Submitted by David Stockman – The Contra Corner Blog
Ronald Reagan and David Stockman
David Stockman was elected to Congress at age 29 back in 1976; he was an avid student of Austrian economics and supported a gold-backed money system and a balanced budget. He later joined the Reagan administration as Budget Chief, where he watched in awe as the Reagan administration quickly became the most profligate spenders in the history of the United States.
After leaving the Reagan Cabinet, he worked at the well-known investment house Salomon Brothers, and later co-founded the Blackstone Group alongside legendary hedge-fund manager Steve Schwarzmann.
In his most recent book, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America,Stockman systematically repudiates and dismantles the myths surrounding the Fed’s supposed past successes at helping the US economy avoid major breakdowns, going all the way back to the crash of ‘29. Instead, as he explains, “Programs born out of desperation or idealism 75 years ago have ended up as fiscal time bombs like Social Security or as captive fiefdoms of one crony capitalist syndicate or another… Policies undertaken in the name of public good inexorably become captured by special interests and crony capitalists.”
The most important lesson I took from the book and the interview? Remember that there has never been a time of such profound debt saturation, coupled with intense crony capitalism, as today. No one has ever been here to tell how it turns out. We truly are in an unprecedented era…
David, can you explain how the ‘Fed put’ works on the stock markets and bond markets? How exactly does it translate into artificially higher stock prices and lower interest rates? Continue reading
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