Counterpunch Is this administration’s bank policy Bush-3 – or Clinton-5 or Reagan 8? After (1) threatening for eight years that the prospect of a trillion-dollar deficit spread over a generation or so is sufficient reason to stiff Social Security recipients and abolish debts to the nation’s retirees, and (2) after the Bush administration provided $8... Read More

For the first time in my life (and I trust it will be the last), I find myself siding with the otherwise abhorrent neocons against a young, courageous giant of the Right, Tom Piatak. Equally surprising, I differ from Tom on the kind of issue that I would usually agree with him about. Now I’m... Read More

Global Research Mr. Paulson’s bailout speech on Monday, October 13 poses some fundamental economic questions: What is the impact on the economy at large of this autumn’s unprecedented creation and giveaway of financial wealth to the wealthiest layer of the population? How long can the Treasury’s bailout of Wall Street (but not the rest of... Read More

Guns and Butter Interview on KPFA radio. For part one of this interview click here. I’m Bonnie Faulkner (BF): Today on Guns and Butter, Dr. Michael Hudson. Today’s show: “The Bailout’s New Financial Oligarchy.� Dr. Hudson is a Financial Economist and Historian. He is President of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trend,... Read More

Guns and Butter Interviews on KPFA radio. You can read part two of this interview, The Bailouts New Financial Oligarchy, here. I’m Bonnie Faulkner (BF): Today on Guns and Butter, Dr. Michael Hudson. Today’s show: “The New Kleptocracy�. Dr. Hudson is a Financial Economist and Historian. He is President of the Institute for the Study... Read More

I believe that Usama bin Laden said at one point that the way to destroy the Great Satan was to attack its economy. Does anyone seriously believe the currently more than $1.3 trillion bailout(s) are going to accomplish anything more than putting the US deeper in debt at a time when the country is fighting... Read More

It is easy to indict the American people for conniving at fast and loose behavior on Wall Street, but there is a danger that blaming everyone means no one is to blame. According to the "blame everyone" line of reasoning, Americans became addicted to the easy credit from Wall Street, becoming so greedy in the... Read More

WASHINGTON and SAO PAULO - The George W Bush administration's US$700 billion no-accountability scheme, globally, informally dubbed "cash for trash", is making all the headlines. Simultaneously, there's the small matter of the United Nations General Assembly sanctioning the troubled birth of a new, multipolar world. As a 21st-century counterpart to the Dadaist Manifesto, this chain... Read More

Counterpunch The banksters’ plan now is for icing on the cake – to take Mr. Paulson’s $700 billion and run. It’s not a “bailout of the financial system.� It’s as giveaway – to insiders, to sell out all their bad bets. Companies across the board will get rid of their bad mortgages, and also their... Read More

Counterpunch Saturday’s $700 billion junk mortgage bailout is the largest and worst giveaway since a corrupt Congress gave land grants to the railroad barons a century and a half ago. If it goes through, it will shape the coming century by giving finance unprecedented power over debtors – homebuyers, industry, state and local government, and... Read More

Global Research Nobody expected industrial capitalism to end up like this. Nobody even saw it evolving in this direction. Marxists saw industrialists growing into giant trusts and depriving workers of the wages needed to buy their output, and the post-1980 era of corporate raiding has indeed seen downsizing and outsourcing of the labor force. But... Read More

A democracynow interview with Nomi Prins and Michael Hudson. Audio of democracyNow interview. A copy of the video can also be downloaded from here. The US government has seized control of insurance giant American International Group in an unprecedented $85 billion bailout. The Federal Reserve made the deal on Tuesday to save AIG from collapse... Read More

Michael Hudson on the highly respected Democracy Now, telling the inside story on the bankers bailouts.

Counterpunch Early on the morning of July 30, President Bush signed the act that the Senate had passed at a special session the previous Saturday. The new “housing act� (a more honest title would have been the “Financial Bailout Act of 2008�) authorizes the Treasury and Federal Reserve Board to provide unlimited credit to the... Read More

A Counterpunch Special Report I am writing this article about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while sitting in the Queens Botanical Garden. This was not my plan today. The central air conditioning in my apartment broke down six weeks ago and still has not been fixed. (It’s a nice condominium building, but accidents happen.) It... Read More

Counterpunch If the move to a Unitary Executive of unfettered presidential power frightens you, America’s radical right turn to Unitary Finance should compound your fears – and your debts as well. The financial events of the last two weeks of March 2008 demonstrate that the “economic royalists�[1] and “money changers�[2] whom Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR)... Read More