Click here if you wish to access this video presentation of a talk given by Michael Hudson at the recent conference in Greece posted on his website and delivered via YouTube.
What I think is most interesting is the first three minutes of this video in which Hudson compares financial imperialism as being essentially another way of conquering a nation and stealing its resources. In the rest of his talk he argues that this approach is completely irrational simply because it will destroy the Greek economy so that they cannot pay back the country's debt.
I believe that he misses the point of what financial global capitalists located in the the US Empire are faced with. Hudson essentially argues that they are stupid in pursuing these austerity policies. I think that because European bankers, who play a top role in the European division of the Empire, have relied so much on lending their accumulated wealth to others in order to keep their system going, they really have no alternative but to steal Greek assets, slash social safety nets, and impose cheap labor rates on Greek workers. European bankers are clearly aware that Greece can't pay back the loans, so they intend to steal from Greece what they believe is theirs. If they make concessions to Greece, then many other countries will expect the same.
In this era of neoliberalism, the advanced stage of capitalism, capitalists have developed the machinery or weapons of financial capitalism to do what armies did in the first half of the 20th century. And in the first three minutes Hudson offers a very good summary description of this kind of financial warfare.
