In TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin... And How to Bring It Back, David Stockman brings us an insider-turned-iconoclast's report on how 30 years of financial and political misrule by the Washington/Wall Street elites have brought the U.S. to the brink of ruin.
He shows that the Fed's destructive ZIRP and QE policies have buried Flyover America in debt while clobbering it with shrinking real wages and vanishing job opportunities. At the same time, the bicoastal elites have prospered mightily from the massive inflation of financial assets in the Wall Street casino and the debt-fueled expansion of Imperial Washington's domestic rackets and global interventions.
Stockman argues that Donald Trump's improbable candidacy happened because Flyover America has had enough of a rigged system that benefits the few but has failed to delivery economic recovery and real prosperity at home and a safer and more stable world abroad.
Stockman's book is no testimonial on behalf of Trump's candidacy, and contends that much of what he advocates is wrong-headed or downright reprehensible. But it does salute him as the rallying force for Main Street political insurrection because the existing regime of Bubble Finance on Wall Street and statist aggrandizement in Washington threatens incalculable harm.
Stockman also argues that there remains a way forward. He suggests the "political outlaw" who considers himself to be the world's greatest dealmaker would need to "make ten great deals" to bring American back from the brink. These include a Peace Deal, a Jobs Deal, a Sound Money Deal, a Super Glass-Steagall Deal, A Liberty Deal and five more.
In this trenchant, wide-ranging and unvarnished account, Stockman draws on his unique 40-year career in Washington and Wall Street. After a career as a Capitol Hill staffer, two-term member of Congress and ultimately as President Ronald Reagan's budget director, Stockman then went to Wall Street. For two decades as an investment banker and private equity investor he had a front row seat as the nation's financial markets mutated into today's Bubble Finance casinos.
