Everyone from Adam Smith, John Stewart Mill, they were all reforms. What they wanted to reform was getting rid of this parasitic landlord class that had conquered England in 1066 and it's the heirs of the military warlords who ended up taking the land and making everybody pay them and all of their descendants just for having been conquered. You can see the carry-over of this today. The rent that people have to pay, the money they have to pay the banks instead of having a public option. That's the price they still have to pay for being conquered.
Michael HudsonTrump has said that he wants to remove the tax deductibility of interest. If he can do that, fine. But I hope that Trump knows that it's not the President that sets tax policy. It's Congress.
Michael HudsonAs you have to pay more interest and amortization on what you owe, you're left with less and less money to buy goods and services - unless you borrow even more and go further into debt.
Michael HudsonIf you look at payments to labor as a proportion of national income or gross domestic product, you find profits going way up, investment and savings going up.
Michael HudsonI don't think that governments should permit speculation in raw materials, because they're what the economy basically needs.
Michael HudsonNow, suppose that a homeowner puts down only 3% of their own money or 3.5% for the FHA. That means if prices go down by only 3%, the house will be in negative equity and it would pay the homeowner just to walk away and say, "The house now is worth less than the mortgage I owe. I think I'm just going to move out and buy a cheaper house." So it's very risky when you have only a 3% or 3.5% equity for the loan. The bank really isn't left with much cushion as collateral.
Michael HudsonOil now, as a result of the Saudi production, is priced so low that there are not going to be new fracking investments made. A lot of companies that have gone into fracking are heavily debt-leveraged, and are beginning to default on their loans. The next wave of defaults that banks are talking about is probably going to be in the fracking industry. When the costs of production are so much more than they can end up getting for the oil, they just stop producing and stop paying their loans.
Michael Hudson