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The updated and expanded 3rd edition of Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire is now available. This highly respected study of U.S. financial diplomacy explores the faults built into the core of the World Bank and the IMF at their inception. Forensic detail reveals how the world’s core economic functions were sculpted to preserve US financial hegemony. Difficult to detect at the time, these problems have since become explicit as the failure of the...

Mr. Soros has expressed his ideological fury at the prospect of not being able to make the kind of easy money off China that he was able to siphon off when the Soviet Union was carved up and privatized. On September 7, 2021, in his second mainstream editorial in a week, George Soros expressed his horror at the recommendation by BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, that financial managers should triple their investment in China. Claiming that such investment would...

In a Financial Times op-ed, “Investors in Xi’s China face a rude awakening” (August 30, 2021), George Soros writes that Xi’s “crackdown on private enterprise shows he does not understand the market economy. … Xi Jinping, China’s leader, has collided with economic reality. His crackdown on private enterprise has been a significant drag on the economy.” Translated out of Orwellian Doublethink, the “crackdown on private enterprise” means cutting back on what the classical...

President Biden put a popular flag-waving wrapping for America’s forced withdrawal from Afghanistan in his 4 PM speech on Monday. It was as if all this was following Biden’s own intentions, not a demonstration of the totally incompetent assurances by the CIA and State Department as recently as last Friday that the Taliban was over a month away from being able to enter Kabul. Instead of saying that the massive public support for the Taliban replacing the United States showed...

Understanding of the dollar’s world role is dominated by the ideas of ‘dollar hegemony’ and ‘US hegemony’. In this paper, based on our extensive past work, we reveal how these ideas are ideologies, not theories. In their place, we reveal an understanding one that is theoretically sound and accords with the historical record, a geopolitical economy of the international monetary system of modern capitalism. We begin with a theoretical outline of how money operates under...

Published by Sage Journals Abstract Marx and many of his less radical contemporary reformers saw the historical role of industrial capitalism as being to clear away the legacy of feudalism—the landlords, bankers, and monopolists extracting economic rent without producing real value. However, that reform movement failed. Today, the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sector has regained control of government, creating neo-rentier economies. The aim of this...

The Radical Imagination episode with guests Michael Hudson & Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove: April 21, 2021 (transcribed May 3, 2021):  [embedded content] Jim Vrettos:
 So, Michael, Jonathan. Thank you so very, very much for being here. Jonathan, you’re from… We’re looking at you from North Carolina there and Michael is in Queens. You’ve both had tremendous influence in your respective fields. Spiritual economic activist and so on. What do you make of the contradictory...

Nearly half a millennium ago Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince described three options for how a conquering power might treat states that it defeated in war but that “have been accustomed to live under their own laws and in freedom: … the first is to ruin them, the next is to reside there in person, the third is to permit them to live under their own laws, drawing a tribute, and establishing within it an oligarchy which will keep it friendly to you.”[1] Machiavelli...

Michael Hudson and Paul Craig Roberts Cross posted from Paul’s site. Out of habit, American economists worry about federal debt. But federal debt can be redeemed by the Federal Reserve printing the money with which to retire the bonds. The debt problem rests with individuals, companies, and state and local governments. They have no printing press. We have explained that the indebtedness of the population means there is little discretionary income with which to drive...

This article is based on Chapter 1 of Cold War 2.0. The Geopolitical Economics of Finance Capitalism vs. Industrial Capitalism (Dresden, ISLET: in press; Chinese translation 2021). © 2020. All rights reserved. Marx and many of his less radical contemporary reformers saw the historical role of industrial capitalism as being to clear away the legacy of feudalism – the landlords, bankers and monopolists extracting economic rent without producing real value. But that reform...