151 Quotes by Michael Hudson

"More and more money is being extracted from of the production and consumption economy to pay the FIRE sector. That's what causes debt deflation and shrinks markets. If you pay the banks, you have less to spend on goods and services."

"There are so many currency exchange rate problems that people are buying gold as a safe haven. Right now, gold looks like a safe haven if international exchange rates break down."

"The myth is that if housing prices go up, Americans will be richer. What banks - and behind them, the Federal Reserve - really want is for new buyers to be able to borrow enough money to buy the houses from mortgage defaulters, and thus save the banks from suffering from more mortgage defaults."

"Actually, high housing prices don't help the economy. They raise the cost of living."

"Just like a house is worth whatever a bank's going to lend against it, an education is worth whatever the bank is going to lend the student to pay the university. So the availability of government-guaranteed student loans has vastly inflated the cost of education, just like it's inflated the cost of housing."

"That's the problem with the financial sector. Banks and the financial sector live in the short run, not the long run. In principle the government is supposed to make regulations that help the economy over time. But once it's taken over by the financial sector, the government lives in the short run too."

"The economy is being run primarily by the banks for their own interest."

"When people are running up more and more debt for housing, they call that "real wealth." It exposes what's wrong in the mainstream economics and why most of the economics that justifies austerity programs and economic shrinkage is in the textbooks is not scientific. Junk economics denies the role of debt and denies the fact that the economic system we have now is dysfunctional."

"I guess the main thing that came out of the Panama Papers was that Ukrainian President Poroshenko had promised to divest of his chocolate company and instead, he simply moved it into an offshore account. And on the very day that he was increasing the attacks on the eastern Donbass region of Ukraine, the export sector, he was signing documents to conceal his own money offshore. So the exposé of the Panama money laundering has hit some of the dictators that America is protecting and promoting."

"People are putting their money into treasuries because they worry that the risk of putting their money into the bond market, the stock market or even the money markets is very high."