There is an underlying problem — debts that have been building up in recent decades — that the virus is exposing and turning into a crisis. We are in a situation much like a war. There are winners and there are losers in a war. In this case the winner is the aggressor – the financial sector. Its demands for payment have set the stage for today’s economic breakdown. This has been the case throughout history. Finance always has been the great destabilizing factor… The debts that have been built up are being used as a financial warfare tactic. It is more efficient than military warfare. Debt has been used to strip away the assets of middle-class people, of home owners, of employee pension funds, to suck their savings and property up to the top of the economic pyramid. The pandemic crisis has created a battlefield. Its rules have been written by the financial sector and their lobbyists as an opportunity for the largest property and financial grab since the Great Depression.
Remarks from the Systematic Crises Triggered the Current Pandemic & Progressive Way-Outs teleconference
By Michael Monday, June 29, 2020 Articles No tags Permalink
Remarks given at the 1st ASECU Teleconference ‘Systematic Crises Triggered the Current Pandemic & Progressive Way-Outs, May 8, 2020.
Well, I think you’re quite right in organizing the conference to point out that today’s pandemic crisis hastens and intensifies the internal contradictions that have been building up. Many of these contradictions are going to be blamed simply on the virus. But there is an underlying problem that the virus is exposing and turning into a crisis. That underlying problem is the debts that have been building up for the last few decades.
We are in a situation much like a war. There are winners and there are losers in a war. In this case the winner is the aggressor – the financial sector. Its demands for payment have set the stage for today’s economic breakdown.
This has been the case throughout history. Finance always has been the great destabilizing factor. Right now, you’re having businesses – retail stores, restaurants, hotels, airlines and other businesses that are being closed down or operating at only a small capacity far below break-even levels. These businesses are not able to pay their stipulated rents or mortgage debt service. Their landlords are not able to pay their banks.
Workers have been laid off, and they’re unable to pay their landlords or creditors. So they are falling more deeply into debt. Entire states and the cities, like New York State and New York City, are being squeezed. In addition to having to pay local unemployment insurance, they have to maintain basic infrastructure and social services. But their tax revenues are plunging as a result of fewer sales taxes and income taxes. So the pandemic is creating a fiscal crisis as part of the overall debt and real-estate crisis.
The question is, how do we get out of it? What is happening is what legal contracts call an Act of God. What do you do when economic activity is disrupted and the flow of payments that people have every month – their debt service, their rents or their mortgage, or their credit cards and other basic ongoing expenses. What do you do when they can’t be paid? I think that this crisis is laying the problem bare. It is a problem that’s occurred in Western civilization for the last 2,000 years. But what is so striking is how much more adroitly ancient civilizations handled this problem. They did so in a completely different way from how other civilizations have handled things.
I have written quite a bit about Bronze Age archaeology in the ancient Near East. That is where the Act of God stipulation originated. It appears in the Laws of Hammurabi c. 1750 BC. The problem that the Babylonians had to deal with was what to do when there is a flood, a drought, warfare or a pandemic. What should be the rules when, suddenly out of nowhere, cultivators and the citizenry on the land are rendered unable to grow and harvest crops, out of which to pay the debts that they have run up during the year and are falling due. They owe the taxes, sharecropping or other rent that could not be paid.
Hammurabi was quite specific about how to handle this situation. Paragraph 48 of his Laws said that there would be a debt and a tax amnesty when the weather god, Adad, created a flood or otherwise prevented debts and other obligations from being paid. If the storm god floods the lands, the debts and rents don’t have to be paid. A fresh start was made under conditions of balance for the next crop season.
The basic problem was similar to that today: How does a society restore continuity and save itself from disruption creating a permanent loss and distortion of existing wealth and income relationships? What Hammurabi and every other Babylonian, Sumerian ruler and other Near Eastern rulers did between about 2,500 BC and the 1st century BC was to proclaim amnesties in such circumstances. If they hadn’t done that, cultivators would not have been able to pay their creditors and they would have fallen into bondage. They would have owed their labour and crops to their creditors.
This would have caused a serious fiscal problem for rulers. If victims of a crop failure or other economic interruption had to pay their creditors with their labour and crop surplus, this labor and crop tax wouldn’t be available to pay the palace its normal claims for taxes and corvée labour duties to build infrastructure or even serve in the army. Social balance and continuity would have been destroyed – from within. So when Hammurabi and every ruler of his dynasty proclaimed a clean slate cancelling the debts and rent arrears that had mounted up unpaid, proclaiming a return to the normal situation prevented a creditor oligarchy from emerging and seeking its own interest as distinct from that of the palace.
All this changed in Roman times. Classical antiquity protected the financial and rentier elites. Cicero and the other Roman leaders said that all the debts had to be paid, even (or indeed, precisely because!) this led to the enslavement of poorer Romans and Greeks. Rome’s creditor oligarchy used every crisis as an opportunity to grab the land of the smallholders, to force the population into bondage and to get control of their land.
We’re seeing the same basic dynamic occur throughout the post-Roman Western world. Creditors are now already planning to buy up distressed real estate from landlords that default as their rents are not paid. There is going to be a huge bankruptcy sale. Large private capital funds have already announced their intention to begin buying out the retail stores that have gone bankrupt, along with their real estate.
Individuals who are unable to pay their debts, workers who’ve been laid off, are told to borrow from their pension funds or social security accounts. That means that they won’t be receiving the retirement income they need to live. Likewise, the states and the cities that Jeffrey Sachs mentioned also are facing a debt crisis with their bondholders. Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate head, said that Democratic states like New York, New Jersey and California should cover their shortfall by taking the pension funds that they’ve set up for public employees. The financial sector’s intention is to use this crisis to wipe out the pension funds and transfer the savings of the wage-earners to pay bondholders and other creditors. The promises that state and local governments made for pension in exchange for not asking for higher wages are to be wiped out.
The debts that have been built up are being used as a financial warfare tactic. It is more efficient than military warfare. Debt has been used to strip away the assets of middle-class people, of home owners, of employee pension funds, to suck their savings and property up to the top of the economic pyramid. The pandemic crisis has created a battlefield. Its rules have been written by the financial sector and their lobbyists as an opportunity for the largest property and financial grab since the Great Depression.
The result will be that much of the American and European economies are going to end up looking like the Greek economy five years ago, when it was unable to pay its euro-debts. You can look at Greece as the future of the United States, catalysed by the coronavirus pandemic.
Thank you, thanks a lot. Michael, it’s your turn and allow me, before you start, because there was an extra question addressed to you, but also to the rest, included perhaps in the previous questions: who are the big winners, in economic terms, after current developments?
I’ll talk about the questions in reverse order, beginning with the idea that there may be an inflation to help pay off the debts.
Just the opposite: What we are facing now is an era of debt deflation. It’s the worst debt deflation since the Great Depression. I’ve already described how there are going to be major defaults in real estate, especially for commercial real estate, for stores and all the other businesses that are going without income while their rents have accrued. If we are going to have a close-down for at least three more months, with no income for stores, entertainment, motion-picture houses and museums, paying three months’ back rent is not viable. There’s no way in which stores, or many wage-earners, can earn enough to pay the rent out of normal work and business. So, they’re going to go out of business.
There is going to be a wave of bankruptcy, and that will be followed by fire sales of real estate. Unemployment is going to lead to lower wage levels, and there also will be cutbacks in public spending for social services, transportation and other normal programs. Privatisation sell-offs will occur, much like Margaret Thatcher’s in England. this is now going to be imposed upon Europe. It’s possible that the Eurozone will break up if it does not change its rules and create the euro-money to enable Italy and Spain to get by. But at present the Eurozone rules are that all the money, all of the credit that is needed to grow in Europe, should be borrowed from banks at interest.
Banks can create this money on their keyboards electronically. The government could do the same, but relinquishes this privilege to the privatized banking sector. As Modern Monetary Theory explains, a central bank can simply print the money that is needed to fuel economic growth. But the financial sector has captured the hearts and minds of central bankers, from Europe to the United States.
The problem is these banks don’t lend money to create means of production or livelihood. They don’t lend money to build factories. Banks lend money against assets already in existence, mainly real estate, houses, buildings, and also companies – and to corporate raiders to buy other companies on credit. So, the effect of this bank lending has been to inflate the price of real estate, because a house or a building is worth whatever a bank will lend against it.
The financial sector has become less and less productive, and more predatory. It has prevented European governments from having a central bank that directs deficit spending into the real economy. Only the banks and financial sector, the elite One Percent, are supported, as in the United States. Ten trillion dollars ’s put into the economy, mainly into the stock and financial markets, the bond market and the real estate market, but not into production.
The Eurozone does not do that. This means that the governments of Europe are not really democratic. Europe is governed by the European Central Bank. It works for its customers, the commercial banks. And the commercial bankers say: “We want to starve the economy of credit, so that we, the commercial bankers, can create the money to lend to our customers, and charge interest and financial fees. Our own financial speculation that all the growth, the surplus that Europe produces, should be turned over to the financial sector.” That’s what the Europeans have voted for. In effect they vote for lower wages, cutbacks in public services and shorter pensions. These living standards are threatened by the way in which the financial dimension of the coronavirus crisis is being managed.
You’re seeing a disparity between Italy and the Mediterranean countries and northern Europe. Countries need credit in order to recover. But the Eurozone refuses to provide the credit that is needed to get through the coronavirus suspension of economic activity and its aftermath of unpaid debts, rents and other obligations. The Eurozone is treating Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain just like President Trump here in America is treating the Democratic states like New York, New Jersey and California. The effect is to create a deflationary crisis. That makes it impossible to pay the backlog of debts and rents.
We may see a power grab creating something much like feudalism. In the United States it’s suggested that for student loans, or for loans to wage-earners collateralized by the debtor promising to pay 10%, 20%, 25% of everything they earn for the rest of their life. This is like a tax, but it’s really a form of debt peonage. It’s a payment much like medieval serfs had to turn over their economic surplus to their landlords. Well, now the wage-earners, small business and even big business in America and in Europe are going to have to turn over even more of their earnings to the financial sector in order to survive.
This may seem a crazy way to organize society, but it is how Western civilization has been structured on the basis of protecting creditor rights, not debtor solvency and overall social balance and continuity. Unlike non-Western societies, unlike even China today, credit in Europe and America is privatized. The supply of credit, like money, should be a public utility. Just like public health should be a public utility. Just like roads and communication should be a public utility. Europe has let it be privatized in an aggressive, predatory way.
As long as governments subordinate the will of democratic voters to whatever the central banks tell you, you are not a democracy. Jeffrey earlier mentioned what Aristotle thought. Aristotle explained a kind of eternal political triangle. He said that many constitutions appeared to be democratic, but they’re, actually, oligarchic. That’s because democracies tend to evolve into an oligarchy. The oligarchy makes itself hereditary into an aristocratic ruling class. Finally, thank heavens, some of the wealthy aristocrats fight among themselves and they try – like Cleisthenes did in Athens as early as 406 BC – to take the masses into their camp, and become democratic and order to mobilize support in the citizens against the other aristocrats. Then you have a democratic revolution, but democracy once again develops into oligarchy. That’s the eternal political triangle that Aristotle described.
And that’s what you have in Europe. It’s not a democracy anymore; it’s an oligarchy making itself into the same kind of hereditary aristocracy that occurred in classical antiquity. Many of you hoped that Europe had overthrown the aristocracy after World War I when you did indeed get rid of the kings and royalty. But you opened the way for a new kind of oligarchy turning itself into a hereditary aristocracy, that of finance. That’s the task before you to solve. The only thing I can say is that, perhaps, this crisis has indeed catalysed this basic internal contradiction and will create a response that deals with the pandemic by cancelling debts and de-privatizing the banking sector.
By Michael Hudson, Thursday, June 4, 2020 Interviews No tags Permalink
A podcast with journalist Paul Jay.
The Federal Reserve is directly buying stocks, bonds, junk bonds, mortgages, junk mortgages, all to prop up the value of assets owned by the top 5%. This does not spur much new production or create jobs. Michael Hudson joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news podcast
Transcript
Paul Jay
Hi, my name’s Paul Jay, and welcome to theAnalysis.news podcast. Michael Hudson is a distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and also a professor at Peking University in Beijing. He’s written or edited over 10 books on international finance, economic history and the history of economic thought. His newest book is J is for Junk Economics and most recently, And Forgive Them Their Debts, which Martin Wolf of the Financial Times cited as a Book of the Year for 2018.
Thanks for joining us, Michael.
Michael Hudson
It’s good to be here, Paul.
Paul Jay
So with so much bad news in the world, and when the stock market crashed in late February, why didn’t it stay crashed? Two months after the crash to 14 month lows, So at a certain point, almost historic lows, the Nasdaq composite is closing in now on all time highs. Why?
Michael Hudson
There is only one reason for a stock or bond prices to go up. And that’s because of the flow of funds into the stock market. What had been supporting the stock market for the last 12 years was very largely stock buybacks by companies using their revenue to sort of close down their business, disinvest and buy their own stocks to at least keep the prices up. Well, what’s flowing into the market right now? Obviously, it’s not corporate profits buying their own stocks, and it’s certainly not popular money coming into the market by small investors thinking that stocks are going to earn more. All this money is coming into the market from the 10 trillion dollar bailout via the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve is going out directly and is buying stocks, bonds, junk bonds, mortgages, junk mortgages, all to prop up the value of assets.
Now, when it’s putting this money into the stock market, it’s buying stocks that are already issued and have long since —the proceeds have been spent on building factories or enterprises or as means of making money. So none of this bailout money, none of this 10 trillion going into the stock market has any effect at all on the real economy of production and consumption. It’s solely to support the assets that are held almost eighty five percent by the wealthiest 10 percent of the economy.
So the Fed has revived the stock market downturn. It’s come up, and what it said is, “Folks, you can bail out of the stock market, give us your junk bonds. That’s sort of like the Statue of Liberty for wealthy people. Give us your stocks. Sell your bonds. We’ll buy them all up at Federal Reserve expense and will purchase them. And we’ll also do our own forward buying to manipulate the stock market by promising to buy our stock, so the higher price in the forward market. So that’s going to create a speculative demand for stock. So the speculative demand for stocks by Federal Reserve manipulation and the actual flow of funding money into the stock market from the government has been pushing it back up, giving the illusion of prosperity, at least for the 10 percent.
Paul Jay
But are they actually straightforwardly buying stocks to they’re buying corporate debt, which allows them to go buy their own stocks and also just making so much money, so cheap people can buy stock?But is the Fed actually straightforwardly buying stock?
Michael Hudson
That’s what it said it’s been doing. Or it’s buying packages. It’s buying—We don’t know exactly what it is buying because it doesn’t have the report. That’s why the Treasury left the Fed to do something that doesn’t have to be followed carefully. It took up Randy Wray at Bard College’s Libby Institute about a year just to untangle what the Fed had done after 2008 and 2009 with the big Obama bailout of quantitative easing. So we’re not going to know for later what’s been happening. But certainly corporations are not buying their own stocks now because that would make that that would be a political disaster and they just wouldn’t get more bailout money. So the money is coming almost entirely from speculators or from the Fed promising to buy what speculators buy at a higher price later on. So it’s manipulating the foreign exchange market just like the Leibor market was manipulated. Almost all the financial markets these days are manipulated by high finance in cahoots with the Central Bank. And if you don’t have that central bank backing, then there’s not going to be the flow of funds going into the markets.
And certainly small investors are not buying. Regular investors have already been getting out of the stock market for quite a few years now. It’s only for our professionals, often for a computer trading gets into the act. It’s an insider’s game that is basically fueled by the Central Bank.
Paul Jay
So you wrote an article called, The Coming Financial Horror, that the Federal Reserve Chairman Powell is essentially promoting a fantasy that there’s going to be relatively quick recovery, although recently he was saying it’s not going to be quite so quick as people thought. But this stimulus program they have, whether it’s propping up the stock market or buying corporate debt or funneling money directly to corporations—Is it going to have any effect that’s longer term than what it seems to be, because one can see that if they try to get the economy going again, and they haven’t done more on the side of consumer demand, who the heck’s going to buy us off to get the economy going again?
Michael Hudson
Well, now you’ve suddenly changed to another topic, to the economy. Obviously, the stock market isn’t the economy. The real fiction and what the Federal Reserve, Powell was saying, was that somehow a recovery in the stock market means a recovery in the economy. And all it means is that the wealthy investors are bailing out of the market and moving into their gated communities and, essentially, they’re pulling out. The whole stock buyback program of the last 10 years has been disinvesting. All of the insiders and the big investors know that the game is over.
That’s why there’s so much talk of moving to New Zealand. But the Coronavirus has, all of a sudden, provided a wonderful opportunity for the 10 percent. It’s enabled them to have an excuse for a huge bailout and an excuse to essentially make, enable them to get out of stocks, get out of bonds and avoid the crisis that’s coming, leading the Federal Reserve and the suckers, as they would say, holding the bag when the economy collapses. Obviously, there’s going to be a collapse, and there was going to be a collapse even before the Coronavirus. Everybody was talking about the decline in oil prices, which is not only going to hit the fracking companies and the oil companies with the low oil prices, but it’s also leading to very large defaults by Third World countries. Raw materials prices are going down. So they’re going to be a lot of third world debt defaults. They’re going to be a lot of breaks in the chain of payments.
But what the Corona virus did was somehow give an excuse for the government to create all of this money, saying it was going to be for small business. Well, obviously, it has not been for small business. And, you know, just think what the Fed could have done with this 10 trillion dollars. It could have put money, revive the economy by putting the money into building the means of production. Mainly in this case what’s needed is infrastructure rebuilding things like the New York City subway so people can get to work without their being so crowded that you’re probably going to catch a new virus when the regular service begins again. They could have begun rebuilding the economy, but none of this money has gone into the real economy at all. So the economy’s been left holding the bag. But at least the Fed has used this money. They did notice that they don’t call it taxpayer money for the bailout. “Taxpayer money”—-they only use that phrase when it’s for real production, or to support employment or social spending. But when when the same money is created by the same process, the support of the stock and bond market, that’s never called taxpayer money. But it’s all the same thing. So you see that all of the lobbyists have sort of been waiting with a wish list of what they would like the government to do to take all of the bad loans off their hands. And the thing to realize is that the one percent, 10 percent realizes that the game’s over and they’re trying to—
Paul Jay
What do you mean when you say the game’s is over? What do you mean the game’s over?
Michael Hudson
The idea that the debts can be paid. The idea that somehow you can put money aside, and the money will grow for you. It will give you interest. The money will somehow be pushed into the stock market by buybacks without much income and push up stock prices. The idea that you can put in a million dollars and have the money go up through stocks or bonds or real estate without having the economy grow at all. That was a game because it’s not realistic.And it was a decoupling of the financial and real estate markets from the economy, and that whole decoupling—now, finally, you can only decouple so far before the fact that the rents are not being paid, the taxes are not being paid. The states and localities are having a huge tax shortfall that is forcing them to cut back services. And the commercial real estate; half of the Empire State Building tenants have not paid their rents for March and April. About maybe 40 percent of tenants, generally in the New York City commercial buildings, restaurants, storefronts—they’re just not paying. So everybody’s expecting a break in the chain of payments. And at a certain point, the government can’t simply keep the pretense up when the economy’s plunging, and the stock markets are going up. People are going to realize, “wait a minute. Why isn’t this money creation being spent to actually revive the real economy?
Paul Jay
So what happens when, in theory, this virus comes to an end? Oh, that, who knows? It could be year, two, three. But even before the end of the virus, these back grants, as you say are piling up. Debt servicing is piling up. At some point there’s going to be mass evictions. As you’ve written, mass evictions, foreclosures, bankruptcies are going to be inevitable. You’re advocating that these deaths should simply be written off. Is that what you’re proposing? And can you imagine them actually doing that?
Well, they’re not going to be paid one way or another. That’s the important thing. Imagine the 25 million unemployed. They’re not getting paychecks. How are they getting by? The only way they can get by is to run up their credit card debt. And by running it up, they’re going to be not paying the monthly usual charge. They’re going to be subject now to interest rates on the credit card that go up now from, maybe 20 percent to twenty nine percent or even more.
Michael Hudson
Companies are reported in New York City just to be packing up and moving out of their offices, others taking all the assets they can, leading to the kind of commercial real estate collapse that people were talking about in 2008. So what’s happening now is really the end of the whole Obama bailout, the whole depression. It was all, it was never possible to have a recovery of the economy, leaving the debts in place that existed in 2008. And the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing of about four point six trillion managed to sustain it to the coronavirus time. And then that’s left up. All of these people who don’t have a job, you can just imagine what the situation is. It’s already about half of Americans reported that they don’t have four hundred dollars available if there’s an emergency like a health emergency, and they’re reported living paycheck to paycheck. Well, if you’re living paycheck to paycheck, and you don’t have a paycheck, you can just imagine what’s going to happen. The homeless problem is going to increase.
Normally, there would be state and local spending to somehow revive the economy or make work jobs. But that’s not going to happen because the revenue is all falling. In New York and other states the quarterly, the real estate tax is going to be due in just a few weeks in June. And obviously, a lot of companies think, well, if we’re not going to be able to collect the rents because our tenants are moving out, we might as well take a risk and not pay the tax now because we may have a problem with the banks.
The banks are not lending money to the landlords, THE WORST THREAT ??? And they’re not lending money to the businesses that have been closed down so they can pay the landlords, so the landlords can pay their mortgages to the banks. So right down the line, there’s going to be this break in the chain of payments and nobody can come up with any scenario whereby the debts can be paid. Now, the question then is, how are they not going to be paid if they’re not going to be paid by large foreclosures?
The New York Times today just said that Goldman Sachs is up, foreclosed on 10,000 homes. If they’re not going to be paid by foreclosures, then the only thing to do is to bail out the debtors by wiping out their debts. Or the Federal Reserve could have even created the money to pay the debts to give to the banks and save them. That’s what Obama had promised to do in 2008. Somehow he was going to enable the victims of the junk mortgages to pay the banks while they write down the value of the mortgage, the real value of the property, not the fictitious value. None of that was done. So right now, if the debts can’t be paid and you have foreclosures, then you’re going to have a very sharp concentration of property in the country and also home ownership. You, you’ve had homeownership rates dropped from about 58 percent in 2008 to about 51 percent now. That’s more than a 10 percent drop in the proportion of Americans that own their own homes. You’re going to have a concentration of homes and companies that have been buying them up. Like Blackstone has been a very major company buying up foreclosed properties. Goldman Sachs bought up a lot of foreclosed properties. You’re going to have, basically, the financial centers buying up real estate and turning the economy into a landlord ridden economy, rather than an economy that is of home ownership, which is what made America’s middle class wealthy by giving it most of the networth that it had.
Paul Jay
And that’s going to happen, not just in the real estate sector, but every sector. The concentration of ownership, which is already at ridiculous levels, it’s going to be extraordinary. I mean, small businesses to a large extent, are going to be wiped out. And it’s going to be a field day for anybody with cash to pick up these sectors of the economy at a bargain basement price.
Michael Hudson
Well, that’s why some of the stocks are going up. Wal-Mart stocks are going up.
The big store chains have seen their stocks going up more than anyone else’s because the smaller stores, Macy’s and Sears and the other, J.C. Penney that went bankrupt last week. These companies, the retail sector was very largely bought out by predatory capital groups, private capital groups that essentially used them to loot them. The strategy was you’d buy a store. They tried to do this with McDonald’s, for instance. The idea was to buy a company. You immediately break it into two parts. You have the company sell the real estate to another part of another group that you’ve created. The group gets the real estate.The store that you’ve just bought out, instead of owning its property, signs a long term lease to pay a huge amount of rent to this real estate part that you’ve just created by splitting up the company. And you’ve created a value based on the prospective rental store income. And you pay yourself a management fee, you charge interest, you charge all sorts of other fees. And this is what is driven almost all of these stories. Toys R US, right down the line it’s driven them all under. Now, you’re going to have something like that occurring outside of the retail store industry for other sectors of the economy, as you point out. One sector after another. The companies that are struggling during this three month abatement are, all of a sudden, not going to be able to come up with the rent in three months or, supposedly your restaurant, for example. Restaurants your biggest expense is going to be the rent to the landlord. But if, you haven’t done any business for three months and you realize that if you go back to work and the landlord says, “OK, you’ll just pay it off in a year or two.” Well, then you realize that, wait a minute, all of the profit, all of the money that was paid to management is really just going to go for the landlord. And we’re not going to make any money at all ——left over after we pay the current rent and the back rent to the landlord, it’s best just to walk away, close down and move somewhere else. So there will be musical chairs as restaurants are closed down, stiff their suppliers, stiff anybody they can and hope that they may or may not start business somewhere else. But it’s going to be awfully hard to get bank credit once you stiffed the landlord and walked away from the bank financing. So there’s just not going to be financing for anyone except the very large and richest financial companies.
Paul Jay
So, when one does this sort of projection forward., you know, a few months, a couple years, it gets worse and worse unless there’s a massive public social expenditure on infrastructure programs of various types, but at a scale that’s more than anything even Roosevelt imagined during the New Deal. And that leads to, you know, a kind of development of a public sector that the right wing of the elites. I shouldn’t say the right wing. All the elites, essentially, don’t want to see that kind of expenditure because it leads to people saying, “Well, if we’re spending all the public money, then why shouldn’t the public own this stuff?“
Michael Hudson
Well, that’s exactly where Wall Street was way ahead of you there. They knew that there would be pressure for just what you’re suggesting. The reasonable thing, if you really want to restore prosperity, is to develop an infrastructure for public spending programs, public transportation, to rebuild the roads and transports that have fallen apart, the parks. And so by giving this 10 trillion dollars all through the stock and bond market and for real estate mortgages. And by giving it all to the financial sector now, they can say, “We’re broke. We don’t have any money for social spending. We’ve already spent it. Look at how big the deficit is. And this is exactly what Mitch McConnell said to the states. He said the states have a tax shortfall. Well, let them take the money that’s in their pension funds. Let them lose the pension funds. Let them not pay any of the public sector workers that have agreed to get pensions in exchange for decade after decade of slow wage growth, saying, “Yes, we’d rather have a pension than a slow wage growth.
Now that that you tricked them into taking a long term promise, do what Donald Trump does, break the promise, break the deal and say, „I’m sorry, you’re not going to get anything. We’re broke. And we gave all the money to the 10 percent. And if you don’t like it, vote for the other party.“ When you have the same donor class behind each party. So basically, there’s not going to be any money to spend into the real economy. It’s all been spent on the financial sector.
what happenw\ed was the the right wingers can now say we’ve got already spent the money. Look at how large the deficit is. And you’ve already had Mitch McConnell come out and say, „ Well, the states that are known are getting their tax revenues have a solution. Let them raid their pension funds, let them break even and pay the bondholders what they owe, and the other suppliers by essentially borrowing or emptying out the pension.
So what you’ve had, is he wants the states to act like Donald Trump has acted: Break the long term deal. For decades, public service workers have accepted low wage growth in exchange for pensions. They’re looking long term. They say, „OK, we won’t increase our wage demands, but we want the security that when we retire, we’re going to get a good pension.“ That’s what made public sector work attractive. But now that the workers have already worked at a low price and the same thing in the corporate sector, taking low wages for years now, the pensions that they were promised are going to be used instead to pay the bondholders because the states have to make a choice. And the states are going to choose the financial sector to the financial sector. The workers and capital and agriculture are just overhead. All of the real money is supposed to go to the financial sector or the fire sector. So all of this money that has been ostensibly saved, is really going to be just emptied out and given to the bondholders.
Paul Jay
But there’s a political calculation here. Just a few months away from the presidential election, if they don’t do something by the time the election comes around, it’s already a whole sections of the working class that never knew what poverty was, are sinking into it. And by the time election comes along whole sections of the American population are going to be in desperate straits. And this is going to doom the Trump presidency. They‘re going to have to do something.
Michael Hudson
No. Well, Trump will try to blame it on the Democrats. He’ll say, „Give me control of Congress so that we can pass a law to get America back to work and make America great again. He will blame it on other Democrats and say that he didn’t cause the Corona virus. Of course, what he did——-And he can point out that the ten trillion dollar bailout was unanimous. Democrats and Republicans. The Democrats, Nancy Pelosi in Congress, which is in charge of writing the Cares Bailout Act, could have said, „Well, we want to make sure that the states and cities are bailed out, so the public services are not cut back and so they don’t have to raid the pension funds and screw all of the retirees as other Republicans want.
But the Democrats agreed with the Republicans to basically throw the workers under the bus, throw the retirees under the bus, throw the pensioners under the bus and focus on their donor class, the financial sector, the bondholders and the stockholders.
Paul Jay
In Canada and most of Europe, maybe all of Europe, the state subsidies have gone to businesses to continue paying wages, even if people are at home. Many countries are paying up to 80 percent, subsidizing 80 percent of workers wages. So, in fact, people aren’t suffering in the same way. And then when they want to start the economy again, everyone just goes back to work. And the U.S. didn’t didn’t do that.
Michael Hudson
Neither party did that because no politician in either party advocated that. Nobody is saying that. That is sort of the forbidden thing to say. And if you try to say it, people will say, „Well, if you don’t like it here, why don’t you go and live in Denmark?„
And so Trump will say, „Well, it’s true that the virus happened on my watch. I’m the guy who can get rid of it. Wouldn’t you rather have me than Who? Whoever the Democrats end up putting up?“ Wouldn‘t you rather have me, a businessman trying to put America on its two feet, just like a real estate company would be rescued, instead of living like a socialist in a socialist country?These are the people who wanted to close down the economy even more. I Trump,I’m the guy who opened up the economy. My opponents want to close it down. That‘s not going to make you recover. I’m the guy who can make you recover.
Paul Jay
But the polling is showing almost everywhere, that most people think that the economy is being opened up in certain states far too early. And in the states where they’re doing it, they’re getting spikes in Corona virus. So I’m not so sure that argument’s going to work for Trump. But let me ask you a question. Let’s assume I’m right and Trump isn’t going to win because I’m betting he’s not. But let’s say Biden does win and the phone rings, which is highly unlikely. But let’s say it is for the sake of the Simental argument or puzzle here. And they call Michael Hudson and ask, „OK, we’ve been listening to your interviews. And what do you think we should do now that we’ve become taken over? Let’s, for the sake of arguments, say they actually take the White House and both houses of Congress. What should they do?
Michael Hudson
Well, I’ll say the Federal Reserve has been buying 10 trillion dollars worth of stocks. Let’s sell off all these stocks so that it’ll have enough money to begin funding state and local public sector investments. Now, selling all the stocks, of course, will crush the stock market.
The good thing about not bailing out the landlords, about not bailing out the stock market is the banks that have made big bets, especially on insuring third world debt, are going to go broke. And I would say now this time when Citibank, Bank of America and Wells Fargo become insolvent, wiping out its net worth as they did in 2008, this time take them into the public sector, make them public banks, and as a public banks, let’s not lend for corporate takeover loans. Let’s not lend money to corporate raiders to outsource and downsize companies. Let’s make lend for actual for loans that will actually rebuild the economy with tangible means of production, tangible infrastructure and back to the real economy instead. I think Mr. Biden would say, „Well, how much money did you contribute to my campaign? Oh, I see, well, thank you very much, sir.“
Paul Jay
I don’t think there’s any amount of money you could contribute to the Biden campaign that would get him to do that program.
Michael Hudson
I think that’s right. His mindset—
Paul Jay
Well, let’s take it somewhat more incrementally. But certainly there’s some banks that could be, that will be at the point of bankruptcy that the federal government could buy.
Insolvency. In other words, they would make bad bets. A lot of banks—-it’s very much like when the Greek bonds were collapsing and Greece was going to default five years ago under Syriza. Obama and Tim Geithner went to Europe and told the European banks. „Well, you know, we know that the biggest bondholders are the German and the French banks, but they’re not going to lose a penny because they bought credit default insurance from the American banks. And the American banks and especially Citibank, are going to go under. And if they go under, we are going to retaliate against you in Europe, and we’re going to drive you under.“ So the threats they made them was, they forced Europe to essentially tear Greece apart and impose a chronic depression on it. Well, right now, you have the same thing. The banks have made all sorts of loans and guarantees that cannot be paid without Federal Reserve support. And so the question is the whole financial model of the last 12 years, you could say that model since 1980, the model of getting rich purely financially without any real economy growing, downsizing the economy, outsourcing its production to China and other Asian countries, basically making the GDP, and for the bottom 95 percent of the population going down for the last 12 years.
The banks, basically the financial model of getting rich, purely financial engineering instead of industrial engineering hasn’t worked. The idea that the economy can grow and give all of the growth in GDP since 2008 only to the top five percent of the population. For 95 percent of the population the economy is already shrinking. Well if it’s already shrinking for 12 years, imagine the plunge that it’s going to take now. There is no way that an economy can grow when you’re doing to the American population what Europe and US diplomacy, did to Greece: mass unemployment lifespans shortened, suicide rates rose and the Greek economy is now in utter stagnation while the wealthy Greeks have taken their money and run. They put it in Switzerland. So Greece, owed 50 billion euros to banks in Italy and France and Germany. But 50 billion euros were already on according to Christine Lagarde, the IMF already stashed away in Switzerland by tax avoiders. Now, obviously, in order to revive the economy here, you have to have a different model of growth. And instead of a financial model of growth, you need to do a number of things. You stop encouraging debt pyramiding because all the debt pyramiding is what has been shrinking the economy and leading to debt deflation. You would remove the tax deductibility of interest. That’s an obvious thing. You’d remove all of the special tax advantages that the real estate and the financial sector get like pretended depreciation on buildings again and again and again. Donald Trump says that he loves depreciation, and that’s why he’s never had to pay income tax. Insurance companies are not paying right now. The insurance companies are all simply refusing to pay the restaurants and the other economies for interruption of business because they said, „Well, we listed interruption of business for a number of causes, but you didn’t put the Corona virus on. You’ll have to sue us.“ Well, when you sue an insurance company, they get to take the entire claim off their book as if it’s a current payment and if it takes five years to get your case in the court to collect on the insurance, that costs about fifty thousand dollars in legal fees.
I’ve gone through this. And then at the end of five years, the insurance company figure, they will have made back enough money just by speculation so that they don’t have to spend an extra penny to repay. It’s all free tax write off money. So in order to re restore this financial life growth, you have to change the tax code and all of the gimmicks that have made financial speculation more profitable than direct investment and actually producing goods and services.
Paul Jay
Let’s assume that none of this gets done. Not much of it gets done. What happens in China now? Is China in a better position to recover? Can China recover if the American market is so depressed? And if China can recover in a way with somewhat decoupling from the United States, if that’s possible, what does that do to the geopolitics?
Michael Hudson
Well, China can recover for two reasons. Number one, most debts ultimately are owned to the public, to the government. The government runs the banks. They’re not upright, private banks, except to decide what to do. The banks are owned by the governments or the government. When a corporation in China is unable to pay the debt, the government doesn’t say, „OK, we’re going to have to close you down and sell you to the cheapest bidder and let some American buy you out at a distressed price.
The government will simply say,“ We’re going to write down the debt that we’ve given you so that we want to keep you in business. And we want to keep your employees in business so others not see the debt problem in China because the debts are forgiven when they can’t pay. That’s normally what socialist governments do. Secondly, others already for the last five years, I’ve had discussions in China about how to re reorient their economy for the Chinese people. The Chinese people, although they now have housing, it’s not the best housing in the world. And the idea is, they say, „Why should we use all of this factory capacity to export, to support the US, to export to the US and earn dollars? What do we need the dollars for? We’re just recycling the dollars into loans to the U.S. Treasury to hold it in bonds instead of getting foreign exchange and just acting as a workshop to the United States. Why don’t we act as a workshop to the Chinese people? We don’t need export income anymore. We’ve got the Belt Road Initiative. We’re developing markets throughout the Near East, Russia, Europe and China. We don’t need the U.S., but most of all, we have enough savings in our foreign exchange reserves and gold that we can begin to pay our workers more and create a thriving domestic market.
Well, one of the problems they had is what the Chinese do when they earn more money. The first thing they want to do is to buy a car. They’re buying a lot of Mercedes now. And there are already too many cars in China. So the problem China has is how can we make our factories work and produce more goods and services for China? And that aren’t cars and won’t add to pollution and won’t distort matters, won‘t distort the air?
That is what their current plan is. They’re decoupling from the US. And they’ve made a decision with Russia, Iran, other countries to essentially decouple their economy from the US and essentially try to write down military spending and unnecessary foreign spending as much as possible.
Paul Jay
So if that happens and it begins to work for China, one would think it fuels those forces within the United States that want to get more aggressive with China, even militarily. Steve Bannon has openly advocated a military confrontation in the South China Sea. When I mentioned this several times on air on the Analysis, when the Trump administration defense secretary was explaining to Congress why they needed such a record high military budget, he justified it with three words China, China, China. They’re already fairly poised in an aggressive fashion, but if the American economy is really down the toilet, and the Chinese begins to recover, it seems to me that that situation gets even more dangerous.
China doesn’t seem that worried about it. Because what can happen? The American naval presence is largely large aircraft carriers and ships that are very open and are really not a good weapon to have in the modern world. They’re very exposed. All the Americans really can do is threat. And you remember when Mao called them a paper tiger? Well, I think China still thinks that the US Army is a paper tiger. And it can make threats, but it can’t really follow through. And if there were any thought of it following through, China would make overtures to its neighboring countries and pretty much be able to share the China Sea and its oil rights with them. And very quickly trade almost the equivalent of Chinese Monroe Doctrine regarding the United States. So the US knows that it’s on the way out, that there’s very little that it can do militarily. And all of you, the U.S. can’t ever invade a country and there are no troops. Nobody’s going to invade China. You can’t defeat a country unless you invade it. All you can do is drop bombs and try to destroy it. But America’s very exposed in the east and so is Japan that hosts American troops in Okinawa. There are just too many exposures that the Americans have that China doesn’t have so much.
Paul Jay
So you think a lot of this rhetoric about China, China. China is just spending a lot of money on arms.
Michael Hudson
It’s not scaring the Chinese, and it’s all meant to just scare the Chinese.
And they’re like the Russians who say, „Well, what are you really going to do?“ And there is no scenario. I understand that the War College here tried to work out all sorts of scenarios. There’s no scenario in which the US comes out on top.
Paul Jay
Without leading to nuclear war, which leads to nobody coming out on top.
Right. I mean, presumably there could be nuclear war, but that wouldn’t benefit anyone. So, I mean, I suggested to China, „Well, now that Trump has raised tariffs 25 percent on Chinese imports, why don’t you impose a countervailing 25 percent export there? Told Trump that you want to help, and you want to help raise Chinese prices and make America more competitive. So you’re increasing your export tax and vastly increasing the prices that Chinese goods would cost to Americans. America is going to be left in as a high cost economy. And there is no way that the United States here can replicate Chinese industry without spending on rebuilding a generation of rebuilding, without higher living standards, without essentially any kind of political acquiescence by the people. So the America’s disinvested physically in its factories and in the industry and also financially by the stock buybacks that have left companies up without the cash.
So American industry is all debt ridden and pyramided. And China’s isn’t because the government can always write down the debt and keep its industry going. So you essentially have a conflict between a productive financial system in China, very much like the Germans before World War One and an unproductive, predatory financial system in the United States. That’s added the cost and overhead and enormous wealth for one percent of the population by impoverishing the 99 percent and preventing its living standards from rising. And by forcing labor to survive only by going deeper and deeper into debt, leading ultimately to a grand default.
Paul Jay
All right. Thanks very much for joining us, Michael.
Michael Hudson
It’s good to be here.
Paul Jay
And thank you for joining us on the Analysis.News podcast.
Hi, my name’s Paul Jay, and welcome to the Analysis Dog News podcast. Michael Hudson is a distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and also a professor at Peking University in Beijing. He’s written or edited over 10 books on international finance, economic history and the history of economic thought. His newest book is J is for Junk Economics and most recently and Forgive Them Their Debts, which Martin Wolf of the Financial Times cited as a Book of the Year for 2018.
Thanks for joining us, Michael.
It’s good to be here. Paul. So with so much bad news in the world, when the stock market crashed in late February, why didn’t it stay? Crashed two months after the crash to 14 month lows. At a certain point, almost historic lows. The Nasdaq composite is closing in now on all time highs. Why? There is only one reason for a stock or bond prices to go up. And that’s because of the flow of funds into the stock market.
What had been supporting the stock market for the last 12 years was very largely stock buybacks by companies using their revenue to sort of close down their business, disinvest and buy their own stocks to at least keep the prices up. Well, what’s flowing into the market right now? Obviously, it’s not corporate profits buying their own stocks, and it’s certainly not popular money coming into the market by small investors thinking that stocks are going to earn more. All this money is coming into the market from the 10 trillion dollar bailout via the Federal Reserve.
The Federal Reserve is going out directly and is buying stocks, bonds, junk bonds, mortgages, junk mortgages, all to prop up the value of assets. Now, when one putting this money into the stock market, it’s buying stocks that are already issued and have long since the proceeds have been spent on building factories or enterprises or it means of making money. So none of this bailout money, none of this 10 trillion going into the stock market has any effect at all on the real economy of production and consumption.
It’s solely to support the assets that are held almost eighty five percent by the wealthiest 10 percent of the economy. So the Fed has revived the stock market downturn. It’s come up. And what it said is, folks, you can bail out of the stock market, give us your junk bonds. That’s sort of like the Statue of Liberty for wealthy people. Give us your stocks. Sell your bonds. We’ll buy them all up at Federal Reserve expense and will purchase them.
And we’ll also do our own forward buying to manipulate the stock market by promising to buy stock so that higher price in the forward market. So that’s going to create a speculative demand for stock. So the speculative demand for stocks by Federal Reserve manipulation and the actual flow of funding money into the stock market from the government has been pushing it back up, giving the illusion of prosperity, at least for the 10 percent. But are they actually straightforwardly buying stocks to buying corporate debt, which allows them to go buy their own stocks and also just making so much money, so cheap people can buy stock?
But is the Fed actually straightforwardly buy stock?
That’s what it said it’s been doing, or it’s buying packages it’s buying. We don’t know exactly what it is buying because it doesn’t have the report. That’s why the Treasury left the Fed to do something that doesn’t have to be followed carefully. It took up Randy Ray at the. At Bard College is Leiby Institute. About a year just to untangle what the Fed had done after 2008 and 2009 with the big Obama bailout of quantitative easing. So we’re not going to know for later.
What’s been happening.
But certainly corporations are not buying their own stocks now because that would make that that would be a political disaster.
And they just wouldn’t get more bailout money. So the money is coming almost entirely from speculators or from the Fed promising to buy what speculators buy at a higher price later on. So it’s it’s manipulating the foreign exchange market just like the labor market was manipulated. Almost all the financial markets these days are manipulated by high finance in cahoots with the central bank. And if you don’t have that central bank backing, then there’s not going to be the flow of funds going into the markets.
And certainly small investors are not buying. Regular investors have already been getting out of the stock market for quite a few years now. It’s only for our professionals, often for a computer trading gets it gets into the act. It’s it’s an insider’s game that is basically fueled by the central bank. So you wrote an article called The Coming Financial Horror that the Federal Reserve Chairman Powell is essentially promoting a fantasy that there’s going to be relatively quick recovery, although recently he was saying it’s not going to be quite so quick as people thought.
But is this stimulus program they have, whether it’s propping up the stock market or buying corporate debt or funneling money directly to corporations. Is it going to have any effect?
That’s longer term than what seems to be, because one can see that if they try to get the economy going again and they haven’t done more on the side of consumer demand.
Who the heck’s going to buy stuff to get the economy going again?
Well, now you’ve all sudden changed the topic to the economy. Obviously, the stock market isn’t the economy. The the real fiction and what the Federal Reserve power was saying was that somehow a recovery in the stock market means a recovery in the economy. And all it means is that the wealthy investors are bailing out of the market and moving into their gated communities and essentially they’re pulling out. The whole stock buyback program of the last 10 years has been disinvesting all of the insiders.
And the big investors know that the game is over. That’s why there’s so much talk of moving to New Zealand. But the coronavirus has all of a sudden provided a wonderful opportunity for the 10 percent. It’s big. It’s enabled them to have an excuse for a huge bailout and an excuse to essentially make enable them to get out of stocks, get out of bonds and avoid the crisis that’s coming, leading the Federal Reserve and the suckers, as they would say, holding the bag when the economy collapses.
Obviously, there’s going to be a collapse and there was going to be a collapse even before the corona virus. Everybody was talking about the decline in oil prices, which is not only going to hit the fracking companies and the oil companies with the low oil prices, but it’s also leading to very large defaults by Third World countries. Raw materials prices are going down. So they’re going to be a lot of third world debt defaults. They’re going to be a lot of breaks in the chain of payments.
But what’s the coronavirus did was somehow give an excuse for the government to create all of this money, saying it was going to be for small business. Well, obviously, it has not been for small business. And, you know, just think what the Fed could have done with this 10 trillion dollars. It could have put money, revive the economy by putting the money into building means of production, mainly in this case. What’s needed is infrastructure rebuilding.
Things like the New York City subway so people can get to work without their being so crowded that you’re probably going to catch a new virus when the regular service begins again. They could have begun rebuilding the economy, but none of none of this money has gone into the real economy at all. So the economy’s been left holding the bag. But at least the Fed has used this money.
They did notice that they don’t call it taxpayer money for the for the bailout taxpayer money. They only use that phrase when it’s for real production or for to support employment or social spending. But when it’s to the same money is created by the same process, the support of the stock and bond market, that’s never called taxpayer money. But it’s all the same thing. So you see that all of the lobbyists have sort of been waiting with a wish list of what they would like the government to do to take all of the bad loans off the hands.
And the thing to realize is that the one percent, 10 percent realizes that the game’s over and they’re trying to disrupt.
What do you mean when you say the game is over? What do you mean the game’s over?
The idea that the debts can be paid. The idea that somehow you can put money aside and the money will grow before you buy it will give you interest. The money will somehow be pushed into the stock market by buybacks without much income and push up stock prices. The idea that you can put in a million dollars and have the money go up through stocks or bonds or real estate without having the economy grow at all. That was a game because it’s not realistic.
And it is a decoupling of the financial.
And real estate markets from the economy and that whole decoupling. Now, finally, you can only decouple so far before the fact that the rents are not being paid. So taxes are not being paid. The states and localities are having a huge tax shortfall that is forcing them to cut back services. And the commercial real estate, half half of the Empire State Building tenants have not paid their rents for a March and April. About maybe 40 percent of tenants generally in the New York City for commercial buildings, restaurants as storefronts.
They’re just not paying. So everybody’s expecting a break in the chain of payments. And at a certain point, the government can’t simply keep the pretense up when the economy’s plunging and the stock markets are going up. People are going to realize, wait a minute, why isn’t this money creation being spent to actually revive the real economy? So what happens when, in theory this virus comes to an end? Oh, that who knows?
It could be year two three.
But even before the end of the virus, these back grants, as you say, are piling up. Debt servicing is piling up. At some point there’s going to be mass evictions. As you read, as you’ve written, mass evictions, foreclosures, bankruptcies are going to be inevitable. You’re advocating that these deaths should simply be written off.
Is that which is that you’re proposing? And can you imagine them actually doing that?
Well, they’re not going to be paid one way or another. That’s the important thing. Imagine the 25 million unemployed. They’re not getting paychecks. What how are they getting by? They’re the only way they can get by is to run up their credit card debt. And by running it up, they’re going to be not paying the monthly usual charge. They’re going to be so subject now to interest rates and the credit card that go up now from maybe 20 percent.
Twenty nine percent or even Marte’s companies are reported in New York City just to be packing up and moving out of their offices, other taking all the assets they can, leading to the kind of commercial real estate collapse that people were talking about in 2008. So what’s happening now is really the end of the whole Obama bailout, the whole depression. It was all it was never possible to have a recovery of the economy, leaving the debts in place that existed in 2008.
And the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing of about four point six trillion managed to sustain it to the coronavirus time. And then that’s left up. All of these people who don’t have a job, you can just imagine what the situation is. It’s already about half of Americans reported that they don’t have four hundred dollars available if there’s an emergency like a health emergency and they’re reported living paycheck to paycheck. Well, if you’re living paycheck to paycheck and you don’t have a paycheck, you can just imagine what’s going to happen.
The homeless problem is going to going to increase. Normally, there would be state and local spending to somehow revive the economy or make work jobs. But that’s not going to happen because the revenue is all falling off the floor in New York and other states. The quarterly the real estate tax is going to be due in just a few weeks in June. And obviously, a lot of companies think, well, we’re we’re not going to be able to collect the rents because our tenants are moving out.
We might as well take a risk or not pay the tax now because we may have a problem with the banks. The banks are not lending money to the landlords who are spread. And they’re not lending money to the businesses that have been closed down so they can pay the landlords so the landlords can pay their mortgages to the banks. So right down the line, there’s going to be this break in the chain of payments and nobody can come up with any scenario whereby the debts can be paid.
Now, the question then is how are they not going to be paid if they’re not going to be paid by large foreclosures? The New York Times today just said that Goldman Sachs is up, foreclosed on 10000 homes. If they’re not going to be paid by foreclosures, then. The only thing to do is to bail out the debtors by wiping out their debts. Or the Federal Reserve could have even created the money to pay the debts to go to the banks and save them.
That’s that’s what Obama had promised to do in 2008. Somehow he was going to enable the victims of the junk mortgages to pay the banks. So while they write down the value of the mortgage, the the real value of the property, not the fictitious value, none of that was done. So right now, if the debts can’t be paid and you have foreclosures, then you’re going to have a very sharp concentration of property in the country and also a home ownership.
You you you’ve had homeownership rates dropped from about 58 percent in 2008 to about 51 percent now. That’s more than a 10 percent drop in the proportion of Americans that own their own homes. You’re going to have a concentration of homes and companies that have been buying them up, like Blackstone has been a very major company buying up foreclosed properties. Goldman Sachs is bought up foreclosed properties. You’re going to have basically a financial centers buying up real estate and turning the economy into a.
Leard ridden economy rather than an economy that is of home ownership. Which is what made America’s middle class wealthy by giving it most of the most of the networth that it had.
And that’s going to happen not just in the real estate sector, but every sector, the concentration of ownership, which is already at ridiculous levels. It’s going to be extraordinary. I mean, small businesses to a large extent are going to be wiped out. And it’s going to be a field day for anybody with cash to pick up these sectors of the economy at a bargain basement price.
Well, that’s why that’s why some of the stocks are going up. Wal-Mart stocks are going up.
The big the big store chains have seen their stocks going up more than anyone else’s because the smaller stores, Macy’s and Sears and the other J.C. Penney that went bankrupt last week are these start these companies. The retail sector was very largely bought out by predatory cashed up capital groups that private capital groups that essentially used them to loot them. The strategy was you’d buy a store. They tried to do this with McDonald’s, for instance. The idea was to buy a company.
You immediately break it into two parts. You have the company sell the real estate to another part of another group that you’ve created. The group gets the real estate, the store that you’ve just bought out instead of owning its property is signs a long term lease to pay a huge amount of rent to this real estate part that you’ve just created by splitting up the company. And you’ve created a value based on the prospective rental store rental income. And you pay yourself a management fee, you charge interest, you charge all sorts of other fees.
And this is what is driven almost all of these US stories, Toys R US right down the line. It’s driven them all under. Now, you’re going to have something like that occurring outside of the retail store industry for other sectors of the economy, as you point out, one sector after another. That’s the companies that are struggling during this three month abatement.
Are all of a sudden not going to be able to come up with the rent in three months or supposedly your restaurant, for example. Restaurants are your biggest expense is going to be the rent to the landlord. But if you haven’t done any business for three months and you realize that if you go back to work and the landlord says, OK, you’ll just pay it off in a year or two, will, then you realize that, wait a minute, all of the profit, all of the money that paid to management is really just going to go for the landlord.
And we’re not going to make any money at all left over after we pay the current rent and the back rents to the restaurant, to the to the landlord. It’s best just to walk away, closed down and move somewhere else.
So there will be musical chairs as restaurants are closed down stiff, their suppliers stiff anybody they can and hope that they may or may not start business somewhere else. But it’s going to be awfully hard to get bank credit once you stiffed the landlord and walked away from the bank financing. So there’s just not going to be financing for anyone except the very large and richest financial companies.
So when one does this sort of projection forward, you know, few months of a couple years, it does.
It gets worse and worse unless there is a massive public social expenditure on infrastructure programs of various types. But at a scale that’s more than anything even Roosevelt imagined during the New Deal. And that leads to, you know, kind of development of a public sector that the right wing of the elites. I shouldn’t say the right wing. All the elites essentially don’t want to see that kind of expenditure because it leads to people saying, well, if we’re spending all the public money, then why shouldn’t the public own this stuff?
Well, that’s exactly where Wall Street was way ahead of you there. They knew that there would be pressure for just what you’re suggesting. The reasonable thing, if you really want to restore prosperity, is to develop an infrastructure for public spending programs, public transportation, to rebuild the roads and transports that have fallen apart, the parks. And so by giving this 10 trillion dollars all through the stock and bond market. And for real estate mortgages. And by giving it all to the financial sector now, they can say, I’m just we’re broke.
We don’t have any money for social spending. We’ve already spent it. Look at how big the deficit is. And this is exactly what Mitch McConnell said to the states. He said other states are have a tax shortfall. Well, let them take the money that’s in their pension funds. Let them lose the pension funds. Let them not pay any of the public sector workers that have agreed to get pensions in exchange for decade after decade of slow wage growth, saying, yes, we’d rather have a pension than a slow wage growth.
Now that they now that you tricked them into taking a long term promise, do what Donald Trump does, break the promise, break the deal and say, I’m sorry, you’re not going to get anything. We’re broke. And we gave all the money to the 10 percent. And if you don’t like it, vote for the other party. It’s hard when you have the same donor class behind each party. So basically, there’s not going to be any money to spend into the real economy.
It’s all been spent on the financial sector. Look at how large the deficit is. And you’ve already had Mitch McConnell come out and say, well, the states that are known are getting their tax revenues have a solution. Let them raid their pension funds. Let them break even and pay the bondholders what they owe. And the other suppliers by essentially borrowing or emptying out the pension. So here’s what you’ve had, is he wants the states to act like Donald Trump is act that break the long term deal.
For decades, public service workers have accepted low wage growth in exchange for pensions. They’re looking long term. They say, OK, we won’t increase our wage demands, but we want the security that when we retire, we’re going to get a good pension. That’s what made public sector work attractive. But now that the workers have already worked at a low price and the same thing in the corporate sector, taking low wages for years now, the pensions that they were promised are going to be used instead to pay the bondholders because the states have to make a choice.
And the states are going to choose the financial sector to the financial sector. The workers and capital and agriculture are just overhead. All of the real money is supposed to go to the final financial sector or the fire sector. So all of this money that has been ostensibly saved is really going to be just emptied out and given to the bondholders unless they stay.
But there’s that there’s a political calculation here. And just a few months away from the presidential election, if they don’t do something by the time the election comes around, it’s already a whole sections of the working class that never knew what poverty was are sinking into it. And by that, by the time election comes along, whole sections of the American population are going to be in desperate straits. And this is this is this is going to doom the Trump presidency.
They’re going to have to do something. You. No.
Chuckles Well, Truncal, try to blame it on the Democrats. He’ll say, give me control of Congress so that we can pass a law to get America back to work and make America great again. He will blame it on other Democrats and say that he didn’t cause it. Coronavirus virus. Of course, what he did. And he can point out that the ten trillion dollar bailout was unanimous. Democrats and Republicans, the Democrats, Nancy Pelosi in Congress, which is in charge of writing the Carers Bailout Act, could have said, well, we want to make sure that the states and cities are bailed out so the public services are not cut back and so that they don’t have to raise the pension funds and screw all of the retirees as other Republicans want.
But the Democrats agreed with the Republicans to basically throw the workers under the bus so the retirees under the plan, throw the pensioners under the bus and focus on their donor class.
The financial sector, the bondholders and the stockholders in Canada and most of Europe, maybe all of Europe, the state subsidies have gone to businesses to continue paying wages, even if people are at home. Many countries are paying up to 80 percent, subsidizing 80 percent of workers wages. So, in fact, people aren’t suffering in the same way. And then when they want to start the economy again, everyone just goes back to work. And the U.S. didn’t didn’t do that.
Neither party did that because no politician in either party advocated that. Nobody is saying that. That is sort of the forbidden thing to say. And if you try to say it. Well, say, well, if you don’t like it here, why don’t you go and live in Denmark? And so Trump will say, well, it’s true that the virus happened on my on my watch. I’m the guy who can get rid of it. Wouldn’t you rather have me then?
Whoever whoever the Democrats end up putting up. OK. Hold on, hold on. The sound scaring up the sound screwed up again, start again with wouldn’t you rather have me? You’ll say, wouldn’t you rather have me trying to a businessman trying to put America on two feet just like a real estate company would be rescued instead of living like a socialist in a socialist country? That’s. These are the people who wanted to close down the economy even more.
I trump the guy who opened up the economy. My opponents want to close it down. And they just closed down. There’s not going to make you recover. I’m the guy who can make your recovery by.
But the polling is showing almost everywhere that most people think that the economy is being opened up in certain states far too early. And in the states where they’re doing it, they’re getting spikes in Corona virus. So I’m not so sure that argument’s going to work for Trump. Let me ask you a question. Let’s assume I’m right and Trump isn’t going to win because I’m betting he’s not.
But what let’s say Biden does win and the phone rings, which is highly unlikely. But let’s say it is for the sake of the Simental argument or puzzle here. And they call Michael Hudson and ask, OK, we’ve been listening to your interviews. And what do you think we should do now that we’ve become taken over? Let’s, for the sake of arguments, say they actually take the White House and both houses of Congress. What should they do?
Well, I’ll say well, the 10 the Federal Reserve has been buying 10 trillion dollars worth of stocks. Let’s sell off all these stocks so that it’ll have enough money to begin funding state and local public sector investment. Now, selling all the stocks, of course, will crush the stock market.
The good thing about and about not bailing out the landlords, about not bailing out the stock market is the banks that have made big bets, especially on insuring third world that are going to go broke. And I would say now that the this time when Citibank, Bank of America and Wells Fargo becomes insolvent, wiping out its net worth as they did in 2008, this time take them into the public sector, make them public banks. And it a public banks.
Let’s not lend for corporate takeover loans. Let’s not lend money to corporate raiders to outsource and downsize companies. Let’s make lend for actual for loans that will actually rebuild the economy with tangible means of production, tangible infrastructure and back to the real economy instead. I think Mr. Biden would say, well, how much money did you contribute to my campaign? Oh, I say, well, thank you very much, sir.
I don’t think there’s any amount of money you can contribute to the Biden campaign that would get him to do that program.
I think that’s right. His mindset. Well, let’s take it somewhat more incrementally. But certainly there’s some banks that could be that will be at the point of bankruptcy that the federal government could buy insolvency.
In other words, they were made bad bets. A lot of banks, it’s very much like when the Greek bonds were collapsing and a Greek Greece was going to default five years ago under Syriza, Obama and Tim Geithner went to Europe and told the European banks. Well, you know, we know that the biggest bondholders are the German and the French banks, but they’re not going to lose a penny because they bought credit default insurance from the American banks. And the American banks and especially Citibank are going to go under.
And if they go under, we are going to retaliate against you in Europe and we’re going to drive you under. So the threats they made them, you know, was they forced Europe to essentially tear Greece apart and impose a chronic depression on them? Well, right now, you have the same thing that the banks have made all sorts of loans and guarantees that cannot be paid without Federal Reserve support. And so the question is the whole financial model of the last 12 years.
So you could say the model since 1980, the model of getting rich purely financially without any real economy growing, downsizing the economy, outsourcing its production to China and other Asian countries, getting it, basically making the GDP and for the bottom 95 percent of the population going down for the last 12 years while all the growth has been for. Just let me take my take that off.
All right. Hello. No, I can’t. Sorry. That’s why I remember before I took it, I lost. Can can we. Hello? Yeah. Keep going. Now, where was I? What was I saying?
What about the banks? Basically, the financial model of getting rich, purely financial engineering instead of industrial engineering hasn’t worked. The idea that the economy can grow and give all of the growth in GDP since 2008 has gone only to the top five percent of the population for 95 percent of the population. The economy is already shrinking. Wolf, it’s already shrinking for 12 years. Imagine the plunge that it’s going to take now. There is no way that an economy can grow.
When you’re doing to the American population what Europe and the US diplomacy, the degrease, the mass unemployment lifespans shortened, suicide rates rose emigrate.
So if you if you it again, it. What do I know? Hold on, hold on, we just. Something just happened. Are you still there? Yes. OK. Keep going. Start going again.
Suicide rates, suicide rates rose in the Greek economy is up now and utter stagnation while other wealthy Greeks have taken their money and run. They put it in Switzerland. So Greece, over 50 billion euros to banks in Italy and France and Germany. But there was a 50 billion euros were already on. According to Christine Lagarde, the IMF already stashed away in Switzerland by a tax avoiders. Now, obviously, in order to re to revive the economy here, you have to have a different model of growth.
And instead of a financial model of growth, you need to do a number of things. You stop encouraging debt, pyramid it because all the debt pyramiding is what has been shrinking the economy and leading to debt deflation. You would remove the tax deductibility of interest. That’s an obvious thing. You’d remove all of the special tax advantages that the real estate and the financial sector and the financial sector get like up pretended depreciation on buildings again and again and again.
Donald Trump says that he loves depreciation and that’s why he’s never had to pay income tax. Insurance companies are not paying right now. The insurance companies are all simply refusing to pay the restaurants and the other economies for interruption of business because they said, well, we listed interruption of business for a number of causes, but you didn’t put the corona virus on. You’ll have to sue us. Well, by suing when you sue an insurance company, they get to take the entire claim off their book as if it’s a current payment and other if it takes five years to get your case in the court to collect on the insurance that costs about fifty thousand dollars in legal fees.
I’ve gone through this. And then at the end of five years, the insurance company figure, they will have made back enough money just by speculation so that they don’t have to spend an extra penny to repay. It’s all it’s all three tax write off money. So in order to re restore this financial life growth, you have to change the tax code and all of the gimmicks that have made financial speculation more profitable than direct investment and actually producing goods and services.
Okay, let’s face it. Let’s assume that none of this gets done. Not much of it gets done. What happens in China now? Is China in a better position to recover? Can China recover if the American market is so depressed? And if China can recover in a way with somewhat decoupling from the United States, if that’s possible? What does that do to the geopolitics?
Well, China can recover for two reasons. Number one, most debts ultimately are owed to the public, to the government. The government runs the banks. They’re not upright. Private banks, except to decide what what to do. The banks are owned by the governments or the government. When a corporation in China is unable to pay the debt, the government doesn’t say, OK, we’re going to have to close you down and sell you to the cheapest, better and, you know, let some American buy you out at a distressed price.
The government simply writes down the debt for the company. They keep the company. And it’s I’m sorry.
There was a big noise on the line when you said the government simply writes down, just pick it up from there.
The government will simply say to the company, OK, we understand you can’t pay, but we’re not going to write down. We’re not going to insist that we’re not going to close you down and force you to sell to the cheapest better and let some American or other foreign buyer buy you out cheaply. We’re going to write down the debt that we’ve given you so that we want to keep you in business. And we want to keep your employees in business so others not see the debt problem in China because the debts are forgiven when they can’t pay.
That’s normally what socialist governments do. Secondly, others already for the last five years, I’ve had discussions in China about how to re reorient their economy for the Chinese people. The Chinese people, although they now have a housing, it’s not the best housing in the world. And the idea is they say, why should we use all of this factory capacity to export, to support the US, to export to the US an earned dollars? What do we need the dollars for?
We’re just recycling the dollars into loans to the U.S. Treasury to hold it in bonds instead of getting foreign exchange and just acting as a workshop. The United States. Why don’t we act as a workshop? The Chinese people, we don’t need export income anymore. We’ve got the Belt Road Initiative. We’re developing markets throughout the Near East. Russia, Europe and China. We don’t need the US. But most of all, we have enough savings in our foreign exchange reserves and gold that we can begin to pay our workers more and create a thriving domestic market.
Well, one of the problems they had is what the Chinese do when they earn more money. The first thing they want to do is to buy a car. They’re buying a lot of Mercedes now. And there are already too many cars in China. So the problem, China adds is how can we make our factories work and produce more goods and services for China? And there aren’t cars and want and the pollution and won’t distort matters. Want to start the air?
That is what their current plan is. They’re decoupling from the US. And they’ve made a decision with Russia, Iran, other countries to essentially decouple their economy from the US and essentially try to write down military spending and unnecessary foreign spending as much as possible.
So if that happens and it’s begins to work for China, one would think it fuels those forces within the United States that want to get more aggressive with China, even militarily. Steve Bannon has openly advocated a military confrontation in the South China Sea. When I mentioned this several times on air on the analysis, when the Trump administration defense secretary was explaining to Congress why they needed such a record high military budget, he justified it with three words China, China, China.
They’re already fairly. Poised in an aggressive fashion, but if the American economy is really down the toilet and the Chinese begins to recover, it seems to me that that situation gets even more dangerous.
China doesn’t seem that worried about it because what can happen? The American naval presence is largely a large aircraft carriers and ships that are very open and are really not a good weapon to have in the modern world. They’re very exposed. All the Americans really can do is threat. And you remember when Mao called them a paper tiger? Well, I think China still thinks that the US Army is a paper tiger. And it can make threats, but it can’t really follow through.
And if there were any thought of following through, China would make overtures to its neighboring countries and pretty much be able to share the China Sea and its oil rights with them and very quickly create almost the equivalent of a Chinese Monroe Doctrine regarding the United States. So the US knows that it’s on the way out, that there’s very little that it can do militarily. And all of you, the U.S. can’t ever invade a country. There are no troops.
Nobody’s going to invade China. You can’t defeat a country unless you invade it. All you can do is drop bombs and try to destroy it. But America’s very exposed in the east and so is Japan that hosts American troops in Okinawa. There are just too many exposures that the Americans have that China doesn’t have so much. So you think a little bit of this rhetoric about China, China. China is just spent a lot of money on arms. It’s not scaring the Chinese and it’s all meant to just scare the Chinese.
And they’re like the Russians are going to say, well, what are you really going to do? And there is no scenario. I understand that the war we’re college here is tried to work out all sorts of scenarios. There’s no scenario in which the U.S. comes out on top. Without leading to nuclear war, which leads to nobody coming out on top, right? I mean, presumably there could be nuclear war, but nobody that wouldn’t benefit anyone.
So and Chad, I mean, I suggested to China, well, now that Trump has raised tariffs 25 percent on Chinese imports. Why don’t you impose a countervailing 25 percent export there? Told Trump that you want to help. And you want to help raise Chinese prices and make America more competitive. So you’re increasing your export taxed in vastly increasing your prices.
That Chinese goods look cost to Americans. America is going to be left in as a high cost economy. And there is no way that the United States here can replicate Chinese industry without spending a generation on rebuilding a generation of rebuilding, without higher living standards, without essentially any kind of political acquiescence by the people. So the America’s disinvested physically in its factories and in the industry and also financially by the stock buybacks that have left companies out without the cash. So American industry is all debt ridden and pyramid.
And China’s isn’t because the government can always write down the debt and keep its industry going. So you essentially have a conflict between a productive financial system in China, very much like the Germans before World War One and an unproductive, predatory financial system in the United States. That’s added the cost and overhead and enormous wealth for one percent of the population by impoverishing the 99 percent and preventing its living standards from rising. And by forcing labor to survive only by going deeper and deeper into debt, leading ultimately to a grand default.
All right. Thanks very much for joining us, Michael. It’s good to be here. And thank you for joining us on the Analysis.News podcast.
Photo by Alev Takil on Unsplash
The 1st ASECU Teleconference hosted over 400 participants from 32 countries being part of 7 major regions of the world: East Asia & Pacific (Australia, China, Japan, Taiwan), Europe & Central Asia (Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Republic of North Macedonia, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Spain, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom), Latin America and Carribean (Brazil), Middle East & North Africa (Lebanon, Palestine), North America (United States), South Asia (Afghanistan) and Sub-Saharan Africa (Ghana, Nigeria). The topics raised at the Teleconference were so relevant and acute in the view of the current socio-economic situation worldwide that it resulted in the keen interest of attendees having various fields of specialization: secondary and higher education, business and public service at public and municipal administration, social and humanitarian institutions.
The Teleconference was divided in 3 large sessions: (1) Macroeconomic, (2) Business and (3) Societal Aspects of Pandemic Crisis. Each session had 5-6 prominent panelists and a moderator who presented the main points of his/her intended contribution. The rest of the session moderator led an open discussion of panelists, based upon the main ideas presented, as well as the questions addressed to the panelists online by the participating audience. In total, the Teleconference had 15 distinguished panelists, world experts in higher education, business and social sphere from Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Japan, Poland, Republic of North Macedonia, Russia, Serbia, Slovenia, Taiwan, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. The full list of panelists and moderators can be found in the Call for Participation of the Teleconference.
The first session covered macroeconomic aspects of the crisis resulted from COVID-19, effectiveness and inefficiency of various instruments in the economic policy under the current circumstances. The panelists also discussed the issue of shifting to another trajectory of the world community development as a reaction to the crisis and its consequences, including the new economic models. Experts from the second session disputed more on the negative repercussions on the corporate business and entrepreneurs. The key impact of the pandemic crisis – virtualization and digitalization of economic process and distance economy formation – became the most discussed topic. The panelists of the third session covered acute social problems raised by COVID-19, namely a demographic problem, unemployment, poverty, and social inequality. By results of the Teleconference, ASECU will issue and post the E-Proceedings on the ASECU website.
To provide a chance to all those who failed to attend the Teleconference on 8 May 2020, ASECU recorded the live broadcast and uploaded the video on the ASECU & ASECU Youth YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh24Px8cFHg&t=12140s.
The Association of Economic Universities of South and Eastern Europe (ASECU) initiated the new event with a new format that is likely to become its annual tradition. ASECU is the union of economic universities proud of having its 56 members − universities and scientific research centers − from 20 countries. Since 1996, ASECU is giving life to new and bold initiatives, but it is most known for known for holding annual ASECU International Conferences. Until now, the Association enthusiastically organized 15 International Conferences. They were held in Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Montenegro, Russia, Poland, North Macedonia, Turkey and Slovakia. For more inquiries about the ASECU, please, contact the ASECU Office (e-mail: asecu@uom.edu.gr).
