For some reason the investing public seems to be giving the WeWork IPO a suboptimal reception. After multiple reductions in the IPO sticker price, from 40B down to 20B and now perhaps even less, the lead investor Softbank is recommending that the IPO be shelved. For some reason when the CEO cashes out 700 million ahead of the IPO in a company whose losses exceed total revenues people aren’t overly eager to put in more money.... Read More
The WSJ today reported on how WeWork co-founder and CEO Andrew Neumann has extracted $700,000,000 in share sales and loans from his money-losing, pre-IPO unicorn. So far Neumann has purchased 4 homes around New York, funded an elementary school his kid goes to, and paid $14,000,000 for a 13,000 squarre foot crib in the Bay area that has a guitar-shaped romper room. He also buys properties and leases them back to WeWork. All very confidence instilling for... Read More
New York Times best-selling author David A. Stockman is the ultimate Washington insider turned iconoclast. He sounded the alarm on US deficit spending and special interest domination of both parties in the Triumph of Politics (1986); warned in The Great Deformation (2013) about massive public and private debt and the Fed’s unhinged money printing and bailouts; and exposed the imperiled American economic dream in Trumped! (2016). Now in Peak Trump: The Undrainable Swamp and the Fantasy of MAGA, he debunks Trump-O-Nomics and the perils of Washington’s addiction to perpetual wars. Stockman says Trump is headed for a great big fall from the imminent crash of a 30-year financial bubble, which he condemned on the campaign trail, but foolishly embraced once in office: “The Donald is not remotely the force of nature he’s been made to seem by the Trump-obsessed media. To the contrary, he’s actually a political flyweight, megalomaniacal incompetent, and bile-ridden bully who stumbled into the Oval Office against all odds; and then lucked-out a second time – bragging about the last gasp of a failing business cycle expansion that had ‘recession ahead’ written all over its forehead”. Stockman says the Great Disrupter’s lasting contribution will be to discredit “Imperial Washington’s self-serving bipartisan consensus in favor of permanent war, unchained entitlements, fiscal incontinence, debt-fueled consumer spending, rampant corporate financial engineering and endless bubble inflations at the Fed.” Stockman warns “the twin fiscal menace of the Warfare State and Welfare State” will be Trump’s undoing. After taking the $2 trillion per year of uncontrolled entitlements off the table, Trump “then added insult to injury via his unfunded $1.7 trillion tax cut and massive defense and domestic spending increases. The result was a guaranteed $20 trillion explosion of the Federal debt over the coming decade.” Listen today Related: You Need To Hear: David A. Stockman on “Peak Trump” (Podcast)
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Read MoreOur latest audiobook is David A Stockman’s “Peak Trump: The Undrainable Swamp and the Fantasy of MAGA”. It’s an amazing read, Stockman has seen the machinations of the US government from the inside as the erstwhile youngest congressman ever elected (until AOC) and was Reagan’s head of MBO. This book takes no prisoners. Carefully balancing an expose on the failures of the political class which led to Trump’s election, while simultaneously excoriating The Donald for his myriad missteps and failures. Carefully note, that this is not a “Never Trump / Orange Man Bad” rant. It’s an incisive expose into a system rigged to preclude any real reforms, now ostensibly being led by a clueless narcissist who is finding that the byzantine workings of The Swamp are far more complex and ingrained for a reality TV star to master, and how that will affect us all.
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Read MoreSocialism is strangely impervious to refutation by real-world experience. Over the past hundred years, there have been more than two dozen attempts to build a socialist society, from the Soviet Union to Maoist China to Venezuela. All of them have ended in varying degrees of failure. But, according to socialism’s adherents, that is only because none of these experiments were “real socialism”. This book documents the history of this, by now, standard response. It shows how the claim of fake socialism is only ever made after the event. As long as a socialist project is in its prime, almost nobody claims that it is not real socialism. On the contrary, virtually every socialist project in history has gone through a honeymoon period, during which it was enthusiastically praised by prominent Western intellectuals. It was only when their failures became too obvious to deny that they got retroactively reclassified as “not real socialism”. Listen today…
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Read MoreSet in 1890’s Imperial Germany, this remarkable novella follows the arc of a family as narrated by the head as he initially enthuses over the socialist sweep to power. Quickly, however, he progresses through various stages of disenfranchisement that inevitably follows: first tempering his expectations, then ratcheting them downward, followed by grappling with cognitive dissonance brought about by the internal contradictions of the new system. When those contradictions are inescapable, he finally spirals into angst and despair as he comes to fully comprehend the horrors of socialism. Realizing it is too late for himself, his family and livelihood largely destroyed, he commits one final act of repudiation against his socialist future. Originally written in German in 1893 by the journalist and politician Eugen Richter, it was translated into English in 1907 by Henry Wright with Thomas Mackay providing an introduction to the English text. Now that so-called “democratic socialism” is finding new found vogue in the current age, Mark E. Jeftovic provides a new forward with contemporary context. Get it now
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