Another must-read from Dr. Michael Hudson, with video.

My articles about the origins of credit, money and interest share a common frame of reference. From the inception of economic practices and enterprise in the ancient Near East down through classical antiquity and medieval Europe to today wealthy classes have wanted to make themselves into an oligarchy in control of their government and religion to protect, legitimize and increase their wealth, especially their rent-extraction privileges as creditors, monopolists or landlords.

That should be the context in which one looks at every epoch’s economic view of the world, above all its perspective concerning how “free” a market should be, and just whose freedom is being endorsed. That has been the great question throughout the history of civilization, from the Bronze Age Near East when rulers regularly proclaimed Clean Slates to restore economic order to check incipient oligarchies, through the five centuries of civil war in the Roman Republic and Jesus’s fight against the emerging Jewish oligarchy, to today’s civilizational fight between the NATO West dominated by U.S.-oriented rentier oligarchies and the global majority centered now on the BRICS.

We see the same fight through the ages by financial elites opposing any government power able to restrict their self-serving rent-seeking and creditor power at society’s expense. We see it today in the pro-creditor economic policies of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the “libertarian” ideology, all of which seek to centralize power to allocate resources and plan economies in the financial sector instead of democratic government. Today’s neoliberal idea is to get rid of government authority (except where it is controlled by the rentier sectors) and let banks in the privatized financial sector control money and credit, which is the most important public utility.

China’s government has financed its remarkable industrial takeoff without having to borrow from private creditors. There was little money to borrow from its domestic population, so the Bank of China printed its own money. Unlike typical financial practice, it did not demand personal wealth to be pledged as collateral, because stock and bondholdings or substantial real estate did not yet exist. The government did not need to turn to bondholders to increase its public spending – and in any case, there were no domestic bondholders to borrow from in the wake of its Revolution.

China, Russia, and Iran are simply continuing the practices of previous nations that, wanting to exist, limited rent seeking. Any nation that did not impose substantial limits on the financial vampire class soon ceased to exist. That explains why China, Russia, and Iran will be around in 2030, 2050, and 2100, while the GAE and it’s ilk will fade into history. Dr. Ron Paul aside, virtually no GAE leader of the past 50 years has even dared think about doing the things that might have preserved America. The two clown puppets of 2024 are no different.