I 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 StockmanOne thing is certain. At some point global investors will lose confidence in our (U.S.) easy dollars and debt-financed prosperity, and then the chickens will come home to roost.
David StockmanIf you let interest rates be freed, be set by the free market, they would rise dramatically. There would be a lot of broken furniture on Wall Street. It needs to be broken. The back of the speculative bubble would be broken and we could slowly heal the financial system. That's what I think we need to do but it's never going to happen because there's trillions of asset values dependent on the Fed continuing to suppress, repress interest rates and shovel $85 billion a month of liquidity into the market.
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 Stockman