Author name: David Stockman

Monetary central planning has most surely destroyed honest price discovery in the financial markets. Today’s Wall Street neither remembers the past nor discounts the future. Instead, it has become just one hot mess of headline reading algos and chart-point chasing day traders. That is to say, an exceedingly dangerous place that rational investors should avoid at all […]

It doesn’t get more “irrationally exuberant” than this. Yesterday the Russell 2000 (RUT) closed at an all-time record of 1648 — meaning that it was valued at 91X reported net income (March LTM) and that it sported a diminutive dividend yield of just 1.25%. In some sense, of course, the RUT’s stratospheric PEs are fully consistent with current manic stock valuations generally. What we have, in

After nearly three decades of monetary central planning, the bonds pits and other financial markets are powder kegs. Asset prices have been so drastically and systematically falsified that they are vulnerable to sudden implosions when exogenous events finally dislodge the Big Fat Thumb of central bank control. That’s the lesson of the current raging political and financial

The casino is having a good-sized hiccup today triggered by the crisis of governance in Italy. But the truth of the matter is that Italy’s political crisis is the fruit of endless easy money, suffocating fiscal debt and a demographic bust—-an incurable disease that is coming to America soon owing to 30 years of fiscal and monetary profligacy, which

You can not build the Empire and drain the Swamp at the same time. That’s because the Swamp is largely the fruit of Empire. And it’s also the reason that the Donald is being rapidly undone. Indeed, it is the Empire’s $750 billion national security budget which feeds Washington’s vast complex of weapons suppliers, intelligence contractors, national security bureaucrats, NGOs, think

When the Donald promised to “drain the swamp” during the 2016 election campaign—-it did sound vaguely like an attack on Big Government, and at least a directional desire to shrink the state and let free market capitalism breathe. After 16 months in office, however, the truth is patently obvious: The only Swamp that Donald Trump wants

If you think the dreamers on both ends of the Acela Corridor have a clue about what they are doing, you haven’t encountered the sage advice of Yogi Berra. Said the oracle of the Bronx Bombers: “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going because you might not get there”. Needless

In the not too distant future there is going to be a “what were we thinking!” moment. And on both ends of the Acela Corridor. Washington is lobbing fiscal bunker busters at the Wall Street bond pits, but so doing it exudes a level of insouciance—-which is to say nonchalance, unconcern, indifference and heedlessness—-that is just plain stunning. In financial terms, the Imperial

There was another horrific school shooting in Santa Fe Texas last week, and predictably it has unleashed a torrent of purple prose regarding what Washington should do about it—ranging from more gun control to more mental health funding to more school safety funding and much more. Au contraire. As horrible as these incidents are, there is

Like we said yesterday: Wall Street’s claim that the economy’s good, earnings are good and rising yields are all priced-in is just plain nuts. That’s just an admonition saying you were born yesterday—so just shut-up and BTFD! “Yesterday” in the casino, of course, represents an unprecedented and unsustainable aberration. That is, sub-zero real money market rates for 9 years running