I am max kaiser this is the kaiser report you know the economy is a man made structure try to scott engineers financial engineers economic engineers. Thinkers. Philosophers and mayfield over time what happens when the foundation of operates what happens when this structure collapses what happens when the simulation goes away lets find out from Stacy Herbert well max you know there was some art a few years ago when we used to be able to meet in person at that little art festival i think it was in miami we had some banana on the wall well you might say our Balance Sheet is looking like that banana meat republic budget deficit hits record 3 trillion dollars as us spends 100 percent more than it earns unfortunately due to helicopter money it is not unlikely that the exploding deficit will ever shrink again until the Monetary System is overhauled so year to date and that we have only one month left in fiscal 2020 the us a spent 6. 00 trillion and collected just 3. 00 asking why dont we do we even collect this 3 charlie and taxes why dont we just like print money for everybody right it brings up a lot of questions you know one thing is that the deficit is huge and its more than 100 percent of g. D. P. And thats true for countries around the world and some play 20300 percent g. D. P. But whats creeping up now is the interest on that deficit even at these low low Interest Rates near 0 percent Interest Rates the interest cost on the deficit is getting close to americas outlay for the military which is their biggest expense so usually what happens when in fact the interest on that debt gets to a point where that also equals your g. D. P. As a country you are technically in default and you are officially no longer a country what is left is a memory of a country you know where at that point in the game you know a monopoly if you play monopoly theres always a point a game where you realize well somebody has a strategic amount of property on the board and theyre going to win in what the only thing left for us to do is to kind of march toward the inevitable. All of losing and this is the problem now with this economy in the us the game of the us is now over because there is no path out there is no escape from the toxic debt there is no recovery at this point theres only how to manage the loss its going to be economic collapse with honor if Richard Nixon were in charge and this were to be the ms ation of the economy how do we honorably fail of course on this debt the deficit gets added to the National Debt every year like you know i remember when it 1st hit a trillion dollars and we were like wow and then it hit 10 trillion dollars or so and then now its like 2530 china is just like escalating so rapidly and who knows like the whole time when it 1st hit a trillion people were shocked and scared and then when it hit 10 trillion people like oh my god this cant last and then hit 20 china now 25 trillion and you know you wonder how long it can go parabolic like can it get to 100 trillion can it get to a quadrillion and the world continue as it is but if feels like you know if youre comparing it to the game of monopoly that somebody is cheating and somebody is getting free goods and services and rental income and things like that right the dice are loaded and when the bankers roll the dice they somehow always pascoe collect free money and get another property when everyone else rolls the dice somehow they end up a prison and so thats the way this game is played and thats why they wealth and income gap. Exploded polarization and the social unrest in america hasnt been this bad i think its worse than the vietnam war its you got to go back to the civil war to find social unrest as bad in america as it is today well you talked about you know you get in another property on this monopoly board you get handed that gift of that well this is really playing out in the covert economy the covert reality where the commercial real estate sector is collapsing of course but our elected representatives are coming to the rescue of this commercial Mortgage Backed securities and stuff like that but you know look at this data it just seems like with this game of monopoly if our game of monopoly of our fee out money and all this free money is based around this illusion of the monopoly board and all the commercial real estate well heres another plank like if if if people are just like scratching out part of the board that this doesnt exist anymore what do you have left but a pile of cash an entire asset class redefined almost overnight by coded work from home total value of all u. S. Commercial real estate is 16 trillion dollars now entering largest bear market since late eightys 50 percent price drop wipes out 8. 00 trillion dollars Major Economic drag knock on effects huge rate stays year 0 percent plus gold coin is what dan type hero is recommending so heres the commercial real estate demand collapses the crashing line is the plans to expand any office space right that its back to my comment at the top of the show the economics and economies are engineer theyre built its a madman construct and in the us you have at the core of that economy property and commercial property in the us mostly what banks lend against and this is the pyramid if you will of not necessarily a pyramid scheme but it is a pyramid like structure and if you pull out the bottom and you have covert economy and suddenly all the commercial property is suspect and maybe not. Worth 0. 10 on the dollar then the entire pyramid will collapse just as a function of physics as a function of engineering thats what will happen and thinking about also properties being handed out like candy if youre in the right class lets take a look according to the most recent information the Us Government is going to hand tick tock a Chinese Company to Larry Ellison over oracle why why is Larry Ellison being gifted a multibillion dollar gift like this for what reason why is that happening its not giving it to the American People the president i states hes not engineering some dividend for us he simply giving this huge asset to one of his friends ok thats not the way economics is supposed to work unless its corrupt Larry Ellison gets handed. Down says tick tock we dont know if thats actually going to go through if the the secret sauce of the Artificial Intelligence which is i think what everybody wants a certainly in the United States certainly the intelligence agencies and stuff like that want whether or not china will allow it who knows but you know speaking of you know free money and free stuff is i read a remarkable statistic is that we know that 75 percent of americans who have to work for a living that theyre making more money they made more money since the covert crisis because of the 600. 00 extra and hants Unemployment Benefits that they receive per week now that has cause a knock on effect of a huge collapse in the number of defaults on used car loans so thats a positive is kind of like a jubilee but also they said 20 percent of americans have doubled their income under cove it would ever forget the pandemic and the situation there but as we head into an election who is in their right mind of those 20 percent who have doubled their income on this monopoly board called america. Who is going to say well you know my income doubled under trump but im going to vote for the other guy who have never seen because he sits in the basement all day like it just seems like this is going to be a spanner in the in the biden works that is just not being discussed it seems remarkable to fee doubling your income and yet getting to stay home yeah i think thats certainly the numbers would bear that out that people would not vote against that and the other thing is that this is an open experiment into a universal basic income yeah right so this is america gets to see what happens if you apply universal basic income and you get to see how it Impacts Society is it incentive or is it does it dnssec devised work and we may find that this is a permanent feature Going Forward and also that doubling of the income shows that the folks that were living under a basic living wage those folks that were the working poor who were lets say working at walmart the weakest employer in america but still needing government relief that in other words walmart got the government to subsidize their wages being that they had to pay so those questions are now i think going to have to be resolved as a result of this incredible experiment in universal basic income in america that we can now have some data to figure out how to go forward and the other thing of course is that you know when we made front running. A year ago you know at the late november early december we were present think things like that that were being presented by candidates like Bernie Sanders as very radical left wing ideas and we even said that you know these might come in these obviously arent going to happen now but maybe in a decade or 2 as generation z. And millennial become more powerful but like within a few months. You know donald trump who we are told is a super fascist and super right wing is bringing in these radical left wing policies so hes it hes interesting in that he exposes so much of the contradictions and us elite society and he forces their hand like this next story as well nearly 300 homeless men who had been temporarily living in a hotel on the Upper West Side of manhattan will be relocated after weeks of backlash from some residents who said the men had to minish the quality of life in the upscale neighborhood Upper West Side you know this is democratic heartland this is the elite democratic heartland this is the Rachel Maddow is this is the enderson coopers this is the Hillary Clintons of the world these are that sort of corporate dam and here theyre they they dont want these dirty stinky poor people in their neighborhood that theyre fine for it you know this sort of stuff to happen and everybody elses theyre the ones that passed laws are the ones that passed tax increases for all sorts of policies that they dont want in their own backyard right what would we make their bars an institution on the Upper West Side where you get some nice lovely food and but that would be a problem as you point out what they called nimby as im not my backyard right so the policies sound great on paper but people dont actually want to live with them or they want to they figure that their immune from actually living of the consequences of what they support and so i suppose that theyre going to take those 50 folks and move them into east hampton and then they can live in the hamptons for a while and see how that goes. But you could look at this through the entire spectrum. You know with their Foreign Policy the neo conservatives are mostly democrats right originally so all the neo cons that ruled under george bush and they their Foreign Policy was a. In iraq invasion of. Iran of eventually yemen all those sort of countries that was their plan but they all started out as democrats and then they became republicans because they couldnt stand the left wing of the of the Democratic Party so like this is something that is were still trying to reconcile that comes that happens during 68. 00 it happens all the time and that and the democratic side but its its around this tension around. Imperialism and this monopoly board like who do you want a homeless you know Homeless People staying in the hotel that you own that because the government makes you because of the pandemic you know Margaret Thatcher was a bit of a test of all 1st but she did say that probably socialism is that eventually run out of other peoples money i think heading in that situation in the United States going to take a break and when we come back much more coming your way. And you gold rush is underway and going to thousands of ill equipped workers off flocking to the gold fields hoping to strike it rich. As. Children otoole in between gold. Was very poor i thought i was doing my best get back to see which side will have the strongest appeal. Welcome back to the kaiser report imax keyser time now to turn to author and economist dr michael heights and dr dobson welcome back to be back max well lets wait we lost a mutual friend david graber author of debt the 1st 5000 years why did david matter i know you were friends with them what are his contributions to our understanding of money he realized that most money is debt and that money was created not as part of the barter process not by merchants but money was created to pay debts starting with debts that people owed the temples in the palaces of the ancient near east and to buy services and goods from the palaces and temples. The end of every crop year. People had to pay for the beer that they drunk during the year it could go through inputs and most payments are made only once a year so when you do a transaction money wasnt involved at all because you only had money once a year if you were a cultivator present youd wait until the harvest and youd sign a contract and when you would go to the local bar and have some ale and we have a contract they would say well if the end of the year youre going to pay your tab. On the threshing floor and when your grain is all measured out that you harvested were going to take the payment that you owe is debt and were going to take it and every. Bushel of grain that you hate is equal to one shekel a silver so and the sober also had to be paid you know once. Ok janelle a if the end of a 5 year trading venture for. Goods and services or money that the palace or the temples consent so that graber emphasized by emphasizing debt issue that money was really for paying debt it wasnt part of the part where assessed it wasnt what the austrians. Economists and the creditors said at all it was part of a fiscal policy in that debts were owed to the state and thats why it was possible for the rulers of mesopotamia to cancel the debts because they were cancelling dust of themselves initially owed mainly to the cells and of the palace collectors so it became much harder in rome and equate in the modern times when today debts are owed by the. Own to the banks and to the one percent and so davids main emphasis in discussing money was to explain why a debt cancellation which was his Main Objective was going to work had worked out for many years in mesopotamia and his that debt the 1st 5000 years especially. Followed the arguments that id been making in an academic setting in my Harvard University colloquium and we had long discussions maybe 15 years ago and i didnt think anybody was going to be interested in debt an end mesopotamian the origins of debt money and tell i could make the point that the day had to be cancelled and david said no it given the long perspective let me write up your ideas is a popular book and i was. Pleasantly amazed to say how popular is caught on and he expressed the debt issue in a monetary issue not in abstract academic theory but in terms. Well. His own personal experience is an anthropologist in terms of the anthropology of death and people could accept the idea of debt cancellation much more readily when youre talking about an anthropological tribe it. Meant a guest star or somewhere or when youre talking about mesopotamia so just as shakespeare would put his own political plays in italy or illyria or somewhere else instead of in england where it would have been highly political david was able to make his point about insulation and money in terms of anthropology imagine something there i want to return to it so here you are talking about the origins of money is debt and the debt was ok came from government essentially and that gave the government and the opportunity to cancel debt when it whenever it was prudent or necessity to do for example during debt jubilees lend when they based the Central Authority would counsel debt and then you mentioned that. Our modern era really is about debt being created by the private banks and of course a central bank is a private bank and that is brought on a whole new era. Where debt is used in a much different way than simply fueling the economy it seems as though private debt from banks and Central Banks is you is in in the greater interest of those few banks that are a showing that debt vs but say government issued debt going back to david grabbers work what seem to be more in the interest of society at large ersatz the problem is how. The rulers of mesopotamia had to take into account Overall Society which if they would have let had the debt be paid then the farmers the peasants the cultivators would have lost their liberty they would have had to do their labor to the creditors they would have had to become bum servants as you read about in the bible and if you become bon servants then you lose your liberty you lose the land because you forfeit that as collateral to the creditors and the result is what would what would they do if theyre going to be on service or losing their land they would surely to another truck they would leave. And then the country the ruler that let its creditors take over society would find all of a sudden its depopulated well just like the the greeks who left greece after the European Union bankrupt it just fizzle up all tick let the last one 3rd of its population since it got independent 9091 people are leaving because its a society that doesnt work well right now youre having a similar phenomenon in the United States youre having every since 2009 you had obama say were not going to cancel the debts were going to pretend to cancel them but were not. Really going to were going to let my campaign banker backers of the bakers kick 10000000 factory families off their out of their houses were going to make them homeless and that same justice that same extro creation of debtors occurred after 2009 and were seeing imminent similar expropriation right today in the middle of the coronavirus. Families who are lose their jobs are unable to pay their rents and either their landlords or the faulting owner if they have a job and bought a house with a mortgage theyre unable to pay the mortgage and there is going to be a new wave of foreclosures of Homeless People but unlike sooner and babylonia its unlike greeks who can move to germany and europe where are the americans who are exposed rated going to go if you had the egyptians in antiquity say well if we dont cancel the debts then our people are going to defect to the enemy but whos the enemy today no no americans and the defect that russian and china because americans arent there are speaking in Foreign Language where can they go so. The dynamic is the same today as it has been for 5000 years that was davids main or main point but the way in which its handled is different in. Ancient society they wouldnt let the Creditor Interests destroy society it populate it and polarize society between creditors and debtors but today we dont have that ethic anymore today we let society polarize between the one percent at the top who old the 99 percent in debt and the other one percent is what they can extract in debt service. Financial fees and rents and toting monopoly rents from the 99 percent so youre having a whole failure not only of its the whole way in which western civilization has been going since. Roman times. But a failure of the 19th century to really get rid of land were chipped to really turn industrial capitalism into socialized industrial capitalism where the banks are run. In. Order to promote Economic Growth and Living Standards instead of destroying Economic Growth and Living Standards so we have somehow industrial capitalism and the whole ethic of adam smith John Stuart Mill march Thorstein Veblen is all been defeated and we have the ethic of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and donald trump and obama right so you and david arguing in favor of state run debt versus private bankers running the debt well you dont need a state run economy in order to solve the debt problem i dont think adam smith and the classical economists advocated a state run economy they advocated a different kind of rule they said that 1st of all land the rent of land should be taken into the Public SectorJohn Stuart Mill and adam smith said that the land of the taxes should be levied on land and on an wells not on labor not on industry so thats simply the tax system and then later in the 19th century people said well we need other banks to be part of the government sector if the government is the creditor the government doesnt have to control it kind of makes but normally the creditor decide the banks so whether its the creditor as a private banker or as a government aid. Its 8 like the new deal agencies under roosevelt the bankers and creditors decide whos going to get the credit and order theyre going to get the credit for and all you need is to control the Credit System when you can steal your credit in a in a. Private sector capitalist economy into the most productive sector but thats not whats happening now in the 19th century everybody. Expected banking to evolve like it wasnt and germanys banks would be baking would be industrialized finance to be industrialized to finance industrial growth and real means of production but instead after world war one head industry being financial. And the Financial Sector the banks dont lend to built factories they dont build for capital accumulation they lend against capital and assets that are already in place well basically look for what they can foreclose on not how they can add to Living Standards and. That means of production profits kyra soured a 2nd segment learning a lot here thanks for being on the show dr Michael Hudson as if this episode of guys report with me my backs kaiser stacy herbut i think our guest dr Michael Hudson its a nice time by our. Move move move move that the bill really to sneer those who really can show you. Show if they can just be suitably. Good. With that i suppose you notice that as they sit back. No no no. If you. Are doing your force well you could be near mushed. Spirit id be to do a. Show. For you to. Sort of move. Ringback ringback to move in domestically not International Scene efforts by International Organizations and governments to promote democracy in countries like iraq afghanistan see how difficult it is also going to be it has to be reduced domestically because always International Actors need to be in the country 24 sevenths make it sustainable so any country in the world thats built to sustain a democracy has to mystic sometimes of its National Health mystically. Poverty 1st. If youre born into a poor family ah youre born into a minority family if youre born into a family that only has a single parent that really constrains your life chances people die on average 15 years younger generational poverty. The fight every day seem to meet your needs and the needs of your family. Returned. Countries in europe begin. Reappearance. In the. Between the 2 main parties are rough but the death of a Supreme Court judge with arguments over who gets to choose the replacement. Also ahead in the program. Left