2010 AMI Conf. Prof. Michael Hudson: Financial Welfare скачать в хорошем качестве

2010 AMI Conf. Prof. Michael Hudson: Financial Welfare

Dr. Michael Hudson argues that monetary reform (like 100% reserve/Chicago Plan ideas) won’t win a mass audience unless it’s paired with fiscal reform and a clear “whole-economy” model showing what credit is for. He contrasts the post-1945 era (high wages, higher taxes, and more productive growth) with the post-1980 era of financialization, where banks largely stopped funding new productive investment and instead expanded credit mainly against existing assets—especially real estate—driving asset-price inflation, “wealth creation,” and what he (and Bill Black) frame as systemic control fraud. Hudson links this to austerity politics in Europe (with Latvia and the Baltics as a neoliberal “dress rehearsal”), arguing debt overhead and bailouts shift losses onto labor through wage cuts, closures of public services, and mass emigration. He reframes modern finance as parasitism: a system that extracts economic rent via privatization, tollbooths, and interest, while persuading the public to protect the financial sector. As a strategy, he urges politicizing reform beyond “bank anger” toward the bipartisan sponsors, and proposes treating banking/finance as a public utility, with key tools like taxing economic rent (especially land rent) so banks can’t capitalize it into debt. In a Q&A afterwards, he discusses China’s land policy and rent taxation to prevent bubbles, and argues today’s “productivity” gains often reflect labor burnout and wage suppression rather than genuine prosperity.