Debt Bondage Quotes

“Popular morality blames victims for going into debt – not only individuals, but also national governments. The trick in this ideological war is to convince debtors to imagine that general prosperity depends on paying bankers and making bondholders rich – a veritable Stockholm Syndrome in which debtors identify with their financial captors.”
― Michael Hudson, Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy

“But money doesn’t work in the sense that labor or tangible capital expends
effort to produce commodities. Credit is debt, and debt extracts interest. Financial salesmen who promise investors, “Make your money work for you” actually mean that society should work for the creditors — and that means for the banks that create credit.

The effect is to turn the economic surplus into a flow of interest payments, diverting revenue from tangible capital investment. As the economy’s reproductive powers are dried up, the financialization process is kept going by easing credit terms and lending — not to produce more goods and services, but to bid up prices for the real estate, stocks and bonds being pledged as collateral for larger and larger loans.”
― Michael Hudson, The Bubble and Beyond

“The motivation for taking on debt is to buy assets or claims rising in price. Over the past half-century the aim of financial investment has been less to earn profits on tangible capital investment than to generate “capital” gains (most of which take the form of debt-leveraged land prices, not industrial capital). Annual price gains for property, stocks and bonds far outstrip the reported real estate rents, corporate profits and disposable personal income after paying for essential non-discretionary spending, headed by FIRE [Finance, Insurance, Real Estate]-sector charges.”
― Michael Hudson, The Bubble and Beyond

“Debt is just as dangerous in business as it is in personal finance. Entrepreneurs need to be careful not to cripple the businesses they lead with debt. Because one thing debt does well is cripple it's host.”
― Hendrith Smith

“Surprising as it may seem today, classical ideas of creating a free market were to be achieved by “socialist” reforms. Their common aim was to protect populations from having to pay prices that included a non-labor rent or financial tax to pay landlords and natural resource owners, monopolists and bondholders. The vested interests railed against public regulation and taxation along these lines. They opposed public ownership or even the taxation of land, natural monopolies and banking. They wanted to collect rent and interest, not make land, banking and infrastructure monopolies public in character.”
― Michael Hudson, J Is for Junk Economics: A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception

“In fact, they are not taught in any university departments: the dynamics of debt, and how the pattern of bank lending inflates land prices, or national income accounting and the rising share absorbed by rent extraction in the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector. There was only one way to learn how to analyze these topics: to work for banks. Back in the 1960s there was barely a hint that these trends would become a great financial bubble.”
― Michael Hudson, Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy

“Home life ceases to be free and beautiful as soon as it is founded on borrowing and debt. (A Doll's House, act 1)”
― Henrik Ibsen, Plays 1: A Doll's House/Emperor and Galilean/John Gabriel Borkman/When We Dead Awaken

“Good debts can lift your life to the next level. Bad debts can ruin your life for up to the next 3 generations.”
― David Angway

“No matter how much a man may owe others, he will never allow his creditors to dictate how he governs his household.”
― Eduvie Donald