Two years before the 2008 Wall Street crash that toppled the global economy into deep recession, Harper’s Magazine published a dark prophecy of what was to come. In “The New Road to Serfdom,” economist Michael Hudson laid out how millions of Americans had taken on huge debts to buy houses on the presumption that they could later sell them at a profit. “Most everyone involved in the real estate bubble so far has made at least a few dollars,” he wrote. “But that is about to change. The bubble will burst, and when it does the people who thought they would be living the easy life of a landlord will soon find out that what they really signed up for is the hard servitude of debt serfdom.” As the twenty million people who lost their homes discovered, Hudson got it entirely right.
Today, unemployment is at record lows, and the stock market is at record highs. Allegedly, we have recovered from the disaster. I talked to Hudson, Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the author, most recently, of J is For Junk Economics, A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception, about his pre-crash prediction, and what he now sees in our future.
Browsings —Then Harper's Blog
Slow Crash
Andrew Cockburn in conversation with Michael Hudson
Crossposted at Micheal Hudson
Also
Cancel Odious Greek Debts (video)
Slow Crash
Andrew Cockburn in conversation with Michael Hudson
Crossposted at Micheal Hudson
Also
Cancel Odious Greek Debts (video)
1 comment:
Micheal Hudson.
'It was very clear that more and more of everybody’s income had to go to buying a house. Housing prices were soaring, and the reason wasn’t because of population growth. And it wasn’t because people were getting richer. It’s because a house is worth whatever a bank is going to lend against it, and banks were lending more and more money against houses and pushing people further and further into debt so that basically they had to spend almost their entire working life to pay off the price of getting a home. People thought they were getting richer as house prices were going up, but while the sellers were getting richer, the people who had to buy the house had to pay a larger and larger proportion of their income.'
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