Sunday, April 2, 2017

Older interview but really good





"The money that has been inflating prices has been the commercial banks inflating real estate prices, inflating education prices, inflating prices for stocks and bonds...the inflationary money creation is by the commercial banks, not by the government. And nobody is talking about that. It's the banks that are creating money. Somehow people have believed that inflation is very good if what's going up is the price of your home. But then when the price goes down, what's really gone up is your debt. And what people thought was an asset boom and net worth and wealth creation - as Alan Greenspan said - it turns out to be debt creation. It's the private debt that is the residue of the bubble economy. Instead of trying to resolve that problem, by writing down the debts to the ability to pay, by writing down housing debts to the real value of the house or the current mortgage, or writing it down to the one quarter of your income - that used to be normal and is normal in other countries - by refusing to roll back the private debt and write it down, the government is pushing austerity here just exactly as the pound is doing, as the euro zone is doing. So all you have to do is look at Greece and Spain and Ireland and you say is this going to be America's future under this kind of pretense that government debt is bad and bank debt is good - run into more debt, that will save us - it's as if they believe the Americans can borrow their way out of debt. That's the current policy." --Michael Hudson.

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