Stockman’s Corner

If you want to understand why we are heading for a financial Gotterdammerung, just consider the specious nonsense and mendacious cant that issued from JayPo’s post-meeting presser last week. It’s all the worse because this drivel is not just his opinion—it embodies the oppressive groupthink of the entire central bank and its Wall Street megaphones, […]

We have been calling it the Kamala Harris/Progressive Left Regency, but it’s actually worse than that—much worse.

We can’t think of anything stupider and more malign than the Fed’s ridiculous “dot plot”. That’s supposedly the longer-term policy guidance on rates to the market from the drunken money printers at the Fed.

If you don’t think we are in la la land, just recall what happened at 9:00 AM on March 17th. On the signal from the IRS, thousands of banks instantaneously credited the accounts of 100 million customers with their $1,400 stimmy check.

This morning’s February retail sales number may well have reflected a 3% decline from the seasonally maladjusted number for January. But that’s just headline noise as usual.

As we documented in Part 1, the watchword here is massive, insensible overkill. The $5.94 trillion of Everything Bailouts represents 7.3X the most generous definition of the GDP-based hole in America’s economic bucket ($815 billion); and it comes at a time when the gap has nearly closed—with the Q4 2020 shortfall computing to just 1.2%

Sleepy Joe is taking a noisy victory lap for the American Rescue Plan today and during the week(s) to come. But when you add this misbegotten act of fiscal madness to the four previously enacted Everything Bailouts, what comes to mind is calamity, not victory.

We hope the geniuses in the Eccles Building are proud of themselves. One consequence of their absurdly low interest rates and bond-buying spree is that during the past year US households have picked up a cool $1 trillion of pocket money without doing a thing.

Once upon a time, the Wall Street Journal functioned as a kind of financial paper of record, which reliably delivered the flow of financial information in a framework of economic orthodoxy. In that world, there were no implicit free lunches, no denial of the law of supply and demand, no yawning disconnects between asset prices

We almost always disagree with progressives and frequently with so-called conservatives, as well. That’s because neither side consistently understands that the #1 threat to personal liberty, true social justice and reasonable prosperity for all is the inherent aggrandizing propensities of the state.