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Stockman David A TRUMPED! A NATION ON THE BRINK OF RUIN… AND HOW TO BRING IT BACK DAVID A. STOCKMAN TRUMPED! A NATION ON THE BRINK OF RUIN . AND HOW TO BRING IT BACK DAVID A. STOCKMAN TRUMPED! A NATION ON THE BRINK OF RUIN . AND HOW TO BRING IT BACK DAVID A. STOCKMAN Laissez Faire Books For Jennifer, Victoria, Rachel and Robert. Copyright by Subsidium, LLC. 14 W. Mount Vernon Pl., Baltimore, MD 21202. All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-6212918-4-8 (print) ISBN: 978-1-6212918-5-5 (ebook) 20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Published by Laissez Faire Books, 808 St. Paul Street, Baltimore, Maryland www.lfb.org www.agorafinancial.com Cover and Layout Design: Andre Cawley CONTENTS PART 1 TRUMPED! WHY IT HAPPENED 1 Flyover America’s Decline and the Rise of Donald Trump 3 2 Why the Flyover Zone Is Hurting—Bubble Finance Is Strictly for the Bicoastal Elites 33 3 The Warren Buffett Economy: How Central Bank-Enabled Financialization Has Divided America 49 4 The Case Against Keynesian Central Banking and Why the FOMC Should Be Abolished 65 5 Trump Isn’t All Wrong About Trade Deficits—How Washington’s Money Printers Betrayed American Workers 99 6 America’s Rolling LBO and Why There Have Been No Breadwinner Job Gains Since the Year 2000 111 7 Falling Backwards in Flyover America—Why Real Household Income Is Down 21% Since 2000 127 PART 2 BUBBLE FINANCE AND ITS RUINS 8 Government Entitlements: The World’s Sixth-Biggest Economy and the Coming Insolvency of Social Security 151 9 “Morning in America” Never Was—How the Federal Debt Went From $1 Trillion to $35 Trillion in Four Decades 165 10 How the GOP Got Trumped—the Fiscal Follies of Johnny Lawn Chair and Faker Ryan 183 11 America’s Bridges Are Not Falling Down: The Perennial Myth of Crumbling Infrastructure 199 12 On the Impossibility of “Helicopter Money” and Why the Casino Will Crash 221 13 Busting the Banksters—The Case for a Super Glass-Steagall 241 14 Bubbles in Bond Land—It’s a Central Bank-Made Mania 261 15 Revolt of the Rubes—Bravo, Brexit! 281 16 The War on Savers and the 200 Rulers of Global Finance 305 17 Fannie Mae’s Swell New Palace—Why the Imperial City Must Be Sacked 329 18 Red Ponzi Ticking—China and the Dark Side of Bubble Finance 339 19 The Apotheosis of Bubble Finance—the Coming Crash of Tesla and the FANGs 377 PART 3 IMPERIAL WASHINGTON AND ITS GLOBAL DEPREDATIONS 20 Imperial Washington—Why There is Still No Peace on Earth 401 21 A Peace Deal for the Donald—Go to Tehran, Bring Home the American Troops 429 22 In Praise of Ignorant Politicians—Unschooled in Beltway Delusions 437 23 Hillary Clinton—Class President of a Failed Generation 443 24 A Lesson for The Donald—Barack, We Hardley Knew Ye 451 25 The Aspen Strategy Group—Hillary’s War Cabinet in Waiting 457 26 In Praise of the Iran Nuke Deal—A Chance for Peace If We Can Keep It 469 PART 1 TRUMPED! WHY IT HAPPENED 1 CHAPTER 1: Flyover America’s Decline and the Rise of Donald Trump IRST THERE WERE 17. THEN LITTLE MARCO, LOW ENERGY JEB AND LYIN’ FTed were gone. At length, there was one. And now there is even a chance he may become president. Donald Trump’s wildly improbable capture of the GOP nomination and rise toward the White House is surely the most significant upheaval in American politics since Ronald Reagan. Yet the rise of Trump—and Bernie Sanders too—vastly transcends ordinary politics. In fact, it reaches deep into a ruined national economy that has morphed into rank casino capitalism under the misguided policies and faithless rule of the Washington and Wall Street elites. This epic deformation has delivered historically unprecedented set- backs to the bottom 90% of American households. They have seen their real wealth and living standards steadily deteriorate for several decades now, even as vast financial windfalls have accrued to the elite few at the very top. In fact, during the last 30 years, the real net worth of the bottom 90% has not increased at all. At the same time, the top 1% has experienced a 300% gain while the real wealth of the Forbes 400 has risen by 1,000%. That’s not old-fashioned capitalism at work; it’s the fruit of a perverted regime of printing press money and debt-fueled faux prosperity that has been foisted on the nation by the bipartisan ruling elites. To be sure, the proximate cause of this year’s election upheaval is similar to that in Reagan’s time. Back then, an era of drastic bipartisan 3 4 TRUMPED! WHY IT HAPPENED mis-governance generated an electoral impulse to sweep out the Wash- ington stables. Now, however, it is not just the Beltway political class that is under attack. The very foundations of American economic life are imperiled. What remained of healthy market capitalism in Reagan’s time is no more. It has been battered by 30 years of madcap money printing at the Fed. It labors under the $50 trillion of new public and private debt generated by that monetary eruption. And it staggers from the destructive blows of serial financial bubbles. Real average wealth of bottom 90% and top 1% of families 700,000 14,000,000 Bottom 90% real average wealth Top 1% 650,000 600,000 12,000,000 Bottom 90% 550,000 10,000,000 500,000 450,000 8,000,000 400,000 350,000 6,000,000 300,000 4,000,000 250,000 op 1% real average wealth 200,000 T 2,000,000 150,000 100,000 0 ’86 ’90 ’94 ’98 ’02 ’06 ’10 50,000 These bubbles have self-evidently resulted in a destructive boom-and- bust cycle in the financial system, but also much more. Bubble Finance has drained productivity and efficiency from the Main Street economy and has channeled vast resources to speculators and wasteful malinvestments. THE ECONOMIC ROT WAS GENERATED IN WASHINGTON, NOT BY OPEN BORDERS AND TRADE Unfortunately, this policy-generated rot at the foundations of the U.S. economy has bred a profusion of public fears and scapegoats. Illegal im- migrants, bad trade deals and the unfair mercantilist practices of China and many other foreign governments have taken the blame—especially in Donald Trump’s campaign patter. But these scapegoats are either irrelevant or just symptoms. The real problem is not free trade or free movement of people. FLYOVER AMERICA’S DECLINE AND THE RISE OF DONALD TRUMP 5 To the contrary, America’s faltering economy was caused by the policy machinations of Washington, D.C., not at the illegal crossing routes on the Arizona border or the containership berths at Long Beach. For more than three decades, the nation’s central bank has flooded the U.S. and world economies with too much free money (dollar liabilities) and Washington politicians have accommodated the Beltway racketeers and the country’s huge entitlement constituencies with too much free booty. So the real disease is bad money and towering debts. The actual culprits are the Wall Street and Washington policy elites who have embraced statist solutions, which aggrandize their own power and wealth. That much, at least, Donald Trump has right. Throwing out the ca- reerists, pettifoggers, hypocrites, ideologues, racketeers, power seekers and snobs who have brought about the current ruin is at least a start in the right direction. Trump is directionally correct on another great matter as well. The American Imperium abroad has been a fiscal, foreign policy and moral catastrophe, as we outline in depth in Part 3. When the Cold War ended 25 years ago, NATO should have been dis- banded and Washington’s vast war machine should have been drastically shrunken—even as the rest of the so-called free world was invited to share in the pursuit of peace and in shouldering the burdens of its own security. But what we got, instead, were the Clinton/Bush/Obama wars of in- tervention and occupation. They have resulted in failed states, sectarian carnage and terrorist blowback, not a more secure America. Worse still, political demagogues, including Trump, have fanned public fears that the barbarism Washington unleashed in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and elsewhere now threatens every city and town in America. That is a gross exaggeration, to say the least, as we demonstrate later in this book. Yet there is absolutely no doubt that the arrogant and insular group- think of the Imperial City is the cause of the murderous chaos that rages across the greater Middle East and beyond. Americans are fearful because Washington’s reckless and destructive foreign interventions have not made them more secure; it has put them in harm’s way. 6 TRUMPED! WHY IT HAPPENED So far, Donald Trump’s solutions have been largely rhetorical, inchoate and often far too bellicose. But he has pinned the tail where it belongs. That is, on the imperial notion that America is the indispensable savior-nation and policeman of the world when Washington should be focused on America’s homeland security first. What made America great once upon a time, of course, were free mar- kets, fiscal rectitude, sound money, constitutional liberty, non-intervention abroad, minimalist government at home and decentralized political rule. Whether Donald Trump gets that part of the equation remains to be seen, and already there is much to suggest that he won’t. Then again, the GOP establishment has betrayed these principles en- tirely; the Democrats are clueless; and the mainstream media and punditry is overtly hostile.
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