[00:18:29] Grumbine: I think about austerity all the time. I read Clara Mattei’s book The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism [Clara Mattei]. And I guess my question to you is this, given all the work that you’ve put into the historical nature of debt and debt jubilees and austerity, how is it when we look at the domestic policy of the United States, we don’t have money for healthcare, for getting rid of student debt?
We don’t have money to invest in universal basic services, to provide any kind of relief. Housing as a right, any of the basic needs, we have no money for this, but we know as MMT, or economically literate people, from an understanding of state theory of money, that the state itself creates its currency.

格拉宾:
我一直在考虑紧缩。我读了Clara Mattei的书《资本秩序:经济学家如何发明紧缩并为法西斯主义铺平道路》。我想我要问你的问题是，考虑到你对债务的历史性质、债务禧年和紧缩政策所做的所有工作，当我们审视美国的国内政策时，为什么我们没有钱用于医疗保健，没有钱来摆脱学生债务?
我们没有钱投资于普遍的公共服务，提供任何形式的救济。住房作为一种权利，以及任何一种基本需求，我们都没有钱，但我们知道MMT，或经济素养的人，从对货币国家理论的理解来看，国家自己创造了货币。
原创翻译：龙腾网 http://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处


How in the world is the United States able to convince people that it doesn’t have money? And it can’t do any of these things, while it uses every bit of its fiscal power, that it’s willing to admit it has, to defeat the rest of the world, but stamps down on its own citizens? I feel like, Michael, this is maybe the most important cog in between, not only the geopolitical world, the larger picture, but as well as the domestic picture, and even down to the local homeless guy living under a bridge. The things that we’re dealing with here are the same thing, it’s just different in scale, maybe. Can you explain that to me?

美国究竟是如何让人们相信它没有钱的呢?当它动用它愿意承认拥有的每一点财政权力，去打败世界其他国家，却压制自己的公民时，它不能做任何这些事情? 我觉得，迈克尔，这可能是最重要的齿轮，不仅是地缘政治世界，更大的图景，而且是国内的图景，甚至是住在桥下的当地无家可归的人。
我们这里处理的东西是一样的，可能只是在尺度上不同。你能给我解释一下吗?

[00:20:04] Hudson: Well, what this is, is reflecting the power of junk economics and ideology. The right wing economists claim that if government were to provide more public healthcare, and more public services, taxes would go up. And because both Republicans and the Democrats have shifted taxes off real estate, off finance, off the 1% onto the 99%, that means that the wage earners taxes would go up. But of course, it doesn’t have to be that way at all, because, as you point out, the state theory of money says that governments can create their own money. That’s been the case for the last few hundred years. And China has shown, governments don’t have to borrow money from the wealthy people to pay interest.

哈德森：这反映了垃圾经济学和意识形态的力量。右翼经济学家声称，如果政府提供更多的公共医疗和公共服务，税收就会上升。因为共和党和民主党都把税收从房地产，金融，从1%转移到99%，这意味着工薪阶层的税收将会增加。
但是，当然，它并不一定是那样的，因为，正如你所指出的，国家货币理论说政府可以创造自己的货币。这是过去几百年的情况。中国已经表明，政府不必向富人借钱来支付利息。

They can simply print the money, and the junk economics people say, well, if you print your money, that’s inflationary. But it’s no more inflationary than bank credit. Suppose that a government does indeed borrow a billion dollars from wealthy bond holders, and the wealthy bond holders are going to take the money out of the bank and turn it over to the government for spending. Why does the government need the bond holders to create this money? Or, why do they need banks to suddenly go to their computer and create a billion dollars, to lend to the government, which the government will then redeposit in these very banks? The government is going to create the money in any case, whether it’s lent by the bond holders, or the banks, or just simply printed.

他们可以直接印钱，垃圾经济学的人说，如果你印钱，那就是通货膨胀。但它并不比银行信贷更具通货膨胀性。假设政府确实从富有的债券持有人那里借了10亿美元，而富有的债券持有人会把钱从银行拿出来，交给政府用于支出。
为什么政府需要债券持有人创造这些钱?或者，为什么他们需要银行突然打开电脑，创造10亿美元，借给政府，然后政府会把这些钱重新存入这些银行?政府在任何情况下都要创造货币，无论是债券持有者，还是银行，或者只是直接印出来。

So the pretense is that the government has to borrow from bond holders. Because the bond holders decide what is economically worthwhile. Well, what does this ignore? That the bond holders are the 1%, and what they find economically worthwhile, isn’t using the government to benefit living standards, benefit labor, and to provide social services. The government’s role is to provide more money for the 1%, via the military industrial complex, and the other government projects.

因此，政府必须向债券持有人借款是借口。因为债券持有人决定什么是经济上值得的。这忽略了什么?债券持有者是那1%的人，他们认为在经济上是有价值的，而不是利用政府来提高生活水平，造福劳工，提供社会服务。
政府的角色是通过军事工业综合体和其他政府项目，为1%的人提供更多的资金。

[00:22:22] Intermission: You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast brought to you by Real Progressives, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT or Modern Monetary Theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon, like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube, and follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Twitch, Rokfin, and Instagram.

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[00:23:13] Grumbine: So as far as austerity in this country, and making people feel like there is no alternative, you talked about the sale of bonds, and the myth that the rich are financing all of our lives. I listened to your friend Stephanie Kelton, who talks about the deficit myth, and talks about how bonds are after the fact, that they’re not really a funding operation. And her paper she wrote in 1998, broke down that taxes and bonds cannot finance government. Yet people still acting like we are in debt to the rich, that we need the rich to survive. How does that myth hold water? Why does that still exist? Why are we not in the streets, locking arms, fighting back, taking this leviathan down?

格拉宾:
至于这个国家的紧缩政策，以及让人们感到别无选择的问题，你谈到了债券的出售，以及富人为我们所有人的生活提供资金的（虚假）神话。我听了你的朋友斯蒂芬妮·凯尔顿的演讲，她谈到了赤字神话，谈到了债券是如何在事实之后出现的，它们并不是真正的融资操作。
她在1998年写的文章，打破了税收和债券不能为政府提供资金的观点。然而，人们仍然表现得好像我们欠了富人的债，我们需要富人才能生存。这个流言是如何站得住脚的?为什么它还存在?我们为什么不走上街头，手挽手，反击，把这个庞然大物打倒?

I’ll just interject one thing also. I had the weird opportunity to spend a night with Jerome Powell, even though I didn’t know it, at the Dead and Company show in Virginia. And before I got there, I was driving through Loudoun County, Virginia, the tech corridor where you got Raytheon, and Boeing, and Halliburton. Every big defense contractor, and it just felt like huge trophies for the gods. It was ridiculous. It was so over the top. That’s what we’re up against. We are up against something so massive, so unbelievably powerful. How does a person that has a leftist perspective, not only of labor and capital, but an understanding of trying to make people’s lives better, how do you do away with empire, when you’re staring at these massive monuments to the gods of industry, of the military industrial complex? How do we take that leviathan on? It seems too big.

我还要插一件事。我有一个奇怪的机会与杰罗姆·鲍威尔共度一晚，尽管我并不知道，那是在弗吉尼亚的Dead and Company演出上。在我到达那里之前，我开车经过弗吉尼亚州的劳顿县，那里是雷神公司、波音公司和哈里伯顿公司的科技走廊。每一个大型国防承包商，感觉就像上帝的巨大奖杯。
这太荒谬了。太夸张了。这就是我们要对付的。我们面对的是如此强大，如此不可思议的力量。一个拥有左派观点的人，不仅对劳动和资本，而且对努力改善人民生活的理解，当你盯着这些工业之神，军事工业综合体的巨大纪念碑时，你如何摆脱帝国?
我们要怎么对付这个庞然大物?看起来太大了。

[00:25:08] Hudson: Well, in contrast to your trip through Virginia, here in New York, in Chicago, in Toronto, and in almost all the big cities throughout the world, the biggest buildings are the banks. They’re not Raytheon, they’re not the military industrial complex, they’re always the banks. They used to be shaped just like ancient Greek and Roman temples, not pyramids, as earlier, but a temple, as temples of finance, often they were called. And they’re the largest buildings because the wealthiest sector of society is the banking sector, the financial sector, not the industrial sector, not the military sector, and not even the real estate sector. Because most real estate rents are paid as interest to the banks. Now, the banks do not really help industrialize the economy.

哈德森:
嗯，与你在弗吉尼亚、纽约、芝加哥、多伦多以及世界上几乎所有大城市的旅行相比，最大的建筑是银行，不是雷神公司，也不是军工企业，一直都是银行。它们过去的形状就像古希腊和古罗马的神庙，不是早期的金字塔，而是神庙，通常被称为金融神庙。
它们是最大的建筑，因为社会上最富有的部门是银行部门，金融部门，而不是工业部门，不是军事部门，甚至不是房地产部门。因为大多数房地产租金都是以利息的形式支付给银行的。现在，银行并没有真正帮助经济工业化。

They actually help de-industrialize the economy, because their philosophy is anti-labor and post-industrial. So how do you explain to people that it’s not necessary, for instance, for the governments to abandon public planning, and leave planning to the financial sectors? If the governments don’t do economic forward planning, Wall Street and the financial sectors will do it, because that is where credit is created.

他们实际上帮助经济去工业化，因为他们的哲学是反劳动和后工业化。那么，你如何向人们解释，相反，政府应该放弃公共规划，把规划留给金融部门? 如果政府不做经济前瞻性规划，华尔街和金融部门就会这么做，因为信贷就是在那里产生的。

Well, you mentioned Stephanie Kelton, and she was my department chairman at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, which was put together with a grant over 20 years ago, by Warren Mosler, and they put all of the Modern Monetary Theorists together there. Randy Wray, myself, Bill Black, explaining bank corruption in his book The Best Way To Rob A Bank Is To Own One. So we had developed a whole curriculum to explain what we called reality economics, how the economy and the world really works. Well, needless to say, a lot of students wanted to come to learn this. They were very sympathetic. Intuitively, they felt that, yes, this is how the economy works.

你提到了斯蒂芬妮·凯尔顿，她是我在堪萨斯城密苏里大学的系主任，20多年前由沃伦·莫斯勒资助成立，他们把所有现代货币理论家聚集在一起。兰迪·雷，我，比尔·布莱克，在他的书《抢劫银行的最佳方式是拥有一家银行》中解释了银行腐败。
所以我们开发了一整套课程来解释我们所谓的现实经济学，经济和世界是如何运作的。不用说，很多学生都想来学这个。他们很有同理心。直觉上，他们认为，是的，这就是经济运行的方式。

But there’s one problem, when they graduated with their PhD, there’s really only two jobs for economists in the economy: one is to drive a cab and the other is to teach. But in order to teach, you have to be hired according to how many journal articles you write for the most prestigious journals. And almost all the journal articles are controlled by the economics departments of colleges like the University of Chicago, or Berkeley, that are funded by the banks, and the large foundations. And so if you don’t publish in these journals, by saying what the neoliberals, the monetarists, the junk economists say, then you’re not going to get hired. So of course our students did get hired, but not by Harvard, or the University of Chicago, or Princeton, or Columbia. They could get hired by the New School here in New York, and by others, but there is a almost total censorship. And some students came from Asia, and they’ve gone back to Asia. Some were my colleagues in China, and Hong Kong, folks studied at UMKC. But you have the control imposing junk economics in the United States, by the media, such as The New York Times, is almost as strong as their control over reporting about the Ukraine war, as if Ukraine’s winning, and not losing.

但有一个问题，当他们获得博士学位后，经济学家在经济中实际上只有两种工作:
一种是开出租车，另一种是教书。但为了教书，你必须根据你为最负盛名的期刊写了多少篇期刊文章而被聘用。几乎所有的期刊文章都是由芝加哥大学或伯克利大学等学院的经济系控制的，这些学院由银行和大型基金会资助。所以如果你不在这些期刊上发表文章，附和新自由主义者，货币主义者，垃圾经济学家说的话，那么你就不会被雇用。当然，我们的学生确实被聘用了，但不是被哈佛大学、芝加哥大学、普林斯顿大学或哥伦比亚大学聘用。
他们可以被纽约的新学院聘用，也可以被其他学校聘用，但那里几乎是全面的审查。有些学生来自亚洲，他们回到了亚洲。有些是我在中国大陆和香港的同事，他们在UMKC学习。但在美国，像《纽约时报》这样的媒体对垃圾经济学的控制，几乎和他们对乌克兰战争报道的控制一样强大，就好像乌克兰是赢家，而不是输家。

They’re saying as if deindustrialization is helping us move into the post-industrial society of mass unemployment and homelessness, as if that’s a good thing. Well, it is a good thing for the 1%, because they get to feel, we’re really it. We’re really the new lords, the financial lords, not landlords, who are also in debt to us, to borrow. So that’s really the situation. Ultimately, if people don’t have a mental model in their mind of how the world works, and how it should work, to promote prosperity, they believe with Margaret Thatcher, as you said, that “there is no alternative.” And the function of economic education is to try to brainwash students into thinking there is no alternative.

他们说，好像去工业化正在帮助我们进入大规模失业和无家可归的后工业社会，好像这是一件好事。这对那1%的人来说是件好事，因为他们会觉得，我们是真的。我们实际上是新的领主，金融领主，而不是地主，他们也欠我们债，向我们借钱。这就是实际情况。
最终，如果人们没有一个关于世界如何运作，以及应该如何运作，以促进繁荣的心智模型，他们就会像你说的那样，相信玛格丽特·撒切尔所说的“别无选择”。而经济教育的功能就是试图给学生洗脑，让他们认为别无选择。

Things have to be the way they are. That’s Darwinian evolution. That’s survival of the fittest, the survival of the bankers. To beat society. The bankers have won, labor’s lost. And if you look at what American polls show, the Americans don’t want war in Ukraine. They want money to be spent domestically — we don’t get it. They want public healthcare — we don’t get it. They want student loans to be forgiven, rather than preventing graduates, debtors, from ever having enough money to actually buy a home of their own and start a family — we don’t get it. And we don’t get it, because neither the Republicans, nor the Democrats support it.

事情只能是这样的。这就是达尔文的进化论。这就是适者生存，银行家的生存。打败社会。银行家赢了，劳工输了。如果你看看美国的民意调查显示，美国人不希望乌克兰发生战争。他们想把钱花在国内——我们不明白。他们想要公共医疗——我们不明白。他们希望学生贷款被免除，而不是阻止毕业生，债务人，有足够的钱买自己的房子，组建家庭——我们不明白这一点。我们没有得到它，因为共和党和民主党都不支持它。

But if they pretend to support it, by passing a law, the Supreme Court is there to make sure that it’s not what the original Constitutional people wanted. Because the Constitution was drafted by authors who feared democracy. Who said that we have to make sure that we have enough checks and blocks, so that the mob cannot rule and take away the power of we, the bond holders, and landlords, and slave owners.

但如果他们假装支持它，通过一项法律，最高法院就会确保这不是最初的宪法人想要的。因为宪法是由害怕民主的作者起草的。他说我们必须确保我们有足够的制约和阻碍，这样暴民就不能统治和剥夺我们，债券持有人，地主和奴隶主的权力。

[00:30:45] Grumbine: Well stated. This is really important stuff you’re bringing up here, Michael, I appreciate it. Let’s roll into the next phase. We’re going to double back, cuz we talked about the BRICS in the very beginning. We talked about China investing in its own financial sector. One of the concerns that many have is the loss of the world reserve currency. And I’ve spoken with quite a few economists who have stated, point blank, that one of the reasons why the US is still able to maintain that level of hegemony, and still be able to hold onto reserve status, is because of the amount of deficit spending it was allowed to do previously, and that allowed the money to matriculate throughout the world.

格拉宾:
说得好。迈克尔，你说的这些都很重要，我很感激。让我们进入下一个阶段。我们要往回走，因为我们一开始就谈到了金砖国家。我们谈到了中国对本国金融业的投资。许多人担心的一个问题是世界储备货币地位的丧失。
我曾与不少经济学家交谈过，他们直截了当地表示，美国之所以仍然能够保持那种霸权水平，仍然能够保持储备货币的地位，原因之一是它以前被允许进行大量的赤字支出，这使得资金流入世界各地。

It has a central hub in Wall Street, where people can invest, and so this is one of the primary reasons they say, that and, of course, the military, that allows us to retain that level. What, if anything, do you see has changed in such a way, to make that threatened by the BRICS, and I guess remedially, what exactly are the BRICS, and what does it represent that they’re trying to do?

它在华尔街有一个中心枢纽，人们可以在那里投资，这是他们说的主要原因之一，当然，还有军队，让我们保持这个水平。如果有的话，你认为发生了什么变化，以至于受到金砖国家的威胁，我想从补救的角度来说，金砖国家到底是什么，它们代表着什么?

[00:31:57] Hudson: Well, the BRICS was an acronym formed over a decade ago, for Brazil, Russia, India, and China. But now that the United States, in February of last year, 2022, confiscated Russia’s dollar reserves in the west, and told the Bank of England to confiscate Venezuela’s gold reserves. The United States says that any country that we declare to be an enemy, any country that we call an autocracy, namely democracies, is our enemy, and we can just grab all of your reserves.

哈德森:
嗯，金砖国家是十多年前对巴西、俄罗斯、印度和中国的首字母缩略词。但现在，美国在去年2月，也就是2022年，没收了俄罗斯在西方的美元储备，并告诉英格兰银行没收委内瑞拉的黄金储备。
美国说，任何我们宣布为敌人的国家，任何我们称之为专制的国家，即便名义上是民主国家，都是我们的敌人，我们可以攫取你们所有的储备。

Well, needless to say, this makes other countries afraid to use it, and they realize that the United States deficit, that has been pumping all these dollars into foreign economies, and their central banks, they end up being re-lent to the US government in treasury bills, and these treasury bills are used to finance the deficit, that’s largely military in nature. The budget deficit is primarily military, and the entire balance of payments deficit, after the Korean War, was entirely overseas military spending. That is what forced the United States to abandon convertibility of the dollar into gold in 1971. Not only General DeGaulle, but Germany, was cashing in every month, the extra dollars that were ending up in their central banks.

不用说，这让其他国家不敢使用它，他们意识到美国的赤字，一直在向外国经济体注入这些美元，而他们的中央银行，最终以国库券的形式重新借给了美国政府，这些国库券是用来填补赤字的，这基本上是军事性质的。预算赤字主要是军事赤字，朝鲜战争后的整个国际收支赤字，完全是海外军事开支。这就是迫使美国在1971年放弃美元兑换黄金的原因。不仅是戴高乐将军，还有德国，每个月都在兑现，这些额外的美元最终流入了他们的央行。

The United States was fighting in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, which were French colonies, and the only banks there at the time were French banks. They’d received this local spending in dollars, sent it to France and DeGaulle would cash it in for gold. And so it was America’s military spending that forced the United States off gold. Well, when it went off gold, what were foreign countries going to spend their dollar inflows on? They don’t really buy real estate, and they don’t really buy stocks and bonds, at that time. They buy government bonds, and so it was the military spending for the balance of payments deficit, that financed the government domestic deficit.

美国正在越南和东南亚打仗，那是法国的殖民地，当时那里唯一的银行是法国的银行。他们收到了当地的美元消费，寄到法国，戴高乐将其兑换成黄金。因此，是美国的军事开支迫使美国放弃了黄金。当它不再购买黄金时，外国将把流入的美元花在什么地方?那时，他们不买房地产，也不买股票和债券。他们购买政府债券，所以国际收支赤字的军事开支，为政府的国内赤字提供了资金。

The government didn’t have to borrow from abroad. Of course, it could have created its own money, but it had to provide some vehicle to absorb all of these dollars, that were being thrown off to other countries. So creating government bonds, by a deficit, was the means of giving foreign central banks an opportunity to dump, and recycle, and save, all of their dollars that America spent on 800 military bases, to encircle them, and have organized color revolutions, for any country that didn’t follow what American wanted, but responded to their own democratic wishes. So the BRICS are onto this, finally. They’ve been expanded to many other countries that want to join them, including Saudi Arabia, Iran. Basically, the BRICS are becoming an expanded Shanghai cooperation organization.

政府不需要从国外借钱。当然，它可以创造自己的货币，但它必须提供一些工具来吸收所有这些美元，这些美元被扔到其他国家。因此，通过赤字创造政府债券，是给外国中央银行一个机会，让他们把美国花在800个军事基地上的所有美元都扔掉，回收，存起来，用来包围他们，为任何不按照美国的意愿去做的国家组织颜色革命。
所以金砖国家终于开始着手解决这个问题了。他们已经扩展到许多其他想要加入它们的国家，包括沙特阿拉伯，伊朗。基本上，金砖国家正在成为上海合作组织的扩展。

They’re the BRICS alternative to NATO, and we’re seeing a whole bunch of shadow international institutions, to counter those of the United States. An alternative to the IMF with a BRICS Bank, an alternative to the World Bank. Not to lend just for dependency on US exports, but to actually help other countries grow, instead of to become dependent. So they realize that the American economic philosophy is junk economics, and the obxtive of American economic policy is to make other countries dependent, and to make sure that they can install client oligarchies to prevent democracy from occurring, right? So that if Chile would elect a socialist president like Allende, America will promote Pinochet to overthrow the whole group.

他们是北约之外的金砖国家，我们看到了一大堆影子国际机构，来对抗美国。以金砖银行取代国际货币基金组织，取代世界银行。不只是为了依赖美国出口而放贷，而是要真正帮助其他国家实现增长，而不是变得依赖美国。所以他们意识到美国的经济哲学是垃圾经济学，美国经济政策的目标是让其他国家依赖，并确保它们可以安插寡头来阻止民主的发生，对吧?因此，如果智利选出像阿连德这样的社会主义总统，美国将推动皮诺切特推翻整个集团。
（未完待续）