David Stockman: The Best Financial Journalist
I have already identified the best living economist: Thomas Sowell. I provided reasons.
To give you some perspective on why I think Stockman is the best, let me identify the person he replaced: Warren Brookes. Brookes died in 1991. He had an uncanny ability to look at government reports, and figure out why they did not add up. He spent most of his career blowing apart ill-founded reports made by the liberal media or by the government. He once told me how he had gained this ability. In one of the first jobs he ever had, he worked for a cardboard factory. He was given the assignment of designing products to minimize the use of cardboard. He had to learn mathematics in a highly practical way. He said this ability never left him from that time on. I can assure you, he made tremendous positive use of that ability.
Ever since then, there has been a hole in the profession. David Stockman has decided to fill this hole.
Here is why Stockman is the best. He is the only financial journalist ever to come down the pike who has had high-level experience in the following fields: investment banking, politics (Congressman), high level bureaucratic management in the United States government (Office of Management and Budget), Austrian School economics, and professional writing (The Great Deformation). We have had competent financial journalists. I think Brookes was the best in his day. Another highly competent journalist today is James Grant, the publisher of Grant's Interest Rate Observer. He is very good with one-liners. Also, because he wears a bow tie, interviewers think he must be harmless. He surprises them. But he has had no experience in government. He has never been inside the belly of the beast. Stockman has.
Stockman also cranks it out daily, which few other people do. His Contra Corner site is filled with good articles by him and a large stable of writers.
He is unimpressed by the Federal Reserve. So, he is merciless in attacking it in a way that bureaucrats fear most: ridicule. The decision-makers at the Federal Reserve are today's emperors with no clothes. He sees that their policies will produce a disaster. When the disaster hits, he will be better positioned than any other financial journalist to answer Lenin's question: "What is to be done?"
I hope he has answers that Congress can understand and will apply. If not, we will get more of the same.
My recommendation: a simple law. "The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 is repealed."