Geopolitical Economy Hour

Is artificial intelligence the technology of the future, or the next great bubble? Michael Hudson joins me for another Geopolitical Economy Hour to discuss the looming AI economic crash. Michael compares the frenzy to the dot-com bubble and the railroad bubbles of the 19th century, while the scale of this one outmatches all what we have previously seen. We examine Washington's plan to turn AI into a monopoly choke point on the world economy and to make everyone dependent on proprietary technology so AI billionaires can continue to collect monopoly rents. China's open-source approach, however, is built around finite...

Is the war meant to break Iran now breaking Washington's Gulf allies instead? I am joined at the Valdai Discussion Club in Moscow by Professor Seyed Mohammad Marandi of the University of Tehran, who points out that seven months of siege and sanctions are strangling the oil-dependent Gulf monarchies that helped wage this war. With US bases around Iran destroyed or half destroyed, these states are emerging as diminished entities.

Will Europe go to war with Russia? At this year's Valdai Discussion Club conference, I am joined by Roger Köppel, owner of the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche, former editor-in-chief of Germany's Die Welt, and a former member of the Swiss parliament. Köppel warns that the world is closer to a third world war than at any time since 1945, even though Europe is too weak economically, militarily and politically for any confrontation with Russia. He sees Europe's disease as the triumph of moralism over realism, and the Ukraine war as its ultimate expression. In his account, Europeans pay, Uk...

The US-Israeli war on Iran has entered an uneasy lull. But is this a pause, or the calm before something much bigger? Laith Marouf of Free Palestine TV joins me once again to take stock of West Asia after President Trump rejected Iran's proposals at the UN General Assembly and repeated his threat to annihilate Iran. Marouf explains why the Saudi war on Yemen, launched at the behest of Washington and Tel Aviv, has turned into a costly retreat, and why the US withdrawal from Iraq may be designed to leave chaos in its wake. We examine the so-called...

President Xi's visit to Washington produced almost nothing concrete. There was no progress on Taiwan, AI or the Iran war, just a trade truce extended to January. So why did Trump greet him at Andrews Air Force Base, something no American president has done for a foreign leader in 60 years? Einar Tangen argues the real outcome was symbolic but huge: the United States has finally had to accept China as a peer. We talk about how America got here, from the decline of its industrial capitalism to a political system that no longer has a plan, and about what...

Kevin Warsh's first move as Federal Reserve Chair was to raise interest rates, and the establishment hailed it as proof of central bank independence. But what inflation is he fighting? Professor Richard Murphy, founder of the Tax Justice Network, joins me to explain why today's price rises come from war-driven shocks to energy and food, not excess demand, and why higher rates will only push us toward recession. Murphy argues that central bank independence is a sham, that NAIRU makes unemployment a deliberate tool of policy, and that 700 years of data point to a real interest rate of zero...

For the first time in its history, South Korea has refused a US demand to send troops to an American war. This is the same country that sent over 300,000 soldiers to fight in the Vietnam War. Regular guest K.J. Noh joins me to explain what is behind President Lee Jae Myung's refusal to join Trump's war on Iran. The pressure comes from a militant labour movement in the streets, Iran's warning over Korea's Gulf assets, and a US empire exposed as a paper tiger. We trace this struggle back to the US-backed massacres South Korea was built on...

Is India's celebrated strategic autonomy real, or a myth sustained by domestic politics? Pravin Sawhney, director of the Force Research Institute, joins me to dismantle the popular narrative around Modi's foreign policy. According to Pravin, the world became multipolar in 2013, when Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin outlined a new international order built on sovereign equality, only for the Modi government to reject China's rise and hitch India's fortunes to Washington instead. We examine why India refused to accept China as a major power despite an unbridgeable gap in military, economic, and technological strength, how this refusal shaped India's recent...

The United States has run through every tactic it knows against Iran, sanctions, assassination, a forty-day air war, tit-for-tat strikes, and still cannot achieve its objectives. Ali Alizadeh, editor of the Jadal YouTube channel, joins me to explain why. Alizadeh details how Iran has systematically dismantled the American military presence in West Asia, driving US forces out of bases in the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait, then out of Iraq entirely after eighteen years, including Ain al-Assad, one of the largest American bases in the world. Jordan is next. Iran has even fired warning shots at a US aircraft...

The 2026 BRICS summit in New Delhi should have marked twenty years since Putin first gathered its leaders in a UN hallway. Instead, the Delhi Declaration was so watery that even a hawkish Indian foreign policy voice called it a virtue. Sushant Singh, consulting editor of Caravan magazine and lecturer at Yale, joins me to explain why. He traces how Modi's government, terrified of being seen as anything less than China's peer, blocked de-dollarization, AI cooperation, and climate coordination that would have cost India nothing and helped it directly.

China's refusal to sign the G20 finance communique reveals a fiction Washington depends on. Warwick Powell, adjunct professor at Queensland University of Technology, joins me to show that the line between market and non-market policy never actually existed, and that every industrial power, including the United States, was built on state intervention. Warwick argues the real imbalance sits on the capital account, where American money now inflates Wall Street instead of building factories, while China's state-owned banks stayed disciplined toward production for eight decades. We look at why 2015, the year Chinese owned manufacturers overtook foreign firms operating inside China...

Is the world quietly reviving a plan the United States buried eighty years ago? Professor Michael Hudson joins me to revisit Keynes' original Bretton Woods proposals, built on balance, capital controls, and the principle that bad debts should be written off rather than enforced into depression. Washington rejected all of it and built the dollar system instead, one designed to keep the world dependent on American credit and American rules. Now Russia, China and Iran are building the alternatives Keynes once imagined, from Lavrov's proposed SCO development bank to China's CIPS system shielding Iranian oil trade from US sanctions...

Is this the most dangerous phase yet of the US war on Iran, or the moment the empire loses whatever control it still has? Professor Seyed Mohammad Marandi joins me for our monthly assessment of the conflict. He finds that Iran's retaliation now far outpacing Washington's. Recently Iran struck eight tankers, ten commercial ships, and fired warning shots at two US warships, all in response to unprovoked American strikes that hit a wedding. Marandi explains why Iran has abandoned its defensive posture for good and why the Gulf regimes that hosted this war are now the ones paying for...

Xi Jinping is heading to Washington on September 24th, but is this summit a genuine reset, or just China managing an American system that can no longer manage itself? I am joined by Einar Tangen, Senior Fellow at the Center for International Governance Innovation and Chairman of Asia Narratives, to unpack why Trump's own Beijing visit was quietly declared a failure, and why Beijing now approaches these encounters with a rehearsed playbook rather than any real expectation of breakthrough. Einar traces the roots of America's dysfunction back to the Powell Memo, the decades-long financialization of an economy that rewards...

In the late 1970s, wars involving three self-declared socialist countries, China, Vietnam and Cambodia were gleefully reported in the Western press along with lurid allegations of ‘killing fields’ in Cambodia. Many considered that this had sounded the death knell of socialist internationalism.

In this Geopolitical Economy Hour, Radhika Desai is joined by Keith Bennett, co-editor of a new book on China’s foreign policy, to help disinter facts that lie buried under decades of misinterpretation and misunderstanding of these complex events. Our purpose is twofold: to help understand these conflicts in a broadly historical materialist manner, one that m...

Zhu Rongji, China's reform-era premier, has died, and the Financial Times wasted no time eulogizing him as a liberal hero, hoping Xi Jinping might take a leaf out of his book. Mick Dunford, professor emeritus at the University of Sussex and a longtime resident of Beijing, joins me to dismantle that myth, walking through the real human costs of Zhu's reforms, from mass layoffs to soaring inequality, and arguing they were not capitalist triumphs but turbulent steps within a still-socialist system, whose excesses were later corrected by Hu Jintao, Wen Jiabao, and Xi himself. The "liberal hero" the West...

Is the West's devotion to Israel rational statecraft, or ideological blindness dragging the whole imperial order down with it? Laith Marouf, founder of Free Palestine TV, returns to break down why even mainstream military and intelligence assessments now admit Iran cannot be defeated, why the CIA's own hidden regional bases have been destroyed, and why Washington's pivot to economic warfare, sanctioning Iranian gold, crypto, and aviation, is a mark of desperation rather than strategy. Laith argues a rational empire would have abandoned Israel decades ago to preserve itself, but Jewish supremacist ideology among Western elites now overrides basic imperial...

Is India's youth revolt a passing meme, or the moment its party system began to visibly crack? Varghese K. George, resident editor in New Delhi for The Hindu, joins me to trace how a Supreme Court judge's slur, calling India's youth cockroaches and parasites, became the seed of the Cockroach Janta Party, a movement with no leaders, no ideology, and millions of members. Varghese explains how this leaderless surge has punctured the BJP's invincibility and Modi's own aura of near-divine leadership, both of which looked unshakeable just two months ago. We trace this rupture back to Modi's hostile takeover...

Donald Trump called it an economic D-Day for Iran, but the sanctions threat reveals that the US has already lost the military war and is now waging a financial one it cannot win either. Professor Michael Hudson joins me for our fortnightly conversation to trace how Bessent's push to expel countries from the dollar system is accelerating the very flight it was meant to prevent, driving oil and grain trade onto China's alternative clearing system even as foreign demand for US Treasuries keeps declining and the "everything bubble" inflates on borrowed money rather than production. The dollar's end, we...

On what would have been Fidel Castro's 100th birthday, Cuba is under its most severe siege since 1959. A six-month US naval blockade has cut off oil, worsened by the collapse of Venezuelan supply after Washington's January attack. I am joined by Francisco Dominguez, founding member of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, and Carlos Martinez, author and co-editor of the Friends of Socialist China website, to trace Fidel's revolutionary audacity from the Moncada Barracks assault through his personal command of the Bay of Pigs victory, where a CIA-trained invasion was crushed in 72 hours, to the internationalism that sent hundreds of thousands...

Reading Capital With Radhika Desai 7: The Production Of Absolute Surplus Value

Would the entire global economy collapse if we told the truth about its books? Richard Murphy, chartered accountant and professor of political economy, joins me to expose the accounting trick sitting underneath GDP: the total absence of any concept of capital maintenance. Richard shows how modern accounting distinguishes profit earned through honest enterprise from profit as pure extraction, a distinction erased in law and economics alike, and how GDP rewards this extraction by counting oil spills, divorce settlements, and financial speculation as growth while ignoring the depletion of soil, skills, and the planet itself. We discuss how this same...

Is Washington's rescue of the yen an act of friendship, or a sign that the dollar system itself is beginning to crack? I am joined by economist Michael Hudson to unpack the US intervention to save a collapsing yen and why the official story of "solidarity" masks a far more desperate calculation. Michael explains how the yen's weakness threatens the carry trade and capital inflows the dollar system depends on, why the US chose to sell euros rather than dollars to defend it, and how even long-time dollar bulls like Barry Eichengreen now admit the intervention exposes Washington's growing...

Is China betraying the world's oppressed nations, or is it playing a longer, harder game than its critics understand? Carlos Martinez, author of The East is Still Red and co-editor of Friends of Socialist China, joins me to confront the charge, common even on parts of the left, that Beijing does far too little for Palestine, Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela. Martinez traces China's foreign policy from the internationalism of Bandung and the Non-Aligned Movement, through its rapprochement with Washington and entry into the world economy, to its present balancing act between principled solidarity and hard-nosed realism. We examine why...

Are nuclear war and climate catastrophe two separate crises, or one civilizational threat with two faces? I'm joined by Ivana Nikolić Hughes to discuss why both dangers have faded into public apathy even as they grow more acute. Ivana walks through the isotope evidence that traces rising CO2 directly to fossil fuels, and the physics of nuclear winter, where soot from even a regional nuclear war could block sunlight and collapse global food production for years. We connect both threats to the same underlying driver: capitalism's demand for endless growth, invoking the idea of the "Capitalocene" as a more h...

Is the AI boom just the latest chapter in a stock market story that was already fiction? I'm joined by Warwick Powell to trace the line from China's Kimi and DeepSeek shock through what I've called America's "sci-fi/fin-fi" model — science fiction promises like AGI dressed up to justify financial fiction, a bubble with roots in the dot-com crash and Reagan's fabricated Star Wars program. Warwick explains how venture capital functions as a closed, rule-bound game for insiders, how Silicon Valley Bank behaved more like a members' club than a bank, and how decades of buybacks and privatised monopolies ha...

Is Trump's Iran war a bluff, or has the empire simply run out of moves? Professor Seyed Mohammad Marandi, Iranian political analyst, joins me to explain why each retreat only strengthens Iran, whose indigenous defense doctrine and Axis of Resistance have outmatched a US military still fighting last century's wars, leaving Gulf assets battered and the initiative, per the Financial Times, now with Tehran. Professor Marandi dismantles the myth of Western superiority, upheld only by imperial elites as Western publics turn against these wars, and traces how Washington's own aggression has pushed Iran, Russia, and China closer together.

Did Nicaragua really just abolish elections, as headlines from the New York Times to the BBC to the UN claimed last week? I am joined by journalist Ben Norton, host of the Geopolitical Economy Report YouTube channel, and fresh from Managua's 47th anniversary celebrations of the Sandinista Revolution, to separate fact from a deliberately distorted quote. Ben explains that Co-President Daniel Ortega's speech, stripped of context, was not a renunciation of elections but a sovereign measure barring foreign-funded parties from contesting them, following the stolen election in Honduras and Gustavo Petro's accusations of US-Israeli interference in Colombia. We trace...

Do the Democrats and Republicans really differ, or are they two wings of the same corporate machine? I am joined by economist Michael Hudson to examine why no progress can be made for American wage earners until the whole electoral system is changed. Michael Hudson argues that the DNC's dependence on Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and AIPAC financing has made it as captured by capital as the Republicans it claims to oppose, a capture traceable to the Clinton-era abandonment of the working class and the sidelining of Bernie Sanders. The coming midterms, they argue, are shaping up as a...

Is India's youth uprising the beginning of the end for Modi's twelve-year rule? I am joined by Rohit Azad, economist at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Utkarsh Bhardwaj, Delhi-based activist and former Vice President of the Students Federation of India, Delhi, both of whom have been on the ground throughout the protests, to examine the true scale and character of the movement now sweeping India. Azad and Bhardwaj describe a genuinely decentralized, largely leaderless uprising, sparked by the leak of the CBSE board exam papers and named after a dismissive remark by India's Chief Justice comparing unemployed youth to cockroaches...

Iran's four-month war with the US and Israel has entered a new, lower-intensity phase. But is this exhaustion, or Iran's most decisive victory yet? I am joined by Dr. Bikram Singh Gill, lecturer in international relations at Cardiff University, to examine the strategic reversals defining this war. Gill explains how the campaign meant to disarm Iran has instead disarmed US deterrence itself, with Iran now controlling the underlying equation of force in the Gulf through its command of the Strait of Hormuz. We examine why Gulf states like Saudi Arabia keep gambling on Washington even as that alliance stops...

Is Ukraine's battlefield momentum actually pushing Europe closer to war with Russia? I am joined by Dr. Oleg Barabanov, Program Director of the Valdai Discussion Club and Deputy Director of the Eurasian Studies Institute at MGIMO, to examine the true state of the war and why Ukraine's tactical successes may be increasing, not decreasing, the risk of wider escalation. Barabanov describes how intensifying Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian oil refineries have driven up gas prices and disrupted daily life, yet have consolidated Russian public opinion behind the Kremlin rather than eroding it, while Ukraine's own political crisis, triggered by...

Dimitri Lascaris, one of Canada's most prominent lawyers and an intrepid journalist, has just returned from Iran, where he attended the extraordinary funeral of Ayatollah Khamenei and witnessed the final collapse of the so-called Memorandum of Understanding. I am joined by him to examine the true stakes of the US-Israeli war on Iran, centred on the struggle for control of the Strait of Hormuz, and why Trump, far from being trapped by circumstance, is choosing to pursue Iran's destruction regardless of the cost. Dimitri describes standing among millions of mourners in Tehran and Mashhad, where grief for Khamenei ran...

Richard Sakwa and Radhika Desai examine why Europe's leaders continue to escalate a war that most Europeans no longer support. They show that the firing of Ukraine's defense minister for being "too honest," alongside protests in Kyiv and Lviv, exposes a Zelensky government that has abandoned even the pretense of democratic accountability, while Gallup polling finds two-thirds of Ukrainians now want negotiations to end the war. NATO's Ankara summit revealed a alliance divided 31 to 1, yet European elites keep deepening their commitment to a war they cannot win against a nuclear-armed power, treating negotiation itself as capitulation rather than a...

Michael Hudson and Radhika Desai examine the gap between Trump's promised economic boom and the reality of an economy sustained by asset bubbles rather than production. They show that the stock market's rise reflects cheap credit, buybacks, and speculation rather than profit, a Ponzi-scheme dynamic that cannot survive the oil shock triggered by Trump's war on Iran. His tariffs have not reversed deindustrialization, and his refusal to end that war guarantees the inflation he promised to kill. The result is a starkly K-shaped economy, in which the wealthiest 1% have seen their assets grow from $10 trillion to over $50 trillion in...

The recently concluded NATO summit in Ankara has been widely hailed by mainstream Western media as a triumph of alliance unity, yet beneath the choreographed family photos lies a deeper, far more fractious reality. In this 79th episode of the Geopolitical Economy Hour, I am joined by Professor Bilyana Vankovska to strip away the distorting narratives of Western media and examine the true political economy of "NATO 3.0". We deconstruct how this new phase of the alliance operates as an aggressive instrument of imperialism, driving a massive transfer of public wealth into the hands of private military corporations under the...

As the United States approaches its semi-quincentennial, the contrast between Washington’s triumphalist rhetoric and its material reality has never been starker. Defined by deep precarity at home and centuries of perpetual warfare abroad, this genocidal slaving oligarchy is entering a period of profound systemic decay. Yet, despite decisively losing a major conflict against a middle-tier power like Iran, the Pentagon continues its grandiose, delusional scheme to militarily subdue China. How can a state failing so abysmally still contemplate a war against a peer competitor? The answer lies in a desperate strategy of proxies—attempting to transform Japan and Sout...

Are the West’s Trade Deficits China’s Fault? Warwick Powell and Radhika Desai blow some holes into the increasingly strident claims of the US and Europe that China is responsible for their trade deficits. This rhetoric is motivated by a desire to divert attention from the real culprit responsible for these deficits, the West’s own neoliberal policy paradigm, by scapegoating China and immigrants. It is also designed to divert attention from the fact that the US and European economies need radical restructuring of a sort that their current ruling classes have no appetite for, and in which they w...

Michael Hudson and Radhika Desai trace the origin of the trend towards allegedly independent central banks from the 1990s onwards, showing that, rather than being independent, they have served the interests of a financial elite rather than the people. Rather than abiding by its dual mandate of keeping inflation and unemployment low, it has employed the rhetoric of doing this to inflate asset bubbles. Rather than driving innovation, as he claimed, Greenspan set the Federal reserve on the trend toward a bubble driven economy. Rather than his pretense of independence, Warsh is as much a weathervane as Greenspan can...

Reading Capital With Radhika Desai 5: Money, Value & The Commodity Form