理查德·沃尔夫——揭穿美国破产神话

迈克尔·哈德森、理查德·沃尔夫——揭穿美国破产神话

2024 年 9 月 15 日
https://braveneweurope.com/michael-hudson-richard-d-wolff-debunking-u-s-bankruptcy-myths

NIMA：很高兴再次邀请到你、迈克尔和理查德参加这个播客。让我们从美国经济的现状开始。问题是，迈克尔，对你来说，美国是否正在迅速走向破产？
迈克尔·哈德森：自奥巴马以来，共和党和现在的民主党一直试图恐吓选民，让他们支持对社会保障的攻击，试图通过他赞助的右翼国会委员会将其私有化，关于联邦债务以及预算赤字如何迫使我们做出艰难选择的欺骗性言论层出不穷，这对人民来说是艰难的，90% 的人口将因为民主党和共和党都想削减的开支而失去社会支出、社会保障和其他基本政府计划。

今天导致破产的真正问题是私人债务。政府债务破产完全没有问题。政府不会破产。他们总是可以印钱。在很多情况下，破产可能是一件非常好的事情，最明显的是学生债务。

如果允许私人债务人做几乎所有其他个人能够对学生债务人做的事情，公司和金融机构能够做的事情，那么学生债务人就可以通过宣布破产来应对他们的学生债务。也就是说，我们没有足够的钱来偿还我们背负的学生债务。

但乔·拜登领导了一场防止学生债务受到破产宣告的斗争，从而造成了我们今天面临的不公平的学生债务危机，使学生成为整个美国经济中唯一无法通过破产来消除债务并摆脱困境的群体。

借口是，我们需要为政府预算提供资金。否则，我们将增加政府债务。借口是，如果我们不让学生偿还学生债务，那么政府就会破产。就好像政府破产就像个人破产一样。

嗯，拜登提到这一切的主要原因是政府需要钱，这基本上就是在说，不，我们必须让政府避免导致债务的赤字。

没有提到对富人的减税或不平等的税收，也没有提到任何关于任何收入超过 12 万美元的人不需要为他们的社会保障支付任何增加的收入的事实。这些都由收入低于 12 万美元的人支付给他们。这些都不在讨论范围内。

好吧，我想从正确的角度来看待这个债务问题。为了做到这一点，我认为有必要从资产负债表的角度来思考。不管怎样，这都是一个谁欠谁的问题。美国政府欠谁的债？

我想明确两点，这两点应该在任何讨论开始时就提出来。首先，没有人会因为负债而陷入困境。问题是，如果你无法偿还债务，就必须偿还债务并支付其持有费用。

我稍后会解释，政府没有意愿或可能性偿还大部分外债。

因此，第二点是首先要认识到，一方的债务是另一方的资产。政府债务是大多数经济体的首选资产。

那么，让我们看看谁持有政府债务作为资产。好吧，鉴于今天所有的悲观言论，人们可能会惊讶地发现，美国债务可能是地球上最理想的金融资产。这就是为什么美国最富有的阶层拥有如此多的债务。

这是因为没有人认为这笔债务必须以政府为代价来偿还。这可能令人惊讶，但只要你仔细想想，就很明显了。

你口袋里的纸币从技术上讲是政府债务。政府发行纸币是为了资助某种支出。它发行纸币，作为纸币的持有者，持有者对政府拥有财务债权。

所以各位观众，如果你口袋里有政府的货币，从财务角度来说，你就是政府的债权人。这实际上使你成为整个社会的债权人。

你不认为自己是债权人，因为它没有那么金融化。但从技术上讲，如果你看看政府的资产负债表，资产必须等于债务。这就是它平衡的原因。所以左边是政府债务，右边是资产。纸币占了很大一部分。

如果政府偿还这些纸币，大概是给你一些回报，那就没有纸币了。所以

当然，政府不会支付这些纸币。

你会想到钱被花在购买东西上，尤其是小额购买。这是在杂货店或类似的场所。但实际上，大多数美国货币都是以 100 美元钞票的形式持有的，而且数额很大。它们通常被打包成大捆，用收缩膜包装起来，被拍到从美国飞机运出，然后支付给我们收买的独裁者、盗贼和政客。

大多数 100 美元钞票和大多数美国货币不是美国人持有的。而是外国人持有的。通常的说法是，如果人们生活在像阿根廷这样货币疲软的国家，他们会把钱放在床垫里。

但当然，拥有这些收缩膜包装的 100 美元钞票的人不需要把它放在床垫里。他们有各种各样的储藏室。

因此，这些美国债务是世界大部分盗贼统治者的储蓄，也是那些试图将美国视为比他们拥有的货币更安全的人们的储蓄。他们对美国纸币的信任度肯定高于对自己外币的信任度。这些钱是用来储蓄的，而不是用来消费的。

那么，第二类美国债务有点像这样。这是外国中央银行持有的债务。这是他们的外汇储备。你可以在《财政部公报》上查看。每个月，《财政部公报》都会列出美国债务的所有者，以及美国国债的所有者。

那么，外国中央银行拥有很大一部分，有时是整个新发行外债的三分之一，尤其是在几十年前军费开支很高的时候。这就是美元本位的本质，我称之为美国国库券本位。

自 1971 年尼克松总统停止用黄金支付赤字以来，外国中央银行除了美元之外，实际上没有其他国际资产可以持有。因此，戴高乐将军和法国人不再能够用 20 世纪 60 年代美国在越南和东南亚的支出获得的美元购买黄金，而现在他们只能购买美国国债。

外国政府持有的这些国债是为了弥补美国的预算赤字，而这主要是美国军费开支的结果，美国在世界各地建立了 800 个军事基地，包围了其他国家，迫使它们不要放弃美元本位，但他们却在为自己的包围和美国针对这些国家的军事建设提供资金。

这使得美国对外国中央银行的外债成为免费午餐。美国可以随心所欲地花这些钱。它所花掉的美元最终流入了欧洲和中国的外国中央银行。

外国中央银行别无选择，除非他们利用这些美元流入购买黄金或其他东西。当然，如果他们这样做，美国就会宣布他们是试图去美元化的敌人，并实质上向他们宣战。

好吧，这顿免费午餐是没人指望能偿还的。美国无法创造足够的国际收支盈余来偿还它欠德国、法国、中国、俄罗斯和日本的所有证券。所以它不会偿还他们。

如果一个国家说，我们想像俄罗斯那样去美元化，美国就会没收 3000 亿美元的俄罗斯资金，并将其支付给乌克兰人，利息也支付给乌克兰人，以帮助攻击俄罗斯，防止它走上这条路。

好吧，让我来解释一下这个系统是如何运作的。假设你去，你可以做美国所做的事情，但规模要小得多。假设你去杂货店购买食物和其他家居用品。当收银员打印出你的 30 美元收据时，你签了一张欠条，欠条 30 美元，并写上你的名字。嗯，这不是信用卡。那只是你给商店或任何应该持有这张欠条的人写了一张纸条，一张签名的纸条，欠条 30 美元。那么，经理会出来问你，我该怎么处理这张欠条？你可以告诉他们，你可以用这张 30 美元的欠条支付你从他们那里购买农产品的人，你知道，他们正在运送牛奶，你知道，部分支付支票，并给他们我的欠条，让它流通，它会流通，每个人都会像交易美元钞票或银行支票一样交易它。这是他们资产的一部分。

嗯，显然这不是你和其他个人的世界运作方式，但这是国际金融体系的运作方式。当美国在国外花钱时，军事开支是美国国际收支赤字的主要类别，向世界经济注入了美元，这些美元的外国接收者会将这些美元交给他们的中央银行以换取本国货币，因为他们以本国货币经营业务或其他业务。

然后中央银行

这些美元，就是他们所谓的国际外汇储备或主权财富基金，并投资于美国国库券。

1974 年石油战争爆发时，欧佩克国家将石油价格翻了两番，他们被告知，你可以为石油收取任何价格，但你必须保留你所有的储蓄，你从石油中获得的所有收入，你必须以美元保留。我们不会让你购买美国公司，但你可以购买股票和债券，但基本上你必须把钱存入美国银行购买国库券。你根本不能花掉它。你只能用它。如果你不这样做，我们会将其视为战争行为。

因此，外国将这些未动用的美元收入计为货币储备，就像商店可能会将你的 30 美元计为其资产负债表上的资产的一部分一样。我们有一项资产，它将列在他们的应收账款或资产上。顺便说一句，美国政府的搭便车行为导致其他国家想要去美元化。金砖国家正试图这么做。俄罗斯已经这么做了。如果它持有任何美元证券，美国就会直接拿走。

中国担心美国可能会像美国对俄罗斯所做的那样，在某个时候直接拿走它所有的钱，但它希望以某种方式与美国成为朋友。

好吧，我们可以稍后讨论这笔债务，但这并不是美国政府没有理由偿还的唯一债务。政府自己的美联储欠着一笔巨额且不断增长的债务。

如果政府想把钱花在经济上，它就要求美联储购买美国国债。因此，美联储拥有这些证券，银行系统拥有美国证券作为其自身存款和贷款的支持和储备。这就是银行的运作方式，持有储备。所以这部分美国债务也不应该偿还。而且美国也绝不会破产。如果美国没有任何债务，就不会有政府债务作为银行储备。美联储也就没有存在的理由了。你可以看到问题所在。

所以，就像你口袋里的纸币一样，美联储持有的其他债券，外国银行持有的政府债务预计不会得到偿还。我认为这种金融操纵表明，美国实际上并不需要借钱。它实际上可以印钞。但当它印钞时，它印的这些钱，就像发行纸币一样，它印的钱被算作对美联储的债务。所以这都是一场洗白交易，有点像债务不知何故陷入困境的假象。

好吧，如果我们能把所有这些类别的美国联邦债务都处理掉，那么最终，我们就有了大多数人想到的那种债务，即国债，即票据，由个人持有，尤其是最富有的人。最富有的投资者都持有大量美国证券或债券市场的资产，美国债务市场已经出现了大量涌入，投资者将美国债务视为避风港。

正如国会警告美国濒临破产一样，华尔街、大型投资者和外国投资者也称美元为避风港。这听起来不像是破产。他们正在从股票和债券以及其他资产中撤出，转而购买美国债务，因为随着美国经济变得更加脆弱和头重脚轻，他们知道美国政府不会破产，因为它的债务全部以本国货币计价。它不欠必须印发的外币债务。它拥有以本国货币计价的债务，并且可以印发任意数量的债务。

如果你去银行或美联储说，这是我的 20 美元钞票，我想把它兑换成钱，他们可以给你两张 10 美元的钞票，但这就是你所能得到的全部。

亚伯拉罕·林肯只是通过印制美元来资助内战，而美元在技术上是一种债务，这就是正在发生的事情。

尽管尼玛提到的美国联邦债务规模巨大，而且当金融天塌下来时，政府破产的警告声也非常响亮，但国债被视为最受欢迎、最安全的资产。

中国官员告诉我，他们并不认为美元真的会贬值。他们正在减少美元持有量，转而购买黄金和其他外币，但他们仍然持有大量美元，因为他们预计美元基本上会保持强势。

所以基本上，自 2008 年奥巴马银行救助计划以来，美国最富有的 10% 人的财富大幅增加，这源于美国债务被抛入金融领域，并创造了历史上最大的债券市场繁荣。

债券市场的繁荣只惠及最富有的金融阶层。

所以，底层 90% 人的工资水平和收入持平。对于前 10% 来说，收入一直在不断上升。

全部

这是由政府债务融资的，将公司债券市场的股票变成了庞氏骗局。所以这是政府债务的光明面，也是为什么你不应该因为害怕而不得不解决它。所以我认为我们应该花几分钟讨论一下为什么人们会试图用政府债务来吓唬人们，他们的动机是什么？

理查德·沃尔夫：是的，我想我可以在这方面提供帮助，因为金融市场认为美元是最安全的地方或最安全的形式来持有你的财富，而考虑到世界运作的方式，美国政府的美元义务与美元义务之间并没有矛盾。

换句话说，美国的地位正在下降，帝国正在分崩离析，但与你的替代方案相比，拥有私人资产的人以这种形式持有这些资产仍然是一个合乎逻辑的地方。这就是安全论点。

现在安全论点的另一部分还没有说出来，但我现在要明确说明。

美元之所以安全，原因之一是，尽管美元在世界范围内的影响力正在缩小，但目前中央银行储备中美元所占比例低于过去半个世纪以来的任何时候。我可以给出所有你想要的统计数据。为什么美元仍然安全？

这是私人世界不言而喻的假设，我们将会看到这是合理的。假设是，尽管美国政府的债务水平很高，尽管其全球影响力正在缩小，但它有内部政治能力确保持有这些债务的人不会因这个问题的解决而受到任何损害。

换句话说，他们正在做的是，他们说你有能力把财富留在这里，我们需要你这样做，而作为交换，我们将这样做。我们将确保那些将不得不为这一切付出代价的愤怒的人无法破坏它。

但这就是它的含义。假设，假设美国人民要求他们选出的代表，我们希望有退休的社会保障，这样我们在 65 岁、66 岁或 67 岁时就可以期待退休生活。我们希望生活在一个尊重一生工作、不会让你在年老时一贫如洗的社会。这似乎不是一个极端的要求。这是合理的。我们想要这个。

你知道我们还想要什么吗？我们希望从出生到死亡都有健康保险，就像世界上许多其他人一样。

你知道我们还想要什么吗？我们想要免费的高等教育。我们希望大学像高中和小学一样。这是我们作为一个社会为自己投资的东西，就像一个公共公园、一个海滩、一个州立保护区，你可以带着家人去露营。我们希望像大多数欧洲国家已经为其人民提供的一样，高等教育完全免费。没有学费。不。我们想要那个。

好吧。因为我们生活在美国，所以答案是，哦，政府负担不起。

等一下。你说政府负担不起是什么意思？政府目前正在支付，我不知道现在是多少，但目前国家债务的利息有六到八千亿美元，预计未来两三年还会更多，更多。

所以美国人民说，好吧，不要支付债务利息。就是这样。那么你现在有 8000 亿美元，这远远超过了你给我们免费教育、免费医疗和我们刚刚要求的所有其他东西所需的金额。那就这样做吧。我们选了你。那就这样做吧。如果你不这样做，我们就会罢免你，用愿意这样做的人来取代你。

哦天哪，世界上所有拥有债务的人都这么说。

这是迈克尔提出的一个非常重要的观点。对于每笔债务，都有人持有这笔债务，而这对他们来说是一项资产，他们想保护自己的资产。他们不希望美国政府停止支付债务利息。

因此，美国政府向他们承诺，虽然没有明说，但非常真实，别担心，我们将削减对美国人民的一切，以保护你们的利益，让你们偿还你们所拥有和投资的债务。你们这些欧洲富人，你们这些世界各地的君主，剥削自己的人民，并将其投资于美元。是的，是的，是的。我们会保护你们，你们没有选举我们，但却资助我们。我们会欺骗美国人民，因为你们选举我们，却没有资助我们。

好吧，这就是交易。没有人会这样对你说。这就是为什么在谈话中，金钱比其他任何事情都更容易让人感到困惑。

我们被告知，天哪，我们必须削减公共服务，这样我们才不会搞砸预算。

等一下，杰克。你不必削减公共服务。你只需要停止支付利息。哦，是的，但是

那么人们就不会借钱给我们了。没错。然后你该怎么办？你必须向富人征税，因为除非你想卖掉大西洋和太平洋，否则就什么都没有了。然后就会有关于谁得到这些钱的争议。

不，不，你希望事情保持原样。这是一个由富人发展起来、为富人服务的制度。现在的情况太糟糕了，你需要无休止地谈论金钱和其他人们一生都困惑不解的事情。

人们有时会像我一样提到迄今为止对资本主义最伟大的批评者，在这一点上，我会忍耐一下。我希望我们能有更好的批评者。但到目前为止，是老家伙卡尔·马克思。他年轻时写过，如果我没记错的话，那是他 20 多岁，也许是 30 多岁，但他是一个非常年轻的人。

他写了一篇短文，大约 10 页，名为《资产阶级社会中的金钱力量》。难以置信。其中一半引用了德国作家歌德和英国巨匠莎士比亚的名言。他引用了很长的篇幅。他自己的评论占了文章的一半。其他是歌德和莎士比亚的名言。

在那里，他抓住了金钱的整个奥秘，以及为什么它一直让人们感到困惑，以及其中的利害关系。这很了不起。他继续批评资本主义，因为他明白，资本主义的保存需要像金钱这样绝对核心的东西被完全神秘化，否则它的功能就无法真正被理解。

迈克尔刚刚做的是给你上了一堂速成课，让你揭开这一切的神秘面纱。当美国政府，即财政部，发行债务，即政府欠你的钱的借据时，它会将其中的很大一部分卖给另一个部门，即政府。这个另一个部门叫做美联储。

它有权印钞票，伙计们。这就是它所做的。它印钞票，并用印出的钱购买政府另一部分的债务。好吧，这很奇怪。你应该马上明白这很奇怪。难怪它让人们感到困惑。

但这只是它一半的目的。你知道，在过去，统治者会在需要的时候印钞票，用于购买新马车、新宫殿、新战争。然后人们就会紧张起来。天哪，他在印钞票。

[30:23]
所以我们成立了一个叫做中央银行的特别委员会。它应该由非常聪明的男人和女人组成。好吧，公平地说，在整个资本主义历史中，它都是非常聪明的男人。即使是现在，女人也很少。它的工作是充当中间人，确保所有这些都完成。什么？所有这些都像往常一样神秘莫测。

只是现在这有点令人费解，因为在印钞的政府和我们其他人之间，我们插入了一个中央银行，它本应让我们感觉好很多，尽管我们从迈克尔之前提到的文件中知道，我们政府借的债务中有多少是从它自己借的，从城里另一个办公室的另一部分借的，而这个办公室实际上是在印钞。

现在，如果你觉得这一切都令人非常放心，那么这个系统就起作用了。如果你看透了，你可能就是一个共产主义者。

迈克尔·赫德森：好吧，理查德提到了“利息”这个神奇的词。虽然我们都同意债务不是问题，但如果你看看年度预算，问题在于不断上升的利率，即相对于政府收入的利息支付。

理查德非常正确地指出，由于美联储近几个月将利率从每年仅 0.1% 提高到 4.5% 至 5%，利息正在上升。突然之间，这意味着预算中将有巨额利息支出，这将增加预算赤字的规模。

你知道，我一开始就说过，没有人会因为借债而破产，但当他们必须偿还债务甚至支付债务的利息时，他们就会破产。

利息就是债务。政府支付给自己的利息，美联储，奥巴马领导下的美联储表示，美联储从政府获得的所有利息现在都可以支付给银行。他们可以免费从美联储借款，也可以将自己的存款存回银行，获得美联储从政府那里获得的利息。

这是奥巴马最大的骗局，是历史上最右翼、最恶毒的金融扭曲。金融市场完全没有注意到这一点，只有那些非常、非常了解金融的人才会注意到。

但你现在会发现，而且你已经从拜登政府那里听到了关于这一点的口头声明，如果我们要增加利息支付，我们就必须有奥巴马试图与他任命的共和党主导的委员会一起创建的平衡预算修正案，以试图通过宪法

最后修正案规定政府必须平衡预算，这样债务就不会再增加。

好吧，让我们看看如果奥巴马民主党的这项政策真的实施会发生什么。如果政府必须避免出现赤字，但要支付每个民主国家都必须支付的紧急支出，那么你必须将现在 40% 以上的预算用于军事，因为如果不支持乌克兰和中东的法西斯主义，你怎么能在不支持乌克兰对俄罗斯的战争、不对中国和中东国家宣战的情况下促进民主呢？

除了军事之外，你还必须支付持有政府债务的 10% 的富人和银行。好吧，这真的没有留下多少社会支出。最容易取消的是社会保障、医疗补助、联邦政府对城市的补助和援助。

这就是卡马拉·哈里斯承诺如果有一个民主政府要做的事情，如果特朗普当选总统，他可能也会这样做。

这是已经计划了 20 年的大规模紧缩，计划将社会支出从政府手中夺走，并将其私有化。那么，他们要做什么呢？

他们不会简单地说，我们不会支付社会保障金，因为这是政府已经确定的合同义务。但他们说的是，我们要做的就是接管社会保障基金，并向贝莱德和其他资金管理公司提供政府补助，以庞大的私有化共同基金的形式管理社会保障金，就像华尔街管理的马来西亚主权财富基金，被金融经理人非法掠夺一样。

这就是金融经理人所做的事情。这就是高盛被刑事起诉的原因，因为它从马来西亚主权财富基金中挪用了数十亿美元，而这些资金原本应该由它作为受托人来管理。

他们想用所有的社会保障基金来做这件事，他们想把这些钱，也就是你每个月支付的社会保障政府资金，以及将要存入共同基金的钱，用于购买美国股票和债券。

金融部门说，如果我们能做到这一点，就会产生巨大的股市泡沫。轰。因为看，所有这些钱，不是支付给政府来资助战争支出和政府的其他支出，而是现在花在股市上。

谢天谢地，现在股市的债务杠杆率过高。它几乎破产了，我们把过去支付给政府的钱交给共同基金，投入股市，把股市庞氏骗局从破产边缘拯救了出来。

然后在某个时候，预测者和大型资金管理基金会说，你知道，这真的不会成功。

他们会出售所有股票，让股东承担全部责任，就像他们在 18 世纪 20 年代的南海泡沫和密西西比泡沫中所做的那样。财富就是这样产生的。你制造一个泡沫，你动员公众相信如果你加入这个泡沫，这个泡沫会以某种方式为你赚钱。然后你卖掉股票，让他们承担全部责任，任由它崩盘。这就是民主党和共和党共同计划在下届政府中实施的计划，如果他们能做到的话。

理查德·沃尔夫：他们会把整个事情，或者至少是其中很大一部分，包装成社会保障体系的改革。这就是这个骗局的运作方式。

我知道你们中的许多人在观看这个节目时，会因为你们读到的关于社会保障体系的新闻报道中的各种片段而担心或思考这个问题。这就是骗局的运作方式。

第一，你要发出警报。这就是警报。社会保障体系的资金即将耗尽。我们没有足够的钱。然后你会听到一位博学的教授，可悲的是，是我们中的一员，站起来说，人口正在老龄化。哦，我们真是天才。人口正在老龄化。所以你看，越来越多的老年人从社会保障体系中提取养老金，而年轻人则在每周的支票扣除中将钱存入养老金体系。这个算术是正确的。结论是荒谬的。

社会保障要么是，要么不是社会对自己的承诺。我们要尊重那些终生工作的人，无论是在工厂、办公室、商店还是在家里，养育孩子等等？我们要尊重这些人，给他们一个体面、安全的退休生活吗？还是我们要把他们扔进垃圾桶？

这告诉你很多关于一个社会的情况，它的发展方向。你现在在世界各地都可以看到这一点。

如果你想支持老年人

作为一个有道德或伦理的社区，作为一名经济学家，我向你保证，我们并不缺乏资金来做到这一点。完全没有问题。

但社会保障不是这样运作的。社会保障的运作方式是从人们的支票中扣除钱，一直持有这些钱直到他们 60 岁，然后支付他们余生的养老金。

每个人都知道这就是这个制度，因为从 20 世纪 30 年代开始，这个制度就一直存在，当时愤怒的美国工人阶级通过动员劳工运动，首次获得了我们历史上的社会保障，两个社会主义政党和共产党共同努力，从当时的总统富兰克林·罗斯福那里获得了这项保障。事情就是这样发生的。

现在，问题的第一部分是，我们是否从每个人的支票中扣除钱？答案是，不，我们从来没有这样做过。我们只从挣工资的人那里扣除支票。

等一下，难道没有人从他们收到的利息、股息、资本收益中赚取收入吗？是的。

从这些收入中扣除多少用于社会保障？答案是没有。什么？是的。美国最富有的人如何持有他们的财富？通过股票、债券和现金，产生利息、股息和资本收益。

因此，最富有的人以社会保障免征养老金税的形式拥有大部分财富。

你知道这叫什么吗？可怕的不公正。这就是所谓的。拥有最多钱的人被免除为体面的社会为自己做的事情做出贡献。

哇，这就像在一个社区里有干净的水，由社区精心清洁和维护，除了富人之外，整个社区都要为此付费。他们可以喝干净的水，而且根本不用付钱。为什么？嗯，因为他们有钱。等一下，什么？是的，等一下，什么？

你应该感到疑惑，但情况比这更糟。事实证明，并非所有的工资和薪金都要纳税。只有第一笔，我想现在是每年 160,000 美元，差不多这个数额。这很好，我们中的大多数人都是这样。

但你知道谁又可以免税吗？宾果，你猜对了，超级富豪，那些收入超过 160,000 美元的人。这就是它的运作方式，朋友们。每个人每年赚到的前 160,000 美元都要支付相同的百分比。超过 160,000 美元的每一美元，都不会扣缴社会保障，也不会扣除社会保障。

所以，如果你是一名公司高管，你赚了一百万、两百万、六百万、一千二百万或二十百万，所有超过 160,000 美元的金额，你就不需要投入我们老年人的养老金池。你是免税的。

为什么？因为你有钱。这就是你获得豁免的原因。不是你知道什么，不是你做什么，不是你是谁，不是你如何为社区服务，不是，不是，不是，不是，不是。只是因为你有钱，这就是原因。

难以置信，不公平，荒谬，现在到了最好的部分。你怎么能解决这个问题？好吧，我立刻就给了你答案。你可以对利息、资本收益和股息征税。对它们征收社会保障税，问题就解决了。没有警报，社会保障也不会缺钱，在本世纪不会。

还有另一个。对所有收入、工资和薪金征税，而不仅仅是 160,000，一直向上。看看伊隆·马斯克要付多少钱。这就是美妙之处，他必须支付数百万，但他不会注意到。

但我们这样做了吗？不，不，不。我们今天允许数百万美国人，我说的是几百万，几百万。我们任由他们为是否要靠社会保障生活、还能享受多久而忧心忡忡。明年、两年、六年后社会保障会减少吗？既然他们已经无法靠社会保障给他们的那点微薄收入生活，那么他们现在应该如何处理储蓄和养老金问题？

那些足够聪明的人知道，过去 10 年里，社会保障并没有像通货膨胀那样大幅上涨，因此，就其可负担购买的东西而言，现在它的价值实际上比过去更低。

抛开所有这些不谈，我们为亿万富翁们节省了大量他们不会注意到损失的钱，而不是为数百万受苦受难的人做点什么。这种铁石心肠让任何对大萧条前美国的描述都相形见绌。

因此，这些债务问题、这些政府财政问题，它们直接进入人们的视野，不仅成为一种解谜，试图解释正在发生的事情，迈克尔做得很好，而且它们也直接影响到你的个人生活。

如果你还不是担心退休的老人，我想提醒你，现在三分之一的美国人都在担心退休，但即使你不属于这个群体，你知道你是谁吗？这些人的孩子。

如果他们得不到社会保障，他们就会来

和你说话，因为你是他们的孩子，他们需要你的帮助。你会想这样做，这会阻碍你的经济发展。

这就是正在发生的事情。一个萎缩的经济，一个衰落的帝国，是由一群处于顶层的人管理的，他们正在做我们都期望他们做的事情。他们将衰落帝国的成本转嫁到社会等级制度中处于他们之下的人身上，那就是你和我。

无论是削减社会保障，还是削减大学资金，还是不允许大学生像迈克尔所说的那样去破产法庭寻求救济，就像我们允许所有其他私人债务人那样，不要被愚弄。

他们会在损害让他们成为世界上最富有的人的核心之前削减其他所有人。操纵货币体系是垂死帝国的精英们再坚持几年的可靠方法。

迈克尔·哈德森：理查德刚才说的话听起来太激进了，简直就是乌托邦。但他对富人征收更多税的想法，比 1913 年美国最初的所得税更不具有进步性。

当所得税首次立法时，只有 1% 的美国人需要缴纳所得税。这是因为只有收入超过一定数额（大约是正常工资的 10 倍）的人才需要缴纳所得税。

因此，缴纳所得税的人是大型企业投资者、大型房地产所有者和大型金融家。工人、工薪阶层根本不需要缴纳所得税。他们免税。

在短短 100 多年的时间里，经济运作的叙述发生了如此大的改变，以至于人们不记得最初的所得税应该是累进的，并且实际上能够通过这些条款为美国参加第一次世界大战提供资金，这些条款只对所谓的食利者收入、租金接受者和金融投资者征税。

当时，在那之后，从 20 世纪 20 年代开始，金融业和它所保护的行业，房地产业、保险业、垄断企业，开始反击。他们的计划是将经济金融化。

他们在 20 世纪 50 年代初取得了巨大成功，当时他们提出了企业养老金计划的想法。企业养老金计划被描述为，现在劳动力是资本家的缩影。我们用股票支付工人工资，这样工人就可以真正拥有他们公司的股票，把股票投入股市。

有两种养老金计划。一种是让他们成为自己公司的共同所有者。这样你就会让工人拥有越来越多的股票，例如《芝加哥论坛报》，这是芝加哥的右翼共和党报纸。

最后，一旦养老金缴款和股票持有量足够高，论坛报就会被一位金融家接管，他没收了自 1950 年代以来工人以论坛报股票形式持有的所有储蓄，并用这些储蓄来偿还借钱给他购买芝加哥论坛报的银行。

对于其他人的养老金计划来说，这基本上意味着，好吧，我们将把你的养老金放在一边，股市将会增长。这意味着把钱投入股市、投资银行和资金管理基金，就创建了一个完整的金融体系。

假设你在一家公司工作，它剥削你，欺骗你，但公司说，好吧，想想看，你剥削了工人。你的钱是储蓄，养老金储蓄存入了我们的公司。所以想想我们剥削你赚了多少养老金。

嗯，这就是整个经济范围内发生的事情。通过投资养老金而不是按现收现付制，而不是像许多欧洲国家那样将养老金作为公共义务，养老金被金融化到股票市场。

现在，你有像加州公共退休储蓄基金（CalPERS）这样的养老金计划。美国各地的养老基金都迫切希望将他们的钱交给私人资本家，承诺通过收购公司、缩小规模、削减劳动力、榨取更多资金并留下破产空壳来获得巨额快速收益。

因此，将钱存入养老金计划的工业雇员正在为经济的去工业化而不是工业化提供资金。这就是政治家捐助者希望看到的计划，以同样的方式转化为如何处理社会保障。

问题是，金融化和金融资本主义与 19 世纪不仅马克思而且其他人所描述的工业资本主义正好相反。

理查德·沃尔夫：是的，如果我要扮演激进的角色，我想说的是，资本主义认为利润是底线。我认识的美国各地商学院的同事们，他们是我的朋友，他们总是

告诉我，他们给学生的基本信息是，如果你想创业，就去劳动力便宜、市场不断增长的地方。

他们说非常好，他们对老师说，非常感谢。我会从中国向你们汇报，因为我要去中国，因为那里的工资低，市场是世界上最大的，而且增长速度比其他国家都快。所以我应该去哪里是显而易见的。待会儿见。你们被困在芝加哥、辛辛那提或其他地方。我要去北京或上海。我知道你们教我应该去哪里。

如果你不喜欢资本主义的结果??，即世界一个又一个地方的去工业化，那就来吧，让我们记住，曾几何时，资本主义是我们在新英格兰庆祝的。然后它离开了，你知道，它去了中西部、俄亥俄州、宾夕法尼亚州和威斯康星州。你知道到今天新英格兰还剩下什么吗？那些工厂，四五层楼高，漂亮的长砖建筑，现在到处都是艺术家工作室、陶器店和瑜伽课。因为这些空置的工厂只能容纳这些。

现在我们叫什么中西部？我们称它为美国的锈带，因为它被遗弃了。资本主义抛弃了新英格兰，去了中西部，又抛弃了中西部，去了南方，去了西方，然后可以预见的是，你不需要在这里当算命师，他们为什么要留在美国境内？

他们最终决定，等一下，同样的逻辑，这样更有利可图，我们可以迫使我们还没有去的国家竞标我们去那里，从而利用利润机制为他们的世界带来就业机会。我们准备好了。我们准备好去中国了。我们准备好去月球了。

资本主义，资本主义总是有这样有趣的地方。当它成长、扩张、发现一些东西时，它希望你看到好的一面。只要你不忘记它也有不好的地方，这些都很好。

你知道，我们活着，生活很美好，但我们也会死。这是我们存在的另一部分。资本主义抛弃了我们。

你想去一个资本主义抛弃的地方吗？去英格兰吧。去欧洲的工业中心吧。现在，欧洲到处都有法西斯主义的种子。在哪里？在废弃的地区，工业已经不复存在，而工业曾经存在。

伙计们，这就是这里正在发生的事情的现实。利润动机既是建设者，也是杀手。如果允许我再引用马克思在《资本论》第一卷开头的话，他说，是的，资本主义，他说，是巨大财富的不断生产者和再生产者。

不幸的是，他补充说，它同样是巨大贫困的生产者和再生产者。一个是另一个的另一面，这就是这个系统的问题所在。这就是为什么我们可以做得更好。

我们所说的一切都是为了说明，在组织经济方面，资本主义经济无疑取得了成就。但我们生活在一个广告社会，我并不是在夸奖他们。

在广告中，请注意一点。客户付钱给广告商，让他们只说客户的好话，无论是真实的还是虚构的，但他们有一个共同点，都是好的。

他们隐藏了什么？所有不好的东西。这是一种与人交流的方式，与我们小时候被告知的完全不同，你必须看到优点和缺点。你必须权衡利弊。你必须为理解你生活的世界做出平衡的贡献。

不，不，不，不，不。广告给你的是一个精心构建的、不平衡的观点。

你会从民主党那里听到关于卡玛拉·哈里斯的美好事物，仅此而已。特朗普先生会说很多关于特朗普的精彩事情，仅此而已。

他们会允许自己把斑马粪便放在另一个上面。这就是广告心态。资本主义给我们的礼物是广告业，它破坏了整个说话和语言的过程。

这意味着迈克尔和我所做的一半，以及尼玛擅长组织的事情，是去神秘化，试图恢复某种类似于经济体系平衡感的东西，这样我们就可以做有创造力的人类一直在做的事情，比他们出生在体系中时发现的更好。

这就是我们在这里要做的一切。我们可以做得比资本主义更好，我们应该停止不吸取这个教训。

迈克尔·哈德森：所以我们谈论的是一个叙述。如果你能看透……

当你听到一个叙述，比如政府破产了，或者我们必须平衡预算，他们想让你做什么？如今，你听到的任何说法，当然是政客的说法，都是为了塑造你对经济运作方式和你在其中的地位的看法，让你去做和支持某项政策。而这些政策是由人民买单的

支持这种叙事的人。

正如理查德刚才所说，我们试图提出一种不同的叙事，因为没有人付钱给我们。事实证明，你为叙事获得的报酬越少，它就越糟糕。

理查德·沃尔夫：是的，没错。你被收买得越少，你就越不会为了赚钱而放弃你正在做的其他事情，放弃你的享受、你的快乐、你的希望、你的梦想。一切都妨碍你实现你最好的一面，因为它质疑或威胁你的生存，这太可怕了。

这是一个非凡的体系。它一直存在，并凭借这一点取得了如此多的成就。但它现在已经完了。我认为它无法挽救了。我和其他人一样不知道它会首先在哪里崩溃，如何崩溃，崩溃的速度有多快，这些都不知道。我无法预测未来。

但我很清楚，传统真理的影响力每天都在一点点减弱。我个人也坚持这一点，将其作为我所做事情的基础。我认为这也是迈克尔和尼玛等人的动力。正是这种感觉让我们必须做点什么，而这正是我们可以做的。

我们可以说，看，世界并不像主流媒体所报道的那样。让我们向你展示这可以帮助你获得哪些非凡的见解，它们可以让你的生活变得更好。

尼玛：是的。理查德，我们这里有一些观众提出的问题。你可以回答。其中一个问题就是针对你的，理查德。

它说，如果政府随意印钞，那么为什么他们还需要向公众征税？

迈克尔·哈德森：说得好。

理查德·沃尔夫：是的。让人们理解这一点非常非常重要。理查德，这就是问题所在。你可以在屏幕上看到。如果政府印钞。

有很多原因。就像社会中做出的所有重大决策一样，特别是如果这些决策持续一段时间，就像这个决策一样，政府长期以来一直在征税和印钞。这绝不是什么新鲜事。

有些形式是新的，但这两种现象非常古老。好吗？

其中一个原因是资本主义的方式，特别是——

它比这更古老，但资本主义的运作方式，你有一个荒谬的，我的意思是，荒谬的情况。你可以把任何资本主义国家的人口分成两类，一边是公司和富人，另一边是其他人。10%、90%，无论你想要什么，你想怎么做。

好吧，现在我们开始。这两个群体，顶层的人和其他所有人，都希望得到政府的服务。企业希望政府保护他们的财富、自由、利润，并提高利润，在需要时给予补贴，确保他们生产的产品的国外市场，确保他们生产的产品的廉价外国投入来源。他们有一长串希望政府做的事情。

而人民大众，为了便于讨论，也列出了他们的清单。他们想要公共教育、医疗保健、良好的道路。企业也想要这些，他们想要有人照顾婴儿和游泳池，等等。好吗？这就是他们所有人想要的。

现在的问题是，这些钱怎么付？他们希望政府来做，政府怎么来做？在这里我们可以清楚地看到，企业和富人希望政府做很多事情，但他们不想为此付钱。

而人民大众希望政府做很多事情，但他们不想为此付钱。好吧，如果没人付钱，你就得不到它。

那么我们有什么呢？我们有一个系统，在这个系统中，我们告诉大众，每个人都必须支付他们应得的份额，所以我们有一个税收系统。非常古老。我们都将从政府正在做的事情中受益，至少我们口头上支持这个想法。所以我们都必须做出贡献，好吗？我们有一个税收系统。

好吧，但是上层人士与我们其他人不同，他们有钱，他们有能力做比“想要”更多的事情。他们可以实现它。这就是成为公司首席执行官、董事会成员或拥有 10 亿美元财富的意义。

你有能力做事，那么你会做什么？你安排降低税收，特别是对你、对公司和富人的税收。所以你把税收负担推到中层和底层。但超过某个点，事情就会变得富有创造力，超过某个点，大多数人就无法再做事了。记住，他们是拿工资的人，超过某个点，就会发生税收起义。每个国家都发生过。我们也发生过。记住，几十年前始于加州，席卷全国。税收起义。

好吧，高层人士现在意识到我们必须玩一场游戏。我们宣布减税，我们可能

我确信每个人都会得到一点减税。你知道，你们减税 5%，你们减税 10%，我们减税 40%。哦，我们得到了这样的减税。

最好的例子就是特朗普先生在 2017 年实现的减税。如果你想称其为唯一的经济创新，那就是特朗普先生通过的。他的四年无所作为，空洞无用，我知道拜登先生也抄袭了，但尽管如此，这些国家都是相互竞争的亲资本主义国家。所以他通过 2017 年的减税促进了这一点。

现在到了最有创意的部分。当你对每个人减税时，告诉人们你可以用更少的钱做更多的事情，你知道，你是在削减政府的开支，就好像当你减税时，它不会对你所能提供的服务产生影响。也许这欺骗了人们。然后你说，好吧，但这里有一个更简单的事情。

我们不用纳税，而是借钱。这不是很棒吗？我们可以给你们想要的东西。我们给你们公司想要的东西。我们会给你们大众想要的东西。我们不会向你们征税，因为你们不想要。我们会借钱。这不是很棒吗？

太棒了，只要你们不明白迈克尔刚刚花了将近一个小时解释的内容。政府从谁那里借钱？他讲过。政府从个人那里借钱。当然，谁？最富有的人。你知道你怎么知道只有最富有的人？因为有多少次政府官员到你家里或办公室来找你，和你谈论向政府提供巨额贷款？

答案是，这在你的生活中从未发生过。那是因为你不算数。你不重要。政府只从富人、其他国家或自己的中央银行借钱。这就是政府借款的方式，这对富人来说很棒，因为他们可以避免纳税，但他们不用纳税，而是把钱作为贷款给政府，政府先付给他们利息，然后再偿还。

这被称为轻而易举，但如果这对富人来说是轻而易举的，那么对我们其他人来说，这也是另一种轻而易举的。

你必须没有脑子才能接受这样的制度。这种骗局就像以 18.95 美元的价格卖给你布鲁克林大桥一样荒唐。如果当有人向你推销这种骗局时你无法识别，那么也许在某个地方、以某种方式、在另一个宇宙中，你真的应该得到你所得到的惩罚。

这是一个由上层人士设计的系统，为他们服务。我不是指美国体制，也不是指资本主义体制，因为这种游戏以各种形式在各地重演。

这就是为什么我们中的一些人批评资本主义。是的。

NIMA：那么让我们用最新消息来结束本次会议，我发给你的 Ted Postal 文章链接正在讨论美国考虑核武器的新战略。他们说这是一种先发制人的战略。

但是，抛开核弹这一部分不谈，你认为这种战略与经济、美国与俄罗斯和中国之间正在进行的经济战争之间有什么联系吗？你认为这两个讨论之间有什么联系吗？一方面是军事方面，另一方面是经济方面。

迈克尔·哈德森：在冷战期间，美国曾希望通过大量军备支出让俄罗斯破产，他们认为这迫使俄罗斯不得不进行与本国军备支出相当的支出。

他们认为这会推翻苏联，因为他们的经济盈余不如我们，这将迫使他们压缩经济，引起公众不满，包括他们自己共产党员队伍的不满，这只会打击他们的士气。因此，如果我们能够增加支出，迫使其他国家花钱，理论上他们的人民就会起义，投票给其他人当权。

这正是北约在 2022 年的想法，当时它不断加强对讲俄语的乌克兰人的攻击，并尽一切可能挑起俄罗斯的战争。

再次强调，他们的想法是，如果他们能够迫使俄罗斯抵制北约对乌克兰东部俄语区顿涅茨克和卢甘斯克平民的袭击，那么俄罗斯首先将不得不将其收入转用于战争开支，无法实现工业化，无法在工业化方面更加自给自足；其次，由于俄罗斯士兵将阵亡，美国国家民主基金会和其他宣传组织、俄罗斯的非政府组织将能够试图煽动民众的不满情绪，显然这没有奏效，但这就是计划。

所以当你提出一个建议，你刚才所做的，这个巨大的

核武器开支的增加，首先，这对美国的军事工业综合体来说是一笔意外之财，因为美国的大部分核武器在过去 50 年里都没有经过清理和整修。

有一个问题，它们还能用吗？我们必须把它们拆开再修理吗？我们是否需要新技术来投资美国，以跟上俄罗斯的高超音速导弹和其他技术？

事实证明，美国用军事开支让俄罗斯破产的计划适得其反。它威胁要用军事开支让美国破产，而所有这些的叙述都是我们开场时所构建的。

叙述是，为了负担得起这笔威胁炸毁世界并重新开始文明的军事开支，为了为此提供资金，我们必须削减社会保障和社会支出以及向债券持有人支付的利息。

因此，所有这些都是在美国将大量资金用于非社会目的的借口，从而挤占了选民真正想要的社会支出计划的预算余地。

当然，要做到这一点，你必须在共和党和民主党之间建立双头垄断。你必须让他们成为一个政党，阻止任何第三方进入选票，例如，尼玛，当我们有绿党反战候选人吉尔·斯坦时，你和我讨论过。

共和党和民主党都试图制定一套错综复杂的规则来进入选票，以至于美国人在投票箱上别无选择，只能投票给共和党进行重新武装，新的冷战武装，或者民主党进行重新军事化。

你可以投票决定哪一个党派来做这件事，每个党派都有自己的身份政治。但你不能让任何一个党派试图敦促和平。

上周，德国上演了一场闹剧。德国正在谈论两个反战政党，为了维护民主，我们必须取缔反战政党。因为如果不发动战争，我们就无法支持全世界的法西斯主义。我们必须支持乌克兰法西斯分子对抗俄罗斯。如果成立了一个政党，无论是德国的替代党还是萨罗瓦涅希特党，我们都必须阻止他们，不让他们进入议会，因为这是反民主的。

民主是在冷战中对美国有利的。这就是我们的定义。民主就是冷战。专制就是避免战争。专制就是金砖国家、中国、俄罗斯、伊朗和其他国家退出整个金融体系。

所以他们不仅有我们谈论的不同叙事，还有不同的词汇，正如乔治·奥威尔所指出的那样。因此，我们每周都会在您的节目中讨论，不仅讨论叙事，还讨论那些旨在扭曲人们对世界的看法和看法的词汇。

理查德·沃尔夫：我只想补充一点。让我暂时以经济学家的身份来解释一下。迈克尔是对的。俄罗斯和美国之间的竞争，战争竞争，军备竞赛，无论你想怎么称呼它，在某种程度上可以追溯到第二次世界大战结束时，这是一种非常聪明的策略。

无论是乔治·凯南获得赞誉，还是后来国务院的一些官员，他们都明白一个非常简单的事情，我认为美国人从未明白过。

美国在二战后成为一个绝对独特的主导经济强国，所有潜在的竞争对手，经济竞争对手都消失了。俄罗斯消失了。中国消失了。德国消失了。英国消失了。日本也消失了，要么被战争间接摧毁，要么被战争直接摧毁。

现在，这不是一个可持续的安排。这一切终将结束，但我认为，在 20 世纪余下的一段时间里，美国一直保持着主导地位。

因此，美国和俄罗斯之间的竞争、军备竞赛是一种糟糕的笑话。一个国家坐拥经济强国之位，另一个国家则处于经济灾难区之位。

没有……这太疯狂了。就在我上次看的时候，两三年前，GDP……美国人不明白这一点。三年前俄罗斯的 GDP 约为每年 1.5 万亿美元。一年的商品和服务总产出约为 1.5 万亿美元。同年，美国的 GDP 约为 22 万亿美元。

好吧，每个人都必须停下来，对吧？1.5 对 22。这个比例现在与以前并没有什么不同。以 1.5 万亿美元经济为基础的军队与以 22 万亿美元为基础的军队之间的军备竞赛？我的意思是，这不是一场比赛。

你知道这有什么神奇的吗

帽子？俄罗斯人实际上能够进行的军事生产水平。即使他们不承认，你也可以看出，他们对军事的重视程度显然是巨大的。

也许苏联对美国是一个挑战，在政治和军事上用这个词比较宽泛。但在经济上，它永远、一点也不接近、根本没有可能。因此，美国可以自信地认为，两国之间的军备竞赛会赢。

我们今天没有处于那种情况。这就是正在发生的事情的一部分。我们的情况不一样。目前，我上次看的时候，美国的国内生产总值约为 23 万亿美元。中国的国内生产总值约为 17 或 18 万亿美元。这是一个完全不同的故事。

把中国和俄罗斯放在一起，你就有高度的军事优先权和更大的经济。而中国是一个山地大经济体，拥有首屈一指的高科技部门。

这是一个新的游戏。如果你现在就认为你会赢得军备竞赛，那你就疯了。你已经脱离了现实。你现在的处境已经不同了，你会犯下可怕的错误。

而你犯下的错误有多严重，第一个迹象就是你认为乌克兰只需要你的武器和金钱就能压倒俄罗斯。

错了。为什么？因为俄罗斯有中国，有金砖国家，有盟友，有选择。

你没有想清楚。你以为你回到了以前的状态，但事实并非如此。你就是没有。结果是一个你还没有想清楚的新框架。

我听说这些天来，新保守主义者在管理我们的外交政策，布林肯，你知道，杰克·沙利文，这些人。他们听起来、看起来、说话都像冷战战士。他们还在那里。他们在另一个地方，有其他当时有一定意义的算计。危险，有风险，但他们有一定的逻辑。

现在你有了危险，你有了风险，但胜算不大。现在的情况已经大不相同了。事实上，每年都在朝着相反的方向发展。这是一个失败的提议，但他们一直在失败，他们想不出出路。他们输了。他们没能打赢朝鲜战争。他们在越南失败了。他们在阿富汗失败了。他们在伊拉克失败了。他们在乌克兰也失败了。他们仍然不明白。

这就是为什么我认为我们比任何人都更接近我认为即将到来的巨大变化。

迈克尔·哈德森：好吧，理查德，给他们点赞。我们确实在 2022 年击败了德国。现在完全依赖它。我们击败了欧洲。

理查德·沃尔夫：是的，但你知道大众汽车正处于最大的危机中，大众汽车是德国的标志性产业。这是一个伟大的成功故事。直到去年，大众汽车在中国的销量比任何其他品牌的汽车都多，等等。他们现在正处于危机之中。他们宣布即将关闭德国各地的工厂，这是他们 70 年历史上从未做过的事。

他们陷入了绝境，但他们知道原因。要小心。我们看到的是表面，他们必须安抚美国，因为迈克尔脑子里有各种理由，他们说得对。

但在表面之下，还有另一层德国工业，正如迈克尔即将说的那样，是美国在乌克兰的政策让德国的经济奇迹消失了。

我们知道我们没有奇迹。我们 [德国] 的技术技能并不比法国人、英国人或意大利人高超。停下来。我们更清楚。我们拥有的是廉价的石油和天然气，是欧洲最便宜的石油和天然气，加上美国人炸毁的管道，我们在未来 30 年内都会拥有它。

我们完蛋了，因为我们是欧洲的引擎，所以整个欧洲都完蛋了。我们真的要在本世纪余下的时间里成为美国的附庸吗？其实我们根本不必这样做。这是一个痛苦的问题，它就潜藏在表面之下，不仅仅是在德国、法国、意大利，甚至在英国。

他们正处于关键时刻。我不确定他们会往哪个方向走。我理解迈克尔的意思。他们可能已经出卖了他们的整个未来。

他们让欧洲，顺便说一句，欧洲，欧洲共同体，成为了世界上最富有的单一集团。它的财富集团比美国还要大。它的财富集团至少比原来的金砖国家还要大，或者至少接近原来的金砖国家。

它已经消失了，或者，对于几个世纪、几千年来一直是世界中心的那个地区来说，这将是件了不起的事情，但在这么短的时间内，它被一个相对较新的国家——美国，和一个完全新的国家——资本主义中国——挤到了一边，而不是之前那样。

因此，我确实相信，这些对话，除了来自左派的有趣评论和所有这些之外，已经足够了。但我比以往任何时候都更相信，我们正处于许多这样的边缘，在

矛盾浮出水面。

我们将讨论事情如何能如此迅速地发生变化，而事实上，我们的讨论已经记录下来，这些变化是长期存在的，已经酝酿了很长一段时间。

NIMA：是的。非常感谢理查德和迈克尔今天与我们在一起。一如既往的高兴。

理查德·沃尔夫：是的，谈话很愉快。迈克尔让我们知道，我希望我没有透露任何信息，他担心自己会就金钱问题发表演讲。但我很高兴你这么做了。我很高兴我们围绕这个话题展开，因为我认为这个话题需要不止一次，我希望我们将来有机会再次回顾其中一些问题。

NIMA：没错。很快再见。再见。

由于以色列在加沙的战争罪行，我们将报道时间从每周五天增加到六天。我们没有资金来做这件事，但觉得这是唯一正确的选择。所以如果你今年还没有捐款，请现在就捐款。捐款请点击这里。

Michael Hudson, Richard D. Wolff – Debunking U.S. Bankruptcy Myths

September 15, 2024 

https://braveneweurope.com/michael-hudson-richard-d-wolff-debunking-u-s-bankruptcy-myths

 

NIMA: So nice to have you, Michael, and Richard on again on this podcast. And let’s get started with the current situation of the economy of the United States. And the question is, Michael, to you, is the United States rapidly approaching bankruptcy?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, when Republicans and now the Democrats, ever since Obama, sought to frighten voters into supporting an attack on Social Security by trying to privatize it with the right-wing congressional commission he sponsored, there’s been a lot of deceptive rhetoric about the federal debt and how the budget deficit forces us to make hard choices, hard for the people, the 90% of the population who are going to have their social spending, Social Security, and other basic government programs squeezed out by what the both Democrats and Republicans want to cut back.

The real problem leading to bankruptcy today is private debt. There’s no problem at all with government debt going bankrupt. Governments don’t go bankrupt. They can always print the money. And in many cases, going bankrupt can be a very good thing, most obviously in the case of student debt.

If private debtors were allowed to do what almost all other individuals are able to do to the student debtors, what companies and financial institutions are able to do, the student debtors could cope with their student debts by declaring bankruptcy. That would say, we don’t have enough money to pay the student debts we’re loaded down with.

But Joe Biden led the fight to prevent student debt from being subject to the bankruptcy declarations, thereby creating this unfair student debt crisis that we have today that makes students the only category in the whole American economy that’s unable to wipe out its debts by bankruptcy and to free itself.

And the excuse is, well, we need to finance the government budget. Otherwise, we’re going to raise the government debt. And the pretense is that if we don’t make students pay their student debt, then the government will go bankrupt. And as if somehow the government going bankrupt is like an individual going bankrupt.

Well, the major reason that Biden cited all this, government needed the money, is to basically say, no, we have to enable the government to avoid deficits that are contributing to the debt.

Didn’t say anything about the tax cuts for the rich or the unequal taxation or the fact that anyone who earns over $120,000 doesn’t have to pay any of the increased income at all for their Social Security. It’s all paid to them by people who earn less than $120,000. None of that’s in discussion.

Well, I want to put this debt issue in perspective. And in order to do that, I think it’s necessary to think in terms of balance sheets. In one way or another, it’s a question of who, whom. To whom does the U.S. government owe its debts?

And I want to make two points clear that always should be made at the outset of any discussion. First of all, nobody ever got in trouble by running into debt itself. The problem is having to repay it and to pay its carrying charges if you can’t pay it down.

And I’ll explain later, the government has no intention or likelihood of having to pay a large part of its foreign debt.

So the second point that’s important to start with is to recognize that one party’s debt is another party’s assets. The government debt is a preferred asset of most of the economy.

So let’s look at who holds the government debt as an asset. Well, with all of today’s gloom and doom talk, it may surprise people to say that the U.S. debt is perhaps the most desirable financial asset on the planet. That’s why so much of it is owned by the wealthiest layer of the U.S. population.

And that’s because nobody expects this debt to have to be paid at a cost to the government. That may be surprising, but it’s obvious when you think about it.

The paper money that you carry around in your pocket is technically a government debt. Government issued paper money in order to finance some kind of spending. And it issues a paper money and as its holder, the holder has a financial claim on the government.

So each of you viewers who have the currency of any government in your pocket, in financial terms, you’re creditors to the government whose paper currency you’re holding. And that makes you, in effect, a creditor to the whole society.

You don’t think of yourself as a creditor because it’s not that financialized. But technically, if you look at the government balance sheet, assets have to equal debts. That’s why it’s balanced. So you have government debt, liabilities on the left side, and on the opposite side, the assets. Paper money is a big chunk of this.

And if the government would repay this paper currency, presumably by giving you something in return, there wouldn’t be any paper money left. So of course the government’s not going to pay this paper money.

And you think of money being spent for what you buy, especially in small amounts. It’s a grocery store or similar venues. But actually, most U.S. currency is held in $100 bills, large amounts. Often they’re packaged together in shrink-wrapped large bundles that are photographed being transported out of U.S. aircraft and paid to the dictators and kleptocrats and politicians that we’re buying off.

Most $100 bills and most U.S. currency isn’t held by Americans. It’s by foreigners. The phrase usually is, people keep it in their mattresses if they’re living in a country with a bad, a weak currency like Argentina.

But of course, the people who have this shrink-wrapped $100 bills don’t need to put it in their mattresses. They have all sorts of storage rooms for that.

So this U.S. debt is the savings of a large portion of the world’s kleptocracy and also just people trying to look at the U.S. as a safe currency compared to what they have. They certainly have more faith in U.S. paper currency than they have in their own foreign currency. And this money is considered for saving, not for spending.

Well, a second category of U.S. debt is sort of like this. It’s the debt that’s held by foreign central banks. It’s their currency reserves. And you can look in the Treasury Bulletin. Every month, the Treasury Bulletin lists who is the U.S. debt owed to, who owns Treasury securities.

Well, a huge chunk, sometimes one-third of the entire new issue of foreign debt is owned by foreign central banks, especially a few decades ago when military spending was very high. And that’s the essence of the dollar standard, which I call the U.S. Treasury Bill standard.

Since 1971, when President Nixon stopped paying deficits in gold, foreign central banks don’t really have an international asset that they can hold apart from U.S. dollars. So instead of General De Gaulle and the French being able to take the dollars that they’re getting from U.S. spending in Vietnam and Southeast Asia in the 1960s to buy gold, now all they could do is buy U.S. Treasury securities.

And these Treasury securities that foreign governments hold are to finance the U.S. budget deficit that is a result largely of U.S. military spending to create the 800 military bases we have around the world to surround countries and sort of force them not to abandon the dollar standard, but they’re financing their own encirclement and their own basic U.S. military buildup against them.

And that makes the U.S. foreign debt to foreign central banks a free lunch. The U.S. can just spend it as much as it wants. The dollars that it spends end up in the foreign central banks of Europe and also of China.

And foreign central banks don’t have an alternative unless they’re to use these dollar inflows and buy gold or something else. And of course, if they do that, the United States declares them an enemy for trying to de-dollarize and essentially declares a financial war on them.

Well, this free lunch is something that nobody expects to be repaid. The U.S. is not able to create enough of a balance of payment surplus to pay Germany and France and China and Russia and Japan, all of the securities that it owes them. So it’s not going to repay them.

And if a country says, we want to de-dollarize like Russia did, the United States simply confiscated 300 billion dollars of Russian money and paid it to the Ukrainian, the interest of it to the Ukrainians to help attack Russia to prevent it from going down that road.

Well, let me spell out just how this system works. Suppose you go to, you could do what America does and in miniature. Suppose you go to a grocery store and you buy food and other household items. And when the cashier prints out your receipt for $30, you sign an IOU, IOU $30 and put your name. Well, that’s not a credit card. That’s just you’re writing a note, a signed note, IOU $30 to the store or whoever should be the bearer of this note. Well, the manager would come out and ask you, well, what am I supposed to do with this IOU? And you could tell them, well, you can use this $30 IOU to pay whomever you buy your produce from, you know, they’re delivering milk, you know, pay them partly in check and give them my IOU and let it just circulate around and it’ll circulate and everyone will trade it just like they’d trade a dollar bill or a bank check. It’s part of their assets.

Well, obviously that’s not how the world works for you and for other individuals, but it’s how the international financial system works. When the US spends money abroad and military spending is by far the leading category of the US balance of payments deficit that is pumping dollars into the world economy, the recipients of these dollars in foreign countries will turn these dollars over to their central banks in exchange for domestic currency because they operate their businesses or whatever in domestic currency.

And the central banks then have these dollars, is what they call their international foreign reserves or sovereign wealth fund, and invested in US treasury bills.

When the oil war happened in 1974 and the OPEC countries quadrupled their price, the price of oil, they were told, you can charge whatever you want for your oil, but you have to keep all of your savings, all the receipts you get from this oil, you have to keep that in US currency. We’re not going to let you buy US companies, but you can buy stocks and bonds, but basically you have to put it in US banks to buy treasury bills. You can’t really spend it for anything at all. You’re stuck with it. And if you don’t do that, we will treat that as an act of war.

So foreign countries count these unspent dollar receipts as their monetary reserves, just as a store might count your $30 as part of its assets on its balance sheet. We have an asset from, it would be listed on their receivables or assets. Well, by the way, the free ride for the US government is what has led other countries to want to de-dollarize their economies. That’s what the BRICS are trying to do. And Russia has already done it. If it holds any US dollar securities, the US will simply grab it.

China is worried that the United States may do to it what America has done to Russia and simply grab all of its money at a point, but it’s hoping that somehow it can be friends with the United States.

Well, we can discuss this debt later, but that isn’t the only debt that the United States government has no reason to pay. A large and growing debt is owed to the government’s own Federal Reserve.

If the government wants to spend money into the economy, it asks the Federal Reserve to buy US Treasury securities. So the Federal Reserve owns these securities and the banking system owns US securities as backing and reserves for its own deposits and loans. That’s how banks work, holding reserves. So this part of the US debt also isn’t supposed to be paid. And there’s no way that the US is going to go bankrupt. If the US had no debt at all, there’d be no government debt to hold as bank reserves. There’d be no reason for the Federal Reserve to exist. You can see the problem.

So just like the paper money in your pockets, this other Federal Reserve holding, foreign bank holding of government debt are not expected to be repaid. And I think this kind of financial maneuvering shows that the United States doesn’t really have to borrow. It can really, in effect, print the money. But when it prints the money, this money it prints, just like issuing paper money, the money it prints is counted as a debt to the Federal Reserve. So it’s all a wash transaction, sort of the illusion of a debt that somehow is in trouble.

Well, if we can get all these categories of the US federal debt out of the way, then finally, we have the kind of debt that most people think of, the treasury bonds that are notes, that are held by individuals, especially by the wealthiest people. The wealthiest investors all have substantial holdings, either in US securities, the bond market, there’s been a flood, a run into the US debt as a safe haven.

Just as the Congress is saying, warning, well, the US is near bankruptcy, Wall Street and the large investors and foreign investors too are calling the dollar a safe haven. That doesn’t sound like bankruptcy. They’re moving out of stocks and bonds, out of other assets into the US debt because as the US economy gets more fragile and top heavy, they know that the US government can’t go bankrupt because its debt is all in its own currency. It doesn’t owe foreign currency debt that it would have to print. It owns debt in its own currency and it can print as much as it wants.

If you go to the bank or the Federal Reserve and say, here’s my $20 bill, I want to cash it in for money, they can give you two $10 bills, but that’s all you’re going to get.

Well, Abraham Lincoln financed the Civil War simply by printing the greenbacks and the greenbacks were technically a debt and that’s what’s happening.

Despite the enormous magnitude of US federal debt that Nima mentioned and the loud warnings of government insolvency when the financial sky’s falling, the treasury bonds are viewed as the most desirable, safest asset around.

Chinese officials have told me that they don’t expect the US dollar really to go down. They’re reducing their holdings of dollars in favor of gold and other foreign currencies, but they still hold enormous amounts of dollars because they expect them essentially to remain a strong currency.

So basically, the enormous increase in wealth that the wealthiest 10% of Americans have made since the Obama bank bailout in 2008, this stemmed from the fact that the US debt has been thrown under the finance and created the largest bond market boom in history.

This bond market boom has only benefited the wealthiest financial classes.

So here’s wage level and income for the bottom 90%, flat. For the top 10%, it’s gone up and up.

All this is financed by the government debt, turning the stock in the corporate bond market into a Ponzi scheme. So this is the bright side of government debt and why you shouldn’t be frightened into having to solve it. So the question is that I think maybe we should spend a few minutes discussing is why are people, what’s their motive in trying to frighten people about the government debt?

RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah, I think maybe I can help in this regard because there really isn’t a contradiction between the notion of the financial markets that the dollar is the safest place or the safest form in which to hold your wealth, the dollar obligations of the United States government given the way the world is working.

In other words, the United States’ position is shrinking, the empire is falling apart, but compared to your alternatives it’s still a logical place for people with private assets to hold them in that form. So that’s the safety argument.

Now the other part of the safety argument isn’t spoken, but I’m going to make it explicit now.

One of the reasons the dollar is safe, despite the fact that the dollar’s footprint in the world is shrinking, that the percentage of central bank reserves held in dollars is less now than it’s been at any time in the last half century, and on and on. I could give all those statistics that you could want. Why is it still safe?

Here’s the unspoken assumption of the private world, which we’ll see is reasonable. The assumption is that the United States government, despite the level of debt it’s involved in and despite its shrinking global footprint, has an internal political capability of making sure that the people who hold that debt will not be in any way damaged by how this problem gets solved.

In other words, what they’re doing is they’re saying you can afford to keep your wealth here, which we need you to do, and here’s what we’ll do in exchange. We’ll make sure that the angry people who are going to have to pay the freight of all of this will not be able to disrupt it.

But here’s what that means. Suppose, suppose, that the American people demanded of their elected representatives, we want the social security of having a retirement that we can look forward to after we reach age 65 or 66 or 67. We want to live in a society that honors a lifetime of work by not making you destitute when you’re old. It doesn’t seem like an extreme demand. It’s reasonable. We want that.

And you know what else we want? We want a health insurance from the day we’re born till the day we die, like so many other people have around the world.

And you know what else we want? We want a free higher education. We want college to be like high school and elementary school. It is something we as a society invest in ourselves, like a public park, like a beach, like a state reserve where you can take your family and go camping. We want a higher education like most of Europe already offers its people for no fee at all. No tuition. No. We want that.

All right. We all know, because we live in the United States, what the answer is. Oh, the government can’t afford it.

Wait a minute. What do you mean the government can’t afford it? The government is currently shelling out, I don’t know what it is right now, but six to eight hundred billion dollars of interest on the national debt right now, and it’s forecast to become more over the next two or three years, a lot more.

So the American people say, okay, don’t pay the interest on the debt. There it is. Then you have 800 billion bucks right now, and that’s way more than you need to give us free education, free health care, and all the rest we’ve just asked for. Do that. We elected you. Do that. And if you don’t do that, we will unelect you and replace you with people who will.

Oh my gosh, say all the people in the world who own the debt.

That’s a very important point that Michael made. For every debt, there’s somebody holding that debt for whom it is an asset, and they want to protect their assets. They don’t want there to be a risk that the United States government will stop paying interest on the debt.

So the American government’s pledge to them, unspoken but very real, don’t worry, we will cut back on everything to the American people to preserve your interest in getting paid off for that debt that you own and that you invested in. You European rich people, you potentates around the world ripping off your own populations and investing it in dollars. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’ll protect you who don’t elect us but who fund us. And we will screw the American people because you elect us but you don’t fund us.

Okay, so that’s the deal. No one will say that to you. That’s why it’s so important that in the conversations, things get confused about money more than anything else.

We’re told, gee, we’ll have to cut public services so we don’t mess up the budget.

Wait a minute, Jack. You don’t have to cut public services. You just have to stop paying interest. Oh yes, but then people won’t lend to us. Exactly. And then what will you have to do? You’ll have to tax the rich people because there’ll be nothing left unless you want to sell the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean. And then there’ll be a dispute about who gets that money.

No, no, you want things to stay the way they are. And that’s a system developed of, by, and for the rich. And it is so gross these days that you need an endless amount of blah, blah noise about money and other things people have had mystified all their lives.

People like me sometimes to mention, and I will at this point, bear with me, the greatest critic of capitalism so far. I hope we have better ones coming. But so far, it’s the old guy Karl Marx. And he wrote as a young man, it was in his 20s if I’m not mistaken, maybe his 30s, but a very young man.

He wrote something called an essay, a short essay, about 10 pages, called The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society. Unbelievable. Half of it is quotations from the German writer Goethe and the British giant Shakespeare. He quotes in lengthy. His own comments are half the article. The others are quotations from Goethe and from Shakespeare.

And there he captures the whole mystery of money and why it has confused people all along, and what’s at stake. It’s extraordinary. He went on to criticize capitalism because he understood its preservation requires something as absolutely central as money to be absolutely mystified, lest its function be actually understood.

What Michael just did is gave you a crash course in demystifying what this is all about. When the government of the United States, the treasury, issues the debt, the IOU that the government owes you money, it then sells a large part of it to another branch of itself, the government. This other branch is called the Federal Reserve.

It has the right to print money, folks. That’s what it does. It prints the money, and it uses the money it prints to buy the debt of the other part of the government it is. Okay, this is weird. You should understand right off the bat this is very strange. No wonder it confuses people.

But that’s half its purpose. You know, in the old days, the rulers would print money whenever they needed it for a new coach, for a new palace, for a new war. And then people would get nervous. Oh my god, he’s printing.

[30:23]
So we had a little special commission set up called the Central Bank. It’s supposed to be composed of very wise men and women. Well, to be fair, throughout the history of capitalism, it’s very wise men. The women are few and far between, even now. And its job is to be an intermediary to make sure all of this is done. What? All of this is done with the same mystification as always.

Only now it’s a bit more mystified, because between the government that prints the money and the rest of us, we interpose a central bank who’s supposed to make us feel all a lot better, even though we know from the very documents Michael mentioned earlier, how much of the debt borrowed by our government it’s borrowing from itself, from the other part of the other office across town that literally prints the damn stuff.

Now, if you find that all terribly reassuring, then the system has worked. If you see through it, you’re probably a communist.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, Richard mentioned the magic word interest. And while we’re both in agreement that debt isn’t the problem, the problem, if you’re looking at the annual budget, is the rising interest rates, the interest payments relative to the receipts of the government.

And Richard pointed out quite right that interest is rising now that the Federal Reserve has raised the interest rates from only 0.1% per year to 4.5% to 5% in recent months. All of a sudden, this means a huge payment of interest in the budget, and that is going to increase the size of the budget deficit.

And that’s, you know, I said at the start that nobody went broke running up debt, but they get broke when they have to repay the debt or even to pay its carrying charges.

And interest is the carrying charges. The interest that the government pays to itself, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Reserve, under Obama, said all the interest that the Federal Reserve gets from the government can now be paid to the banks. They can borrow from the Federal Reserve at nothing, and they can put their own deposits back at the bank and get the interest that the Federal Reserve is paid by the government.

That was the big Obama deception for the most right-wing, vicious financial twist in history. And it went completely unobserved by the financial markets, except for people who follow finance very, very clearly.

But what you’re going to find now, and you’ve already heard verbals about it from the Biden administration, is if we’re going to have this increase in interest payments, we’ve got to have the balanced budget amendment that Obama tried to create with the Republican-dominated commission that he appointed to try to get a constitutional amendment saying the government must balance its budget so that its debt doesn’t go up anymore.

Well, let’s see what happened if this Obama Democratic Party policy actually came through. If the government had to avoid running a deficit, subject to paying the emergency spending that every democracy has to do, you have to spend more than now 40% of your budget on military, because without supporting fascism in Ukraine and the Middle East, how can you promote democracy without supporting Ukraine’s war against Russia and without declaring war on China and Middle Eastern countries?

And next to the military, alongside of it, you have to pay the 10% of wealthy people and banks that hold the government debt. Well, that really doesn’t leave very much left for social spending. And the easiest thing to cancel is Social Security, Medicaid, grants and aid from the federal government to the cities.

And this is what Kamala Harris has pledged to do if there is a democratic administration and probably what Trump, if he gets to be president, also will do.

This is the big squeeze that has been planned now for 20 years, the plan to take social spending out of the hands of government and to privatize it. Well, what are they going to do?

They’re not going to simply say, we won’t pay Social Security, because that’s a contractual obligation that the government has settled up. But what they say is, what we’re going to do is we’re going to take the Social Security Fund and we’re going to create a government grant to, let’s say, BlackRock and other money management companies to manage the Social Security in the form of a huge privatized mutual fund, just like the Sovereign Wealth Fund of Malaysia was handled by Wall Street and criminally just ripped off by the financial managers.

That’s what financial managers do. That’s what Goldman Sachs was criminally prosecuted for, for the billions of dollars that it embezzled from the money that it was supposed to be handling as a fiduciary from the Malaysian Sovereign Wealth Fund.

They want to do that with all of the Social Security Fund and they want to take this money, the government funding for Social Security that you’re paying every month, and all that’s going to be paid into this mutual fund that’s going to buy U.S. stocks and bonds.

And the financial sector says, if we can do that, this will create a huge stock market bubble. Boom. Because look, all this money, instead of being paid into the government to finance its war spending and the other spending that governments do, now it’ll be spent on the stock market.

And thank heavens, the stock market is so over debt leveraged now. It’s so almost insolvent that we’ve saved the stock market Ponzi scheme from the brink of insolvency by giving the money that used to be paid to the government to the mutual funds, put it into the stock market.

And then at a certain point, forecasters and the big money management funds will say, you know, that’s really not going to succeed.

They’ll sell all of their stock holdings, leaving the stockholders holding the bag just like they did in the South Sea bubble in the 1720s and the Mississippi bubble. That’s how wealth is made. You create a bubble, you mobilize public belief that somehow this bubble is going to make money for you if you join it. And then you sell out, you leave them holding the bag and let it collapse. That’s the plan that the Democrats and Republicans together are planning to do if they can do it in the next administration.

RICHARD WOLFF: And they’ll package the whole thing, or at least a large part of it, as a reform of the social security system. Here’s how this scam works.

And I know many of you watching this program will have been, you know, provoked into worrying or thinking about this by various fragments in this or that news report you read about the social security system. Here’s the way the scam goes.

Number one, you raise alarms. Here’s the alarm. The social security system is running out of money. We don’t have enough money. Then you’ll hear an erudite professor, sadly, one of us, getting up there and saying, the population is getting older. Oh, genius we got here. It’s getting older. So you see there’s more old people pulling money out of the social security system as a pension, relative to the young people working and putting money into the pension system in their weekly check deductions. The arithmetic is correct. The conclusion is absurd.

Social security either is or isn’t a commitment a society makes to itself. Are we going to honor the people who give a lifetime of work, whether it’s in the factory or the office or the store or at home, raising children and all the rest of it? Are we going to honor those people by giving them a decent, secure retirement? Or are we going to throw them in the garbage?

And that tells you a lot about a society, which way it goes on that one. And you can see that around the world right now.

If you want to support older people as a matter of a decent moral or ethical community, let me assure you as an economist, we have no shortage of funds available to do that. No problem at all.

But that’s not how the social security works. Social security works by taking money out of people’s checks now, holding that money until they reach 60, whatever, and then paying out a pension for the rest of their lives.

Everybody knew that that was the system, because that has been the system from the beginning in the 1930s, when an angry population of the American working class got social security for the first time in our history, by mobilizing the labor movement, two socialist parties and the communist parties worked together to get that from the president at the time, Franklin Roosevelt. That’s how this happened.

Now, first part of the problem, do we take money from the checks of everybody? Answer, no, we never did. We only take checks from the people who earn wages and salaries.

Wait a minute, aren’t there people who earn income from interest they receive, from dividends they receive, from capital gains they receive? Yes.

What is the amount of money deducted from those incomes for social security? Answer, nothing. What? Yes. How do the wealthiest people hold their wealth in America? By stocks and bonds and cash, which generate interest dividends and capital gains.

So the richest people own the bulk of their wealth in that form which social security exempts from taxing for raising the money for pension.

You know what that’s called? Grotesque injustice. That’s what that’s called. The people who have the most money are exempted from contributing to what the decent society wants to do for itself.

Wow, that’s like having clean water in a community, carefully cleaned and maintained by the community, for which the whole community is charged except the rich people. They get to drink the clean water and they’re not charged at all. Why? Well, because they’re rich. Wait a minute, what? Yes, wait a minute, what?

You ought to wonder, but it’s worse than that. It turns out that not all wages and salaries are taxed. Only the first, I think it’s now 160,000 a year, something in that order. That’s very nice, that is the bulk of us.

But you know who’s exempt again? Bingo, you guessed it, the super rich, the people who make more than 160,000. Here’s how it works, friends. Everybody pays the same percentage on the first 160,000 a year you earn. On every dollar over 160,000, no social security is withheld, no social security is deducted.

So, if you’re a corporate executive and you make a million or two or six or twelve or twenty, everything above 160,000, you’re not required to put into the pool for the pensions for our elderly. You’re exempt.

Why? Because you’re rich. That’s what got you the exemption. Not what you know, not what you do, not who you are, not how you serve the community, no, no, no, no, no. Just because you’re rich, that’s why.

Unbelievable, unjust, grotesque, and now comes the best part. How could you fix this problem? Well, instantaneously, I’ve given you the answer. You could tax interest, capital gains, and dividends. Put the social security tax on them, problem solved. No alarm, no social security running out of money, not in this century.

Here’s another one. Tax all income, wages and salaries, not just 160,000, all the way up. Look how much Elon Musk would have to pay. And here’s the beauty, he would have to pay millions and he wouldn’t notice.

But do we do that? No, no, no. We allow millions of Americans today, I’m talking many millions, millions. We allow them to worry themselves sick over whether or not they will live on social security, how much longer they’ll have social security. Will it get cut back next year, two years, six years from now? What should they do now about savings and pensions, given that they couldn’t possibly live already on the small amount that social security gives them?

Those who are smart enough to know that social security did not go up over the last 10 years as much as inflation did, so it’s actually worth less now in terms of what it can afford you to buy than it used to.

Put all of that aside, but we’re saving billionaires quantities of money they wouldn’t notice they’re losing, rather than do something for the millions of people that are suffering. It is a level of hard heartedness that makes any depiction of pre-depression America look like child’s play in comparison.

So these issues of debt, these issues of government finance, they come right in and become not only a demystification, trying to explain what’s going on, which Michael did so well, but they also touch you right in your personal life.

If you’re not yet an old person worrying about retirement, and I want to remind you a third of the American people right now are doing that, but even if you’re not in that group, you know what you are? The children of those people.

And if they don’t get a social security, they’re going to come and talk to you, because you’re their children, and they’ll need you to help them. And you’ll want to do that, and that’ll impede your economic development.

That’s what’s going on folks. A shrinking economy, a declining empire, is run by a group of people at the top who are doing what we all would have expected them to do. They’re offloading the costs of a declining empire onto those below them in the social pecking order, and that’s you and me.

And whether it’s pinching the social security, or cutting back on funding for colleges, or not allowing the college students, as Michael opened up with, to go and get relief in the bankruptcy courts the way we allow all other private debtors to do, don’t be fooled.

They’re going to cut everybody else before they damage the core of what keeps them the richest people on earth. And manipulating the money system is a tried and true way for the elites in dying empires to hold on for a few more years.

MICHAEL HUDSON: What Richard just said may sound so radical that it seems, well, that’s utopian. But his idea of taxing the rich more is less progressive than the original U.S. income tax in 1913.

When the income tax was first legislated, only 1% of Americans had to pay income tax. That’s because income tax was paid only by those who made over a given amount, something like 10 times the normal wage.

So it turns out that who paid the income tax were large corporate investors, large real estate owners, and large financiers. The workers, wage earners, did not have to pay income tax at all. They were tax-free.

And in just over 100 years, there’s been such a reframing of the narrative of how an economy works that people have no memory that originally the income tax was supposed to be progressive and actually was able to finance America’s participation in World War I by these terms that only taxed what was called rentier income, rent recipients, financial investors.

And at that time, in the wake of that, ever since, beginning in the 1920s, you had the financial sector and the sectors it protects, the real estate sector, insurance, monopolies, fought back. And their plan was to financialize the economy.

And their great success was in the early 1950s when they developed the idea of corporate pension plans. And the corporate pension plans were presented as if, now labor is a capitalist in miniature. We’re paying our workers in stocks so that the workers can actually own stocks in their companies, put it into the stock market.

Well, there were two kinds of pension plans. One is make them co-owners of your own company. So you would have the workers own more and more stock, for instance, in the Chicago Tribune, the right-wing Republican paper of Chicago.

Well, finally, once the pension contributions and stock holdings got high enough, the Tribune was taken over by a financier who confiscated all of the workers’ savings since the 1950s in Tribune stock and used it to pay the banks that had lent him the money to buy the Chicago Tribune.

And for other people whose pensions plans that essentially said, well, we’ll put aside your pension and the stock market is going to be growing. What that meant is that putting the money into the stock market and into investment banks and into money management funds created a whole financial system.

So suppose you work for a company and it was exploiting you and it was cheating you, but the company said, well, just think of it, you exploited workers. Your money is savings, pension savings are put into our company. So think of the pension savings you’re making by our exploiting you.

Well, that’s what’s happened on an economy-wide basis. By investing pensions instead of on a pay-as-you-go basis, instead of making pensions a public obligation as it is in many European countries, it was financialized into the stock market.

And now you have pension plans like CalPERS in California, the California Public Retirement Savings Fund. The pension funds throughout the United States have become desperate to turn their money over to private capitalists to promise huge fast gains in buying up firms, downsizing them, cutting back the labor force and squeezing out more money and leaving bankrupt shells in their place.

So the industrial employees who put the money into their pension plans are financing the de-industrialization of the economy instead of its industrialization. That’s the kind of plan that the politician donors would like to see translated into what to do with Social Security in that same way.

The problem is the financialization and finance capitalism has turned out to be just the opposite of the industrial capitalism that was described in the 19th century, not only by Marx but by everybody else.

RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah, and I would like to just, if I’m going to play the role of radical a bit, you know, capitalism says that profit is the bottom line. My colleagues in business schools across America who I know and who are friends of mine are constantly telling me that their basic message to students is if you want to build your business, you go where the labor is cheap and the market is growing.

And they said very good, they say to their teachers, thank you very much. I’ll be reporting back to you from China because I’m going to China because the wages are low and the market is the biggest one in the world and it’s growing faster than everyone. So it’s kind of obvious where I should be. I’ll see you later. You’re stuck in Chicago or Cincinnati or somewhere else. I’m going to Beijing or Shanghai. I know where you’ve taught me I should be.

If you don’t like the results of capitalism, which is the de-industrialization of one part of the world after another, come on, let’s remember once upon a time capitalism was what we celebrated in New England. Then it left, you know, it went to the Midwest, Ohio and Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. And you know what’s left in New England to this day? Those factories, four or five stories high, nice long brick buildings that now are full of artist studios, pottery shops, and yoga lesson businesses. Because that’s all that will go into these empty factories.

And now what do we call the Midwest? We call it the rust belt of America because it’s abandoned. Capitalism abandoned New England, went to the Midwest, abandoned the Midwest, went south, went west, and then predictably, you don’t need to be a fortune teller here, why would they stay inside the United States?

They decided finally, wait a minute, the same logic that it’s more profitable, that we can force the countries we haven’t yet gone to to bid for us to go there and thereby use the profit mechanism to bring jobs to their part of the world. We’re ready to go. We’re ready to go to China. We’re ready to go to the moon.

Capitalism, it’s always this funny thing about capitalism. It wants you to see the good parts when it grows, when it expands, when it discovers something. And those are fine as long as you don’t forget it has the bad things.

You know, we live and life is wonderful, but we also die. That’s another part of our existence. Capitalism abandons.

You want to go to a place that capitalism has abandoned? Visit England. Visit the industrial heartland of Europe. Now basket cases that are the seeds of a fascism growing everywhere in Europe. And where? In the abandoned areas where industry isn’t anymore, when it was.

That’s the reality, folks, of what is going on here. The profit motive is a builder and a killer. If I can be allowed another quote from Marx early in volume one of Capital, he makes the remark, yes, capitalism, he says, is a constant producer and reproducer of great wealth.

Unfortunately, he adds, it is likewise the producer and reproducer of great poverty. One is the other side of the other, and that’s what’s wrong with this system. That’s why we can do better.

And all that we’ve been saying is a kind of an illustration that when it comes to organizing an economy, the one we have in capitalism has achievements to its credit, no question. But we live in an advertising society, and I don’t mean that as a compliment.

In advertising, notice something. The client pays the advertiser to say only good things about the client, true ones or make them up, but they have one quality in common, it’s all good.

And what do they hide? Everything that’s bad. That’s a way of communicating to people that has nothing to do with what we’re told as children, that you have to see the plus and the minus. You have to weigh the pro and the con. You have to give a balanced contribution to understanding the world you live in.

No, no, no, no, no. Advertising is giving you a carefully constructed, unbalanced view.

You’re going to hear from the Democrats wonderful things about Kamala Harris, that’s all. And you’re going to hear from Mr. Trump wonderful things about Trump, that’s all.

They will allow themselves to put zebra doo-doo on the other one. That’s advertising mentality. Capitalism’s gifts to us is the advertising business, which has corrupted the whole process of speaking and of language.

It means that half of what Michael and I do, and what Nima is so good at organizing, is the demystification, trying to recoup something remotely like a balanced sense of the economic system, so that we can do what creative human beings have always done, better than what they have found when they were born into the system.

That’s all we’re trying to do here. We can do better than capitalism, and we ought to stop not learning that lesson.

MICHAEL HUDSON: So what we’re talking about is a narrative. And if you can pierce the…

When you hear a narrative, like the government is broke, or we’ve got to balance the budget, what is it that they want you to do? Any narrative that you get these days, certainly by politicians, is an attempt to shape how you’re perceiving how the economy works and your place in it, to make you do and support some policy. And this policy is paid for by the people who back the narrative.

And as Richard just said, we’re trying to suggest a different narrative because nobody’s paying us. And it turns out that the less you’re paid for a narrative, probably the poorer it is.

RICHARD WOLFF: Yes, that’s right. The less you’ve been bought off to stop whatever else you’re doing, your enjoyments, your pleasures, your hopes, your dreams, in order to make a buck. It’s awful that everything intrudes between you and the best in you because it questions or threatens your survival.

It’s an extraordinary system. It has lasted and done as much as it has by virtue of that. But it’s done now. And I don’t think it’s going to be salvageable. I don’t know any more than anybody else does where it’ll break first, and how, and how quickly, and none of that. I can’t predict the future.

But it is crystal clear to me that the hold of the traditional truths is slipping a little more every day. And it’s that that I also personally hold on to as a basis for what I do. And I think it’s what animates people like Michael and Nima also. It’s this sense we’ve got to do something, and here is something we can do.

We can say, look, the world isn’t quite the way it’s made out to be in the mainstream media. And let us show you what remarkable insights this can help you to develop, and they can make your life better.

NIMA: Yeah. Just, Richard, we have here some questions from our audience. And you may answer. One of the questions is pointing to you, Richard.

It says, if the government prints money at will, then why do they need to tax the public?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Good point.

RICHARD WOLFF: Yes. It’s very, very important that people understand. Here is the question, Richard. You can read it at the screen here. If the government prints.

There are many reasons. Like all big decisions that are made in a society, especially if they last over a period of time, as this one clearly has, governments have been taxing as well as printing money for a very long time. This is not in any way new.

Some of the forms of it are new, but the phenomena of these two sorts are very old. Okay?

So one of the reasons for it is the way capitalism particularly—

And it’s older than that, but the way capitalism works, you have this absurd, and I mean that, absurd situation. You could divide the population in any capitalist country between those who are corporations and rich on the one hand, and everybody else on the other. 10%, 90%, whatever you want, however you want to do that.

And all right, now here we go. Both of those two groups, the people at the top and everybody else, want services from the government. Corporations want the government to protect their wealth, to protect their freedoms, to protect their profit making, to enhance that, to subsidize them as needed, to secure a foreign market for what they produce, to secure cheap sources of foreign inputs to what they produce. They have a whole list of things they want the government to do.

And the mass of people, just for the sake of argument, they have their list. They want public education, they want health care, they want decent roads. Corporations want that too, and they would like help with babies and swimming pools, you name it. Okay? That’s what they all want.

Now comes the question, how is this going to get paid for? They want the government to do it, how is the government going to do it? And here we can see very clearly, corporations and the rich would like lots of things done by the government, but they don’t want to pay for it.

And the mass of people want lots of things done by the government, and they don’t want to pay for it. Well, you can’t have it if somebody doesn’t pay for it.

So what have we got? We’ve got a system in which we tell the mass of people, everybody’s got to pay their fair share, and so we have a tax system. Very old. We’re all going to benefit from these things the government is doing, at least we give lip service to the idea. So we all have to contribute, okay? We have a tax system.

All right, but people at the top, unlike the rest of us, they have the money and they have the power to do a lot more than “want” something. They can make it happen. That’s what it means to be a corporate CEO, or on the board of directors, or to own a billion dollars of wealth.

You’re in a position to do things, and so what do you do? You arrange for the taxes to be brought down, particularly on you, on corporations and the rich. So you push the tax burden onto the middle and the bottom. But beyond a certain point, and here’s where things get creative, beyond a certain point the mass of people can’t. Remember, they’re the ones who get the wages and salaries, and beyond a certain point you’re going to have a tax revolt. Every country has had it. We’ve had it too. Remember, started back in California several decades ago and swept the country. Tax revolt.

Okay, the people at the top realized now we’ve got to play a game. We announce a tax cut and we make very sure that everybody gets a little cut. You know, five percent for you, ten percent for you, and forty percent for us. Oh, we get that kind of tax cut.

The best example of that is the 2017 tax cut that Mr. Trump achieved. The only economic innovation, if you want to call it that, that Mr. Trump got passed. His was a do-nothing four years of empty crapola, which Mr. Biden copied, I understand, but nonetheless these are competing pro-capitalist countries. So he facilitated that with his 2017 tax cut.

And now here comes the creative, most creative part. When you cut taxes on everybody, telling the people that you can do more with less, you know, you’re cutting the fat out of the government, as if when you cut the taxes it has no consequence on the services you can provide. Having fooled people, maybe. You then say, okay, but here’s an even easier thing.

Instead of taxes, we’ll borrow the money. Isn’t that wonderful? We can give you what you want. We give you the corporations what you want. We’ll give you the masses what you want. We won’t tax you because you don’t want that. We’ll borrow the money. Isn’t that wonderful?

It is, as long as you don’t understand what Michael just spent, you know, almost an hour explaining. Who does the government borrow from? He went through it. It borrows from individuals. Of course, who? The richest. You know how you know it’s only the richest? Because how many times has a government official come to you in the privacy of your home or office and talked to you about making a big fat loan to the government?

The answer is, that’s never happened in your life. That’s because you don’t count. You don’t matter. The government borrows only from the rich, or from other countries, or from its own central bank. That’s how the government borrows, and that’s great for the rich because they get to avoid taxes, but instead of paying the money in taxes, they give the money as a loan to the government, which pays them interest and then pays the money back.

This is called a no-brainer, but if it’s a no-brainer to the advantage of the rich, it’s a no-brainer in a different way for the rest of us.

You got to have no brain to accept such a system. This is a hustle as grotesque as selling you the Brooklyn Bridge for $18.95. If you can’t recognize that hustle when it’s offered to you, then maybe somewhere, somehow, in some other universe, you actually deserve the hiding that you’re getting.

This is a system designed of, by, and for the people at the top. I don’t mean the American system, and I don’t mean the, I mean capitalism as a system, because this game is reproduced in one form or another all over the place.

That’s why some of us are critics of capitalism. Yeah.

NIMA: Then let’s just wrap this session up with the latest news that the link that I’ve sent to you from the article of Ted Postal is talking about the new strategy of the United States considering nuclear weapons. They’re talking about that this is a strategy of preemption.

But do you see, putting this part of nuclear bombs aside, do you see any sort of connection with this type of strategy and with the economy, the war that is going on between the United States and Russia and China in terms of their economy? Do you see any link between these two discussions? On one part, the military part, on the other part, you see their economy at war.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, the United States hoped to bankrupt Russia in the 1980s by arming, under the Cold War, so much spending that they thought that forced Russia to make a mirror image spending of its own military budget.

They thought that this is going to bring down the Soviet Union because they don’t have as large an economic surplus as we do, and that will force them to squeeze their economy and cause public discontent, including discontent among their own ranks of the Communist Party people, and it will just demoralize them. So if we can increase our spending, forcing other countries to spend their money, the theory was their populations will revolt and vote somebody else in the power.

Well, that’s just what NATO thought in the 2022 when it kept stepping up the attacks on the Russian-speaking Ukrainians and tried to do everything they could to provoke Russia into war.

The idea, once again, was if they could force Russia to counteract the NATO attacks on civilians in Donetsk and Luhansk, the eastern Ukrainian Russian-speaking regions, then Russia would, number one, have to divert its income to war spending, and it would not be able to industrialize and become more self-sufficient in its industrialization, and number two, since Russians were going to have their soldiers dying, the American National Endowment for Democracy and other propaganda organizations, non-government organizations in Russia, would be able to try to fan the flames of popular discontent, and obviously that didn’t work, but that was the plan.

So when you bring out a suggestion, what you just did, this enormous increase in atomic weapon spending, number one, this is a bonanza for the military-industrial complex in the United States because most of America’s atomic weapons haven’t been cleaned and spruced up for the last 50 years.

There’s a question, do they still work anymore? Do we have to take them apart and fix them? And do we need new technologies to somehow invest in America to keep up with the Russian technology of the hypersonic missiles and everything?

It turns out that America’s plan to bankrupt Russia with military spending has backfired. It threatens to bankrupt America with military spending, and the narrative of all of this is being framed by how we began the show.

The narrative is, in order to afford this military spending to threaten to blow up the world and start civilization all over again, in order to finance this, we have to cut back social security and social spending and interest payments to the bondholders.

So all of this is an excuse to spend enough money on non-social purposes in the United States that it crowds out the budgetary leeway for the social spending programs that the voters actually want.

And of course, to do that, you have to make a duopoly between the Republicans and the Democratic Party. You have to make them into a single party, preventing any third-party access on the ballot, such as, Nima, you and I have discussed when we had Jill Stein, the anti-war candidate from the Green Party, on.

Both the Republicans and the Democrats have tried to make such a labyrinthine set of rules to get on the ballot that really, Americans don’t have any option on the ballot box but to vote either for the Republicans to do this rearming, new Cold War arming, or the Democrats to do the re-militarization.

You can vote which one is to do it, and each party has its own identity politics. But you can’t have any party that is trying to urge peace.

You’re seeing this whole charade being performed last week in Germany. When you have the two anti-war parties, Germany’s talking about, to preserve democracy, we have to ban the anti-war parties. Because without going to war, we cannot support fascism throughout the world. We have to support the Ukrainian fascists against Russia. And if a party is formed, either the alternative for Deutschland or the Sarovagnecht party, we have to prevent them and just not let them take a position in Parliament, because that’s anti-democratic.

Democratic is what benefits the United States in the Cold War. That’s what we define. Democracy is the Cold War. Autocracy is avoidance of war. Autocracy is the BRICS, China, Russia, Iran, and other countries withdrawing from this whole financialized system.

So they not only have a different narrative that we’re talking about, they have a different vocabulary, as George Orwell had pointed out. So we’re talking on your show every week, not only about the narrative, but about the very vocabulary that is meant to misshape how people perceive and what they think is happening in the world.

RICHARD WOLFF: Let me only add something. Let me put on my hat as an economist for a moment. Michael is right. The contest, the war contest, the arms contest, whatever you want to call it, between Russia and the United States, which in some ways goes all the way back to the end of World War II, was a very clever strategy.

Whether it’s George Kennan who gets the credit or some of the later people in the State Department, they understood a very simple thing, which I don’t think Americans ever understood.

That the United States came out of World War II as an absolutely unique dominant economic powerhouse, and that all the potential competitors, economic competitors, were gone. Russia was gone. China was gone. Germany was gone. Britain was gone. Japan was all gone, either destroyed by the war indirectly or literally destroyed in the war directly.

Now, this was not a sustainable arrangement. It would eventually end, but for a good while, I would argue for the rest of the 20th century, the United States maintained its dominant, overwhelming position.

Therefore, a contest, an arms race between the United States and Russia was a kind of a bad joke. One was sitting on top of an economic powerhouse. The other one was sitting on top of an economic disaster zone.

There was no… This is crazy. As recently as the last time I looked, two or three years ago, the GDP… Americans don’t get this. The GDP of Russia three years ago was around one and a half trillion dollars per year. The GDP total output of goods and services for one calendar year, roughly one and a half trillion. In that same year, the GDP of the United States was about 22 trillion dollars.

Okay, everybody has to stop, right? One and a half versus 22. And that ratio isn’t all that different now from what it was before. An arms race between a military based on a 1.5 trillion dollar economy versus a military based on a 22 trillion? I mean, that’s not a contest.

You know what’s amazing about that? The level of military production that the Russians were actually able to undertake. You can tell, even if they didn’t admit it, that the priority they put on military was obviously enormous.

Maybe the Soviet Union was a challenge to the United States, using the word loosely in politics and in military. But in economics, never, not close, no way at all. So an arms race between them is something the United States could confidently think it would win.

We are not in that situation today. And that’s part of what’s going on. We are not in the same. Right now, the GDP of the United States is in the neighborhood of 23 trillion last time I looked. The GDP of China, about 17 or 18 trillion. That’s a completely different story.

Put China and Russia together and you have a high priority on the military and a bigger economy. And the Chinese a mountainous bigger economy with a high tech sector second to none.

This is a new game. If you assume you’re going to win the arms race now, you’re crazy. You’ve lost touch with reality. You are not in the same situation and you’re going to make terrible mistakes.

And the first clue of how bad the mistakes are is the mistake made when you decided that all Ukraine needed was your weapons and your money to overwhelm Russia.

Wrong. Why? Because Russia has China and Russia has BRICS and Russia has allies and Russia has options.

You didn’t figure. You thought you were where you once were, but you’re not. You’re just not. And the result is a new framework which you haven’t figured out yet.

I listen to the neocons running our foreign policy these days, the Blinkens, you know, the Jake Sullivan, those folks. They sound, look, and speak like cold warriors. They’re still there. They’re in another place with other calculations that made a certain sense then. Dangerous, risky, but they had a certain logic.

Now you get the danger, you get the risk, but the odds, they’re not there. The context is not what it was. In fact, it’s pushing the other way more so every year. This is a losing proposition, but they keep losing and they can’t think their way out. They lost. They couldn’t win the war in Korea. They lost it in Vietnam. They lost it in Afghanistan. They lost it in Iraq. They’re losing it in Ukraine. They still don’t get it.

That’s why I think we’re much closer than any of us dare hope for the very big changes I think are coming.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, give them credit, Richard. We did beat Germany in 2022. It’s now completely dependent on it. We beat Europe.

RICHARD WOLFF: Yep, but you know Volkswagen, which is in its greatest crisis, Volkswagen is the emblem industry of Germany. There’s a great success story. Up until last year, more VWs were sold in China than any other brand of car, etc., etc., etc. They are now in a crisis. They’ve announced they’re about to close factories all across Germany, which they have never done in their 70 years of history before.

They’re in desperate trouble, but they know why. Be careful. What we see is the surface which has to placate the United States for all the reasons Michael has in his mind, and they’re right.

But right below the surface, there’s a whole other layer of German industry which says, as Michael was about to say, it’s the American policy in Ukraine that makes the Wirtschaftswunder of Germany disappear.

We knew we had no Wunder. We [Germany] don’t have greater technical skills than the French do, or the British do, or the Italians do. Stop. We know better. What we had was cheap oil and gas, the cheapest oil and gas of any European, and with the pipeline that the Americans blew up, we would have had it for the next 30 years.

We are screwed, and because we were the engine of Europe, all of Europe is screwed. Are we really going to go into the rest of this century becoming a vassal of the United States when we really didn’t have to? This is the painful question that sits right below the surface, not just in Germany, in France, in Italy, in Britain itself.

They are at a crucial point. I’m not sure which way they’re going to go. I understand what Michael is saying. They may have sold their whole future.

They have made Europe, which by the way, just a footnote for everybody, Europe, the European community, is now the richest single block in the world. It’s a bigger wealth block than the United States. It’s a bigger wealth block than at least the original BRICS, or at least close to it.

It is gone, or maybe, which would be a remarkable thing for that part of the world that has been the center in many ways of the world for centuries, for millennia, to be pushed aside in this relative short time by a relative newcomer, the United States, and an utter newcomer, China, capitalist China, as opposed to earlier.

I really do believe, therefore, that these conversations, besides being interesting commentary from the left and all that, that would be enough. But I believe more than ever before, we are on the edge of a lot of these under the ground contradictions coming up to the surface.

We’re going to be talking about how things could change so quickly when in fact our discussions have been documented that these are long-running changes that have been building for quite a while.

NIMA: Yeah. Thank you so much, Richard and Michael, for being with us today. Great pleasure as always.

RICHARD WOLFF: Yeah, good conversation. And Michael had let us know, I hope I’m not revealing anything, that he was worried that he was going to give a lecture on money. But I’m glad you did. I’m glad that we structured it around that, because I think that topic needs it more than once, and that we will have a chance, I hope, in the future to go and revisit some of these questions again.

NIMA: Exactly. See you soon. Bye-bye.

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