David Stockman Quotes
Main Street has too much debt already. It is simply a bonanza for speculators who can borrow the overnight money and then buy something that they can speculate on.
Stockman, David. Interview by Bill Moyers. Moyers & Company, PBS, 19 Apr. 2013.
Trump as a business man was notorious for setting up business deals where his partners would put up the money. If the enterprise failed the partners were at risk and lost their money while either did not or lost very little. If money was made, however, he took a large share. He not only did this many times but actually admitted it and bragged about his ability to do that. Incredibly enough he even extended this technique to his charity giving. The vast majority of the money he did good things with through his foundation came from other people. There were many years where he gave not a penny to his own foundation, but gave away and took the credit for what was done with other people’s money. The recipients of the foundations grants mostly assumed that Trump was being generous with his own money, and he never disabused them.
Vladimir Lenin. Terrorism has been an instrument of dictatorial states in general and most revolutions. Speculators as used by Lenin at this time were not just businessmen or capitalists. They were people who bought up and hoarded scarce resources and food, waiting for worse shortage, and then selling their food or other goods at very high prices. Or they would take advantage of the fact that farmers did not have enough to eat and only give them food if why would sign over their land rights. Soon honest businessmen were treated like speculators because they made people less dependent on the party and the government. Stalin, who followed Lenin was even more extreme and had speculators, businessmen and landowners executed.
There was a financial crisis in the country and the world when highly risky home mortgage loans defaulted leaving investors and speculators in mortgage-backed securities in a poor position. The investors had been reaping very high interest rates for their risky investments, but this was the first time that this form of risky investment had failed. The investors, of course were looking for a bailout from government. When the Bush administration failed to bail out investment bank, Lehman, there was a panic and the banking system of the country and much of the world froze up. Bush and his Secretary reversed their bailout of speculators policy and provided various assistants and bailouts to the very bankers and other investors who had caused the economic meltdown. The policy was continued by the Obama administration although the bailouts were just as distasteful to Obama as they were to Bush, but most economists agree that the two presidents very distasteful and unpopular bailout actions probably saved the nation from a massive depression. After being bailed out by the taxpayers, the Bankers then paid themselves exorbitant bonuses while the results of their management put 10 percent of the country out of work.
This is essentially what happened in the Economic Meltdown of 2008 leading to the Great Recession.
David Alan Stockman is an American politician and former businessman who was a Republican U.S. Representative from the state of Michigan (1977–1981) and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (1981–1985) under President Ronald Reagan.
