Stockman’s Corner

If you want to know had badly Keynesian central banking has corrupted the financial discourse, just check into the current PC sensation of the week.

Just when you think the Donald’s usefulness in undermining the Wall Street/Washington ruling class has disappeared—often into the maws of Deep Staters like his insidious foreign policy team of Pompeo and Bolton—he takes things into his own hands and lets the brickbats fly.

Welcome to month #118 of the second longest and hands-down weakest business cycle expansion in American history. Calendar-wise a new record for duration is just two months away, but cumulative growth of real GDP—-that is, what happened under the curve between the cyclical peaks—is an altogether different matter.

It’s pretty obvious that the Donald has not been reined in by his minders on the Mexican Border closure. He’s actually tweeting about it like he’s gone bat-shit crazy, and that’s an understatement!

If you don’t believe that monetary central planning has crushed whatever remained of intelligent life on Wall Street, consider this statement today from the White House press room:

The Donald is always and everywhere to be lauded for his enemies—-the bipartisan Washington political class that is bankrupting America with Empire First abroad and is asphyxiating the main street economy with monumental debts and Bubble Finance windfalls on Wall Street.

Let’s see. Lyft is a fast grower all right. It’s 2018 sales of $2.16 billion were up by $1.11 billion or 106% from prior year; and that was only a tad less impressive than its expenses and costs, which grew from $1.74 billion in 2017 to $3.07 billion in 2018 or by $1.34 billion.

We heard some knucklehead on bubblevision this morning saying there is nothing to sweat regarding Lyft’s $24 billion valuation because, well, it’s “only 10X trailing”.

It doesn’t get any wackier than this.

We have been treating with Washington’s endless capacity for fiscal profligacy for nearly five decades now. So there’s not much in the insanity category that can surprise us anymore.