that” God “the father” could forgive our sins.

    Now go drink the blood of your dead savior — “symbolically”, of course. Good you’re not like those irrational primitive “anti-christ voodoo” practitioners.

    Wallahi.

    • Replies: @Chris Moore
  149. Jay Fink says:
    @M Phillips

    I have always thought we should look more at the demand side of fentanyl, not just the supply. I think the reason fentanyl is so popular in the U.S and not other countries is that today’s Americans are morally bankrupt people. It takes some level of decency not to take drugs. We lost that decency.

    • Thanks: TitusAlone
  150. @RJ Macready(Antarctica)

    Right. So it won’t be long before Trump explains to God why he sent bombs and money to people mass murdering children and women on purpose.

    Go straight to Hell, Trump and the other zionist Fatmericans.

    Do not pass Go.
    Do not collect $200 Billion.

  151. @Notsofast

    No, they’ll TAKE the elite’s houses, cars, airplanes, and every other tangible asset they can get their hands on 😉

  152. Sarah says:
    @Mr. Grey

    ” No matter what happens in the world, one can always count on both Wolff and Hudson to predict doom and disaster. ”
    😄😄😄👍👍👍

  153. Sarah says:
    @Anonymous19

    ” I am relieved that MICHAEL HUDSON think this is bad.

    Because it means that this was the right decision to take.
    Congrat Mr Trump. ”
    😂😂😂👍👍👍👌👌👌

  154. Rob Misek says:
    @V. K. Ovelund

    You will see.

    Trump’s demonstrations have forever changed the global perception of the US.

    of being a fascist dictator as he discards the constitution to persecute and silence free speech.

    To discard sworn oaths to the rest of the world as he violates US signatory obligations to the UN genocide convention.

    To use tariffs to coerce nations globally with trade.

    Supporting genocide in Gaza.

    The US has become a pariah like North Korea.

    The world doesn’t need or want Trumps destabilization.

    And we know Zionists have their hands so far up Trumps ass their working his mouth while his are deep in their pockets.

    We can do without the drama.

    • Replies: @V. K. Ovelund
  155. BrooLidd says:
    @Notsofast

    I’ve yet to see on this website or elsewhere any understanding of what ‘crypto currency’ actually is. If any TUR commenter has such understanding now is the time for him to step forward.

    Who operates/manages/’owns’ these funds? Where do the dollars/euros/pesos/rubles/yuans go? Into the ether? The analysis I put forward here several months ago found no echo.

    In the 17th century Dutchmen sank quite a few guilders in tulip bulbs.

    • Replies: @Rob Misek
    , @Notsofast
  156. JR Foley says:
    @AmericaOnly

    Monday April 7 Netanyahu is coming to DC ot chat with Donald Trump’
    Tuesday April 8 –Jesus is returning with an important message.
    “We three have blue eyes and Benny and Donnie will retire in Gaza in a rebuilt paradise with no talking snakes!”

  157. Rob Misek says:
    @BrooLidd

    what ‘crypto currency’ actually is

    Crypto is the antithesis of regulation.

    It is the Wild West of greed and deception AKA capitalism to the extreme.

    It is a grand pyramid scheme, a casino, where “investors” embrace complete anarchy believing “they” have it all figured out.

    • Replies: @littlereddot
    , @Notsofast
  158. Mefobills says:
    @question

    The wealthy own the commanding heights, the choke points, means of production and distribution, so that money leaving their hands (within reason) always comes back to them, without any effort.

    Especially the finance sector, they take for using their highways.

    There is another sector that Catherine Austin Fits, calls Dark Money. She estimates some $21 trillion, yes trillion has been pushed “off books.” That this is enough to create a second civilization. It is something like the Pentagon’s lost money, but much worse, it is the black budget gone crazy.

    So, within the real economy, you have rentiers … people taking using scams that reduce the life of producers. Rentiers sit on their ass, licking the cream.

    Then there are off book economies that take from the producers.

    You cannot have money creation done in the dark, outside of sunshine. It plays to man’s worst instincts.

    During Covid, the FED cracked open new ledgers, called SPV (Special Purpose Vehicles). There are secret ledgers, dark money. Double entry credit requires ledgers.

  159. @JR Foley

    National Enquirer—

    I was expecting the infographic from Trump’s presentation on the White House lawn.

    But close enough, both are of the same quality/reliability.

    LOL

  160. @Rob Misek

    Crypto is a marvel of the today’s world.

    In the past one needed real tulip bulbs to make people part with thousands of Dutch guilders to acquire them.

    Today, one only needs to offer “digital tulips” and people will part with tens of thousands of dollars for each one.

    How we have progressed!

    BTW, whatever happened to those $Trump meme coins?

    • Agree: Notsofast
    • Replies: @Rob Misek
  161. Rob Misek says:
    @littlereddot

    Today, one only needs to offer “digital tulips” and people will part with tens of thousands of dollars for each one.

    For something without substance or intrinsic value. Something that can be deleted or copied instantly without effort.

    Like I said. Anarchy

    Money represents transferable work. Anything else is corruption.

    This corruption is how Jews control Trump.

  162. Notsofast says:
    @Rob Misek

    it’s digital liars poker.

  163. Notsofast says:
    @BrooLidd

    can’t answer those questions but i’m going long on tulips, they’re overdue. i’m planning on cleaning up come easter, you know just when trump brings peace to ukraine. if i can’t dump them by easter, i have a recipe for delicious tulip stew, so you see, it’s a lot safer investment than bitcoin.🌷

  164. @Voltara

    If Trump had simply focused on a few problem countries like China then he wouldn’t have caused a global meltdown. China has long exploited US good will on trade and last I check still fixes their own currency. They play dirty while establishment economists normally shrug and advise our presidents to look the other way.

    Tariffs have been used effectively by countries like China and Brazil but the risk is a trade war. What was the point of tariffs on Canada? Why needlessly insult their prime minister? It makes zero sense. Trump mumbled something about fentanyl but his own administration admitted that practically all of it goes through the Mexican border.

    This isn’t merely a case of Trump increasing some tariffs on countries like China that deserve pushback. This is Trump throwing a tantrum and passing tariffs that he can’t even explain. He really did pass tariffs on an island of penguins. That was not the creation of late night talk show hosts.

    It’s amusing that some of you are railing about Jewish economists when after Trump the next 10 presidents will want their libertarian Milton Friedman economist that promotes free trade. They will go right back to what they believe is safe. You will not see an Irish or German name near anything related to the market.

    Trump will ironically be undermining the utility of tariffs by overusing them. Another fake populist that trashes the potential of populism. Which means he serves the system by pretending to challenge it.

    Oh and again I’d like to thank everyone who thought it was a good idea to put a felon and reality TV star in charge of the economy. A silver spoon brat who was born into wealth and can just declare bankruptcy when he gets it wrong. I would not trust a politician that gave Hillary Clinton a dollar and this guy actually helped fundraise for her NYC Senate race. I cannot stand WWE wrestling 30 seconds and Trump actually went on as a guest star. I doubt practically any wrestler on that awful program would be there if they had a billion dollars. Trump however went on because he loves attention more than anything.

    • Replies: @question
    , @Rob Misek
  165. question says:
    @John Johnson

    just declare bankruptcy when he gets it wrong.

    That’s not what it is, he said plainly that he and all his rich friends use the bankruptcy courts to enrich themselves, it’s a feature. Use the bankruptcy court to stiff bond holders and lenders.

  166. @Joe Webb

    Trump is an israeli first child murderer..

    Its jew jew jew jew and nothing else. America LAST.

    Harry Vox



    Video Link

  167. Rob Misek says:
    @John Johnson

    China has long exploited US good will on trade

    Bullshit!

    The Chinese produced cheap crap cheaper for the US customers who wanted it.

    Trump just recognizes that the Capitalist US can’t compete in fair trade, so he’s coercing and isolating the US like North Korea and to some degree China does.

    Look elsewhere for freedom.

    This is as good a time as any to change our entire economic system.

    Money should only represent transferable work and its value regulated accordingly instead of by the casino concept of a free market.

    Products should be recyclable and safe for the environment, designed to last decades being repaired as necessary.

    This represents a sustainable economy, one civilized nation’s could agree upon.

    The Wild West of greed and waste, capitalism, was always a bad idea.

    Trumps trying to dig the US out of the hole it’s in.

  168. @Rob Misek

    Abetment of genocide and the suppression of speech are weighty matters. You will get no argument from me there. However, the topic was tariffs.

    Trump’s demonstrations have forever changed the global perception of the US.

    Look, as a U.S. citizen, I do not wish to go out of my way to irritate foreigners, but I just don’t much care how foreigners perceive my country. I never have. Should I?

    The Biden administration cared so much how foreigners perceived my country that that administration adorned U.S. embassies with homosexual rainbow flags, stole Russia’s dollar reserves, and then outrageously blamed that same Russia for a Ukrainian war the U.S. had cold-bloodedly engineered and provoked. No, maybe the global perception of the U.S. was pretty much trashed, already.

    As to forever, though, that is a long time. Maybe check back in with me in a year, and see if anyone still remembers what the present excitement was all about.

    To use tariffs to coerce nations globally with trade.

    Tariffs are hardly coercive. Tariffs are also nothing new. Foreign exporters that do not wish to endure Trump’s tariffs will export to countries other than the United States. It’s not very complicated.

    We can do without the drama.

    Those that can do without it, can probably just ignore it.

    • Replies: @Rob Misek
  169. kiwk says:
    @radicalcenter

    All they have to do is go to one of the numerous food banks and the numerous nonprofits that sell stuff for cheap.

    Easy peasy.

  170. @Triptolemus

    Triptolemo fruges dare.

    You don’t seem to realize that, yes, on-shoring would be a good thing. But these arbitrary tariffs are not going to encourage it one bit. The corporations will find a way around it. There will be no factories built in the US. Would that there were. But they won’t. If you really wanted to make tariffs work, you would carefully analyze where they should be applied, and then negotiate, not only with the foreign countries involved, but with the corporations you want to come back onshore. Trump will never negotiate with the corporations. Why doesn’t he just over-tax or fine the corporations that off-shore, and under-tax and reward corporations that on-shore? Because of the lone nut strategm that’s why.

    These tariffs are not really for the purpose of on-shoring at all. They are simply a way to abolish income tax for the very rich. That’s all all of this is for. Making the world safe for the very rich. Yes, you’re giving too much fruit to yourself, that’s for sure.

    • Replies: @epebble
  171. @Rob Misek

    China has long exploited US good will on trade

    Bullshit!

    The Chinese produced cheap crap cheaper for the US customers who wanted it.

    Maybe ask for an example before assuming you know everything.

    For starters the Chinese fix their currency:
    https://www.investopedia.com/articles/forex/030616/why-chinese-yuan-pegged.asp

    That’s trade manipulation. It’s not a fair trade if the other side is fixing their currency against the global market.

    Trump should have focused on China and other countries that play dirty.

    China is very manipulative and our libertarian advisors in the past presidencies have advocated against taking action. Do nothing while the Chinese laugh at our inaction.

    Libertarians have a pseudo-religious fear of tariffs and taxes, even when there is a hostile and unscrupulous actor that has profited from Western impotence.

    Trump however has gone too far and unfortunately gives the establishment credence to maintain the status quo. That means another libertarian telling us to basically let China do as they please cause the free market gods must be appeased.

  172. Rob Misek says:
    @V. K. Ovelund

    the topic was tariffs.

    Actually, the topic was about Trump, and his trade policies.

    Trade is defined by the relationship between nations.

    If you don’t care about that, why are you commenting on this topic?

  173. Rob Misek says:
    @John Johnson

    It’s not a fair trade

    If the Chinese economic system is kicking the free markets ass, maybe the free market is the problem.

    Yes, Trump’s gone too far trying to dig the US out of the hole it’s in.

  174. Trumps tariffs have wiped trillions of dollars off the world’s stock markets, I ask is this a bad thing?

    Most of this confetti is hot off the printing press looking for a home…enter the stock market, the biggest casino in the world.

    The stock market makes billionaires for the undeserving while making paupers of those who work for a living, devaluing the dollar everytime newly printed money is slammed down for a share, a thinner slice of the pie for everyone.

    The stock market is the home of Zionist power, its time to throw the “money lenders out.”

    Trump may have done more good than he thinks, just get the crooks hands off the money levers before they create trillions of dollars to pump back into stock markets.

    Who are these central bankers really working for…not you…thats for sure!

  175. @John Johnson

    Trump however has gone too far and unfortunately gives the establishment credence to maintain the status quo. That means another libertarian telling us to basically let China do as they please cause the free market gods must be appeased.

    The natural result will be a reactive backlash against any form of protectionism or tariffs. The line will be “we tried tariffs with Trump and they don’t work. They were a disaster.”

  176. @John Johnson

    The Chinese do not “manipulate” their currency, they isolate it from
    the Great Satan´s manipulations and machloikes – because they can;
    the dollar would lose 97% overnight without the reserve currency racket,
    in addition the GS uses credit “pump´n´dump” to further impoverish
    weaker nations.
    China is now “too big to fuck”, sorry 😎

    • Replies: @mulga mumblebrain
  177. @Mefobills

    “The merchant Jew has always been for free trade…”

    Don’t they also have their hands in currency exchange needed by one or both parties to make these transactions go forward?

    And if one or both parties needs credit at one end or the other don’t Jews also provide that service, wringing out even more from each transaction?

    In short, do international Jews act as the House, skimming their Take off of each global transaction?

    • Agree: Thomasina, HdC
  178. Chris Moore says: • Website
    @radicalcenter

    You mock voodoo, but believe that God sent … himself and/or his son … down to earth as a human being (kinda) … because he HAD TO BE tortured and murdered “so that” God “the father” could forgive our sins.

    Jesus of Nazareth in the flesh, I now realize, was captive of the Satanists, just as the Prophets became captive and killed by the Satanists.

    Satanists are stunted, infantile, willful, tantrum-prone, and can turn downright murderous when exposed for what they are.

    The authentic Jewish Prophets repeatedly exposed these Hebroid Satanists for what they were, and they didn’t like it one bit, and so killed the Prophets, just as they killed Christ when he exposed them for what they were and challenged their righteousness and moral authority by citing their hypocrisy, murderousness, and desecration of scripture and the temple.

    Or I should say, they thought they killed him… but he and the Prophets came back as Christendom, and throttled these Satanic Hebroids no end.

    Now the Satanists think they have the upper hand, but Judeofascist Israel is unwittingly exposing them and their Marxist-Zionist lackeys for what they are and have always been: killers, criminals, thieves, and Golden Calf voodoo racketeering scum.

  179. epebble says:
    @John Johnson

    It’s not a fair trade if the other side is fixing their currency against the global market.

    Floating exchange rates are not laws of nature. Between 1944 to 1971/1976, world operated on Fixed exchange rates. It even had a name – Bretton Woods system.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system

    There may be many things we may not like about Chinese political economy. But in what matters to us, fixed exchange rate is probably low impact.

    • Replies: @mulga mumblebrain
  180. epebble says:
    @obwandiyag

    But these arbitrary tariffs are not going to encourage it one bit.

    I am no CEO, but even I would hesitate to make a business decision involving minor investment, say a fast food restaurant, based only on a hastily crafted Executive Order. Which can be equally quickly rescinded when the emperor is on the golden throne at 4 a.m. Tuesday if the Dow drops another 2,000 points on Monday. Something that creates a new world order of this magnitude doesn’t even have a fig leaf of law (as in Congressionally passed legislation, signed by the president – giving an appearance of some permanence).

  181. @question

    I don’t know a single person in my industry (Commerical construction) that promotes current zoning policy anywhere or promotes the IBC. I think it’s quite the opposite, that the industry suffers from a lack of organization needed for the pushback as well as how spread out the fight is. They would have to fight against decades of entrenched policy in thousands of jurisdictions. I think who they are fighting is not developers or contractors themselves, but actually the code writers, who represent the manufacturers of goods and leftist think tanks who are heavily entrenched in zoning policy.

    I do understand zoning policy, ZIRP and overly stringent building code has driven up costs and made me (and anyone else in the industry) wealthier. But I also be I believe that most would understand it will not be sustainable in the long term and it needs to change.

    • Replies: @question
    , @question
  182. trevor says:
    @Hapalong Cassidy

    And the thing about tariffs is that the other country has to be willing to sell you something in order for you to collect the tariff.

    The “other country” may be willing to sell, but will not be willing to pay the 25% tariff that will render the sale a losing proposition.

    It is the buyer of the product who pays the tariff in the form of an increased price – essentially an additional “sales tax” on the product impossed by the government.

    The results are many economic issues beyond the scope of this comment.

  183. @Hulkamania

    I’ve liked him because he has been one of the few serious economists to talk about the history of the debt Jubilee. Of course his perspective is that of the anti-capitalist, but it’s such a lacking subject in normal discourse. I honestly had no idea what it really meant before reading his work. Many learn of usury through the church, but with no concept of what that means in the real world. Of course the debt jubilee is a great potential weapon against the MIC, something Unz readers should appreciate.

  184. question says:
    @Spider Monkey

    somewhere in that loop of zoning code, permitting, inspections,private land holdings, BLM (bureau of land mgmt, vast land holdings in western US), EPA, regulatory agencies, pollution control agencies, water rights, corporate interests, etc , somewhere in all that, is a dog in the manger.

    • Replies: @question
  185. Medusa says:

    This is the best analysis of Trump’s tariff policy I have found:

    Ben Norton explains on his website:

    Instead of crafting a coherent industrial policy, Trump is imposing austerity and eroding government capacity, mixing Reaganomics with protectionism.
    Rather than investing in education and job training programs for reindustrialization, Trump is signing executive orders to dismantle the Department of Education.
    • Trump has even torn up the very bare-bones attempt at industrial policy that was pursued by the Biden administration, undoing the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and attacking the CHIPS Act.
    This will not reindustrialize the United States. In fact, it was exactly this kind of neoliberal ideology that led the US economy to be deindustrialized in the first place.

    The US financial sector was deregulated under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, and then Bill Clinton in the 1990s. This deregulation, combined with the emergence of new digital technologies, made it much more profitable for US capitalists to invest in the financial sector, not in manufacturing.

    Instead of investing in expanding production, US corporations plowed their net income into stock buybacks. In 2014, Bloomberg reported that among the top 500 publicly traded companies in the US, in the S&P 500 stock market index, 95% of their earnings went to buying back their own stocks and paying dividends to shareholders.

    Until the US government fundamentally changes its policies toward the financial sector, heavily taxes capital gains, and incentivizes companies to invest in local manufacturing, they are going to continue to prioritize financial speculation over tangible production.

    Ben also explains the connection between current account and capital account:

    Trump’s desire to maintain dollar dominance while also reducing the US trade deficit is utterly contradictory. One of the main reasons for this massive deficit is because of the role that the US plays in the world economy as the issuer of the global reserve currency,
    By definition, the inverse of the US current account deficit is the US capital account surplus.
    What does that mean? It means that, because the dollar is the global reserve currency, other countries around the world need to get access to dollars. How do they get those dollars? The US has to run a trade deficit with other countries, otherwise they won’t have the dollars they need for the dollar to remain the global reserve currency.

    Countries that have a trade surplus (export more to the US than import from it) invest these export dollars in US treasury bonds and (involuntarily) finance the US wars … read more here:

    https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/04/04/trump-tariffs-effect-us-economy/

    • Replies: @mulga mumblebrain
  186. question says:
    @question

    oops, meant ‘zoning, building code, …’

  187. Rob Misek says:

    I figure that Trumps globally destabilizing trade policies are merely a distraction to obfuscate the Zionist US genocide in Gaza and expansion to WW3 beginning with Iran to achieve the Zionist “greater Israel” objective.

    Recession/depression vs WW3

    You can thank Zionists and their useful idiots like Trump.

  188. epebble says:

    There is an interesting and unusual leading indicator of coming recession:

    Sex Workers Already Predicted There’s A Recession Coming — Here’s How They Know
    The past has shown that nontraditional measures like brothels, beer and lipstick can tell us a lot about the economy’s health.
    https://www.huffpost.com/entry/a-recession-is-coming-sex-workers_l_67eaa67fe4b008c5a2ecc0bc

    • Thanks: Anonymous534
  189. epebble says:

    We may have time travelled to April 2020 sans the virus.

    Trump’s tariff onslaught against China launches a battle the US may not be able to win
    https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/08/politics/china-trump-tariffs-trade-war/index.html

  190. America deserves to fail.

    But tariffs might save it. You know if economists hate it, there is at least a 50% chance that it’s the right thing to do.

    The alternative is to continue down the same road, where the US owes nearly $2 trillion in interest payments, against revenues of $5 trillion, annually. This problem won’t go away, but not making it worse should be a priority.

    Of course, Trump has some terrible ideas that should be reversed, such as tax cuts for the rich, and spending more money than ever on the MIC.

    And as for “white supremacists” complaining that they are being discriminated against: Michael, have you tried to get a job lately? Obviously your college days are far behind you, so you don’t have personal experience of what’s going on at the colleges. But please, tell me you’re an out-of-touch boomer without telling me.

  191. @Medusa

    ‘It’s our dollar but your problem’.

    • Replies: @epebble
  192. @epebble

    What you like or dislike bout China’s political economy is irrelevant. It’s none of your fucking business.

  193. @Rob Misek

    ‘US good will..’??!! What a quaint fiction!

  194. AussieDon says:

    Was April 2, 2025, The 18th Brumaire of Trump, when POTUS 45/47 finally made a complete fool of himself?
    Dr. Hudson and Prof.Wolff say ‘yes’.
    It’s chaos out there.
    Foundations are queuing up ringing Dr. Hudson for clarification.
    Prof.Wolff has called-out DJT’s effrontery in actually diverging from textbooks, Prof.Wolff had never thought of ‘economics’ in this format.
    Why won’t DJT play by the leftist rules?
    Why hasn’t he read their textbooks?
    Is the USA now ruled by an aberration, a grotesque mediocrity?
    A Louis Napoleon.

    [MORE]

    Is it an economics coup d’état?
    Is reactionism looming?
    Trump has to be discredited at all costs. Just make him appear stupid: Goofiness, goofy, bluster, foolery, it’s about [class] decadence, self-interest, overwhelming BS.
    Louis Napoleon!
    Why are Marxists scholars so upset with ‘Trumponomics’? Apparently it’s attached to DJT’s herky-jerky behavior and his ‘divide & conquer strategy’, that is not attached to normal political foundations.
    But there’s more.
    Amongst all this alleged threatening Trumpian goofiness, we discover ‘white supremacist’ thinking at work, transhumans are frightened-off, snow birds and Gaza’s Palestinians and even earthquake victims in Myanmar will suffer.
    Trump is in the tradition of extremists in the GOP, ‘that’s all he is’.
    But who cares?
    Who’s afraid of goofiness?
    It must be outlawed??

    DJT’s stats certainly are, ‘inventive’.
    Mark/Twain Disraeli lamented ‘lies, damned lies and statistics’!
    However, economists can make things up in their head, invent new ways of looking at economics [see Joan Robinson]. And then they write peer reviewed, parroted textbooks to confirm The Truth of economic LAWS.
    Keynes dubbed economists ‘shrieking parrots.
    Marxist textbooks have spun herky-jerky for 180 years
    The left have-fallen in again, and are reacting to the DJT agenda. As they say in Australia: Come in spinner!
    Leftists are linear thinkers, get angry if human behavior does not conform to some precise materialistic dialectic formulations of the latest cool ‘herky-jerky’.
    When Karl Marx wrote the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte/Napoleon he focused on the 1851 French coup d’état, by which Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, president of the Second Republic and Napoléon Bonaparte’s nephew, became emperor of the Second French Empire as Napoleon III. [WIKIPEDIA]
    It seeks to explain how capitalism and class struggle created conditions which enabled “A GROTESQUE MEDIOCRITY TO PLAY A HERO’S PART”. DJT will never be given credit for his very real revolution.
    The Bonapartist creation threw the Marxists into some confusion. Trump-think is Louis Bonaparte on steroids. The best is yet to come

    In the real world of south-east Asia, where I live, Trump’s ‘herky-jerky’ economics has just led to a 30% reduction in store prices for US imports [e.g. cheese, milk, apples, oranges, +++, and maybe the odd-John Deere].
    So far so good.
    Better than a Marxist-Alinsky-Soros pogrom, herky-jerky cultural revolution any day!

    • Replies: @mulga mumblebrain
  195. epebble says:
    @mulga mumblebrain

    When they don’t buy our debt, many of us can’t buy house or car.

    Treasury Secretary Bessent expects bond market will calm down, suggests spike in yields is normal trading
    One of his predecessors at Treasury thinks Trump team is being viewed by investors as a ‘problematic emerging market’
    https://www.marketwatch.com/story/treasury-secretary-bessent-expects-bond-market-will-calm-down-suggests-spike-in-yields-is-normal-trading-1f953b7c

  196. @Eric135

    ALL Jews are the same, eh, bozo. What a boon it is to be born moronic.

    • Replies: @Eric135
  197. Eric135 says:
    @mulga mumblebrain

    “What a boon it is to be born moronic.”

    I hope you’re enjoying it.

  198. @nokangaroos

    JoJo is a mouse with lascivious intentions on the Chinese elephant.

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