David Stockman Quotes

• Bernanke has cultivated this idea that he is a brilliant scholar of The Great Depression, but that’s not true at all.

  David Stockman

  Ideas, Brilliant, Great Depression

  "David Stockman on his Book and the Bailouts". Mises Institute Interview, mises.org. September 6, 2013.

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• In short, Mr. Ryan’s plan is devoid of credible math or hard policy choices. And it couldn’t pass even if Republicans were to take the presidency and both houses of Congress. Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan have no plan to take on Wall Street, the Fed, the military-industrial complex, social insurance or the nation’s fiscal calamity and no plan to revive capitalist prosperity - just empty sermons.

  David Stockman

  Wall, Military, Math

  "Paul Ryan's Fairy-Tale Budget Plan". www.nytimes.com. August 13, 2012.

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• 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.

  David Stockman

  Way, Sides, Kind

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• In 1985, the top five percent of the households - the wealthiest five percent - had net worth of $8 trillion - which is a lot. Today, after serial bubble after serial bubble, the top five per cent have net worth of $40 trillion. The top five percent have gained more wealth than the whole human race had created prior to 1980.

  David Stockman

  Race, Today, Wealth

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• The United States is broke — fiscally, morally, intellectually — and the Fed has incited a global currency war Japan just signed up, the Brazilians and Chinese are angry, and the German-dominated euro zone is crumbling that will soon overwhelm it. When the latest bubble pops, there will be nothing to stop the collapse. If this sounds like advice to get out of the markets and hide out in cash, it is.

  David Stockman

  War, Japan, Advice

  "State-Wrecked: The Corruption of Capitalism in America" by David A. Stockman, www.nytimes.com. March 30, 2013.

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• The Republican Party, as much as it pains me to say this, should be ashamed of themselves.

  David Stockman

  Pain, Party, Republican

  "60 Minutes Promotes Washington's 1098 Income Tax Initiative, Stahl Hails Stockman as 'Brave' for Wanting Tax Hikes" by Brent Baker, www.newsbusters.org. November 1, 2010.

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• We 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

  Wealth, Taxes, Next Generation

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• The Ryan plan isn't a budget. It's the last will and testament of the Republican party.

  David Stockman

  Party, Lasts, Republican

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• The 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 Stockman

  Real, People, World

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• One 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 Stockman

  Home, Dollars, Debt

  David Stockman (2013). “The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed”, p.398, PublicAffairs

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• Insanity has infected all the central banks of the world.

  David Stockman

  Insanity, World, Central Banks

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• A veritable incubator of short cuts, schemes and devices to overcome the truth.

  David Stockman

  Cutting, Hair, Overcoming

  David Stockman (2013). “The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed”, p.75, PublicAffairs

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• I think everybody in this generation, and I'm the leading edge of the baby boom - I was born in 1946 - has benefitted from a 30-year explosion of debt, which created temporary but unsustainable economic prosperity and a financialization of the system through lower, and lower, and lower interest rates that has created massive rewards to speculation but not real investments so I benefitted from it. Almost everyone who has been in the market has benefitted but they didn't earn it.

  David Stockman

  Baby, Real, Thinking

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Kemp-Roth was always a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate.

  David Stockman

  Horse, Trojans, Trojan Horse

  "The Education of David Stockman" by William Greider, www.theatlantic.com. December 1981.

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• Look 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

  Wall, Real, New Job

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• 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 Stockman

  Thinking, Finance, Interest

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• 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 Stockman

  Jobs, Thinking, Long

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• I'm just not going to spend a lot of political capital solving some other guy's problem in 2010.

  David Stockman

  Guy, Political, Other Guys

  "Trickle-Down and Pissed Away" by Reese Schonfeld, www.huffingtonpost.com. February 10, 2009.

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• Then, 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 Streetm 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

  Wall, Years, Elephants

  "The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America". Book by David Stockman, 2013.

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• If 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 Stockman

  Wall, Thinking, Broken

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Main Street has too much debt already. It is simply a bonanza for speculators who can borrow the overnight money and then buy something that they can speculate on.

  David Stockman

  Source: www.pbs.org

  4 Copy quote

• If 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 Stockman

  Believe, Thinking, Today

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• I think the stock market is a very dangerous place to be at the present time. In fact, the stock market today is almost identical to where it was in October 2007 and then there was a $7 trillion crash and before that in March 2000.

  David Stockman

  Thinking, Today, October

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• I think everybody benefitted from what I am calling a bubble finance system, a bubble economy and if we're ever going to right the system, we're going to have to stop this explosion of the federal debt. We need huge spending cuts, OK? Don't get me wrong, we need to raise regular taxes too but even beyond that it's not going to hurt if we want to reset the system to ask those who have benefitted disproportionately - remember, we got $60 trillion of net worth in the household sector. $45 trillion of that belongs to the top 5 percent.

  David Stockman

  Hurt, Cutting, Thinking

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• If there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing.

  David Stockman

  Cutting, Republican, Politician

  "Four deformations of the Apocalypse" by David Stockman, www.nytimes.com. July 31, 2010.

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