Curriculum Vitae

 

Dr. Michael Hudson
119-49 Union Turnpike
Forest Hills, N.Y.  11375       

E-mail: hudsonmi@aol.com
(718) 520-8645 (or -8675)

 

Education

Work History
   

Most of my professional life since 1962 has been spent in applying flow-of-funds and balance-of-payments statistics to forecast interest rates, capital and real estate markets.  Academically, my focus has been on financial history and, since 1980, on writing a history of debt from Sumerian times through antiquity and feudal Europe to the present.
   

1996-present: President, Institute for the Study of Long Term Economic Trends (ISLET) preparing reports on the U.S., Japanese, Norwegian and Russian financial systems. Since 1998 my reports on dollar-yen relations and Japan's financial bubble have been published monthly in Japan. These, along with a number of my books, have been translated and published in Japanese. In Russia I wrote a series of reports and testified on numerous occasions before the Duma with regard to its land policy and financial reforms. For the Norwegian Shipowners' Association I produced a series of reports on the financial dimension of technology assessment. And for U.S. clients I traced the role of debt service relative to wages, profits and capital formation.
   

My second duty at ISLET has been to organize and co-edit a series of conferences on the evolution of property and credit since the Bronze Age. I chaired conferences on the Mesopotamian roots of urbanization, interest-bearing debt and land redistribution, the origins of account-keeping and money, at New York University, the Oriental Institute (St. Petersburg, Russia), Columbia University, and the British Museum. The published colloquia include Urbanization and Land Ownership in the Ancient Near East (Harvard, Peabody Museum, 1999), Debt and Economic Renewal in the Ancient Near East (CDL Press, 2001), and
Origins of Account-Keeping and Money in the Ancient Near East (CDL Press, in press).
   

1994-95: Research Director, Henry George School, preparing a statistical chart book demonstrating real estate's role in the U.S. economy, and organizing the International Scholars' Conference on Ancient Near Eastern Economies (ISCANEE) to trace the economic origins of modern civilization back to Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC. The first conference, held in November 1994, was on Privatization in the
Ancient Near East and Classical World (published by Harvard University, Peabody Museum, 1996).
    

1984-present: Consultant to institutional investors on balance-of-payments and flow-of-funds analysis.
    

In 1989 I used my balance of payments country risk model to advise Scudder, Stevens & Clark on setting up its Sovereign High Yield Investment Co. N.V., an offshore fund traded on the London Stock Exchange. Starting business in November, by 1990 this fund ranked second worldwide in rate of return and capital appreciation. In the process of marketing this fund, I wrote a special report for Scudder on Sovereign High Yield Bonds: A Major New Investment Vehicle for the 1990s (published in Russian in 1993 by the state Economic Institute).
    

During the late 1980s, when the trade deficit was the single major influence on 30 year Treasury bond movements, my quarterly financial reports on the direction of long  and short term interest rates (and, as a derivative, the stock market) forecast within month movements on these bonds as well as medium-term trends.
    

1978-83: Consultant to the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) defining instability mechanisms inherent in the world economy and evaluating possible Third World strategies
and U.S. responses to the proposed New International Economic Order.

1976-80: Consultant to Canadian government agencies. My main reports were to the Science Council on the implications of the New International Economic Order for Canadian industrial and trade prospects; to the Institute for Research on Public Policy on the adverse long term consequences of Canada's foreign borrowing, high interest rates and its commercial banking structure; and to the Secretary of State on the implications of information-transfer technology for national communications policy, and to the Cultural Policy Task Force on the prospective impact on Canada of foreign domination of its television and film
programming.
    

1976: Consultant to The Futures Group (Glastonbury, Conn.) for the National Science Foundation analyzing the economic and financial conseqences of life extending technology in two reports: When We Live Longer: Prospects for America (with Herb Gurjuoy et al., 1977) and A Technology Assessment of Life Extending Technologies (Vol. 5: Demography, Economics and Aging, 1977). I believe these were the first reports to pinpoint the implications for the Social Security system of an aging population and its inter-
generational financial tensions.
    

1973-76: Consulting economist for the Montreal brokerage house Molson Rousseau, writing a bimonthly market report on U.S. economic conditions and international financial developments, and making oral reports to clients.
   

1972-76: Professional Staff, Hudson Institute. Published studies on world monetary reform (with Herman Kahn), the balance of payments implications of the energy crisis, Project Independence (coal liquefaction), technology transfer between the United States and Soviet Union, and related topics for the Dept. of Energy, Energy Research Development Agency (ERDA), NEH, White House Staff, Dept. of Defense and other U.S. agencies. In addition, undertook personal consulting for clients of the Institute's Corporate Environment Study, including Ciba Geigy (Basel) and the Bank of Mexico.
    

1970-71: Senior economist, Continental Oil Company (Coordinating and Planning Dept), where I wrote the company's domestic and international economic environment studies, and special reports on U.S. trade
policy, and evaluations of the copper and real estate industries.
    

1968-69: Balance of payments specialist, Arthur Andersen and Company. Employed specifically to write a monograph on A Financial Payments Flow Analysis of U.S. International Transactions: 1960 1968, published by NYU's Institute of Finance as a triple issue of its Bulletin in March 1970. This report was the first study to pinpoint that the entire U.S. payments deficit derived from government account, specifically
the military sector (i.e., the Vietnam War), not foreign aid or private investment abroad.
     

1967-68: Consulting editor for the publisher Augustus M. Kelley in the history of economic thought while completing dissertation. Also did statistical model building for banks (in financial accounting techniques), and New Mexico's Home Education Livelihood Program (HELP) in the economics of rural
economic development.
   

1964-67: Balance of payments economist, Chase Manhattan Bank (economic research division). Prepared country risk analyses, wrote the bank's studies on The Balance of Payments of the Petroleum Industry (1966), and prepared speeches for bank officers on balance of payments topics. I left the bank
to complete my doctoral dissertation.
    

1962-64: Economist, Savings Banks Trust Company. Wrote the quarterly Deposit Statistics, the annual Income and Expense Analysis and the Summary of Mortgage Statistics covering New York's 126 savings banks.
Academic career
    

1985-1998: Research Associate, Peabody Museum (Harvard), and Visiting Scholar, New York University (during 1988-89 in its Economics and Classics Departments, from 1990-94 at its Institute of Fine Arts) specializing in the economic archaeology. At the IFA I co taught the 1989 course on Mycenaean archaeology. At the Skirball Dept. of Hebrew Studies (1994-98) I organized a series of economic colloquia on how Near Eastern debt practices and related economic institutions diffused to the Mediterranean (see Publications for the 1996, 1994 and 1990 colloquia).
    

The colloquia sponsored by ISLET have been published by the Peabody Museum, at which I became a Research Associate in Babylonian economic development in 1985. My research deals with the Bronze Age origins of enterprise and credit in Sumer's temple and palace institutions, and the debt crises of classical Greece and Rome.

1969-72: Assistant Professor of Economics, The New School for Social Research, Graduate Faculty. Taught international trade and investment; money and banking; and balance-of-payments analysis, as well as third world economic development, theories of social accounting and a seminar in theories of inflation.


PUBLICATIONS

Books and Monographs

Reports for UNITAR (published by Pergamon Press)
    

Articles