Everyone's jumping on David Stockman, perhaps for good reason. The former director of the Office of Management and Budget under Ronald Reagan penned a particularly gloomy Op-Ed piece in Sunday's New York Times decrying the current state of debt and deficits and the influence of Wall Street over politics and policy to the detriment of the citizenry.
Maybe on the latter he has a point. Wall Street and the big banks saw trillions in bailouts and low interest loans while average Americans received very little in terms of financial support, losing their homes in droves, some because of fraudulent foreclosures that went largely unpunished. But when it comes to debt fear mongering, Stockman is dead wrong. Frankly, it astounds me how debt mongers like Stockman and others can build a following on a false understanding of the monetary system. They have never been right, and they won't be right, but for some reason millions of people want believe the message.
In 2011 when I was still at Fox News, I ran into Stockman and we had a discussion. He railed about the Federal Reserve's "out of control" money printing and government debt, saying that interest rates would soon spike as "creditors" were going to demand higher returns on their money. He said all this even after the historic downgrade of U.S. credit that saw rates fall to historic lows.
I tried to explain to Stockman that the Fed sets interest rates, not the markets, and that's true for all countries that issue their own money and where debts are denominated in that currency. I pointed out the situation in Japan, where the debt was nearly three times that of the U.S. yet rates have been hovering near zero for years while the yen remains strong. He said something about Japan being "internally financed," which always makes me laugh because all that means is a country's debts are denominated in its own currency. In case he hadn't noticed, that's also true for the U.S, which is "internally financed" just like Japan because all its debts are denominated in dollars.
Several months later I bumped into him again at Fox, just before he was about to go on air with Neil Cavuto. This time, however, he was talking about how the Fed was keeping rates too low. Here was a guy who just several months earlier insisted that the bond vigilantes were getting ready to discipline the nation with punitive rates, but now was crying that it was all the Fed's doing. The Fed was setting rates! When he emerged from that interview, I reminded him of our previous conversation, where he said rates would soon spike, but now he was admitting that the Fed was the rate setter. I tried to point out his own contradiction, but he wanted none of it.
That brings me to my main point about debt mongers like Stockman. They are a mountain of contradictions. When it comes to their arguments about money printing, inflation, interest rates, debt and deficits, they cannot see the distinction between a nation that issues its own free-floating, non-convertible currency and one that doesn't. Nor can they admit that nothing they've ever predicted has ever materialized. They can only say that it will happen one day -- they just can't say when.
It's true that Greece, Spain, Italy and Cyprus can go broke. They are subject to the whims of money markets. Like you and I, they don't issue their own money; they have to borrow, tax or earn it, and if expenses exceed revenues long enough, they become insolvent.
That's not the case with currency-issuing nations like the U.S., Japan and the U.K. Although we may think and act like we will become the next Greece or Cyprus, that can't happen unless we intentionally do it to ourselves.
Stockman may be right that we've allowed our national policies to be shaped by the demands of the financial sector, which has become far too rapacious and destructive and is probably no longer worth the trouble.