That’s the dire conclusion of David Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget, who is out with a new book: “The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America.”
“We have been in a bubble I believe for the last 20 or 30 years, we have a central bank that is now totally out of control, printing money like never before, violating every principle of sound money,” Stockman told TheBlaze senior contributor Mallory Factor in video interview (below). “Our budget has really become a doomsday machine. Nothing is really in sight thats going to slow down the red ink.”
“You sound like Ron Paul,” Factor told Stockman.
Stockman notes that he agrees with the Libertarian-Republican on a lot of things, especially the pledge that “we cannot borrow, and inflate and print our way to prosperity,”as we’ve been doing.
“There’s plenty of blame to go around, its bipartisan,” Stockman said. Obama came in with a terrible economic condition because of Bush, according to Stockman, “Remember Bush created massive deficits during peace time.”
Stockman, a former Congressman himself, says Republicans are just as guilty as the Democrats. The former OMB Director noted that while speeches from each party may sound different, what Democrats and Republicans do in the White House is “indistinguishable.”
“There isn’t a lot of hope that things are going to change in the near term when both parities say things that aren’t true,” Stockman said. Democrats wrongly say social security is not part of the problem. Republicans say defense is not part of the problem.
In his book Stockman says that big investment banks are a major part of the problem. The 2008 bailouts were unnecessary, it wouldn’t have spread to the banks across the country, Stockman told TheBlaze.
The Reagan official said FED Chairman Ben Bernanke pushed this, and he is “false scholar” of the great depression. The Great Depression was not caused by the FED, no matter what Bernanke continues, Stockman argued.
Of the banks left standing after 2008, Stockman says Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are among the worst. Stockman believes the banks shouldn’t have been bailed out, and should have went to chapter 11.Why did theses banks skate by? Stockman said that Goldman Sachs occupying the Treasury Department at the time did not hurt.
A whole generation of people in finance have been a part of this bubble, Stockman told TheBlaze.
The former OMB director defines “crony capitalism” as the opposite of free market capitalism. It’s where you use the instruments of government to effect and alter results that would otherwise occur in the free market, Stockman said Monday.
“If we do this long enough we basically disable the free market.”
Watch the full interview with David Stockham below:
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