Monday, March 6, 2017

Why Deficits Hurt Banking Profits — Sharmini Peries interviews Michael Hudson


The post is actually about the establishment push to establish a market state through privatization and deregulation in order to extract rents by replacing what is left of the FDR New Deal welfare state that publicly provides social benefits through the government's policy space as a currency sovereign.

While Hudson doesn't go into the history prior to Bill Clinton, this push was initiated by Jimmy Carter's fiscal conservatism, accelerated under Reaganomics, was amplified by Bill Clinton under the aegis of Robert Rubin, cemented in place by Alan Greenspan, and continued by Bush and Obama. Now Trump is setting about advancing the job dismantling the remnants of New Deal.
The aim of neoliberals is to prevent governments from spending money to revive growth by running deficits. Their argument is: “If a government can’t run a deficit, then it can’t spend money on roads, schools and other infrastructure. They’ll have to privatize these assets – and banks can create their own credit to let investors buy these assets and run them as rent-extracting monopolies.”
The bank strategy continues: “If we can privatize the economy, we can turn the whole public sector into a monopoly. We can treat what used to be the government sector as a financial monopoly. Instead of providing free or subsidized schooling, we can make people pay $50,000 to get a college education, or $50,000 just to get a grade school education if families choose to if you go to New York private schools. We can turn the roads into toll roads. We can charge people for water, and we can charge for what used to be given for free under the old style of Roosevelt capitalism and social democracy.”
This idea that governments should not create money implies that they shouldn’t act like governments. Instead, the de facto government should be Wall Street. Instead of governments allocating resources to help the economy grow, Wall Street should be the allocator of resources – and should starve the government to “save taxpayers” (or at least the wealthy). Tea Party promoters want to starve the government to a point where it can be “drowned in the bathtub.”
But if you don’t have a government that can fund itself, then who is going to govern, and on whose terms? The obvious answer is, the class with the money: Wall Street and the corporate sector. They clamor for a balanced budget, saying, “We don’t want the government to fund public infrastructure. We want it to be privatized in a way that will generate profits for the new owners, along with interest for the bondholders and the banks that fund it; and also, management fees. Most of all, the privatized enterprises should generate capital gains for the stockholders as they jack up prices for hitherto public services.”...
Michael Hudson
Why Deficits Hurt Banking Profits
Sharmini Peries interviews Michael Hudson

1 comment:

GLH said...

Michael Hudson understands what is going on in the US as well as anyone I know.