Michael Hudson: The Catholic Church, the Crusades, and the Origins of International Banking

LOGO DAEDALUS: Well, I just wanted to say thank you. First off, your books have been extremely important to me. I’ve done, I think, some good work in helping to popularize them on Twitter or X, I guess we’re calling it these days.

But when I first found your work, I was really coming from more of a literary studies sort of perspective. I studied Russian literature and Russian in college, and was mostly interested in literature, and then slowly became interested in economics, more from a literary perspective.

In your one of your interviews about your biography, you described going into musical composition, classical composition, and then finding a sort of aesthetic satisfaction in the study of economics.

I found that very inspiring personally, because I feel sort of the same way. The appeal to Marx and other political economists like Veblen and guys like that, guys like yourself, was that they gave me the same satisfaction of reading a great novel, especially like a great satirical novel. And that’s been sort of my interest in all of this… how economics is sort of an outgrowth of literary satire, and the genre of the anatomy that people like Northrop Frye would describe. So I think of you as like the greatest living satirist in the world – you make me laugh more than anyone in the whole world. So thank you.

MICHALE HUDSON: Well, you understand where my mentality is at.

LOGO DAEDALUS: If there’s any question I could start off with – I’m sure you’re going to cover this in the book you’re working on. I‘ve been a long time follower of your work. So I’m waiting patiently for the next book in the cycle on debt covering the crusades and onward, because that’s a particular interest of mine from a literary perspective on Christian hermeneutics. The translation of the Lord’s Prayer was a major thing for me – the “forgive us our debts” and whatnot. Tying this into material economics really opened all of this up for me.

So I believe you referred to a specific school of the Catholics, men who come up with the justification for charging interest on debts, but under a different name, so it doesn’t qualify as usury. I was wondering if you could go into detail about when specifically you would say this shift happened and under what dispensation?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, funny, you should put the question that way about literary

discussion, because most of the discussions about economics in the 13th and 14th Century – and that’s when the schoolmen were coming up with their justification of interest – the best discussions were all of a literary character, of course, by Dante. I mean Dante describes putting all the usurers back in the seventh circle of hell.

And there was a kind of theme of usurers being put together with the sodomites, in the sense that they said lending is sterile. Lending does not produce an economic return for the borrower. The borrower has pay the interest out of whatever they earn elsewhere.

If it’s the government borrowing money to go wage war, then it has to levy taxes, and this reduces the population. If it’s an individual who borrows from a usurer, then they have to cut back their consumption or lose their property, or lose their economic freedom and fall into debt bondage.

So it’s the literary people that describe this, just like in Greek and Roman history. It’s the literary writers that describe what was happening in the creditor landowning oligarchy that ended up stifling Rome. Also, in the 20th Century it was the literary historians that won the Nobel Literature Prize for writing about antiquity, or were nominated… people like Theodor Mommsen and Guglielmo Ferraro. They were viewed as literary historians.

Economists don’t talk about debt, they don’t talk about finance, they don’t talk about interest, or how it began at all, because it didn’t begin in the private sector. It was the Catholic Church that created and sponsored the first international banking in the 12th and 13th Century. And they sponsored it because the Roman church wanted to essentially take over all of Christianity, and the crusades were waged mainly against Christians.

The official crusade, the first real crusade, was in southern Italy and Sicily by Robert Guiscard. The Catholic Church asked, who are we going to get to kill the Christians that don’t agree with us? Who are we going to get to fight the Germans? The Germans wanted a decent, balanced church without all of the craziness and fighting against everybody who didn’t agree with you. How are we going to fight against the Muslim territories? But most of all, how are we going to fight against Orthodox Christianity, the majority of Christianity. There were five Patriarchates in the 12th Century. Rome was the least important. The most important was Constantinople, then, Antioch, then Alexandria, and then Jerusalem.

Rome was at the nadir in the 9th and 10th Century. The Catholic Church histories call it the pornocracy, because it was basically just the local families of a wealthy Roman suburb called Tusculum that sort of had controlled the church as their own personal set of sinecures for themselves, and they were so corrupt that you had Germans set out to try to reform it.

And then they said, how are we going to get rid of the nepotism and the fact that the Vatican is captured by churches? – basically, so they could find either young women or boys to screw… the utter corruption that you read about these families. They asked, how are we going to make some semblance of Christianity again? And they tried to reform.

Well after them came another reform that wanted to prevent an aristocracy from taking over the Catholic Church and making it a family business. They did not want to let the clergy and popes be married, because if they marry, they’re going to have kids, and if they have kids, they’re going to make them the Pope. That’s what happened from the 9th and the 10th Century in Tusculum. You can find it all on Wikipedia or in the Catholic Church histories. They’re sort of embarrassed.

So that made Western Christianity, Roman Christianity, different from all the other Christian churches that permitted priests to get married.

LOGO DAEDALUS: Yeah, that used to be something you had to do. That was a way of demonstrating that you were invested in the community that you were overseeing.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Sure, and the German reformers wanted to make the Christian church part of society, even playing a role in trade and in the military. They wanted, you know, to have a Christian community. That’s not what ended up happening.

And also, the Roman church wanted to introduce this theory of the the Trinity that basically said Jesus wasn’t the Son of God, he wasn’t a human being, and he nothing to do with being a political or social leader, or leading opposition to the creditor class. It was all about God.

And the Catholic Church basically had been poisoned in the 4th and 5th Century by two of the most evil theologians in history, Cyril of Alexandria, who based the Christian church on anti-semitism because he wanted to drive out all of the Christians who weren’t under his personal control. And most early Christians were Jewish. So he led pogroms against the Jews in addition to killing Hypatia, who was a mathematician, and he put in the Trinity idea and elevated the Virgin Mary to the Trinity, knowing that that’s the one thing the Jews were not going to go along with because they wouldn’t have a woman as part of the Trinity.

LOGO DAEDALUS: Well, it’s like a constant refrain in the Old Testament where they’re putting up the stack of idols to the Queen of Heaven and things like that, which becomes a major problem for the reformers. That’s one of the first things I think Jehu does in the Old Testament, is destroy all of the shrines to the Queen of Heaven.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Right. And the other person, of course, St. Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo in North Africa, said, how do we get rid of the fact that a lot of Christians don’t like interest? They also don’t like landlordship, and if there’s a landowner that’s a creditor reducing people to bondage – according to the documents that have survived – they raid the guy’s house, and they freed the bond persons.

So Augustine said, look, we’ve got to kill all of these Christians that are not pro-Roman. And he said, you’ve got to give their churches to us, not them… and he said, we’ve got to get rid of the fact that in the Lord’s Prayer they’re all praying “forgive us our debts,” because the all the debts are owed to you – my constituency, the Romans, the 0.1%.

And so he said, it’s not really about debt at all. It’s about sin, and we’re all born with sin,

and there’s nothing we can do, just like you have to pay a debt, you have to pay for the sin, and you have to pay us, the church. And this led to a large argument, and there were Welsh, British theologians…

LOGO DAEDALUS: The Pelagians!

MICHAEL HUDSON: Who said, no, if we’re Christians, we want to do good things, good works for the world. You know, we want to use our money to help people, maybe to forgive the debt.  Augustine said, no, no, I’m excommunicating you. You can’t have anything. You can’t have people spend their own money in helping the society around them. You have to give to the poor. The poor are us. The poor are us clergy who are going and helping them – we get the money. And it’s all about sin. And the sin is inborn. There is nothing you can do but go through us, and when you die, give us your estate so that you can go to heaven by giving us the money.

I mean he sounds like one of today’s Protestant evangelical leaders. So this was the Roman setting for that.

This did not characterize the Eastern Christian Church orthodoxy. It was Constantinople and the rest of the Patriarchates… Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem that we’re following pretty close to the original Christianity. The Romans said, we’ve got to fight against that in order to control the entire church and make it all celibate, so that we can’t have the Tusculum people, the Popes, making it a family.

They had the same problem that they had that Stalin pointed to in World War II. He said, How many armies does the Pope have? Well, they didn’t have an army. So what were they going to do? They found Norman warlords who had come down and were raiding the lands of Southern Italy and the Popes said, to Robert Guiscard, well, we’ll give you the kingship of Southern Italy and Sicily – Sicily was the key – if you promise to be pledge fealty and become our vassal King, then we will back your divine kingship.

And he did. He became king. And a couple of decades later, you had another warlord, William the Conqueror, and they made a deal. They said, William, if you want to take over Britain we will make you King. You have to promise to give us tribute and perform vassalage to us and do pretty much what we say. And William the Conqueror made the deal. He became King, and it was the Catholic Church.

Well, then they went into the Crusades, really, to take over the lands that Constantinople held as Orthodox Christianity, especially in what used to be Yugoslavia – the whole peninsula going down the Balkans. Greece, they tried to grab that land. They opposed Germany, because the German Emperor was the Holy Roman Emperor, and that upset Constantinople, because they said, wait a minute, we’re the Roman Empire. We’re the New Rome. You’re not the New Rome. You’re old Rome. We’re the real Rome. You’re just on the sideline there.

So the Catholic Church, the Romans, said, how are we going to have the British King and the Sicilian King fight against the Germans and Constantinople? The sinews of war are money. They needed money. How are we going to raise money? That’s when it was the church itself that created the banking class… merchant bankers in Northern Italy and right across in the Alps – the trans-Alpine bankers. Roman popes would go to the British Kings, especially at first King John, and then his son, Henry the Third, and say, you know, we want you to go into debt to pay for an army to go and fight the Germans, who somehow gained more control over southern Italy and moving into Spain and Sicily.

So this led to a fight within the church. And you have wonderful documentation from the analysts at the time who wrote the annals, like Matthew Paris, who wrote all about all of this in great detail. He was a friend of Henry the Third and was very well situated at the monastery in Saint Albans, where he worked.

So the when Henry the Third was was told, well, you have to raise money and we’ll make your son King of Italy, as long as he pledges fealty and pays us tribute like you’ve been doing. Well, if you can imagine, the nobility fought back and said, wait, we don’t want to pay taxes in order for you to go to war to fight the churches war, that’s not our war. Well, this fight had already occurred in 1215 with the Magna Carta under King John. King John wanted to look for Vatican support to grab the land. He was called John Lackland, while Richard was fighting in Jerusalem. And so the the Barons got together and wrote the Magna Carta.

And John wrote something finally – you know they were going to overthrow him – so he said, okay, I’ll agree with all of your demands and I promise if I go back on my word then everything I say will be negated in all of this and I promise not to go and ask for any override.

Well, as soon as they signed it – I guess he was the Donald Trump of his day, or Barack Obama – he immediately went to the Pope and said excommunicate all of these people who will not let me serve you. And the Pope excommunicated the Barons that supported the Magna Carta.

In the 1250s, under Henry the Third, the same thing happened. Henry the Third wanted to go into debt to fight the Germans in Sicily and the church said, if you disagree with usury we will excommunicate you. And you can imagine the turmoil this caused in the church. The church used to excommunicate usurers and now they’re excommunicating those who oppose usury.

What happened? Well, when the Pope kills other people and does usury it’s not a crime, to quote Richard Nixon, basically. It was all okay. The theologians were put to work to figure out how to get rid of all these critics of usury because the church is all about usury now. We have to create a banking class that will make its money by war lending to Kings who will go fight our wars against people who will not accept Roman leadership over the Orthodox Christian leadership and the German support of it.

So that’s when the churchmen came in and said, we have a new word – it’s not called usury anymore, lets call it interest. And they acted as if somehow loans were made – not to wage war, not to fight and kill people, not to serve the Vatican – but just to do mercantile trade. Because after all most of the bankers had made their money in mercantile trade. They we’re merchant families and became merchant bankers.

Well, they had a whole logic that we were taught in the history of economic thought when I was in college in the 1960s, and it was the problem of foreign exchange dealing. That’s not really interest – you’re charged a fee for foreign exchange. And since these were international loans you’re changing from one currency into another so you’re allowed to make agio.

LOGO DAEDALUS: Take your bite.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Yeah, just like when you exchange money at the airport they take a cut.

Also, if a merchant banker lends money he is not able to use this to make profits for himself. So he is giving up the profits, and that’s called lucrum cessans – you stop getting lucre, money. They get compensated, and the rate was 22%. And if you’re late, the late fee is another 22%. The church became a Visa card.

So it ended up in England to be 44% that they had to pay, and this was all legitimized by the churchmen as interest. Well, you can understand if someone is late in paying it costs money, so what did the bankers do? Well Matthew Paris, and local bishops in England, described just exactly what they did. They said, okay, you borrowed from us, now you have to pay us.

The repayment is going to be in just one month or two. Well, normally you make a loan and pay at harvest time, because at harvest time – a year later – is when you get the money to pay the loan. Soon, you end up doubling the interest rates with the late fee. And the small print was easy to manipulate if you were a banker.

And the Popes all stood behind that and basically got together and essentially reversed Christianity’s long standing opposition to Christianity. And this is after St. Augustine changed the Lord’s prayer to “forgive us our sins” for which you have to pay the church to get to heaven, instead of “forgive us our debts” that you’d have to pay to the Romans – if we’re following Christian documentation.

So it was the Roman church that created the banking class. It’s very funny, there’s hardly any of this impetus on the church in economic histories. And a lot of it is because of Jewish historians that were understandably concerned about the fact that there was so much anti-semitism aimed at the Jews. Some, even many Jews, if they’re merchants, did lend money. But Matthew Paris and others say, well, they weren’t charging as much as the Christians. Well, Christians immediately – wanting to get rid of the Jewish money lenders – got King Henry’s son Edward to exile the Jews from England. And Phillip the Fourth exiled them from France.

And so the Jews did not play a role in this creation of international banking – it was the church. And I’m just amazed at how the Jewish historians haven’t said that this whole idea of identifying Jews with international banking has been used as an anti-semitic accusation. They did not play any role at all. The Vatican, when it was organizing the war loans to its vassal Kings, did not borrow from the Jews. They would confiscate their money, but they wouldn’t borrow, and they would certainly not pay interest.

The role of Jews when they were brought into England was the fact that they were the merchant class. And the warlords didn’t know too much about creating mercantile trade or production because they were robbers, not merchants.

LOGO DAEDALUS: Well, listen, they did a lot of human trafficking so they had some industries.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Right, so it was the Jewish population that had the background of organizing trade credit, along with the Islamic lenders. But of course the English and French chose to let the Jews in but not the Muslims, basically.

LOGO DAEDALUS: That is making me think – I’m a big fan of Thorstein Veblen, and I know you’re a big fan of Veblen, too. He has this great, little essay he wrote called An Experiment In Trusts, which is about the origin of financial trusts with the Jomsvikings, in their slate trading corporations that they would establish.

So I’ve been interested in how these Norman warlords are the reason why the Catholic Church develops this whole ideology so it can justify the extraction of interest. Why is it that none of this is ever covered in mainstream economics?

It seems to lead to what now looks like a massive rise in anti-semitism you could say, but it’s really more like how Marx and Engels described anti-semitism as like, retarded political economy. Because it’s these people who are genuinely trying to understand how the system of economics that we live under works and where it came from, but, outside of you, there’s really not many great resources to point people toward in order to come to an understanding of the actual history of these things. And most of the people who are going to tell them that story are just going to tell them the Jews invented banking and here we are.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, there’s a reason for this tunnel vision. If you look at Böhm-Bawerk and all of the apologists to justify the charging of interest, they all do it on an individual bases. Well, if a lender makes a loan then he’s not able to spend this money on his own consumption. So he is giving up something and he is being paid for being abstinent.

That led Karl Marx to say that the Rothschilds should be the most abstinent family in all of Europe – obviously, if you’re a very wealthy banker you don’t really give up consumption. Because the money that you do get, the interest and others, you make new loans. You don’t consume more with it, you make new loans. And you mentioned trusts – you’re corporatizing, essentially, a monopoly, a business monopoly. Well, this is because of the genius of financial organization.

By the 13th and 14th, you had the banking class decide… how can we extend the market for our loans? Well, I mentioned the fact that the Barons of England first opposed King John taking on debt with the Magna Carta. And then Henry the Third, again the Barons opposed it. And most Kingdoms of Europe – there was a kind of parliament of one kind or another – that had the power to block the Kings from taxing and said, you have to tax for the benefit of the country. And at that time they didn’t believe that going to war for somebody else’s war was for the country. The King was constrained.

When a King took on debt from the international bankers there were only two resources a King had. One was his own royal domain – that part of the land that belonged to him personally. The royal domain was much less than the church domain. The largest landowner in almost every kingdom in medieval times was the church, not the King. So the King had that, and the King had the power to tax subject to parliamentary constraint.

So, the bankers got together – and remember, they’re merchant bankers who did foreign trade as well as war lending – and they said, well, you’re able to charge customs duties, and that does not require parliamentary approval. They found the small print in the legal code and said you can organize the import and export trade.

So you had the English Kings, Edward and onward, being able to make a corporation or partnership group out of England’s wool trade. And England would export the wool to Flanders and the low countries, to weave into cloth to send to Italy to be made into fashions. And the money would then go from Italy back to England via the low countries to pay for the wool. And that the triangular flow that you had in England, basically.

So the way that Kings were able to make money without taxing the people was to make royal corporations that would be monopolies. By the 17th Century these extended to the East and West India Corporations. And the Bank of England was a corporation. You’d create a monopoly, you’d give it to the company to raise money, and you’d say, were going to sell it, and that’s how we get the money to pay our foreign creditors. And so the creditors sort of help the Kings organize their finances so they could raise enough money to pay the debts they took on.

Well, by the late 17th Century, you had leading Kings who were all Catholics. French, the Spanish, and the Austrian, the Hapsburg Kings, all kept defaulting again and again and again in the 17th Century because, even though Spain had all of this silver coming in from the New World, it just went right out. The silver was squandered on luxury spending. None of the money being used was spent on developing its own handicraft industry.

Instead, with all of this money coming in, they taxed handicraft labor and other labor, and you had a huge emigration of skill labor. And Adman Smith pointed to this – they’d go to places like England, or the Protestant countries, where things were free. And the Protestant countries had a completely different form of political organization than the royal autocracies. The idea came from the self-governing cities of Europe, like Venice for instance, or Genoa and Florence. These self-governing cities would elect leaders, and because they were a commune, all of the members of the community were liable for the debts that the community took on. And the bankers said, this is a wonderful idea, if only we could have nations act this way.

Well, you had a lot of these communities in the Dutch countries – and these communities joined together to create Holland. And the idea of having a whole national government as a community where all of the citizens were liable for debts and not only the King. If a King ran into debt and couldn’t pay and the debtor went bankrupt then the bank lost the money. Because they didn’t have any recourse to all the money in England when the King didn’t have the ability tax all of the citizens. But the new parliamentary democracies became something that have been called fiscal states. The bankers took the lead in organizing these fiscal states where the leadership in Holland and especially in England after the 1688 revolution that brought King George to England – all of that became the new kind of political organization.

And the result was that the parliamentary democracies were able to borrow from creditors to get the military loans to defend themselves against the Catholic Kings who were attacking them to take them over. And the Catholic Kings couldn’t raise war loans because they were no longer as credit worthy as the democracies that could tax the entire population against them.

So, it is very funny – Max Webber talked about the Protestant revolution as promoting a financial class because of its ethic of personal gain. But it was really the organization of the fiscal state that made the big change for what really emerged from all of this. And ever since, the Bank of England, and later the English and French governments tried to raise more money by selling off their monopoly of the slave trade. France sold the Mississippi bubble based on plantation slave agriculture in Louisiana. And England had the South Sea bubble – they had conquered Spain and had the Asiento monopoly on the slave trade. Everyone thought that the slave trade was going to be the industry of the future, sort of like computers today… so basically a bubble.

So, you have the financial sector helping governments organize mercantile monopolies and organize finances. And the bankers of the 13th Century backed royal autocracies because the church was able to protect the Kings against the nobility, who would not want to pay the war debts they took on.

By the 17th Century the banking class said, well, we really can’t afford autocracies anymore because they go to war – and because they’re an autocracy – all the debts are owned only by the King because the King controls everything, but there’s the rest of society around them… so now were going to switch to the opposite position that we had originally: we’re going to back the parliaments that we opposed when parliaments wouldn’t pay the debts, because now, under the new fiscal parliamentary states, the parliaments are promising to pay the debts. Because that was the condition on which they were able to borrow war loans from the banks. So that made them more credit worthy and they could borrow on better terms than the autocratic Kings who really couldn’t borrow at all. And that shifted the economic and military advantage to Northern Europe because of the banking class.

Well, what happened is the banking class basically created a new web of interconnections within Europe that took the place of what used to be the Catholic Church. Instead of the Catholic Church creating a system of integration – largely economic, and above all financial with Europe – what this financial class created became the new organizer of the system of integration that shaped Europe and it’s gone right down to the present day.

The banking class, through government, has backed governments who promote creditor interest. Because, if governments do not promote creditor interest then nobody will lend to it because it’s not credit worthy anymore. When it goes to war it’s not going to be able to get as much money as the other groups and war is fought by money and paying mercenaries.

And that’s sort of the big theme of my book. The title I’ve come up with is A Political History of the West’s Financial Takeoff from the Crusades to World War I. And I’m working on the final chapters and rewriting the chapter summary now.

LOGO DAEDALUS: Amazing. I can’t wait to read it. If there’s one last thing I could ask you about – I guess we’ll go to current events.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Very briefly, because I don’t want to drain your audiences attention.

LOGO DAEDALUS: I just wanted to throw this by you because I just read your interview with Ben Norton on the tariffs. There’s a great Veblen quote where he says, “all business sagacity reduces in the financial estimation to a judicious use of sabotage.”

MICAHEL HUDSON: Ah ha!

LOGO DAEDALUS: Would you describe that basically what’s going on is an attempt to sabotage the global economy – that’s all that it comes down to?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, Veblens point was that it was the financial sector that sabotaged industrial capitalism. It’s the financial system that seeks to make its gains financially – capital gains, corporate raiding, living in the short term, paying out profits as quickly as it can instead of reinvesting its profits in long term investment like the German banks were doing. So it’s a shift from industrial capitalism to finance capitalism that ended up destroying industrial capitalism leading to deindustrialization.

Veblen’s pointing on how the American economy was turned into a rentier economy, largely on real estate. Because 80% of bank loans are for real estate. And the effect of increasing the loan to value ratio is you lend more and more money against any given property or home or office building and the effect is to constantly inflate real state prices. Well, the financial sector gained enough power over the government by being able to make mortgage interest the primary financial return along with monopoly rent.

So you have land rent and monopoly rent being the objective of finance capitalism, not industrial profits. So the finance sector took the lead against classical economics. And the fight against classical economics was much like that of the Roman Church against early Christianity. The whole idea of classical economics and the free market  – from the French physiocrats to Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill and Marx, all the way up to Veblen – was that a free market is one free from the landlord class and its land rent. Free from monopolies and monopoly rent. And free from predatory banking and its interest, which was a form of monopoly rent because banks had a monopoly on being able to create money and credit with government banking.

And so, as the financial sector took over governments moving toward the apotheosis that you have in America since the Supreme Court Citizens United case – essentially privatizing the election process, saying anybody can fund elections – you have a shift of politics to favor the financialization of the economy, which in turn favors land rent, monopoly rent and interest. And also the financial class became the major donors to the Universities. Especially the business schools, and they backed economic curriculum that rewrites all of economic history as if its all individuals… well, international banking began when merchants wanted to lend money to handicraft people who were exporting to other people, weaving cloth, it was all part of business and its was all very productive. No discussion at all over the fact that that wasn’t what created banking. It was war lending that base of the international banking class. This is not a private enterprise approach to history.

So, you have part of the financialization of the economy taking over the industrial aims – increasing labor productivity, raising wages, increasing the internal market. Now you have just the opposite. You have more and more of the economy siphoned off in the form of the various forms of various rent and less and less available for personal spending, the internal market, and private capital investment. So that’s basically the dynamic, which has gone hand in hand with an ideological airbrushing of history. When I went to graduate school, 60 years ago, we not only had the history of economic thought where you knew what Adam Smith really wrote – I wrote my book J is for Junk Economics on how the vocabulary has changed – we also had economic history. And even though the economic history wasn’t what I wrote about, at least you had economic history and a long term approach and you realized that markets are shaped by government, by society, by public policy, and there’s no room to analyze that.

LOGO DAEDALUS: Yeah. There’s the irony that the creation of markets and all these things that are the bedrock of libertarian theory are all government creations, they’re all public goods – a corporation is a public good, markets in general are a public good. These things didn’t emerge from voluntary individuals but were state projects.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Right.

LOGO DAEDALUS: That’s an irony that’s very difficult for libertarians to see.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well that’s the neoliberalism. Economists are brought up with a tunnel vision. That’s the problem. They don’t see that there’s a role of government because the financial sector wants to take over government and dismantle it, and make what used used to be government – including all of the public enterprises and natural public monopolies and the election process – all part of the financial sector, not part of the political sector.

LOGO DAEDALUS: Yeah, yeah… yeah. We’ll hopefully things get better, but it’s going to be a long road ahead. How do we change this view on economics en masse, how it is even possible when all of the institutions are effectively captured by the most powerful interests in the world to teach the exact opposite.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, the only way I can do it is by writing my books. No publisher has been eager to publish my books so they’re all done by my research foundation. They’re published by a Chinese group.

LOGO DAEDALUS: Chinese, yeah.

MICHAEL HUDSON: I translate my books into Chinese so obviously this idea is very popular there because they have a public-private economy and they’re open to this idea. Other countries translate the books but there’s very little English language discussion of this so there’s no market for publishers to write books like this because – how do you fit the ideas that I just described in the academic curriculum? It is not going to be in the economic courses because there’s no economic history anymore, maybe in the literary courses but I don’t think I’m going to win any literary prize for this. People don’t know how to characterize this approach just explained in the last 45 minutes.

LOGO DAEDALUS: Well, it’s the approach that me and my listeners are a big fan of so keep up the good work. Thanks for letting me talk to you, man. Its been a dream of mine for a while and… get some rest. Stay strong, stay healthy.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Thank you, I look forward to what your group comments on and what they see in all of this.

LOGO DAEDALUS: Yeah, alright man, well, thanks again.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Thank you.

LOGO DAEDALUS:  Peace out.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Bye bye.