Summary of Michael Hudson's Killing the Host

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 As economies grew, people were supposed to save more and have less need to go into debt. However, as debt levels increased, people began to consume less and save more. This caused a shortage of market demand.
#2 The aim of political economy for the past three centuries has been to recover the flow of privatized land and natural resource rent that medieval kings had lost. The political dimension of this effort involved democratic constitutional reform to overpower the rent-levying class.
#3 The financial sector aims to minimize the cost of roads, electric power, transportation, water, and education, but to maximize what can be charged as monopoly rent.
#4 Financializing industry has changed the character of class warfare from what socialists and labor leaders envisioned in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Then, the great struggle was between employers and labor over wages and benefits. Today, finance is cannibalizing industrial capital, imposing austerity, and shrinking employment.

Sujets

• Politique
• Business
• Economics
• Economic History

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 24 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798822520141
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Michael Hudson's Killing the Host
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9 Insights from Chapter 10 Insights from Chapter 11 Insights from Chapter 12 Insights from Chapter 13 Insights from Chapter 14 Insights from Chapter 15 Insights from Chapter 16 Insights from Chapter 17 Insights from Chapter 18 Insights from Chapter 19 Insights from Chapter 20 Insights from Chapter 21 Insights from Chapter 22 Insights from Chapter 23 Insights from Chapter 24 Insights from Chapter 25 Insights from Chapter 26 Insights from Chapter 27 Insights from Chapter 28 Insights from Chapter 29
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

As economies grew, people were supposed to save more and have less need to go into debt. However, as debt levels increased, people began to consume less and save more. This caused a shortage of market demand.

#2

The aim of political economy for the past three centuries has been to recover the flow of privatized land and natural resource rent that medieval kings had lost. The political dimension of this effort involved democratic constitutional reform to overpower the rent-levying class.

#3

The financial sector aims to minimize the cost of roads, electric power, transportation, water, and education, but to maximize what can be charged as monopoly rent.

#4

Financializing industry has changed the character of class warfare from what socialists and labor leaders envisioned in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Then, the great struggle was between employers and labor over wages and benefits. Today, finance is cannibalizing industrial capital, imposing austerity, and shrinking employment.

#5

Financial sector advocates have sought to control democracies by shifting tax policy and bank regulation out of the hands of elected representatives and into the hands of nominees from world financial centers.

#6

Money creation is now monopolized by banks, which use this power to finance the transfer of property. The financial strategy is capped by creating international financial institutions to bring pressure on debtor economies to take fiscal policy out of the hands of elected parliaments and into those of institutions ruling on behalf of bankers and bondholders.

#7

The financial sector has taken away the free lunch economic rent that was supposed to be given to the public in the form of lower prices and more services. Instead, they have created a neo-rentier society that extracts wealth from the economy and gives it to them.

#8

The financial sector’s response is to lend enough to enable debtors to pay. When this financial bubble bursts, creditors foreclose on the public domain of debtor economies, just as they do with defaulting mortgage debt.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1

The original fight for free markets was to free them from exploitation by rent extractors: owners of land, natural resources, monopoly rights, and money fortunes that provided income without corresponding work.

#2

The guiding principle of classical value and price theory was that everyone deserves to receive the fruits of their own labor, but not that of others. Neoliberal economics seeks to deny that any income or wealth is unearned, and that market prices may contain an unnecessary excessive rake-off over intrinsic value.

#3

Up until medieval times, most families produced their own basic needs. It was not until the 13th century’s revival of trade and urbanization that an analytic effort arose to relate market prices to costs of production.

#4

Economies are in danger of succumbing to a new rentier syndrome. This was pointed out in 1774 by Dean Josiah Tucker, who noted that it made a difference whether nations obtained money by employing their population productively or by piracy or simply looting of silver and gold.

#5

The main distinction between today’s mode of conquest and that of 16th-century Spain is that it is now largely financial, rather than military. Land, natural resources, public infrastructure, and industrial corporations are acquired by borrowing money.

#6

Classical value theory provides the clearest tools to analyze the dynamics that are polarizing and impoverishing today’s economies. The aim was to do away with inherited privilege and put everyone and every business on an equal footing.

#7

The stranglehold of hereditary aristocracies seems to be coming to an end, as finance becomes industrialized.

#8

The financial sector is plundering what were expected a century ago to become the social functions of capital. Instead of promoting industry, capital formation, and infrastructure, finance has become a symbiosis with the other rentier sectors: real estate, natural resource extraction, and natural monopolies.
Insights from Chapter 3

#1

Neoliberalism has redistribute wealth, not generate it. It has commodified and privatized land and expelled peasant populations, among other things.

#2

The history of property acquisition is one of force and political intrigue, not labor by its existing owners. The wealthiest property owners have been the most predatory - military conquerors, landed aristocracies, bankers, bondholders, and monopolists.

#3

The post-Soviet economies are going into neoliberal rentier decadence. The problem of how an economy can best recover from such grabitization is not new, and classical economists spent two centuries analyzing how to recapture the rents attached to such appropriations.

#4

The Physiocrats, a group of French economists who were inspired by the idea of laissez faire, coined the term to represent freedom from the aristocracy living off its rents in courtly luxury while taxes fell on the population at large. They believed that the class that produces the surplus is the natural source of taxation.

#5

The labor theory of value was extended to include finance and land ownership in The Wealth of Nations. The major focus of value and price theory remained on land rent throughout the 19th century.

#6

The first step in implementing a land tax is to value all the land in the country. The present value of all land should be exempt from the tax, but after an interval had elapsed, during which society had increased in population and capital, a rough estimate might be made of the spontaneous increase that had accrued to rent since the valuation was made.

#7

Even rent-extracting sectors claim to contribute to the host economy’s wellbeing. For example, David Ricardo, the leading spokesmen for Britain’s banking interests, argued that globalization promoted commerce, which was still the major market for bank lending in the early 19th century.

#8

The logic behind why land rents would rise as populations grow applies much better to the rent of location for urban sites. The desirability of sites in good neighborhoods is enhanced by public infrastructure investment in transportation and other improvements, as well as the general level of prosperity.

#9

The argument was made that landlords used the rents they received in a way that helped the economy, by investing the money and raising crop prices. Malthus argued that high rents were necessary and unavoidable condition for increased supply of corn for an increasing population.

#10

Ricardo’s trade theory, which stated that buying in the cheapest market leaves the economy dependent on foreign producers, was used to persuade foreign countries not to protect their industries with tariffs and subsidies.

#11

The financial sector has taken over the position that landlords had in the past. Debt service is what plays the extractive role that land rent did in Ricardo’s day. Unlike the rental income that landlords were assumed to inject into the economy for luxuries and new capital investment, creditors recycle most of their interest into new loans.
Insights from Chapter 4

#1

The overgrowth of debt is at the root of today’s economic crisis. Creditors make money by leaving their savings to accrue interest, which draws more and more control over labor, land, industry, and tax revenue into the hands of creditors.

#2

The doubling time of interest is five years, which is the typical time period for lenders to lend money to traders embarking on voyages. The growth is purely mathematical with a gestation period for doubling dependent on the interest rate.

#3

The growth of debt is exponential, and can be illustrated by a chessboard that doubles the number assigned to the preceding square, until all sixty-four squares are doubled.

#4

The Rule of 72 provides a mathematical principle that helps you calculate the number of years it will take for your money to double at a given compound rate of increase. To double money at 8 percent annual interest, divide 72 by 8. The answer is 9 years.

#5

The more money is borrowed to pay interest, the less is available to produce and pay as a result of unemployment, underutilization of resources, emigration, and capital flight.

#6

The inability of productive investment opportunities to keep pace with the expansion of credit is the Achilles heel of finance-based growth. If banks and a creditor class receive this money, will they spend it domestically to maintain balance, or will they drain the economy’s income stream and shift it abroad to new loan markets.