Monday, October 22, 2012

More Education for David Stockman

From his former colleague Alan Reynolds; people who create glass investment houses shouldn't throw stones;

Anyone who believed Stockman’s gloomy 1986 book about how “Reaganomics failed,” or Greider’s book about how Stockmanomics failed, might easily have missed the 1985–1999 bull run. So did Stockman, apparently. After an uninspiring post-political tour as director of dubious mergers and acquisitions at the defunct Salomon Brothers investment bank (which took him on tour among money managers as a political showpiece), Stockman then failed as a wheeler-dealer with Blackstone. 
Stockman “became known internally for hyping bad deals and arguing against investments championed by others,” Dan Primack reported in Fortune magazine. 
....Is Stockman saying the Fed was too easy for the entire 1985–1999 span, when Bain was outperforming all rivals? Why didn’t easy money help the others, or Stockman? Is he suggesting the boom in tech stocks had nothing to do with the birth of the Internet and smartphone industries in 1996?
....Fortunately, Newsweek promises to stop publishing by the end of the year. Unfortunately, that turns out to be too late to avoid this extra entry to their recent record as a forum for sensational, opinionated, partisan nonsense. Both Newsweek and David Stockman could have accepted their embarrassing failures with far more humility, dignity, and grace.

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