Those new stock market records? Just another bubble—but this
one might well finish us. ‘Great Deformation’ author David Stockman told Daniel
Gross where we went wrong, and who’s to blame.
“Most 742-page jeremiads aren’t much fun to read. But The
Great Deformation, David Stockman’s revisionist history of the past 100 years
of capitalism American-style, is a spirited, occasionally gleeful, skewering of
many of our most widely held assumptions and most lionized figures. A former
divinity student, Stockman chronicles what he views as the moral rot in the
American financial system—one fueled by easy money, profligate debt, and
needless government intervention. To a degree, this book is autobiographical.
As a congressman, Reagan-era budget official, and private equity executive,
Stockman has lived through the booms and busts of the past half-century. He
knows the world of which he writes from the inside out. And in The Great
Deformation, few escape his opprobrium—current and past policymakers, Roosevelt
and Reagan, Democrats and Republicans, leveraged buyout titans, and corporate
CEOs. “Sundown now comes to America because sound money, free markets, and
fiscal rectitude have no champion in the political arena,” Stockman writes…..
