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The Unz Review •�An Alternative Media Selection$
A Collection of Interesting, Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media
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The U.S. national debt just passed $36 trillion, only four months after it passed $35 trillion and up $2 trillion for the year. Third quarter data is not yet available, but interest payments as a percent of tax receipts rose to 37.8% in the third quarter of 2024, the highest since 1996. That means interest... Read More
All of these small moves by the non-Western countries are starting to stack up. You can easily see the dollar falling as the world currency over a period of decades, just on this current trajectory. Unfortunately for homosexuals and Jews, that trajectory is likely to get a lot steeper if and when the US empire... Read More
The Russian presidency of BRICS 2024 could not have chosen a more multicultural and multi-nodal site to host a summit laden with enormous expectations by the Global Majority. The southwestern Russian city of Kazan, on the banks of the Volga and Kazanka rivers, is the capital of the semi-autonomous Republic of Tatarstan, renowned for its... Read More
The BRICS Summit in Kazan, Russia, aimed to be a turning point towards a truly multipolar or multi-nodal world that has been in transition for a few years now. The changes announced in Kazan regarding the payment system and the reserves of nations are concrete steps towards independence from the U.S. imperialistic system. This system... Read More
“It was not the highly visible acts of Congress but the seemingly mundane and often nontransparent actions of regulatory agencies that empowered the great transformation of the U.S. commercial banks from traditionally conservative deposit-taking and lending businesses into providers of wholesale financial risk management and intermediation services.” — Professor Saule Omarova, “The Quiet Metamorphosis, How... Read More
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And why the dollar isn't going away
In any alternative media space, you are sure to find much talk about US dollar dominance, as well as optimistic forecasts of its imminent decline. This is also true in the radical right, where nationalists pine after an end to US imperial hegemony and the rise of a more multipolar world. Often though, this hope... Read More
In Part 1, I explained that the next financial crisis will be bailed out not with central bank money creation but with our stocks, bonds and bank balances. In Part 2, I explained the multi-year quiet regulatory changes that dispossessed us of our property. In Part 3, I explain David Rogers Webb’s conclusion that a... Read More
Dr. Michael Hudson is an American economist, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City and a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College, former Wall Street analyst, political consultant, commentator and journalist. Dr. Steve Keen is an Australian economist and author. A post-Keynesian, he criticizes neoclassical economics as inconsistent, unscientific and... Read More
Like all indoctrinated economics PhDs, I used to teach students that the Federal Reserve was created as a central bank in order to provide cash to banks experiencing a run on deposits so that bank failures would not become general and collapse the money supply and, thereby, employment and output. It all sounds so reasonable... Read More
Another agenda is in play
Dear readers and fellow economists, the Federal Reserve is treating a rise in prices from supply shocks and disruptions from the Covid lockdowns and sanctions against Russia, Iran, and other countries as if it were a monetary inflation. It is true that too much money is chasing too few goods and services, but the cause... Read More
As I reported at the time, the banking crisis is not limited to Silicon Valley Bank. Silicon Valley Bank’s failure was followed by the failures of New York Signature Bank and First Republic Bank of San Francisco. Now three more banks have had their stock prices collapse–Western Alliance, PacWest Bankcorp, and Metropolitan Bank. As I... Read More
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According to an article in American Banker titled “SEC’s Gensler Directly Links Crypto and Bank Failures,” SEC Chair Gary Gensler has asked for more financial resources to police the crypto market. Gensler testified at an April 18 House Financial Services Committee hearing: [Crypto companies] have chosen to be noncompliant and not provide investors with confidence... Read More
Guest: MICHAEL HUDSON Professor of Economics, University of Missouri - Kansas City Proposed questions: There are many perspectives on what are the most serious problems facing China and the rest of the world today. Even if you don’t agree on the diagnosis of some people, you at least need to know how they think. That... Read More
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The crashes of Silvergate, Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and its related bank insolvencies are much more serious than the 2008-09 crash. The problem at that time was crooked banks making bad mortgage loans. Debtors were unable to pay and were defaulting, and it turned out that the real estate that they had pledged as... Read More
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The collapses of Silvergate and Silicon Valley Bank are like icebergs calving off from the Antarctic glacier. The financial analogy to the global warming causing this collapse of supporting shelving is the rising temperature of interest rates, which spiked last Thursday and Friday to close at 4.60 percent for the U.S. Treasury’s two-year bonds. Bank... Read More
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Russia Is Following the American Playbook
No country has successfully challenged the U.S. dollar’s global hegemony—until now. How did this happen and what will it mean? Foreign critics have long chafed at the “exorbitant privilege” of the U.S. dollar as global reserve currency. The U.S. can issue this currency backed by nothing but the “full faith and credit of the United... Read More
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TACTICS, STRATEGY AND OPERATIONS So far the Russian military operation in Ukraine has been a reconnaissance in force preceded by the destruction of the supplies and headquarters of the Ukrainian Armed Forces by standoff weapons. The object being to suss out where the Ukrainian forces are, to surround them, to check existing Russian intelligence against... Read More
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Inflation is plaguing consumer markets, putting pressure on the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates to tighten the money supply. But as Rex Nutting writes in a MarketWatch column titled “Why Interest Rates Aren’t Really the Right Tool to Control Inflation”: It may be heresy to those who think the Fed is all-powerful, but the... Read More
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The era of so-called industrial deregulation and globalized free trade, whose icon was the World Trade Organization (established in 1994), has been grotesquely misshaped into an era of restrictive trade, and mean-spirited and often petty recriminations in the form of targeted sanctions exercised mainly by the NATO powers. A strategy once applied with some sense... Read More
It’s impossible to understand the finer points of what’s happening on the ground in Russia and across Eurasia, business-wise, without following the annual St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF). So let’s cut to the chase, and offer a few choice examples of what is discussed on top panels. The Russian Far East - Here’s a... Read More
A report published last year by the WEF-Carnegie Cyber Policy Initiative calls for the merging of Wall Street banks, their regulators and intelligence agencies as necessary to confront an allegedly imminent cyber attack that will collapse the existing financial system. In November 2020, the World Economic Forum (WEF) and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace co-produced... Read More
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It usually makes sense to follow the money when seeking understanding of almost any major change. The strategy of following the money in our current convergence of crises in late summer of 2020 leads us directly to the lockdowns. The lockdowns were first imposed on people in the Wuhan area of China. Then other populations... Read More
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The federal reserve recently announced a $1.5 trillion dollar coronavirus "stimulus" package, $500 billion of which will go to incentivize banks to keep lending. Another maneuver, cutting Federal Reserve interest rates from an already low amount to effectively 0%, means big banks will be handed the equivalent of interest-free cash under the assumption that they... Read More
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Public Banking Institute Podcast Michael Hudson: [00:00:00] There's recognition that commercial banking has become dysfunctional and that most loans by commercial banks are either against assets – in which case the lending inflates the prices of real estate, stocks and bonds – or for corporate takeover loans. The economy’s low-income brackets have not been helped... Read More
Last week, the Federal Reserve responded to Wall Street’s coronavirus panic with an “emergency” interest rate cut. This emergency cut failed to revive the stock market, leading to predictions that the Fed will again cut rates later this month. More rate cuts would drive interest rates to near, or even below, zero. Lowering interest rates... Read More
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Or…EVERYONE Pays the Piper
In emulating the American economic raison d’etre, China has attempted to develop its unique capitalist model while ignoring that it too will soon suffer the same fate for the same reason: Unsustainable debt. When examining the recent realities of Chinese banking and finance over the past year it seems the steam that president Xi Jinping... Read More
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IMMR CoffeeHouse Discussion Forum # 8 Full Transcript (EDITED VERSION) Thurs. Dec. 19, 2019 Michael Hudson on how debt money has pushed the US and European economies to their financial limit. Followed by an open discussion forum. INVITATION: I’m sure you have many discussions of bank money causing problems. My focus is on how banks... Read More
Westerners have been for generations infused with a conviction that a nation’s central bank must, under threat of great ‘moral hazard’, be kept separate and independent of that nation’s government. The reasons are unclear, but since this mythology qualifies as a biblical pronouncement, it is by nature not open to question. The proposition is, of... Read More
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All Are Equal, Except Those Who Aren’t
Like a gilded coating that makes the dullest things glitter, today’s thin veneer of political populism covers a grotesque underbelly of growing inequality that’s hiding in plain sight. And this phenomenon of ever more concentrated wealth and power has both Newtonian and Darwinian components to it. In terms of Newton’s first law of motion: those... Read More
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The history of debt cancellation and Jesus's economic justice activism 
Left Out, a podcast produced by Paul Sliker, Michael Palmieri, and Dante Dallavalle, creates in-depth conversations with the most interesting political thinkers, heterodox economists, and organizers on the Left. The Hudson Report is a new weekly series produced by Left Out with the legendary economist Michael Hudson. Every episode we cover an economic or political... Read More
The crooks who run the Western financial system set up the gold market in a way that lets them control the price. Gold is not priced in the physical gold market where bullion is bought and sold. Gold is priced in a futures market where uncovered contracts that are settled in cash are bought and... Read More
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Glass-Steagall or Another Economic Meltdown?
Donald, listen, whatever you’ve done so far, whatever you’ve messed up, there’s one thing you could do that would make up for a lot. It would be huge! Terrific! It could change our world for the better in a big-league way! It could save us all from economic disaster! And it isn’t even hard to... Read More
William Goetzmann, Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible (Princeton University Press, 2016) Debt mounts up faster than the means to pay. Yet there is widespread lack of awareness regarding what this debt dynamic implies. From Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC to the modern world, the way in which society has dealt with... Read More
All of Europe, and insouciant Americans and Canadians as well, are put on notice by Syriza’s surrender to the agents of the One Percent. The message from the collapse of Syriza is that the social welfare system throughout the West will be dismantled. The Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras has agreed to the One Percent’s... Read More
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A 1970 strike in Ireland provoked an admirable outbreak of ingenuity - Greece should take note
Television reporters stand in front of the shut doors of banks in Athens and speak as if a few days more of bank closure brings the Greeks that much closer to catastrophe. Media coverage dwells obsessively on the theme that for Greece it is five minutes to midnight, but somehow midnight never comes. Shuttered banks... Read More
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The Rise of “Criminal Capitalism”
Introduction: About 75% of US employees work 40 hours or longer, the second longest among all OECD countries, exceeded only by Poland and tied with South Korea. In contrast, only 10% of Danish workers, 15% of Norwegian, 30% of French, 43% of UK and 50% of German workers work 40 or more hours. With the... Read More
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Government Backing for Toxic Mortgage Securities?
The leaders of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, Sen. Tim Johnson (D., S.D.) and Sen. Mike Crapo (R., Idaho), released a draft bill on Sunday that would provide explicit government guarantees on mortgage-backed securities (MBS) generated by privately-owned banks and financial institutions. The gigantic giveaway to Wall Street would put US taxpayers on the hook... Read More
Grand Cayman: In 1503, when Christopher Columbus discovered this remote island group between Jamaica and Mexico’s Yucatan, its only inhabitants were crocodiles, turtles, iguana and insects. He named it Las Tortugas. It didn’t take long for Tortugas to become the most notorious pirate’s lair of the West Indies from where they preyed on Spanish treasure... Read More
Banks nab $400B in USTs for "Window Dressing"
“Increasing the Fed’s transparency, openness and accountability has been one of my top priorities as chairman.” -Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke on the 100th anniversary of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke is a big believer in transparency. Transparency, transparency, transparency. Hardly a day goes by that Bernanke doesn’t reiterate his commitment to transparency. He thinks the... Read More
"I am not a crook," Jamie Dimon might as well have been insisting in his five telephone calls these past two weeks with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, asking that a criminal investigation of JPMorgan Chase be dropped as part of a plea deal on what has turned out to be a $13 billion fine... Read More
As I have pointed outbefore in this space, much of the most shocking evidence of America’s weakening position in the world these days gets swept under the rug in the mainstream press. We had another instance last week when a Japanese bank was found to have egregiously flouted the American-led financial embargo on Iran. The... Read More
Hard Landing in China? It's Just a Matter of Time
An uptick in manufacturing activity in March has eased fears of a hard landing, but China is not out of the woods yet, not by a long-shot. The industrial powerhouse has succumbed to the same problems as its trading partners in the West who were thrust into crisis by soaring real estate prices, reckless credit... Read More
Although the aftershocks created by the botched Cyprus bank bailout are by no means over, the news this morning is on balance reassuring. At least we should be thankful for small mercies: the European banking system is still standing. While the crisis has precipitated bank runs in Cyprus, depositors elsewhere seem to have remained remarkably... Read More
How Wall Street "Privatized" Money Creation
Regulators are worried about the explosive growth of shadow banking, and they should be. Shadow banks were at the heart of the last financial crisis and they'll be at the heart of the next financial crisis as well. There's no doubt about it. It's simply impossible to maintain a system where unregulated, non-bank financial institutions... Read More
Cordray Fails to Protect
Richard Cordray might be the most powerful man in America today, and you've probably never even heard of him. As head of the new US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Cordray can effectively set the clock back to 2005 and inflate another gigantic, economy-busting housing bubble without breaking a sweat. All he has to do... Read More
How the Financial Lobbyists Carried the Day
Last Thursday, the Wall Street Journal ran an article titled "Burdened by Old Mortgages, Banks Are Slow to Lend Now", in which, author Nick Timiraos said that the reason that housing has been so slow to recover is because Fannie and Freddie "have been forcing banks to take back an increasing number of loans that... Read More
Skimming Profits Off Bad Loans
Didn't Ben Bernanke promise that another round of bond purchases would lower unemployment and boost economic growth? We think he did, which is why we're wondering why all the benefits from QE3 appear to be going to the banks. According to Bloomberg News: Well, how do you like that? That means that Mr. Bernanke's trickle... Read More
CounterPunch Diary
Since what is now going is being described as “the greatest financial scandal in the history of Britain” -- the Barclays imbroglio – I have a question to ask. Where are those tents outside St Pauls? Or ones in solidarity this side of the Atlantic? Where are the vibrant reminders that – as has happened... Read More
If you are a contrarian like me, you probably hold a few bank stocks — so as the Libor scandal has gathered steam you may be wondering about your exposure. Daily newspaper reports have not been much help because they mention only a few of the more obvious names. As a reader service, I have... Read More
I Thought People Were Supposed to Rob Banks, Not Vice Versa
Over a year ago Vi was wondering where to put her family’s modest savings. The peso was erratic. Any contact with the US involved too many forms and regulations. A friend suggested Danskebank, which is Danish. We thought about it. The Danes were not too vivacious, entirely inadequate as party animals, but solid and respectable.... Read More
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