The United States is pushing as policy division of the world into rival currency camps - the dollar area on the one hand, and the Russia-Chinese-Shanghai Cooperation Organization group on the other, especially now that the IMF has changed its rules. People think that if there are rival currency groupings and national currencies are going bust, we might as well use gold as a safe haven.
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 HudsonThe concept of productivity in America is income divided by labor. So if you're Goldman Sachs and you pay yourself $20 million a year in salary and bonuses, you're considered to have added $20 million to GDP, and that's enormously productive. So we're talking in a tautology. We're talking with circular reasoning here.
Michael HudsonEducation is something that should not be organized on a for-profit basis, because in that case its purpose is not really to provide an education. It's not to teach students how to get better work, but how to provide banks with a free giveaway opportunity from the government, by making junk loans that are defaulted on. The effect may be to wreck the futures of the graduates that fall for the false promises that are being made.
Michael HudsonI guess the main thing that came out of the Panama Papers was that Ukrainian President Poroshenko had promised to divest of his chocolate company and instead, he simply moved it into an offshore account. And on the very day that he was increasing the attacks on the eastern Donbass region of Ukraine, the export sector, he was signing documents to conceal his own money offshore. So the exposรฉ of the Panama money laundering has hit some of the dictators that America is protecting and promoting.
Michael HudsonMr. Trump wants to turn the U.S. economy into the kind of real estate development that has made him so rich in New York. It will make his fellow developers rich, and it will make the banks that finance this infrastructure rich, but the people are going to have to pay for it in a much higher cost for transportation, much higher cost for all the infrastructure that heโs proposing. You could call Trump's plan "public investment to create private profit". That's really his plan in a summary.
Michael Hudson