Stockman’s Corner

You could call it a modern version of fiddling while Rome burns, but that would be too charitable. Never before has there been such abject complacency in the face of blackening storm clouds than is now prevalent on both ends of the Acela Corridor. Yesterday was a striking case in point. The Donald was out on the hustings, boasting […]

Here is a proposition that can’t be repeated enough:What we have is a tired, beaten-down capitalist economy entering month #110 of the weakest business cycle in modern history; it literally groans under the weight of the central bank policies which have fostered destructive levels of debt, speculation and financial asset inflation. So they ought to be sweating bullets at both ends

We are reasonably sure we understand the words “acceleration” and “breakout”, and we’re also quite confident that the chart below does not evidence any such thing. The fact is, for the entirety of this so-called recovery the US economy has been laboring heavily against the headwinds of monumental domestic debts and the strip-mining of corporate America by financial engineering obsessed

Facebook (FB) was priced for perfection. So it went down in flames last night—-shedding $130 billion of market cap after coughing-up some very un-fake news about its performance and outlook. For instance, its monthly user stats (MAU) in North America and Europe, where it generates 73% of its revenue, were flat with Q4 at 617 million; and MAU was up by just 3.5% from Q2 last

Fake GDP breakouts come with the territory—–and the 4.1% reported for Q2 this morning is no exception. Perversely, it amounts to a “thanks, but no thanks, Donald” because much of it reflected one time gains in exports and personal consumption. To wit, 1.1% of the gain was due to a surge in exports—mainly soybeans which soared by

The 78 million member Baby Boom generation was born between 1946 and 1962, and the final costly flourishes on today’s giant retirement-driven Welfare State were enacted during the subsequent 15 years. These giant long-term fiscal inflators included LBJs Medicare program in 1965; Tricky Dick’s disastrous 1972 social security amendments that indexed earnings for wage growth; and Jimmy

During 94 days of sheer monetary madness in the aftermath of the stock market meltdown of September 2008, the Bernanke Fed printed 145% more balance sheet (money) than the nation’s central bank had accumulated during its entire first 94 years of operation. In dollar terms, its footings went from $925 billion to $2.25 trillion in virtually a monetary heartbeat. Naturally,

The most chilling thing about the just released Carter Page FISA application is right at the top. It essentially says that if you talk to any foreign government not approved by Washington about any civilian topic such as energy policy, you can be accused of being a foreign agent, wire-tapped and charged with a crime:

In Part 1 we referenced the infamous hysteria triggered in Salem Massachusetts by Betty Parris (age 9) and Abigail Williams (age 12). In 1692 their pre-pubescent imaginations were apparently more than capable of detecting the evil doings of witches at loose in their community; and a population hopped up with Calvinist enthusiasm for the supernatural works of the Almighty apparently was also capable of lapsing

If you want to know why America is going to hell in a fiscal hand basket, it’s because the last vestige of opposition to the Warfare State and the fiscal muggings of the military/industry/intelligence complex has utterly evaporated. We are referring, of course, to the delirious Russophobia that has overtaken the Dems and the liberal