How can China avoid the “Western financial disease� – a real estate bubble followed by defaults and foreclosures? The U.S. and European economies originally sought to avoid this fate by taxing the location’s site value. A rent tax was the focus of Progressive Era reforms. Enacting a rent tax remains China’s main challenge to accompany... Read More

As published in the World Economic Association’s World Economic Review Vol #1. ABSTRACT Current macroeconomics ignores the roles that rent, debt and the financial sector play in shaping our economy. We discuss the Classical view on rents and policy responses to the rentier sector in the 19th century. The finance, insurance & real estate sector... Read More

Prof Hudson appears on the Renegade Economists radio show to discuss the economic growth trap, compound interest, Sumeria, the corruption of economics and how US interests are flexing in the debate over what constitutes a CDO default in the EU. This interview was conducted just days before Greece was given another reprieve. Recorded March 7th... Read More

Michael Hudson features in this 40 min documentary on the role property speculation and public finance had on this Great Recession. What role does economics itself have to blame for policy failure? More details

Michael was recently interviewed on the Renegade Economists following his visit to Medvedev’s Global Policy Forum. Listen here Transcription Karl Fitzgerald: Michael Hudson, our old friend here on the Renegade Economists, from the University of Missouri in Kansas City, has just returned from Russia speaking at the Global Policy Forum. Michael, tell us about the... Read More

The cost of the 2011 cutbacks in federal spending will fall most directly on consumers and retirees by scaling back Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and social spending programs. The population also will suffer indirectly, by lower federal revenue sharing with U.S. states and cities. The following chart from the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA,... Read More

We all know that the world is unfair. The most useful question to ask is how much poverty is economically necessary, how much is a product of policies that can be alleviated? A related question is how financial and fiscal austerity hurts the national economic interest. This problem is especially relevant in Russia today, since... Read More

Michael features in this upcoming Australian documentary on how economic theory was kidnapped and the policy manipulations that allowed this to happen. How was property speculation allowed to crash the global economy?

Michael is interviewed on the Real News Network. History teaches…

What would Adam Smith have said about the Bowles-Simpson economic report last week? What a pity the great free marketer was not around to serve on the Deficit Reduction Commission. He not only would have rolled over in his grave, he would have risen up wielding an ax to the fiscal proposals that are diametrically... Read More

Some Prefatory Remarks to the N.Y.U. Real Estate Institute discussion, Oct. 25, 2001 Economic theory focuses on labor and capital, yet the largest category of tangible assets is not industrial plant and machinery earning profits, but real estate, and its primary objective is to make capital gains. Most new entries into the Forbes or Fortune... Read More

As published in Critique, based on a presentation given at the China Academy of Sciences, School of Marxist Studies in Beijing in November 2009, and at the Left Forum in New York City, March 20, 2010. Classical economists developed the labor theory of value to isolate economic rent, which they defined as the excess of... Read More

Interview with Xulin Dong May 2010 DX: You have strongly advocated the use of taxation as a most effective and desirable way to prevent real-estate bubble. Now in the Chinese media there’s a good deal of discussion about the need to re-design China’s real-estate tax regime. In particular, about the merit of a US type... Read More

The most comprehensive official statistics on nationwide real estate values are those published by the Federal Reserve Board (FRB) in its annual “Balance Sheets of the American Economy.� As part of its Z.1 statistical release the FRB compiles annual balance sheets of seven sectors which, taken together, make up the U.S. economy. These are the... Read More

Dr Hudson is President of the Institute for the Study of Long-term Economic Trends, New York. He has specialised in national income accounting, the balance of payments and flow of funds analysis for leading Wall Street finance houses. A former economics professor at the New School’s Graduate Faculty, he is the author or editor of... Read More