Wow, Alan Greenspan and David Stockman both came to my side of the debate in the same weekend and the market rockets – very interesting

First, we had Alan Greenspan on Meet the Press, regurgitating my “Tale of Two Economies,” which was our theme for 2010 investing and, of course, is something I have been carping about for many years as income disparity has become critical in this country.  Somehow though, it sounds more official when a crotchety octogenarian says it – so we’ll give the Chairman his due:

Our problem, basically, is that we have a very distorted economy in the sense that there has been a significant recovery in a limited area of the economy amongst high-income individuals who have just had $800 billion added to their 401(k)s and are spending it and are carrying what consumption there is.  Large banks, who are doing much better, and large corporations, whom you point out and the–and everyone’s pointing out, are in excellent shape. 

The rest of the economy, small business, small banks, and a very significant amount of the labor force, which is in tragic unemployment, long-term unemployment, that is pulling the economy apart.  The average of those two is what we are looking at, but they are fundamentally two separate types of economy.

Another conservative darling who turned on his masters this weekend is Reagan’s OMB Director, David Stockman, who eviscerated current Republican fiscal policies in a NY Times Op-Ed this weekend, summing it up neatly with the title: “How the GOP Destroyed the US Economy,” which is a must read but here’s a few juicy tidbits:

IF there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt — if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 — will soon reach $18 trillion. That’s a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice. It is therefore unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase…

…This approach has not simply made a mockery of traditional party ideals. It has also led to the serial financial bubbles and Wall Street depredations that have crippled our economy. More specifically, the new policy doctrines have caused four great deformations of…
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