Michael Hudson: The Secret Deal That Started a Global Economic War

Yves here. On a recent interview with Nima Alkhorshid, Michael Hudson explains how the Trump tariffs are yet another mechanism for the US to try to preserve and perhaps even extend its hegemony, and how Trump’s approach extends policies that go back to the end of World War II.

Originally published by Dialogue Works

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Hi, everybody. Today is Thursday, May 15, 2025, and our friend Michael Hudson is back with us. Welcome back, Michael.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Good to be here.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael, let’s talk about what’s going on between the United States and the United Kingdom. In your opinion, how is Britain being used by the United States today in a similar way to its role in 1944 during the creation of the IMF and World Bank?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, it’s pretty much exactly the same role.

In 1944, the United States was planning, how do we create a post-war order that benefits itself? And its number one aim was to dissolve the British Empire and the French Empire by making rules that benefited the United States.

For instance, the end of empire preference and basing the financial system on gold and especially countering John Maynard Keynes, who saw the problems that were going to develop over the next 50 years.

He said that the problem is going to be that the United States is going to be a creditor country. It’s going to get other countries in debt to itself. They’re going to like England, especially. And we want a kind of rules that if there’s one country that continues to run surpluses and in other countries that run deficits, we have to say, okay, America is not letting England earn the dollars to pay the debts that the United States has forced it into with the British loan in 1944.

And I’ve described all that in Super Imperialism and there were wonderful debates in the House of Lords and the House of Commons. And they basically, the tenor of their comments was, we don’t have any choice. We’re completely dependent on the United States. We just have to knuckle under.

And so Keynes’s rules were turned down and England agreed to rules that became the post-war economic order benefiting the United States in creating the IMF and the World Bank along lines that benefited itself at the expense of other countries.

Well, what the United States then did was go to continental Europe and say, well, look, we’ve done this with England. That’s the prototype. There was an inertia and England was always the first to sell out Europe and other countries to surrender to the United States. And the US would take its surrender and use that negotiation to set the rules that other countries were supposed to join.

Well, that’s just what happened in the last few days. The United States went to England and made it, it agreed, without mentioning China specifically, it agreed on trade rules that were national security rules, meaning anything that China exported to England that could be national security, like cloth that could be used for army uniforms, anything that would be banned.

And basically, Trump had already announced pretty much what he was going to do on Liberation Day on April 2nd. He said, we’re going to impose these tariffs on other countries. He didn’t say this is going to create chaos there, but we’re going to give him a choice.

What he said was, of course, we can roll the tariffs back down if they give givebacks. And the givebacks were what American policies were they going to accept. And the acceptance were pretty much exactly what England has just agreed to.

So it’s obvious that Trump did not really expect this whole tariff issue to be about tariffs. He made it very clear the tariff issue is about forcing other countries to join our Cold War against Russia and China, especially China, for all of that. And that is basically what these rules are about.

And the same thing you have Germany now joining England under Mr. Merz.

So the problem for other countries is, are they going to avoid this short-term crisis, this short-term disruption in their trade that Trump has caused by reorienting their trade away from Russia, away from China, and away from their allies in East Asia?

Or are they going to decide, well, the U.S. economy is shrinking, and it’s shrinking especially, we can discuss that, because of the actions that Trump has taken, he’s guaranteed we’re moving into a recession here.

If other countries surrender to him and agree to his terms to tie their trade and investment to a shrinking U.S. economy, then they’re going to have to sacrifice not trading with Russia, China, and the global majority that’s growing instead of shrinking.

Well, the whole problem for other countries is, what do we mean when we say another country? We usually mean what their leaders are going to say, and Starmer in England and Merz in Germany really do not represent what their voters want.

And we know that because of all of the protests by the voters against Starmer, the Labour Party is now at the lowest ebb that it’s ever pulled before. And same thing for the Christian Democrats in Germany, the Germans don’t want Merz and the anti-Russian re-militarization that he wants, but the United States has promoted people like Starmer and Merz to be the heads of their countries.

So you have a strange condition that the leaders of countries that America deals with first are representing U.S. interests or being willing to go along. They believe that their personal careers will continue to be linked to the United States, just as the U.S. was promoting them from the very beginning along U.S. ideological and political lines.

So that’s basically what’s happening. Other countries are being asked to sacrifice themselves to the U.S. economy.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael, you mentioned the national security of the United States. How do you see the strategic goal behind the United States invoking national security clauses in trade negotiations, particularly in relation to China?

MICHAEL HUDSON: National security means anything that you want it to. It’s a portmanteau word, as linguists say. It can mean anything can be national security.

You see the United States wanting to close down Harvard and other universities on the grounds of national security that its students protest against war and genocide. That’s a national security threat.

You see him arresting immigrants on the grounds that it’s national security. Anything can be national security.

So all the United States has to say is X, Y, or Z trade with Russia or China threatens our national security because China wants to export something that we want to export instead. Or China wants to import something from Europe like etching machinery for computer chips that it can use militarily.

And so essentially it means that the United States has completely arbitrary dictatorship in deciding what other countries can do. It means that we now are aiming at a centrally planned economy planned by the U.S. military and the deep state in preparation for escalating cold war against Russia and China. That’s what it means.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael, what choice do countries face between aligning with the United States and turning toward China, China’s more dynamic market, if we can put it that way?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, if they’re not allowed to trade with China, what can they do?

They’re not able to earn enough foreign trade returns to remain solvent. And the main victims in all of this are the global south countries in particular. They’re already having difficulty paying their foreign debts. They’re falling into arrears.

The bonds of Latin American and other global south countries are falling in price because they’re really risky. And so here’s basically the problem. And there’s a solution that they have.

The problem is that if they increase their taxes to somehow throw their currency on the foreign exchange market to try to raise the dollars to pay the bondholders that hold dollar-denominated debts, then they’re not going to have enough money for the governments to invest in domestic infrastructure or to promote just social programs. They will have to do to themselves what Trump and Musk and the Republicans are doing to the United States, cutting back social programs, cutting back research and development, squeezing out the economy by imposing austerity to pay the bondholders.

And in other words, countries and their leaders, or elected leaders, are going to have to put the interest of foreign countries over their own national interest.

Well, that’s a loss of sovereignty. You’d think that the definition of sovereignty is to permit sovereign countries to decide how to run their own tax and monetary system to promote their own economic development. But if they’re prevented from doing this now, then what to do?

Well, what Trump has done is given them a godsend in all of this. There was already talk about, are we going to be back in the situation we were in the 1980s, after Mexico defaulted on its Tesobonos, and you had the Latin American countries declaring insolvency. You then had the Brady plan come in and wrote down their debts to something that was payable, but it was a lost decade for Latin America.

And the International Monetary Fund, basically an arm of the U.S. military, used its loan capacity to support right-wing leaders supported by the United States and to withdraw support from countries with leaders who U.S. foreign policy did not find congenial to American foreign policy.

So the countries can now say, well, there was an implicit moral contract in international trade, and this was exactly what Keynes had spoken about in 1944. Keynes had been one of the, probably the leading economists during the German reparations debate, saying that if the allies insist in getting reparations debts to pay the United States, the United States has to permit Germany to earn the money by exporting to the United States.

But the United States Congress said, well, wait a minute, we don’t want the debtors to earn money to pay us by competing with U.S. industry. So they passed a law about trade with countries with depreciating currencies, meaning a floating tariff that would go up to erase any currency advantage that Germany or other allied debtors had trying to raise the money to export to pay their foreign debts.

Well, Keynes said, you have to wipe out the Versailles reparations debts and the inter-allied debts that were supposed to be paid out of German reparations to the United States for arms that the allies fought before America had entered World War I.

Well, the same moral argument that was discussed all during the 1920s has just reappeared today. Global South countries can say, Trump’s tariffs have prevented us from earning the money to earn the dollars to pay the bondholders that have U.S. dollars. We can’t pay them, so we’re going to need exactly what happened to the world in 1931 when there was a moratorium on German reparations and inter-allied debts or in the 1980s when you had the Brady plans come in.

They have an opportunity to suspend debt payments, and what that’s going to do is force the United States to make a choice. You’re going to have the bondholders do what they tried to do to Argentina in the last few decades. They’ll say, well, if you default on a foreign debt, we get to treat you like we treated Venezuela or Argentina or Iran. We get to grab whatever assets you have here. We can grab, if you have government investments in the United States, we can grab them. We can grab your gold. We can grab your military ships when they travel abroad as the Americans tried to grab an Argentinian ship when it visited a friendly African port.

So, other countries literally will face a force majeure of the U.S. trying to grab their assets in the same way that the United States and Europe grabbed Russia’s $300 billion of assets.

What can they do? All they can do is join together and say, well, if you grab, this is morally wrong, and you have not let us write the rules of international finance and international trade in a way that benefit us, not you. You, the United States, changed the rules in 1971 away from gold. You’re changing the rules today under President Trump unilaterally. But you’re 1% of the population, or 15% when you add all Europe and everyone in. We’re going to have to create a whole alternative economic order. And if you grab our assets, we get to grab all of your foreign investments in our countries.

And finally, we’ll just sort of leave existing assets in place, and every country gets to keep what assets are in their own country. The U.S. gets to grab foreign assets of debtor countries that it’s prevented from paying their debts. The global swath and global maturity will together take control of America’s mining investments abroad, oil investments abroad, any assets they have abroad. They will take US banks under their own national control and turn them into public utilities, much like China’s central bank. You’ll have the opportunity, tailor-made, to create their own monetary order. Well, all you need for this is an idea of what will this order look like. They have to actually have a plan. That’s the only thing that’s missing right now. They need a plan, and they need the reality that they can call America’s bluff. They can say, okay, you know, we’re not going to sign an agreement like the agreement that England signed and that Germany is going to sign as a surrender. We’re going to say, okay, we’re going to say, okay, leave your 80% tariffs on Bangladesh and other countries, leave your 40% tariffs on us. We can’t pay, we’re now maybe at the BRICS meeting that’s coming up next month, we’re going to lay out the plans for a new international economic order, such as we actually have wanted to do ever since the Bandung Conference in Indonesia in 1974 of non-aligned countries and its sequence conferences.

So you can have these non-aligned countries align with each other in mutual aid now that they have enough variety, enough of a full-spectrum range of production and money among themselves that they can afford to go it alone. They could never afford to go it alone before, but now they can. So all they have to do is realize their position of strength.

Well, everyone realizes this except economists who said, well, you have to conform to the market and the market is just what America has designed. The market isn’t natural. It’s designed in the United States for the United States to benefit the United States at your expense or, as Donald Trump says, to make us winners and you losers.

So the question is, how are we going to get the global majority to actually act on this wonderful opportunity and create this new international economic order that is independent and finally gets rid of the fact that debts cannot be paid without sacrificing their own growth so that you finally leave countries with their own natural resources free of American owners that do not pay taxes on these? And to use these natural resources, land rents, monopoly rents, monopoly rents from the public utilities and infrastructure that American companies have bought. They can now use all of these economic rents to finance their own capital investment and begin to develop along the same lines that America, Germany, other countries developed in the 19th century, for their industrial takeoff. That’s the potential.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael, with what you’ve said, considering all the information that you’ve given to us, do you believe that Trump’s plan is not actually to re-industrialize the United States, but rather to dismantle it?

MICHAEL HUDSON: That’s the effect of what he’s doing. The fact is, there’s no way that the United States can re-industrialize for a number of reasons. There are preconditions that you need to re-industrialize.

The most obvious thing you need in America to re-industrialize, you need labor. But there’s America doesn’t have the labor force to work in industry because nobody wants to work in industry, because the pay rates are so low for very hard factory work jobs, blue-collar labor, that it’s only 35 cents an hour more than being a waiter or a service industry person or a stacker in an Amazon warehouse.

So, white people don’t want to work in manual labor. In the past, this manual labor was done very largely by immigrants. But Trump doesn’t want immigrants, so you have the immigrant labor not available to do this.

In the past, there was a black labor who moved up from the south to become the industrial labor and the unionized labor.

But in order to work in industry, you actually need some kind of training. And that’s why, for many years, America had a highly developed vocational school system, just as Germany did during its industrial takeoff. Very, very good training of workmen and industrialists and factory jobs.

But that has not been the case in the United States. We’ve shifted away from science and engineering and mathematics and industrialization generally into more, I’m not sure how to characterize what they’re studying, but it’s not industrial.

So, you’ve had this class war in the United States against unionized labor, mainly industrial labor, by offshoring. And that offshoring of industry has indeed led to very little demand for industrial labor. So, hardly by surprise, there isn’t an industrial labor force anymore.

Well, the other thing you need, suppose you had this labor, you need raw materials like steel and aluminum, because almost any manufactured good is made out of steel and aluminum.

Well, what Trump has done is the reverse of what protective tariffs are supposed to do. The whole strategy of Britain, of the United States, was we want to import low priced raw materials from other countries, and we want them all to compete with each other, supplying us with crops and metals and mineral products. And then we will monopolize ourselves industrial production, and that’s where the value added is. So, our labor can exchange for much more labor of raw materials that produce these countries.

Well, what Trump has done is essentially going to the few unions that are left, like the steel workers. And he said, “You know, I want union votes.” He trotted out a steel worker who said, “This is a wonderful tariff.” You know, we’re certainly going to vote for Trump.

But the rest of industry, what Trump’s tariff means is that American manufacturers are going to have to pay much more of a world — there’s a common world price for all raw materials, but Americans are going to have to pay more than their European or Asian counterparts because of Trump’s tariff. So he’s already broken the most basic rule of tariff policy.

Well, another thing you’re going to need is you’re going to need machinery. And most of the machinery. And most of the machinery that is used in the United States right down to nuts and bolts and screws.

I used to know the CEO of a company that made screws and fasteners. And she finally closed down her company because she said, “No, we can’t afford to make them anymore. Other countries are making them. And imagine there are no more screws made in the United States. They’re all imported.”

Well, imagine if all of a sudden, with the trade barriers, America’s dependent on foreign countries for things that should be very easy to make, like screws, but which American industry says, “Well, there’s no monopoly profit from high technology and patent rates on all of this.”

Trump’s plan is to make American exports based on a particular kind of industry. Either it’s the computer industry, information technology, or it’s arms, monopolized exports that other countries do not produce and are blocked from producing for one reason or another.

And he hopes that somehow he can get these huge monopoly products, prices on selected US sectors and essentially get a free lunch from other countries, not producing them. Well, as your other commentators have pointed out in the fighting in Ukraine, and elsewhere, the American arms don’t seem to work very well. And other countries, even though Trump has just negotiated an enormous arms sale to Saudi Arabia, this does not mean that these arms are really going to work. I think this is a political idea. And basically, Saudi Arabia’s agreed to be a good customer for the US, so that the United States will protect its interests and put its Wahhabi terrorists in charge of Syria, so that Saudi Arabia can spread Islamic terrorism. and its particular brand of Islam and protect it against Iranian or more civilized forms of Islam.

So trade doesn’t depend on actual usefulness of process anymore. And just in the last few weeks, we’ve seen other reasons why America can’t can’t industrialize.

Trump has waged war on America’s leading universities. He’s said, we’re closing down all research funding for technology, for pharmaceuticals, for biology, for everything at universities that permit its students to say, we’re against war, and we’re against genocide. That is a threat to American security, because genocide is us. War is us. That’s a threat if they’re doing that.

So he’s essentially trying even to take away the tax exemption of Harvard as sort of the first big giant to knock down so he can take over essentially, it used to be called fascism, take over the curriculum that Harvard’s allowed to teach. It really can’t teach Islamic studies, Near Eastern studies. It’s a total control. And not only is the money for university research cuts back, but also Trump has deterred foreign students from attending universities.

Well, foreign students, especially from China and other Asian countries, India, were their profit centers because they were the students who paid full tuition of anywhere from 50,000 to 90,000 a semester for their studies. Well, now they’re not going to be coming anymore. You’re going to have a drastic reduction in their coming. They’re afraid to come because what if they were to say, we’re against the war? Well, out you go. Your student visa is canceled. You don’t get to show up for your final tests.

And not only that are the students blocked, but so are the graduates. The feeling is that many of the students who came to the United States from abroad and wanting to specialize in engineering and science and technology stayed in the United States. And so the United States had other countries pre-educate and all the costs of raising children growing up through college age. And then it got the benefit of their coming here.

That’s what’s made America so rich ever since the early 19th century, the immigration of skilled labor.

And Trump is now his war on the universities and war on anyone advocating peace is losing this whole benefit that the United States has had.

So Trump is actually his so-called tariff policy and the givebacks that he’s announced saying that these tariffs are to help us re-industrialize. That’s just a cover story. They’re not going to help America industrialize.

What Trump really wanted to do was he imagined that somehow other countries were going to surrender to the United States. They would continue to export just what they’re exporting now, but they would drastically reduce the price of what they charge for their exports.

Trump said Americans won’t pay the cost of tariffs. Foreign countries will pay the cost of tariffs. Well, that was just silly. Of course, Americans have to pay the price of tariffs.

Other countries are not going to sacrifice because there’s no profit for them. Profits are often 10 to 15%. If tariffs are higher than that, you cannot produce export goods at a profit. They’ll have to find another market.

Well, where are they going to find another market if they have to sign a contract with the U.S. saying we’re not going to trade with Russia or China for all of this? You can see the noose that Trump is tightening around the U.S. economy and the whole Cold War neocon plan for everything.

There’s very little that they can do.

Well, what are other countries going to do for all this? They’re not going to export and that means that there’s not going to be anywhere near the vast amount of tariff revenue that Trump promised would be.

Same thing with Elon Musk’s cutbacks of government spending at Doge. Many of these are marginal and fictitious. He’s really gone after cultural spending on Medicare payments. Payments for the low income classes are basically scratched.

But there’s not going to be anywhere enough income to make up for the tax cuts that the Republicans are now putting this week before Congress renewing all of the tax cuts that Trump put before and then some.

So the result is everybody who’s done a budget analysis sees the American budget is going to go up and up and up. And today, the 10-year Treasury bond, the yield is over 4.5%. When the bond prices yield go up, the prices go down. People are saying, wait a minute, do we really want a 10-year, not to mention a 30-year Treasury bond, if there’s such a large budget deficit and so little production taking place, this is going to be inflationary. Do we really want to invest our savings? And this includes foreign central bank savings and foreign government savings. Do we want to invest in the debt of a country whose prices are going to go up and we won’t call it hyperinflation, but the price increase will go up, the exchange rate of the dollars we have will go down.

And Trump has said, we want the exchange rates to go down. 10%, 20%. Well, I think it was 10% in the Plaza Accords with Japan, way back, back in those days. And if you’re losing 10% of your money, and the interest rate is only like 4%, you’ve lost two and a half years of interest. And the principal value of all of this.

So what is the attraction of the United States as an investment market and of the dollar as an international reserve currency for foreign central banks and means for saving? All of Trump’s actions and its sort of nutty economics that really don’t work at all when you do the math and just project the statistical trends, you can see that the economy is in a real non-investable for foreign countries.

So this should act as a kind of catalyst to force them to say, if we don’t act together, we’re all going to hang separately, if we don’t hang together, as I think the American revolutionists put it.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael, Donald Trump is threatening to ban Chinese built ships, a large strategy of economic isolation and possible self sabotage. How is that in his mind? How is that going to benefit the United States?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, an awful lot of trade is in ships done in China. The tax rules and the regulatory rules for US ships are so high that there are hardly any US ships around.

And China and along with, I think, South Korea and Japan have developed shipbuilding and created their own market.

But if you ban Chinese ships from American markets, well, ships often go from one country to another. And that means that the whole set of countries that the ships go to somehow will be blocked from trade if he does that. So this is another. It’s a non-tariff barrier that in many ways is even more of a deal blocker.

By the way, Trump also is insisting in Panama that American ships do not have to pay any fees at all. And Panama had just said American ships have to pay larger fees because they’re so big that they require special attention. Trump has insisted they have to pay nothing, increasing shipping for all other countries.

So not only do you have tariff barriers, the whole cost of transportation and foreign trade has gone up.

Well, in the last few days, the United States has approached South Korea and Japan and said, let’s say we need to have a three country agreement in building ships. And we’ll call them U.S., You’ll build them, but we’ll put a U.S. flag on them so that we can essentially build them. And the question is whether South Korea and Japan will do this.

Well, I think in the last show we discussed Japan that already is thinking, do we really want to tie our future to the United States now that it’s blocked our exports? Do we want to think of reorienting with China?

So the question is if shipping to the United States in ships that are not U.S. ships or ships that are either Chinese or have traded with China, then that trade is simply stopped. Well, you can see that the trade is not really going to stop. It’ll just be redirected away from the United States.

So once again, Trump in trying to isolate China is ending up isolating himself.

And the reason he’s gone to South Korea and Japan is somebody told him, you know, it takes 10 years to just build a port that is capable of building a ship. They’re gigantic for ships. You have to set up a whole system. You have to create an enormous forward planning and expensive shipbuilding industry.

China, South Korea and Japan have already invested the sunk costs in all of these. But now these costs for the United States are enormous, especially because we’ve just deported a major source of American construction labor.

So you can just look at how every act that he’s done trying to isolate China has just isolated the United States and cut itself off from other countries. Throwing the decision onto other countries about, well, now that we have to trade with ourselves, what are the terms and conditions and institutions that we’re going to base our own trade with? Well, they’ll need a new international monetary fund, a new World Bank, and ultimately a new United Nations.

Well, speaking of the United Nations, another thing that Trump has cut back is health spending. Drastic cutbacks, there’s health and weather. They’ve cut back the weather forecasting here. Just when global warming has gone way up and extreme weather has increased, stuff threatening American cities. You have landslides here. You have flooding every night on the news. All the coping with bad weather, that’s cut back and is causing devastation.

And these areas on sea level is where you’d make the shipping. You’re not going to build shipping in the middle of Indiana. You have to build it on the ocean, and that’s exactly where you have the rising sea levels.

And regarding sea levels, Trump has also pulled the United States out of all of the environmental agreements for global warming.

And also, the Americans are getting very sick. They’ve cut back all of the reporting now on COVID and other diseases. There’s no more weekly or monthly reporting on the spread of COVID, the tests from the water supply of COVID.

So the Americans are getting sicker. The lifespan of Americans are going down while almost all other countries are going up.

Just to add to the problems that every action that Trump has taken worsens conditions, certainly for the 90% of the economy. And the 90% of the economy is basically responsible for the production in the economy. The 10% are rentiers. They live on their stocks and bonds and real estate rents.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael, before wrapping up this session, a very important question right now when it comes to the conflict in Ukraine to the Middle East. And whenever we’re talking about it, it’s the SWIFT system that the United States is using.

And when they put sanctions on other countries like Russia and Iran, they cannot use it. Here is the question, in my opinion. The main question right now for the United States and the Trump administration would be, is the attempt to monopolize information technology and platforms like SWIFT a sustainable strategy for maintaining the United States global influence?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Ever since Marco Polo visited China and some Catholic priests brought back silkworms to the West, it’s been almost impossible for any country to monopolize any technology.

The Italian fashion designers and Italian technologists were driven out of Italy by essentially the dictatorship and the inquisition. The French industrialists were driven out again by the Catholic inquisition there to other countries.

It’s not possible to prevent a technology from developing. And also because technology itself is evolving very rapidly and to evolve, you need research and development that in a financialized economy like the United States, you’re not going to back research and development because that takes development takes time. It takes a couple of years to develop something.

And if you’re a chief financial officer of a technology company, you’re paid by according to how much money you make on the stock of your company. So you use your profits for stock buybacks or to pay out dividends to increase the stock price, not for research and development.

Well, countries that are not financialized, like China, don’t have that problem. Countries that do not have a financial class that has taken over industry and financialized it to make money financially instead of industrially are obviously have an advantage in their developing new technology.

And that’s why almost weekly now we’re having reports of new Chinese breakthroughs and computers and others. In the last month, China’s announced this new kind of a block chain system for payments that are made in its currency and currency of friendly countries in order to break free of SWIFT.

So once you try to protect the technology, what you do is force other countries to not only duplicate it, but usually because it’s later now than it was when America developed it. Usually they’re able to improve it this time around and get an advantage.

And so every kind of sanction has helped other countries develop their own self-reliance in this technology, just as we’ve discussed in the case of Russia and numerous occasions on your show before. And that’s exactly what’s happening now.

China’s spending the money on development, other countries, South Korea, Japan, other countries are doing this.

The United States hoped somehow that it could have its investment banks buy control of these foreign countries industry or buy them out and consolidate them into the American parent companies. countries because a lot of this research and development is funded by governments there, just as it is here. The governments are not willing to let these industries that they funded be sold out to the American bankers and turned over to the United States to monopolize at the expense of their own domestic economies.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Thank you so much, Michael, for being with us today. Great pleasure as always.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, it’s really good to be here. I wonder. I hope other countries can solve the problems that we’ve discussed. I think we’ve shown what’s needed to solve them. I guess that’s for future shows.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Yeah, exactly.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Thank you.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Thank you. Thank you very much.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Thank you.