Welcome to today's program. My name is Glenn Dyson. I'm professor at the University of South Eastern Norway. With me is my colleague, Alexander Mercuris, from the very informative and popular Duran. And the guest today is none other than the excellent Michael Hudson, a very renowned economist. He's written brilliant books, which I can't recommend enough on the industrial economy, the financial economy, the process of debt, empire collapse.

So he's really one of the great economists of our times.

So the reason we really wanted to talk to him today is because we're

we're living in an age where the world is undergoing tremendous transformation.

I would argue that many of the conflicts and wars we currently have have at least some origin in economics.

And what has gone wrong and what will be the new alternatives coming next is really something

we want to explore today as we see that the main trend of these days appear to be the relative

decline of the West, both the United States and Europe. And we also see the rise of the east,

especially the North China at the forefront.

And often the analysis were presented within the media is often limited to GDP,

which doesn't really help us to understand why.

The US, for example, have lost its competitiveness, its industrial strength, its ability to compete,

especially with the Chinese.

And while we tend to refer to the Chinese as a communist country,

it has to be pointed out that to a large extent,

they appear to resemble the industrial economy of the United States in the 19th century,

that of the, especially the American system, I would say.

And we don't have to limit it to China.

It appears that Russia is building a similar economic,

well, following a similar economic formula, if you will.

So I wanted to hand it over to Michael Hudson first.

And I thought we can start off by explaining, I guess, what signifies this US transition

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