Distinguished economist Michael Hudson was in England during Margaret Thatcher's rise to power. Here he tells the depressing story of how her determination to privatize every last civic function has made London the heaquarters of kleptocrats, drug lords, and dictators while in the process crushing the working and middle classes. Excerpt: "So by deregulating British banking, Margaret Thatcher led a race to the bottom of international finance. She said, we're going to be the ground floor, we're going to be the absolute bottom, deregulated, everything goes. She opened the doors for what became really the criminalized financial system that ended up wrecking AIG in America, pushing, if you noticed, the Wall Street firms like Lehman Brothers. It was all their London office where all of the real fraud and the gambling occurred."

---

 theREALnews                                                                               Permalink

Thatcher Gave More Power to Finance

Michael Hudson: Thatcher deregulated banking and made London the center of speculation and financialization - April 9, 13

Bio

Michael Hudson is 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). His most recent book is "Beyond the Bubble."