Michael Hudson (born in 1939, Chicago, Illinois, USA)is research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC).He is also a Wall Street analyst and consultantas well as president ofThe Institute for the Study of Long-term Economic Trends (ISLET)and a founding member ofInternational Scholars Conference on Ancient Near Eastern Economies (ISCANEE).
Hudson previously taught at the New School in New York City,and he is currently a research professor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City.He also lectures and publishes in association with UMKCat The Berlin School of Economics.
Hudson served as Chief Economic Advisor for Dennis Kucinich’s 2008 presidential campaignand holds the same position in Kucinich’s Congressional campaign.He has been economic advisor to the U.S., Canadian, Mexican and Latvian governments,to the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR),and he is president of the Institute for the Study of Long-term Economic Trends (ISLET).
Hudson is a former balance-of-payments economist forChase Manhattan Bank andArthur Andersen,and economic futurist for the Hudson Institute (no relation).For Scudder, Stevens & Clark in 1990,he established the world’s first Third World sovereign debt fund,which became the second best performing international fund in 1991
Hudson has written cover stories for Harper's Magazineand is on the editorial board of Lapham's Quarterly.He is a regular onAmerican Public Media's Marketplace,Bloomberg Radio,has been on numerousPacifica Radio interview programs,and is a regular contributor toCounterPunch (http://counterpunch.com/).He has written for theJournal of International Affairs,Commonweal,Bible Review,International Economy,New York Times op-eds,and has often contributed editorials in leading Latvian, Polish and Arabic business papers.His trade books are translated into Japanese, Chinese, Spanish and Russian.
Hudson's April 2006 Harper's cover story,“The $4.7 Trillion Pyramid: Why Social Security Won’t Be Enough to Save Wall Street,”helped defeat the Bush administration’s attempt toprivatize Social Securityby showing its aim of steering wage withholding into thestock marketto reflate stock market prices for the benefit ofinsidersandspeculators— and to sell to thepension funds.His May 2006 Harper's cover story,“The New Road to Serfdom: An illustrated guide to the coming real estate collapse,”was the first major national article forecasting- in precise chart form -the bursting of the real estate bubbleand its consequences for homeowners and state and local governmentsolvency.The November 2008“How to Save Capitalism”issue ofHarper'sincludes an article by Hudson onthe inevitability of a large write-off of debts and the savings they back.
Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire,was the first book to describe the global free ride for America after it went off the gold standard in 1971, putting the world onto a paper U.S. Treasury-bill standard. Obliging foreign central banks to keep their monetary reserves in Treasury bonds forced them to finance U.S. military spending abroad, which was responsible for the U.S. balance-of-payments deficit at that time. See exorbitant privilege for more discussion of reserve currency status, and super-imperialism for history and use of the term.
Global Fracture: The New International Economic order,a sequel to Super Imperialism,forecast the division of the world into regional trade and currency blocs.
Super Imperialism - New Edition: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance,a new and completely revised edition of "Super Imperialism",describes the genesis of America's political and financial domination.
Global Fracture: The New International Economic order, Second Edition,a new and updated edition that explores how and why the US came to achieve world economic hegemony.
His forthcoming book,The Fictitious Economy,is among the first to explain to general readershow a corrosive bubble economy is replacing industrial capitalismvia debt-financed, asset price inflationwith the main purpose of increasing balance-sheet net worth,benefiting a select few while spreading risk among the general population.
In 1984, Hudson joinedHarvard’s archaeology facultyat thePeabody Museumas a research fellow inBabylonian economics.A decade later, he was a founding member ofISCANEE (International Scholars Conference on Ancient Near Eastern Economies),an international group ofAssyriologistsandarchaeologiststhat has published a series ofcolloquiaanalyzing the economic origins of civilization.This group has become the successor toKarl Polanyi’s anthropological and historical group of a half-century ago.Four volumes co-edited by Hudson have appeared so far,dealing with privatization, urbanization and land use,the origins of money, accounting, debt,and clean slates in the Ancient Near East(a fifth volume, on the evolution of free labor, is in progress).This new direction in research is now known as theNew Economic Archaeology.
Professor Hudson received his Ph.D. in economics from New York University in 1968. His dissertation was on American economic and technological thought in the nineteenth century. He received his M.A. also from New York University in 1963 in economics, with a thesis on the World Bank's philosophy of development, with special reference to lending policies in the agricultural sector. He was a philology major with a minor in history at the University of Chicago, where he received his B.A. in 1959. He attended the University of Chicago's Laboratory School for high school and grade school.
