Free Republic

We are apparently back in the spend-your-way-to-prosperity mode. Last week Wall Street greeted the “strong” April PCE number with a spree of dip-buying, but you have to wonder just how long households can keep reaching into their cookie jars in order to spend what they are not earning. According to the Commerce Department, the abysmal 4.4% personal savings rate posted for April was the lowest level since August 2008, and we know what happened next! Its also damn obvious from the chart that the triple whammy of the Covid-Lockdowns, the stimmy bacchanalia and red hot acceleration of global inflation and...

International Man: Whether we like it or not, the reality is, the Federal Reserve has an enormous influence over the dollar and the stock market. And right now, the Fed has an urgent and fateful decision to make. It can keep printing trillions of dollars, let inflation skyrocket or tighten monetary policy, and watch the stock market crash. In other words, it can sacrifice the stock market or the dollar. David, what do you think the Fed will do, and what are the implications?David Stockman: Well, I think whether it wants to or not, the Fed will crash the stock...

Reagan White House Budget Director and best-selling author David Stockman says, “This is not the time to be invested in the markets . . . . A reset is just a pleasant name or a clinical name for a crash of epic proportions, which we will have because the markets are so inflated. There are trillions of dollars that are at risk. To put a dimension on this thing or a way of sizing this, is we have a $60 trillion bubble on the balance sheets of 130 million people in American society, but especially in the top 5% to...

Additionally, Trump commuted the sentence of former Texas GOP Rep. Steve Stockman, who was convicted in 2018 of money laundering, conspiracy and other charges related to a scheme to defraud charitable donors.

Conservative former Congressman Steve Stockman is languishing in prison with COVID-19. Some crooked bureaucrats at the Bureau of Prisons will not allow him to move to home confinement, despite the fact he is over 60 years old and has diabetes and other health problems. Every other inmate in his prison over 60 with diabetes has been moved to home confinement. He has heard they won’t allow it because he’s basically a conservative political prisoner. Meanwhile, murderers and rapists all around the country have been let out, with some committing new heinous crimes.  Stockman is serving a 10-year sentence for raising money...

Former Congressman Steve Stockman has asked the Supreme Court to hear his appeal from a 10-year criminal sentence on multiple counts involving raising money from just two GOP donors. You may have heard the term “criminalization of politics.” Steve Stockman’s 2018 conviction is very literally an example. Stockman’s asking the Supreme Court to overturn that politicized conviction should be watched by conservatives who know that a Biden/Harris administration would be a reboot of the lawless Obama Deep State, probably even more vindictive towards conservatives. Former prosecutor Rachel Alexander said of Stockman: He was a Congressional whistleblower on Obama administration corruption,...

Democrats are gloating over the sentencing of former Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Texas) last week. He was ordered to serve 10 years in prison for the vague charges of mail fraud, wire fraud and money laundering. Whenever prosecutors want to get someone who hasn’t actually committed a crime, they use those vague but scary sounding charges. He was also ordered to pay $1,014,718.51 in restitution, to be divided between him and two other co-defendants.What did Stockman actually do to warrant this? He facilitated four donations from two donors totaling $915,000 to two nonprofits he was associated with. One of the nonprofits...

The watchword for 2018 is: UNHINGED!That refers to Wall Street, Washington, the Dems and the GOP, and all the far and near corners of the planet which are implicated in their collective follies.The latter begins with the fact that Imperial Washington has become so dysfunctional that the most powerful government on earth can't seem to keep its doors open for more than a few weeks at a time.The next continuing resolution (CR) deadline is January 19 and the route thereto resembles nothing less than kick-the-can-alley. It's strewn with $100 billion of unfunded disaster aid, defense and nondefense sequester caps...

Two weeks after David Stockman warned that "the market is apparently pricing in a huge Trump stimulus. But if you just look at the real world out there, the only thing that's going to happen is a fiscal bloodbath and a White House train wreck like never before in U.S. history" and exclaimed that, when looking at markets, "what's going on today is complete insanity" he is back with another interview, this time with Greg Hunter of USAWatchdog in which he, once again warns, that a giant fiscal bloodbatch is coming soon, and urges listeners to pay especially close attention...

Count David Stockman, former director of the Office of Management and Budget under Ronald Reagan, as one of the non-believers in the Trump rally and coming economic boom. U.S. markets have hit record highs since the election of President Donald Trump, and Wall Street continues to anticipate pro-business policies that will benefit banks and infrastructure. However, Stockman reiterated his warning on "Fast Money" that a financial meltdown was in the offing. On the eve of Trump's inauguration, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget offered a reality check for investors who thinks the days of Reagan prosperity...

Former Reagan Budget Director David Stockman on the need to rein in America's mounting debt. "We'll hit the next recession with nothing to break the fall." On the GDP, "The growth in the baseline is totally unrealistic." Stockman also discusses a new Federal Reserve Chief, "Get the Keynesian money-printers out".

The Cleveland Fed’s Loretta Mester is a clueless apparatchik and Fed lifer, who joined the system in 1985 fresh out of Barnard and Princeton and has imbibed in its Keynesian groupthink and institutional arrogance ever since. So it’s not surprising that she was out flogging—-albeit downunder in Australia—- the next step in the Fed’s rolling coup d’ etat. We’re always assessing tools that we could use,” Mester told the ABC’s AM program. “In the US we’ve done quantitative easing and I think that’s proven to be useful. “So it’s my view that [helicopter money] would be sort of the next...

Video at link. David Stockman (Office of Budget and Management, Reagan Administration) explains why the market will not be going up any time soon.

To wit, artificial suppression of free market interest rates by the central bank is designed to cause households to borrow more money than they otherwise would in order to spend more than they earn, pure and simple. Its nothing more than a modernized version of the original, crude Keynesian pump-priming theory—–except it dispenses with the inconvenience of getting politicians to approve spending increases and tax cuts in favor of the writ of a small posse of unelected monetary mandarins who run the FOMC and peg money market interest rates at will. But the whole enterprise is a crock. The consumer...

RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, the unemployment rate, what is the latest reported unemployment, 5.5%, is that what it is, 5.3, 5.6? It's in that neighborhood, right? I don't know what the exact number is. Not that this matters to anything anymore. I mean, the truth is increasingly irrelevant. The truth is increasingly meaningless. In fact, there isn't any truth in way too much of the country. There is certainly no objective truth. Anyway, I have had, as you know if you listen regularly, I've had a lot of doubt about the accuracy of an unemployment rate of 5.5% when, at...

Washington • The state-owned oil company of Azerbaijan secretly funded an all-expenses-paid trip to a conference at Baku on the Caspian Sea in 2013 for 10 members of Congress and 32 staff members, according to a confidential ethics report obtained by The Washington Post. Three former top aides to President Barack Obama appeared as speakers at the conference. Lawmakers and their staff members received hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of travel expenses, silk scarves, crystal tea sets and Azerbaijani rugs valued at $2,500 to $10,000, according to the ethics report. Airfare for the lawmakers and some of their spouses...

David Alan Stockman interviewed on CBS-TV 60 Minutes (October 2010) Highlights of recent interview by Harry Dent. David Stockman: People don't want to hear the reality and the truth that we're facing. But I think there is an enormous appetite out in the country to get a different perspective than what you have from the media day in and day out, so I say the fed is out of control. Its balance sheet is exploded. It's printing money like never before. Zero interest rates for 70 months have basically destroyed the pricing function in the financial markets. I said...

"If and when Congress votes on a new immigration bill -- whatever the "triggers," timetables or other provisos -- the real issue to be decided will be the same as it has been from the beginning. That issue is whether the Republican Party, dazed from a daily pounding by the Washington press corps, will agree to commit political suicide by enfranchising 11 plus million illegal aliens on U.S. soil, the vast majority of whom will soon be casting Democratic ballots." So wrote the great M. Stanton Evans, who passed away on Tuesday. Having been at the forefront of the movement...

Crude oil is not the only commodity that is crashing. Iron ore is on a similar trajectory and for a common reason. Namely, the two-decade-long economic boom fueled by the money printing rampage of the world’s central banks is beginning to cool rapidly. (snip)Nowhere is this more evident than in China’s vastly overbuilt steel industry, where capacity has soared from about 100 million tons in 1995 to upwards of 1.2 billion tons today. Again, this 12X growth in less than two decades is not just red capitalism getting rambunctious; its actually an economically cancerous deformation that will eventually dislocate the...

The House Armed Services Committee has come up with a creative approach to look for emails from embattled former Internal Revenue Service (IRS) official Lois Lerner that were apparently lost in a computer crash: they're asking the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Defense Department. The panel approved a resolution Wednesday authored by Rep. Steve Stockman, R-Texas, that directs the Secretary of Defense to send the House of Representatives "copies of any electronic communication in the possession of the Secretary, the Director of the National Security Agency, or any office that reports to the Secretary or the Director that was...