Michael Hudson - Life and Thought

This is a good video of Michael Hudson which is a kind of autobiography. He says how he started out studying music but he needed to a make a living as well, and then one day a friend told how sunspots affected a certain U.S district's water table which would cause droughts and this would put a drain on the financial system leading a crash. Michael Hudson found this so interesting that he decided to study economics.

After he got his economics degree, he starting working for an oil company as well as a bank and so he learnt a lot about finance. Continuing with with with his higher degrees he had to take a course in finance and banking, but he found that what the text books taught was wrong.  His professor, and the text books, said that finance lends to businesses, but he knew this was all wrong and that they mainly lent money for speculating on assets and property, and if they ever lent to businesses, it was usually for asset stripping and breaking up companies.

Michael Hudson ended up getting a C+ in his exam and his college professor said to him that he did not understand how finance and banking worked. Well, his professor had never worked in a bank and seemed to get all his information about finance from text books, which were all written by professors who had never worked in finance either. Hmmm!

Anyway, I looked around the net this morning and there was an article on WW3, one about how climate change was much worse than we had thought, some horrible stuff on the Saudi Crown Prince, some more stuff on war, and so on, and I felt depressed.

So, maybe I'm losing it, but look out for my new video coming up on how a gentleman should choose the right hat for his body shape if he wants to look rather dapper. It's very entertaining. But luckily for you this time you were spared that because this Michael Hudson interview fabulous. I love this guy!

The interview with Professor Michael Hudson was conducted on 7 May 2018 in Beijing, by Professor Lau Kin Chi and Professor Sit Tsui Jade. Professor Hudson talked about his formative years, and his turn to economics from music as he found his mentor Terence McCarthy's speech about economics beautiful and asethetic. He recalled his experiences in research and teaching, and the background leading to his writing the many books on imperialism, balance of payment, history of debt, and fictitious capital.