Brownstone » Articles for David Stockman

David Stockman

David Stockman, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is the author of many books on politics, finance, and economics. He is a former congressman from Michigan, and the former Director of the Congressional Office of Management and Budget. He runs the subscription-based analytics site ContraCorner.

donald trump

Trump’s Disastrous Final Year in Office 

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We are now 40-months on from the Donald’s foolish empowerment of Dr. Fauci and his Virus Patrol in mid-March 2020, and all doubt has been removed. If there were two countries on the planet which had diametrically opposite policy approaches with respect to the Covid, it was Australia, which degenerated into an outright public health tyranny, and Sweden, where officials kept their minds open to the facts and social institutions—schools, churches, shops, theaters, malls, factories, etc–open to the public.

stagflation

America’s Prolonged Economic Stagflation 

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The US economy is freighted down with debt and it is also short of labor, riddled with non-productive speculation and financial engineering and starved for productive investment. Taken together, those malign forces were more than enough to slow the underlying growth of the US economy to a crawl.

inflation

The Battle Against Inflation Is Nowhere Near Won

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In a word, American fiscal governance is broken and broken badly. Owing to the Fed’s massive monetization of the public debt over last several years Washington has lost all sense of the economic costs and consequences of massive borrowing. And that’s because there has been no “crowding out” and no spiraling interest rate signals from the bond pits of the type which historically kept Washington pols close to the fiscal straight and narrow.

donald trump

The Buck Stops Where?

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The most outrageous breakout of statist excess in US history happened on Donald Trump’s watch with his full complicity. In turn, these Covid-lockdown assaults on normal economic function transformed what was a mediocre economic record during his first 38 months in office into a complete disaster during the last 10 months.

administrative state

The Administrative State Strikes Again: Monetary Edition

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They have done it again, and in a way that makes a flaming mockery of both honest market economics and the so-called rule of law. In effect, the triumvirate of fools at the Fed, Treasury, and FDIC have essentially guaranteed $9 trillion of uninsured bank deposits with no legislative mandate and no capital to make these sweeping promises good.

Twitter Ministry of Truth

Twitter Became the Ministry of Truth

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The Twitter story is not a one-off case, nor is it evidence that Wall Street and the homegamers alike are comprised of greedy fools who will fall for anything. To the contrary, the destructive outbreak of corporate moonlighting in behalf of woke ideology and partisan causes was born, bred and matriculated by the money-printers at the Fed.  At the end of the day, it is bad money that leads to bad, value-destroying behavior in the C-suites—just one more instance of the “malinvestment” which is the inherent result of monetary inflation.

pandemic hysteria

Let the Real Investigations Begin

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Indeed, it would not be going too far to say that the eruption of irrationality and hysteria in America during 2020-2021 most resembled not 1954, when Senator McCarthy set the nation looking for communist moles behind every government desk, or 1919, when the notorious raids of Attorney General Mitchell were rounding up purported Reds in their tens of thousands, but the winter of 1691-1692. That’s when two little girls—Elizabeth Parris and Abigail Williams of Salem, Massachusetts—fell into the demonic activity of fortune-telling, which soon found them getting strangely ill, having fits, spouting gibberish, and contorting their bodies into odd positions.

The Post-Lockdown Labor Market: Weak and Worsening

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What is happening is people are taking multiple jobs in order to stay abreast of the soaring cost-of-living, and also because work-from-home has made it very easy for free lancers and gig workers—especially in the tech sector—to attach themselves to two, three or even four employer payrolls. These all count as “jobs” in the establishment survey, but not in the household survey.

Bravo, Elon!

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Twitter’s phony “content moderation” operation was not unique, but symptomatic of a much broader perversion of corporate management throughout Silicon Valley and much of corporate America, too. In a word, the stock market was so fantastically over-valued owing to the Fed’s egregious money-printing that executives were given leave to pursue their political and ideological hobby horses on a whim, rather than keep their noses on the grindstone of profit and loss.

The Macroeconomic Consequences of Lockdowns and the Aftermath

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Washington compensated one and all for the resulting harm and then some by unleashing a $6 trillion spending bacchanalia in less than 14 months, which was accomplished with barely a dissent from either party to the Washington duopoly because interest rates on government debt had plunged to an all-time low. In turn, that was enabled by the most reckless spurt of money printing and debt monetization in recorded history.

Inflation and Recession are Becoming Entrenched

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A bad stagflation is here. Since the Fed will be locked in a battle to tame the price side of the equation even as real output falters for months and years to come, we seriously doubt that the economic contraction to be recorded on Joe Biden’s watch will be described in the history books as a “very slight recession.”

Inflation: Where Are We Now?

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The fact is, Tuesday’s CPI report destroyed the idea that the Fed will pause soon. In fact, excluding volatile food and energy prices, the so-called core CPI rose 0.6%, which if sustained would be an annual rate above 7%.

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