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Quote by Michael Hudson

“This unique ability of the U.S. Government to borrow from foreign central banks rather than from its own citizens is one of the economic miracles of modern times. Without it the war-induced American prosperity of the 1960s and early 1970s would have ended quickly, as was threatened in 1973 when foreign central banks decided to cut their currencies loose from the dollar, letting them float upward rather than accepting a further flood of U.S. Treasury IOUs.”

Quote by Michael Hudson

Book:Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance
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Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance

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Michael Hudson
Michael Hudson

Michael Hudson is a renowned economist, born in 1939. He has conducted extensive research in the field of economics, particularly in finance, real estate, and debt. Professor Hudson has held teaching positions at several prestigious universities and has authored numerous publications on economic theory and policy. more

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“The book received a wider review in the business press than in academic journals. A few weeks after the U.S. publication I was invited to address the annual meeting of Drexel-Burnham to outline how the new Treasury bill standard of world finance had replaced the gold exchange standard. Herman Kahn was the meeting’s other invited speaker. When I had finished, he got up and said, “You’ve shown how the United States has run rings around Britain and every other empire-building nation in history. We’ve pulled off the greatest rip-off ever achieved.” He hired me on the spot to join him as the Hudson Institute’s economist. I was happy enough to leave my professorship in international economics at the New School for Social Research. My professional background had been on Wall Street as balance-of-payments economist for the Chase Manhattan Bank and Arthur Andersen. My research along these lines was too political to fit comfortably into the academic economics curriculum, but at the Hudson Institute I set to work tracing how America was turning its payments deficit into an unprecedented element of strength rather than weakness.”

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Book:Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance
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“Private investors traditionally had been obliged to take losses when debtors defaulted, but it became apparent that the U.S. Government was not about to relinquish its creditor hold on the Allies. This intransigence obliged them to keep tightening the screws on Germany.”

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Book:Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance
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“But instead of U.S. citizens and companies being taxed or U.S. capital markets being obliged to finance the rising federal deficit, foreign economies were obliged to buy the new Treasury bonds being issued. America’s Cold War spending thus became a tax on foreigners. It was their central banks who financed the costs of the war in Southeast Asia.”

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Book:Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance
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“These rules meant that, unlike Britain, the United States was able to pursue its Cold War spending in Asia and elsewhere in the world without constraint, as well as social welfare spending at home. This was just the reverse of Britain’s stop–go policies or the austerity programs that the IMF imposed on Third World debtors when their balance of payments fell into deficit.”

MonetarySuper ImperialismDollar Debt
Book:Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance
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