How the Chicago Boys Wrecked the Economy

[Crewleader]

August 29, 2008
An Interview with Michael Hudson
How the Chicago Boys Wrecked the Economy

By MIKE WHITNEY

Michael Hudson is a former Wall Street economist specializing in the balance of payments and real estate at the Chase Manhattan Bank (now JP Morgan Chase & Co.), Arthur Anderson, and later at the Hudson Institute (no relation). In 1990 he helped established the world’s first sovereign debt fund for Scudder Stevens & Clark. Dr. Hudson was Dennis Kucinich’s Chief Economic Advisor in the recent Democratic primary presidential campaign, and has advised the U.S., Canadian, Mexican and Latvian governments, as well as the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR). A Distinguished Research Professor at University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC), he is the author of many books, including Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (new ed., Pluto Press, 2002

http://www.counterpunch.org/

[truedelphi]

1. A very revealing paragraph:

As for labor unions, they haven’t been any help at all in solving the housing crisis.<ed: he means in the USA>

In Germany where I am right now, unions have sponsored co-ops, as they used to do in New York City, at low membership costs. So housing costs only absorb about 20% of German family budgets, compared to twice that for the United States.

Imagine what could be done if pension funds had put their money into housing for their contributors, instead of into the stock market to buy and bid up prices for the stocks that CEOs and other insiders were selling.
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Boy do I agree. Instead the pension funds go into whatever bubble looks really appealing for the short term! So what if playing so risky with other people's money can cause the other people to lose their pensions - it sure seems fun when you are a money manager believing that the bubble can only go up and can never go down.