MICHAEL HUDSON: "The Federal Reserve, by bailing out Wall Street, spent $13 trillion, more than tripling America's public debt just to give it away to Wall Street for the money that it had gambled and lost." RICHARD D WOLFF: "The reason we have a suddenly humungous deficit is because we had a failure of our private capitalist system, and that the government has come in to hold it up, to rescue it... When the government shores it up and borrows tremendous amounts of money ... it wants to make the people who pay for this be the poor people on Medicaid, the old people on Medicare."

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Debt and a Broken System

Hudson and Wolff: Massive public debt incurred to bail out a broken private system


Original with full transcript here.

Bio

Michael Hudson is President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and author of Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (1968 & 2003), Trade, Development and Foreign Debt (1992 & 2009) and of The Myth of Aid (1971). ISLET engages in research regarding domestic and international finance, national income and balance-sheet accounting with regard to real estate, and the economic history of the ancient Near East. Michael acts as an economic advisor to governments worldwide including Iceland, Latvia and China on finance and tax law. Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, New York City. He also teaches classes regularly at the Brecht Forum in Manhattan. Earlier he taught economics at Yale University (1967-1969) and at the City College of the City University of New York (1969-1973). In 1994, he was a Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Paris (France), I (Sorbonne).