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[youtube-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5exbO-Ros2Q]
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Stockman: Market Will Not Be Pretty Under Trump
[Ed. Note: To see exactly what this former Reagan insider has to say about Trump and specifically what he believes must be done to drain the swamp, David Stockman is sending out a copy of his book Trumped! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back out to any American willing to listen. To learn how to get your free copy CLICK HERE.]
As bonds break a three day win streak and the U.S market hitting new record highs with a trifecta of records, CNBC was roaring about what to expect going forward. The Daily Reckoning contributor David Stockman joined Courtney Reagan to discuss what to expect going forward.
After the CNBC host positioned the critiques offered by David Stockman of the Trump administration she asked whether that would continue given the state of the market. Stockman did not mix words beginning the conversation with, “What’s going on today is complete insanity. The market is apparently pricing in a huge Trump stimulus package, when if you just look at the real world out there the only thing that is going to happen is a fiscal bloodbath and a White House train wreck like never before in U.S history.
How much more evidence do these so called traders need? Trump is lost in Twitter-land and he is out of control. He is turning out to be a complete jackass in the Oval Office. Co-President Bannon is off the deep end on terrorism, travel bans, Mexican walls, immigrant bashing and protectionism.”
David Stockman is a former Reagan Administration official who was the Office of Management and Budget Director. He also served as a two-term Congressman from the great state of Michigan. His latest book, Trumped! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back is out now. It offers his insight and exclusive analysis on exactly what the newly elected president must do in order to succeed in the White House. To get your own FREE copy, CLICK HERE to learn how.
“[They are] having nothing to do with the economic agenda and Trump has got an empty economic bench. He’s got no Secretary of the Treasury, no Office of Management and Budget, no Council of Economic Advisor Chairman. By this time, when I was there with the Reagan Administration, the plan was ready to go and he was going to Congress within a couple of days into February. We have a debt ceiling freight train coming down the road which will hit March 15 and then the cash will start running out and the system will be on edge. All of the continuing resolutions expire in April.”
“They are going to spend the year trying to repeal and replace Obamacare and it will be a fiasco. Nothing is going to happen this year. I don’t even think they can pass the budget resolution. There is going to be no tax action this year. If there is any bill next year it is going to be deficit neutral. Which means it is not going to add $15 to earnings like these crazy people expect.”
“Why would you be trading in this market, with this kind of chaos emerging everywhere at twenty six times trailing earnings? That’s where we are. It is completely crazy and it is only a question of how many more days or weeks that this kind of fantasy land can last.”
Courtney Reagan then pressed back asking, “At what point do you give in and admit that [Trump] is atypical but maybe he could get things done? I mean, look at all of the CEO’s that Trump has met with.” The former Reagan insider remarked that, “CEO’s come and go with every president. They came in with Reagan, they tell a president what they want to hear. These guys are just selling the song and dance about how many jobs they’re going to create in the next five years. They have no clue.”
“If we have a recession in the next five years, which surely we will, because recessions have not been outlawed and we haven’t had one for ten years. None of this stuff is going to happen. This is meaningless. What is meaningful is that Trump is out of control. This tweeting and getting off track on all of this terrorism stuff. This is a sign that there is going to be no governing coalition and that all of this fiscal stimulus expected by Wall Street is a complete fantasy. It can’t happen.”
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When CNBC then turned over the camera to a day trader who asked about the positive sentiment that exists within the market regarding Trump and his plan to deregulate Stockman stayed true to message. “Trump is just putting out press releases and the guise of Executive Orders. All of this stuff is going to get litigated, it goes through a rulemaking process, that takes years. So the relief on regulation will be important, but it way down the road and it won’t be that impactful.”
“The second thing, is we’re at 92 months in this expansion already. It is running out of gas. You can’t expect it to run forever. That is seemingly what is priced in by the market.”
“The third thing is, we have a giant debt and deficit problem. The debt ceiling is coming back into play it will be 20 trillion when it freezes in on March 15th. I’ll tell you this, people aren’t paying attention to the fact that Trump will never get a debt ceiling increase through the Congress without a government shutdown. When that happens it is, “bar the doors” because nobody is expecting it. We need to look at the facts, not the hopes.”
As the CNBC affirmed, it is not clear that the market is just going to drop tomorrow and history will repeat itself, Stockman repositioned. “The market it clearly factoring in a big Trump stimulus and I think anybody down there would admit if it doesn’t happen, if we get zero tax cuts, if we get a fiscal bloodbath in the Washington I am describing – the market is not going to stay where it is today at these absurd multiples of earnings.”
“This is all based on the idea that there is going to be a surge of economic growth and that profits are going to come back from about $89 a share by basis, where they were during the last twelve months, to a potential $110 or $130. My argument is there is not going to be any economic rebound. There is not going to be any profit surge. Therefore the market will be repricing dramatically downward once it is clear.”
Another CNBC analysis asked why – with the positive trends in jobless claims, manufacturing increasing, interest rates at near record lows – would the market not close out the year near record levels? “The market is assuming that profits are going to rebound. That we are not going to have any market dislocation and that nobody is going to be pushing back on Trump. It is hard to understand how people watching the day-to-day action down there could believe that.”
“Everybody is pushing back on Trump, he can’t even get his cabinet approved. He’s going to be bogged down in a Supreme Court fight, he’s going to be bogged down in a fight over a ridiculous travel ban. The idea that there is not going to be pushback is naive. What there is going to be is a train wreck. It is already clear that the people in the White House have no idea what they’re doing and it is only a matter of time before this honeymoon goodwill evaporates and the politicians get down to doing what they do best. Which is to undermine and obstruct anything that might be positive.”
When finally asked whether there is anything positive that would make him turn bullish in the near future he responded affirmably, “No, because Trump is inheriting thirty years of a disaster created by his predecessors. We have to take this $20 trillion of debt seriously. There is $10 trillion more built in under current policy, and that is without a dime of Trump tax cuts, infrastructure or stimulus. There is going to be a tremendous fiscal crisis in the years ahead which will prevent any of the kind of action that the “stimulus junkies” are looking for.
To catch the full interview with David Stockman on CNBC click here. If you would like to claim your own free copy of David Stockman’s bestseller Trumped! Click here to learn how.
Thanks for reading,
Craig Wilson, @craig_wilson7
for the Daily Reckoning
https://dailyreckoning.com/stockman-market-under-trump/
David Stockman
| David Stockman | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Director of the Office of Management and Budget | |
| In office January 21, 1981 – August 1, 1985 |
|
| President | Ronald Reagan |
| Preceded by | Jim McIntyre |
| Succeeded by | Jim Miller |
| Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Michigan‘s 4th district |
|
| In office January 3, 1977 – January 21, 1981 |
|
| Preceded by | Edward Hutchinson |
| Succeeded by | Mark Siljander |
| Personal details | |
| Born | David Alan Stockman November 10, 1946 Fort Hood, Texas, U.S. |
| Political party | Republican |
| Spouse(s) | Jennifer Blei (1983–present)[1] |
| Education | Michigan State University (BA) Harvard University |
| Website | Official website |
David Alan Stockman (born November 10, 1946) is a former businessman and U.S. politician who served as a Republican U.S. Representative from the state of Michigan (1977–1981) and as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (1981–1985) under President Ronald Reagan.
Contents
[hide]
Early life and education
Stockman was born in Fort Hood, Texas, the son of Allen Stockman, a fruit farmer, and Carol (née Bartz).[2] He is of German descent, and his family’s surname was originally “Stockmann”.[3] He was raised in a conservative family, and his maternal grandfather, William Bartz, was a Republican county treasurer for 30 years.[4][5] Stockman was educated at public schools in Stevensville, Michigan. He graduated from Lakeshore High School in 1964[6] and received a B.A. in History from Michigan State University in 1968. He was a graduate student at Harvard University, 1968–1970 studying theology
Political career
Stockman’s Congressional portrait
He served as special assistant to United States Representative and 1980 U.S. presidential candidate John Anderson of Illinois, 1970–1972, and was executive director, United States House of Representatives Republican Conference, 1972–1975.
Congress
Stockman was elected to the United States House of Representatives for the 95th Congress and was reelected in two subsequent elections, serving from January 3, 1977, until his resignation January 21, 1981, to accept appointment as Director of the Office of Management and Budget for U.S. President Ronald Reagan.
Office of Management and Budget
Stockman was one of the most controversial OMB directors ever appointed, also known as the “Father of Reaganomics.” He resigned in August 1985. Committed to the doctrine of supply-side economics, he assisted in the passing of the “Reagan Budget” (the Gramm-Latta Budget), which Stockman hoped would curtail the “welfare state“. He thus gained a reputation as a tough negotiator with House Speaker Tip O’Neill‘s Democratic-controlled House of Representatives and Majority Leader Howard Baker‘s Republican-controlled Senate. During this period, Stockman became well known to the public during the contentious political wrangling concerning the role of the federal government in American society.
Stockman’s influence within the Reagan Administration was weakened after the Atlantic Monthly magazine published the infamous 18,246 word article, “The Education of David Stockman”,[7] in its December 1981 issue, based on lengthy interviews Stockman gave to reporter William Greider.
Stockman was quoted as referring to Reagan’s tax act in these terms: “I mean, Kemp-Roth [Reagan’s 1981 tax cut] was always a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate…. It’s kind of hard to sell ‘trickle down.’ So the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really ‘trickle down.’ Supply-side is ‘trickle-down’ theory.”[7] Of the budget process during his first year on the job, Stockman was quoted as saying, “None of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers,” which was used as the subtitle of the article.[7]
After “being taken to the woodshed by the president” because of his candor with Greider, Stockman became concerned with the projected trend of increasingly large federal deficits and the rapidly expanding national debt. On 1 August 1985, he resigned from OMB and later wrote a memoir of his experience in the Reagan Administration titled The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed in which he specifically criticized the failure of congressional Republicans to endorse a reduction of government spending to offset large tax decreases to avoid the creation of large deficits and an increasing national debt.
Fiscal legacy
President Jimmy Carter’s last fiscal year budget ended with a $79.0 billion budget deficit (and a national debt of $907,701,000,000 [8] as of September 30, 1980), ending during the period of David Stockman’s and Ronald Reagan’s first year in office, on October 1, 1981.[9] The gross federal national debt had just increased to $1.0 trillion during October 1981 ($998 billion on 30 September 1981, up from $907.7 billion during the last full fiscal year of the Carter administration[8]).
By 30 September 1985, four and a half years into the Reagan administration and shortly after Stockman’s resignation from the OMB during August 1985, the gross federal debt was $1.8 trillion.[8] Stockman’s OMB work within the administration during 1981 until August 1985 was dedicated to negotiating with the Senate and House about the next fiscal year’s budget, executed later during the autumn of 1985, which resulted in the national debt becoming $2.1 trillion at fiscal year end 30 September 1986.[8] Reaganomics had just begun.
In 1981, Stockman received the Samuel S. Beard Award for Greatest Public Service by an Individual 35 Years or Under, an award given out annually by Jefferson Awards.[10]
Business career
After leaving government, Stockman joined the Wall St. investment bank Salomon Brothers and later became a partner of the New York–based private equity company, the Blackstone Group.[11]:125–127 His record was mixed at Blackstone, with some very good investments, such as American Axle, but also failures, including Haynes International and Republic Technologies.[11]:144–147 During 1999, after Blackstone CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman curtailed Stockman’s role in managing the investments he had developed,[11]:146 Stockman resigned from Blackstone to start his own private equity fund company, Heartland Industrial Partners, L.P., based in Greenwich, Connecticut.[12]
On the strength of his investment record at Blackstone, Stockman and his partners raised $1.3 billion of equity from institutional and other investors. With Stockman’s guidance, Heartland used a contrarian investment strategy, buying controlling interests in companies operating in sectors of the U.S. economy that were attracting the least amount of new equity: auto parts and textiles. With the help of about $9 billion in Wall Street debt financing, Heartland completed more than 20 transactions in less than 2 years to create four portfolio companies: Springs Industries, Metaldyne, Collins & Aikman, and TriMas. Several major investments performed very poorly, however. Collins & Aikman filed for bankruptcy during 2005 and when Heartland sold Metaldyne to Asahi Tec Corp. during 2006, Heartland lost most of the $340 million of equity it had invested in the business.[13]
Collins & Aikman Corp.
During August 2003, Stockman became CEO of Collins & Aikman Corporation, a Detroit-based manufacturer of automotive interior components. He was ousted from that job days before Collins & Aikman filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11 on May 17, 2005.
Criminal and civil charges
On March 26, 2007, federal prosecutors in Manhattan indicted Stockman in “a scheme… to defraud [Collins & Aikman]’s investors, banks and creditors by manipulating C&A’s reported revenues and earnings.” The United States Securities and Exchange Commission also brought civil charges against Stockman related to actions that he performed while CEO of Collins & Aikman.[14] Stockman suffered a personal financial loss, over $13 million, along with losses suffered by as many as 15,000 Collins & Aikman employees worldwide.
Stockman said in a statement posted on his law firm’s website that the company’s end was the consequence of an industry decline, not due to fraud.[15] On January 9, 2009, the US Attorney’s Office announced that it did not intend to prosecute Stockman for this case.[16]
Web site
In March 2014 Stockman launched a web based daily periodical, David Stockman’s Contra Corner featuring both his own articles and those from leading contrarian thinkers on geopolitics, economics, and finance.
Personal life
Stockman lives in the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City.[12] He is married to Jennifer Blei Stockman and is the father of two children, Rachel and Victoria. Jennifer Blei Stockman is a chairwoman emerita of the Republican Majority for Choice,[17] and President of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Board of Trustees.[18] In 2013, Stockman signed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in favor of same-sex marriage.[19]
Quotes
 |
This page is a candidate to be copied to Wikiquote using the Transwiki process. |
- “[Social Security] has to be means-tested. And Medicare needs to be means-tested […] Let the Bush tax cuts expire. Let the capital gains go back to the same rate as ordinary income.”[20]
- “The Republican Party has totally abdicated its job in our democracy, which is to act as the guardian of fiscal discipline and responsibility. They’re on an anti-tax jihad — one that benefits the prosperous classes.”[21]
- “I invest in anything that Bernanke can’t destroy, including gold, canned beans, bottled water and flashlight batteries.”[22]
- “Ninety-two percent of the wealth is owned by five percent of the people.” (Bloomberg TV 2013)
- “[T]he Republican Party was hijacked by modern imperialists during the Reagan era. As a consequence, the conservative party cannot perform its natural function as watchdog of the public purse because it is constantly seeking legislative action to provision a vast war machine of invasion and occupation.” [23]
Bibliography
- The Reagan Economic Plan, 1981
- The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, Harper & Row, 1986, ISBN 9780060155605
- The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, PublicAffairs, 2013, ISBN 9781586489120
- Trumped!: A Nation on the Brink of Ruin, and How to Bring it Back, 2016
References
- Jump up^ “LOSING THE BATTLES AND WINNING THE WAR”. Lexington Herald-Leader. April 7, 1985.
- Jump up^ Hunter, Marjorie (December 12, 1980). “Office of Management and Budget David Alan Stockman; Strong Support From Kemp Chosen by House Republicans Views on Economy”. The New York Times.
- Jump up^ “News65”. 19 June 1998.
- Jump up^ “The Tuscaloosa News – Google News Archive Search”.
- Jump up^ “The Montreal Gazette – Google News Archive Search”.
- Jump up^ Heibutzki, Ralph (2012-06-04). “Stockman Surprise Speaker at Lakeshore’s Graduation”. The Herald-Palladium. Retrieved 2012-06-04.
- ^ Jump up to:a b c William Greider (December 1981). “The Education of David Stockman”. The Atlantic Online.
- ^ Jump up to:a b c d Treasury Department’s Historical Debt Outstanding – Annual 1950 – 1999
- Jump up^ Office of Management and Budget Historical Tablessee Table 1.1 (Excel Spreadsheet)
- Jump up^ “Jefferson Awards”. Jefferson Awards.
- ^ Jump up to:a b c David Carey & John E. Morris (2001). King of Capital: The Remarkable Rise, Fall and Rise Again of Steve Schwarzman and Blackstone. Crown.
- ^ Jump up to:a b “Collins & Aikman seeks to emerge from bankruptcy,” Bloomberg News article by Jeff Bennett, published in the newspaper The Advocate of Stamford and (identical version, perhaps with changes by the local editor in the common business section for both newspapers) in the Greenwich Time on September 5, 2006, page A7, The Advocate
- Jump up^ David Carey and Lou Whiteman, “PE firms find buyer for Metaldyne,” The Deal, Sept. 1, 2006.
- Jump up^ Levin, Doris (29 March 2007). “Stockman Outsmarts Self in Detroit”. Bloomberg. Retrieved 19 September 2014.
- Jump up^ “Ex-Collins Chief David Stockman Charged With Fraud (Update10)”. Bloomberg. March 26, 2007. Retrieved 2010-08-02.
- Jump up^ “Fraud charges dropped against ex-Reagan aide David Stockman”. Chicago Tribune. 10 January 2009. Retrieved 19 September 2014.
- Jump up^ About Us Republican Majority for Choice
- Jump up^ Trustees, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
- Jump up^ [1]
- Jump up^ “Why David Stockman Isn’t buying it”. CBS News. March 2, 2012.
- Jump up^ Dickinson, Tim (Nov 9, 2011). “How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich”. Rolling Stone. Retrieved 2011-11-10.
- Jump up^ David Stockman: I Invest In Anything Bernanke Can’t Destroy, John Carney, CNBC, October 6, 2010
- Jump up^ Stockman, David (2013). The Great Deformation — the corruption of capitalism in America. PublicAffairs. p. 688. ISBN 978-1586489120.
External links
- Biography at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
- Appearances on C-SPAN
- Four Deformations of the Apocalypse, David Stockman, The New York Times, July 31, 2010, op-ed
- Ronald Reagan, Ron Paul, & the Fed: Q&A with David Stockman on YouTube, Reason.tv, January 2011
- Fixing America’s Finances interview on On Point, May 2011
- David Stockman on ‘The Great Deformation’ and Our Economic Doom, Daniel Gross, The Daily Beast, April 1, 2013, interview
- NY Times review by Peter T. Kilborn of a 1986 biography of David Stockman
| United States House of Representatives | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Edward Hutchinson |
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Michigan’s 4th congressional district 1977–1981 |
Succeeded by Mark Siljander |
| Political offices | ||
| Preceded by Jim McIntyre |
Director of the Office of Management and Budget 1981–1985 |
Succeeded by Jim Miller |
- 1946 births
- 20th-century American writers
- 21st-century American writers
- American people of German descent
- Blackstone Group people
- Businesspeople from Greenwich, Connecticut
- Connecticut Republicans
- Directors of the Office of Management and Budget
- Living people
- Members of the United States House of Representatives from Michigan
- Michigan Republicans
- Michigan State University alumni
- People from Berrien County, Michigan
- People from Killeen, Texas
- Private equity and venture capital investors
- Republican Party members of the United States House of Representatives
David Stockman — The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America — Videos
Stockman: Washington can’t be rescued
Fed Is Deadly ‘Instrument of Speculation’: Stockman
Stockman, Orszag in budget battle royale
David Stockman: We’ve Been Lied To, Robbed, And Mislead
The David Stockman Controversy: Which Points Are Valid?
How Crony Capitalism Corrupts the Free Market | David Stockman
David Stockman Says The US Economy Has No Free-Market Element To It, Everything’s Manipulated
David Stockman on Outlook for US Economy, Deficit Reduction, & Wages
This Is Housing Bubble 2.0: David Stockman
David Stockman: You’re Now In The “Bernanke Bear Trap”
David Stockman on Crony Capitalism – Bill Moyers & Company
Stockman: Fed Has Declared Itself “Politburo of the U.S. Economy” 09-14-12
David Stockman told CNBC – FED is the problem – Ron Paul was Right!
In the Arena : CNN: David Stockman: Heretic or truth-teller?
David Stockman – Conversations with Casey
David Stockman on Federal Reserve Arrogance and Monetary Mission Creep!
2012-07-16 Bloomberg TV. Stockman: We’re Heading Toward Recession, Paralysis Video
The Forgotten Cause of Sound Money | David Stockman
DAVID STOCKMAN: We’ve Been Lied To, Robbed, And Misled
hen, when the Fed’s fire hoses started spraying an elephant soup of liquidity injections in every direction and its balance sheet grew by $1.3 trillion in just thirteen weeks compared to $850 billion during its first ninety-four years, I became convinced that the Fed was flying by the seat of its pants, making it up as it went along. It was evident that its aim was to stop the hissy fit on Wall Street and that the thread of a Great Depression 2.0 was just a cover story for a panicked spree of money printing that exceeded any other episode in recorded human history.
David Stockman, The Great Deformation
David Stockman, former director of the OMB under President Reagan, former US Representative, and veteran financier is an insider’s insider. Few people understand the ways in which both Washington DC and Wall Street work and intersect better than he does.
In his upcoming book, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America [37], Stockman lays out how we have devolved from a free market economy into a managed one that operates for the benefit of a privileged few. And when trouble arises, these few are bailed out at the expense of the public good.
By manipulating the price of money through sustained and historically low interest rates, Greenspan and Bernanke created an era of asset mis-pricing that inevitably would need to correct. And when market forces attempted to do so in 2008, Paulson et al hoodwinked the world into believing the repercussions would be so calamitous for all that the institutions responsible for the bad actions that instigated the problem needed to be rescued — in full — at all costs.
Of course, history shows that our markets and economy would have been better off had the system been allowed to correct. Most of the “too big to fail” institutions would have survived or been broken into smaller, more resilient, entities. For those that would have failed, smaller, more responsible banks would have stepped up to replace them – as happens as part of the natural course of a free market system:
Essentially there was a cleansing run on the wholesale funding market in the canyons of Wall Street going on. It would have worked its will, just like JP Morgan allowed it to happen in 1907 when we did not have the Fed getting in the way. Because they stopped it in its tracks after the AIG bailout and then all the alphabet soup of different lines that the Fed threw out, and then the enactment of TARP, the last two investment banks standing were rescued, Goldman and Morgan [Stanley], and they should not have been. As a result of being rescued and having the cleansing liquidation of rotten balance sheets stopped, within a few weeks and certainly months they were back to the same old games, such that Goldman Sachs got $10 billion dollars for the fiscal year that started three months later after that check went out, which was October 2008. For the fiscal 2009 year, Goldman Sachs generated what I call a $29 billion surplus – $13 billion of net income after tax, and on top of that $16 billion of salaries and bonuses, 95% of it which was bonuses.
Therefore, the idea that they were on death’s door does not stack up. Even if they had been, it would not make any difference to the health of the financial system. These firms are supposed to come and go, and if people make really bad bets, if they have a trillion dollar balance sheet with six, seven, eight hundred billion dollars worth of hot-money short-term funding, then they ought to take their just reward, because it would create lessons, it would create discipline. So all the new firms that would have been formed out of the remnants of Goldman Sachs where everybody lost their stock values – which for most of these partners is tens of millions, hundreds of millions – when they formed a new firm, I doubt whether they would have gone back to the old game. What happened was the Fed stopped everything in its tracks, kept Goldman Sachs intact, the reckless Goldman Sachs and the reckless Morgan Stanley, everyone quickly recovered their stock value and the game continues. This is one of the evils that comes from this kind of deep intervention in the capital and money markets.
Stockman’s anger at the unnecessary and unfair capital transfer from taxpayer to TBTF bank is matched only by his concern that, even with those bailouts, the banking system is still unacceptably vulnerable to a repeat of the same crime:
The banks quickly worked out their solvency issues because the Fed basically took it out of the hides of Main Street savers and depositors throughout America. When the Fed panicked, it basically destroyed the free-market interest rate – you cannot have capitalism, you cannot have healthy financial markets without an interest rate, which is the price of money, the price of capital that can freely measure and reflect risk and true economic prospects.
Well, once you basically unplug the pricing mechanism of a capital market and make it entirely an administered rate by the Fed, you are going to cause all kinds of deformations as I call them, or mal-investments as some of the Austrians used to call them, that basically pollutes and corrupts the system. Look at the deposit rate right now, it is 50 basis points, maybe 40, for six months. As a result of that, probably $400-500 billion a year is being transferred as a fiscal maneuver by the Fed from savers to the banks. They are collecting the spread, they’ve then booked the profits, they’ve rebuilt their book net worth, and they paid back the TARP basically out of what was thieved from the savers of America.
Now they go down and pound the table and whine and pout like JP Morgan and the rest of them, you have to let us do stock buy backs, you have to let us pay out dividends so we can ramp our stock and collect our stock option winnings. It is outrageous that the authorities, after the so-called “near death experience” of 2008 and this massive fiscal safety net and monetary safety net was put out there, is allowing them to pay dividends and to go into the market and buy back their stock. They should be under house arrest in a sense that every dime they are making from this artificial yield group being delivered by the Fed out of the hides of savers should be put on their balance sheet to build up retained earnings, to build up a cushion. I do not care whether it is fifteen or twenty or twenty-five percent common equity and retained earnings-to-assets or not, that is what we should be doing if we are going to protect the system from another raid by these people the next time we get a meltdown, which can happen at any time.
You can see why I talk about corruption, why crony capitalism is so bad. I mean, the Basel capital standards, they are a joke. We are just allowing the banks to go back into the same old game they were playing before. Everybody said the banks in late 2007 were the greatest thing since sliced bread. The market cap of the ten largest banks in America, including from Bear Stearns all the way to Citibank and JP Morgan and Goldman and so forth, was $1.25 trillion. That was up thirty times from where the predecessors of those institutions had been. Only in 1987, when Greenspan took over and began the era of bubble finance – slowly at first then rapidly, eventually, to have the market cap grow thirty times – and then on the eve of the great meltdown see the $1.25 trillion to market cap disappear, vanish, vaporize in panic in September 2008. Only a few months later, $1 trillion of that market cap disappeared in to the abyss and panic, and Bear Stearns is going down, and all the rest.
This tells you the system is dramatically unstable. In a healthy financial system and a free capital market, if I can put it that way, you are not going to have stuff going from nowhere to @1.2 trillion and then back to a trillion practically at the drop of a hat. That is instability; that is a case of a medicated market that is essentially very dangerous and is one of the many adverse consequences and deformations that result from the central-bank dominated, corrupt monetary system that has slowly built up ever since Nixon closed the gold window, but really as I say in my book, going back to 1933 in April when Roosevelt took all the private gold. So we are in a big dead-end trap, and they are digging deeper every time you get a new maneuver.
Reagan Adviser Stockman Warns of Crash From ‘Unsustainable’ Fed-Fueled Bubble
The U.S. economy is in a bubble inflated by “phony money” from the Federal Reserve and will burst within a few years, warned David Stockman, who was budget director for President Ronald Reagan.
In an essay published in the New York Times, Stockman wrote that the Fed’s quantitative easing policies in the aftermath of the credit crisis have flooded stock markets with cash even while the “Main Street economy” remains weak. The combination, he wrote, is “unsustainable.”
“When it bursts, there will be no new round of bailouts like the ones the banks got in 2008,” wrote Stockman, a former senior managing director at Blackstone Group LP and a former Republican congressman from Michigan.
“Instead, America will descend into an era of zero-sum austerity and virulent political conflict, extinguishing even today’s feeble remnants of economic growth.”
Stockman, 66, is the author of “The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America,” which will be published April 2.
The Fed, led by Ben S. Bernanke, is purchasing $85 billion in assets every month. The Fed is leaving its key interest rate near zero while it tries to reduce unemployment below 6.5 percent and hold inflation below 2.5 percent.
The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index rose to an all-time high last week, closing at 1,569.19 on March 28. That surpassed the previous record of 1,565.15 set in October 2007. U.S. stock markets were closed March 29 for the Good Friday holiday.
Gold Standard
Among the other culprits Stockman blamed for what he termed a “state-wreck” are President Franklin Delano Roosevelt for weakening the gold standard in 1933, President Richard Nixon for removing the convertibility of dollars to gold and “lapsed hero” Alan Greenspan, the former Fed chairman, for keeping interest rates too low for too long.
Investors will sell, Stockman wrote, at any hint that the Fed is starting to remove assets from its balance sheet.
“Notwithstanding Bernanke’s assurances about eventually, gradually making a smooth exit, the Fed is domiciled in a monetary prison of its own making,” he wrote, warning of unsustainable fiscal policies as well. “These policies have brought America to an end-stage metastasis. The way out would be so radical it can’t happen.”
Paul Krugman, the Princeton University economist and New York Times columnist, responded on his blog yesterday, saying that he was “disappointed” in Stockman’s “gee-whiz, context- and model-free numbers embedded in a rant — and not even an interesting rant.”
Krugman called Stockman’s piece “cranky old man stuff,” and summarized it this way:
“We’ve been doomed, yes doomed, ever since FDR took us off the gold standard and introduced unemployment insurance. What about those 80 years of non-doom? Just a series of lucky accidents. Now we’re really doomed. I mean it!”
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