Stockman: Good Riddance to Gary Cohn, He Gave Trump Terrible Advice
RUSH EXCERPT:
KELLY: "You're going to have a deficit when you have a comparative advantage in services."
STOCKMAN: "That's the free market argument and I am a free market guy from day one. But when you have bad money, free markets don't work. When you have the central banks of the world distorting the entire trading system, keeping their exchange rates low, we end up importing labor from China that could be done here. But the problem is you have to go to the central banks. You have to go to the monetary system."
BARTIROMO: "What's the answer if not these tariffs?"
STOCKMAN: "The answer is to raise the interest rate rapidly to 3 --"
BARTIROMO: "That's not the president's domain. That's the fed. What should the president do."
STOCKMAN: "He should be calling in the fed and say let's get back to a normal monetary policy."
BARTIROMO: "He can't dictate the fed. What's the president to do?"
STOCKMAN: "He could easily dictate the fed."
BARTIROMO: "Give me a break. Then he criticized for dictating the fed."
STOCKMAN: "The problem isn't dumb, stupid trade negotiators. The problem is stupid monetary policy. They need to have a meeting of the minds because corporate America --"
BARTIROMO: "You were against the tax cut plan. We're talking about 3.5% growth. Come on.
STOCKMAN: "We're not getting 3.5% growth. If we get 2% this quarter we'll be lucky. We're late in this business cycle. We saw this morning $155 billion of stock buybacks announced in February alone. We're at $800 billion stock buyback rate. We're having stupid m&a deals everywhere, trillions of them. They shrink jobs. They shrink the economy."
BARTIROMO: "They're not going to Ireland. They're doing deals in the U.S. They're not taking their business to Ireland."
STOCKMAN: "Maria, no one was ever taking jobs to Ireland."
BARTIROMO: "They were too. They were going and doing deals so they could get a lower tax rate.
STOCKMAN: "They were taking the corporate headquarters and 16 people.
BARTIROMO: "They changed the tax rate.
STOCKMAN: "That's a matter of revenue, not a matter of jobs and production and growth. IBM sent 130,000 people to India because of low labor costs, not because of the tax regime.
McDOWELL: "What's more destructive, running annual trade deficits or a national debt that's double?"
STOCKMAN: "Both of them."
McDOWELL: "Are they equally destructive?
STOCKMAN: "They're equally destructive. We have a whopping dent, a deficit, $22 trillion of debt and we have $800 billion this year of trade deficits that we can't afford."
BARTIROMO: "You didn't like the spending in the Reagan white House. You left. You know what Gary Cohn's going through. He said I'm not going to take this anymore. You left the Reagans just like Gary Cohn's doing."
STOCKMAN: "I left for a good reason. He left for a bad reason. His bad reason was he was not able to convince trump, yes, you're right on trade but let's go a different direction. Let's clean house at the fed. Goldman Sachs loves what the fed is doing. Goldman Sachs loves a corporate tax cut that is leading to $800 billion of stock buybacks, gulessing stock prices -- goosing stock prices. The trading desk at Goldman Sachs has had the busiest two months of its history in terms of stock buybacks."
