I think we're so addicted to bubble finance at the Fed that they can't get out of the corner they painted themselves into. I think the Fed is making federal debt so cheap that Congress has no interest, Washington has no incentive to ever face up to our massive fiscal gap that is going to grow, and grow as we go forward in time and so we have a paralyzed system.
David StockmanI invest in anything that Bernanke can't destroy, including gold, canned beans, bottled water and flashlight batteries.
David StockmanIf the stock market does go through a crisis of confidence, which I think clearly will happen one of these days, no one can predict just like you couldn't the dot com crash or the Lehman crash, but when it goes down it will go down by thousands of points because everyone will panic. No one owns this market today because they believe there's a huge sunny future for the United States economy. They're buying because they think the Fed can keep the thing pumped up, the bubble expanding.
David StockmanThe problem is that you're creating a system of bubble finance where interest rates are so low that people can speculate. An asset value goes up. You put it up as collateral. You borrow against it. You buy more of the asset. You then take the rising asset. You borrow against it again. This is the nature of what's going on in the world. This isn't an excess of real savings. This is an excess of artificial credit that's being fueled by all the central banks.
David StockmanLook at what's happening between Main Street and Wall Street. The stock market index is up 136 percent from the bottom. Middle class jobs lost during the correction: six million. Middle class jobs recovered: one million. So therefore we're up 16 percent on the jobs that were lost. These are only born-again jobs. We don't really have any new jobs, and there's a massive speculative frenzy going on in Wall Street that is disconnected from the real economy.
David StockmanI don't think that Mitt Romney can legitimately say that he learned anything about how to create jobs in the LBO (leveraged buyout) business. The LBO business is about how to strip cash out of old, long-in-the-tooth companies and how to make short-term profits. All the jobs that he talks about came from Staples. That was a very early venture stage deal. That, you know they got out of long before it got to its current size.
David StockmanWe need a wealth tax that on a one-time basis is going to take back at least some small fraction of the great windfall that the upper 1 percent, or 5 percent and pay down the government debt, pay back the federal debt because we can't put this on the next generation or they're going to be buried paying taxes.
David Stockman