82-year old polymath Michael Hudson is my favourite economist. He currently lectures in China to million-strong audiences. His latest book is The Destiny of Civilisation: Finance Capitalism, Industrial Capitalism or Socialism. His latest article is well worth a read.
Titled Germany’s Position in America’s New World Order, it was originally published on the German e-site bravenewworld.com, and republished on the blogs Naked Capitalism and The Vineyard of the Saker. He previously identified the US objectives of the Ukraine war being to split Germany and the rest of Europe from the rising east. He outlines the stakes:
Germany has become an economic satellite of America’s New Cold War with Russia, China and the rest of Eurasia. Germany and other NATO countries have been told to impose trade and investment sanctions upon themselves that will outlast today’s proxy war in Ukraine. U.S. President Biden and his State Department spokesmen have explained that Ukraine is just the opening arena in a much broader dynamic that is splitting the world into two opposing sets of economic alliances. This global fracture promises to be a ten- or twenty-year struggle to determine whether the world economy will be a unipolar U.S.-centered dollarized economy, or a multipolar, multi-currency world centered on the Eurasian heartland with mixed public/private economies.
The whole article is well worth spending the time on. As stated, Hudson is a polymath: financial analyst, historian, political activist, economist. He explains the current geopolitical dynamic by reference to the medieval battles between the popes and the holy roman Empire for supremacy and tribute. He understands the destructive power of debt, and played akey role in the Jubilee 2000 campaign which resulted in massive debt relief for third-world countries.
A favourite book of mine is his …and forgive them their debts, where he traces the history of debt forgiveness jubilees in Mesopotamia. Its not an easy read, but his opinion that Jesus was delivered up for execution by the Scribes and Pharisees because of his preaching against the rabbi Hillel’s workaround against the prohibition of usury resonates with me. It certainly explains the relevance of the cleansing of the Temple account in the synoptic gospels.
A nice touch occurred in the comments on Naked Capitalism cited above when he was asked by a commenter using the pseudonym Gramsci to clarify a somewhat obscure sentence in the item. I was grateful to the questioner as I couldn’t parse it either. No trouble, Hudson is humble, and back came a better explanation:
In practice, U.S. rhetoric accuses China of being autocratic in regulating its economy to promote its own economic growth and living standards, above all by keeping finance and banking as public utilities to promote the tangible production-and-consumption economy.
We are currently debating the relationship between finance capital and living standards in Aotearoa/New Zealand. In terms of the split between economic alliances, whether we like it or not we are being drawn/pushed/forced into the unipolar U.S.-centered dollarized economy.
Hudson outlines what is at stake:
What basically is at issue is whether economies will be planned by banking centers to create financial wealth – by privatizing basic infrastructure, public utilities and social services such as health care into monopolies – or by raising living standards and prosperity by keeping banking and money creation, public health, education, transportation and communications in public hands.
Michael Hudson and I will quite likely not be here in ten years’ time. I think the future of our families in Aotearoa/New Zealand and the world will be much better if all are playing a full part in a multi-polar, multi-currency world, following the second option.
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