Not Trump Lies. Not Dem Spin. Not UniParty
Pettifoggery. Not Wall Street Cons…… Just Fierce
Focus On The Facts.

Dear Reader,

The 2024 election is long over, but the truth still remains in exceedingly short supply. Neither the Big Government Democrats nor the Trumpified Republican Party—now purged of principled small-government, sound-money, and balanced-budget voices like Tom Massie—will level with you about what is actually happening: That is, to bubble-ridden financial markets, the debt-entombed Main Street economy and Washington’s rogue machinery of the Warfare State, the Welfare State, and the Federal Reserve printing presses.

The consensus in both wings of the UniParty is clear: Keep spending, keep borrowing, keep printing, keep intervening abroad, and keep papering over the consequences with promises, propaganda and prevarication.

As for Wall Street, its easy-money gamblers cheer on this UniParty folly because the Fed’s flood of printing press credit juices asset prices in the short run. And its endless bailouts, cheap money-subsidies to professional gamblers and hedge funds and stock index propping operations have the worst possible societal impact: Namely, they generate massive wealth gains to speculators among the top 1%—even as they socialize losses from the periodic bubble crashes and bailouts and cause the sweeping diversion of resources into money-shuffling and wagering on Wall Street rather than productive investment in plant, equipment, technology and workers on main street.

Even then, the mainstream media defaults on its true job of exposing the corruption, venality and waste, even as it eagerly amplifies the misleading propaganda and noise from both ends of the Accela Corridor.

What gets buried, however, is reality. What we get is unsustainable debt trajectories, distorted bubble-fueled financial markets, eroding main street economic fundamentals, and policy choices that punish savers, workers, and future generations while enriching insiders and speculators today.

That is why you need an independent daily source of facts, analysis and historical context more than ever before. David Stockman’s Contra Corner cuts through the partisan theater, Beltway bombast, and financial hype.

So doing, we deliver facts, charts, historical context, and unvarnished analysis rooted in 50 years of experience across Capitol Hill, the Reagan White House, two decades on Wall Street at Solomon Brothers, Blackstone Group and our own private equity shop—and we do so without allegiance to any party, candidate, narrative or self- interested angle.

And now we have a special added sauce. We have mastered the art of using AI on a daily basis to mine, formulate and display in clear and compelling charts and tables the true information that cuts down all the phony claims, shibboleths, memes and talking points, which are the stock and trade of propaganda peddlers from Washington and Wall Street alike.

Markets, Main Street, and the Fed: The Gap Between Spin and Substance

For instance, we regularly eviscerate the Wall Street narrative celebrating record high stock prices and the claim that the US economy is thriving and “strong.” At Contra Corner, by contrast, we examine the shaky foundations of the US economy and financial markets alike: To wit, the fact that household savings rates are at rock-bottom levels; that 80% of households have virtually no liquid buffer; that businesses carry $21 trillion in debt while stretching fragile supply chains around the planet for short-term margin gains; that aside from the AI CapEx bubble real domestic investment has flatlined; and that we have a struggling main street economy still digesting the 36% cumulative cost-of-living increase since January 2017.

Needless to say, the Fed’s malign role receives especial scrutiny. Decades of aggressive balance-sheet expansion (i.e. money-printing) and interest-rate suppression have distorted capital allocation, inflated asset prices relative to underlying cash flows, and left markets vulnerable to external shocks or a sustained loss of confidence in the Fed “put”.

Likewise, on main street unit labor costs have risen sharply, while productivity trends remain mediocre. At the same time, wages adjusted for actual inflation are dead in the water. The same goes for faltering small business viability and the massive diversion of Big Company cashflows into fulsome Wall Street payouts in the form of dividends, stock buybacks and LBOs—to the detriment of productive long-term internal investment.

All of these distortions tell a far different story than headline unemployment or GDP prints shaped by government spending and statistical conventions and legerdemain.

Moreover, the insanely punitive Trump tariff-taxes and the related Washington-driven industrial policy—wrapped in “America First” rhetoric—do not magically offset the price-level consequences of the Fed’s prolonged and excessive monetary expansion. Chronic trade deficits actually stem far more from Fed-inflated domestic cost structures and savings/investment imbalances than from “unfair” foreign practices.

Sound money, fiscal discipline, and market signals—not protectionist experiments or endless spending stimulus or unpaid for tax cuts—are the historical foundations of durable prosperity.

We apply the same fiercely independent lens to foreign policy and the Warfare State. The truth is there has not been a single “Forever War” —from Korea and Vietnam through two Iraq wars, Syria, Libya, various east Africa skirmishes and now the colossal catastrophe of the Trump/Bibi Netanyahu attack on Iran—that has bolstered the Homeland Security of America.

Instead, perpetual foreign interventions, provocations, and open-ended commitments have created a hugely costly and dysfunctional Empire, which drains resources and distracts harshly from domestic prosperity and solvency. Even then, the resulting trillion dollar per year Warfare State operates with minimal congressional oversight or strategic discipline from either party because both parties are on the payroll of the military- industrial-intelligence complex.

The Fiscal Doomsday Machine Neither Side Will Confront:

Public debt now exceeds $39 trillion and is on track to smash through $50 trillion well before the end of this decade. Under current baseline projections plus the spending promises embedded in both parties’ agendas—tax cut extensions, new tax exemptions and loopholes, the Donald’s absurd 50% DOD budget hike to $1.5 trillion per year, border control measures, entitlement inertia, and endless supplemental appropriations—the debt trajectory points toward $70 trillion by the mid-2030s and roughly 175% of GDP by mid-century. That’s a national debt of $150 trillion by mid- century, and one that will sink what’s left of American prosperity and stable democratic governance.

These are not partisan forecasts. They flow from the arithmetic of the Warfare State and Welfare State that the UniParty has entrenched. Social Security and Medicare spending will total $36 trillion over the next decade alone. Defense and national security spending continues its upward ratchet with little serious debate over mission, cost, or results. Neither major party shows appetite for structural reform of entitlements or genuine retrenchment of the national security establishment.

Interest costs on the federal debt have already surged past $1 trillion annually. At prevailing rates, they are projected to reach $3 trillion per year by the mid-2030s—exceeding current combined spending on defense, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps.

Likewise, private debt exceeds $65 trillion across households, businesses, and financial sectors. Cheap debt from the last decade is rolling over at ever higher costs, if it rolls over at all. These rising rates, in turn, crowd out private investment, pressure productivity, jobs, and real incomes.

This is not a temporary cycle. It is the predictable consequence of decades of easy money, chronic deficits, endless financialization, and the moral hazard of chronic Washington bailouts and crony capitalist subventions. The 2020-2021 pandemic response—$6.6 trillion in fiscal bailouts and stimmies (roughly 7.5 times the GDP loss) and a Fed balance sheet explosion from $3.8 trillion to $9 trillion—simply accelerated the process.

In fact, after the phony Trump/Fauci pandemic lockdowns and spend-a-thons of 2020, the Fed replicated 106 years of balance-sheet growth in just a matter of months. Inflation, asset bubbles, and embedded cost pressures followed as night follows day.

Yet neither Trump nor the Democrats have offered any solid measures to address these core problems. Instead, silly, shallow and increasingly angry partisan rhetoric and finger-pointing from both camps continues to dodge it. The result: America is locked into the most fragile fiscal and financial position in modern history.

What Contra Corner Delivers Five Days a Week

As we indicated, our daily missives are not designed to cheerlead any administration, party, or market rally. We are here to identify the good, the bad, the bogus, and the Beltway bombast—without fear or favor.

• Daily Dissection: Analysis of breaking economic data, market moves, policy announcements, and geopolitical developments. We separate signal from spin using primary sources, historical parallels, accounting reality and regular AI deep dives into the data, which actually inform and clarify the MSM noise of the day.
• Charts and Data: Visuals that reveal trends hidden in headline numbers—debt dynamics, yield curves, valuation metrics, inflation components, sectoral imbalances
• Historical Context: Lessons from gold-standard eras, previous debt cycles, monetary experiments, and fiscal consolidations. In all, our assessments draw upon 50 years on the Acela Corridor in the US Congress, OMB, investment banking, Blackstone partnership, private equity investment, authorships of a half dozen books and daily Contra Corner commentary since 2014
• Contrarian Voices: Recommended reads and insights from other independent thinkers challenging mainstream delusions on bubble finance, Forever Wars, entitlement math, regulatory capture, and cultural-economic fads.
  No Sacred Cows: We critique DEI mandates, climate alarmism, lockdown precedents, intelligence community overreach, corporate welfare, and financial speculation with equal rigor. Personal liberty, free markets, sound money, non-
  intervention abroad, and constitutionally limited government remain our lodestar

Each daily missive aims to equip you with perspective: A coherent framework for interpreting the daily flood of information that mainstream outlets, partisan actors and financial speculators distort or omit.

The 2020s Reckoning Is Here—Preparation Beats Panic

America’s thirty-year long party of false prosperity—built on easy money, cheap debt, financialization, and political promises that ignore arithmetic—is winding down. Chickens are coming home to roost regardless of which faction temporarily holds the White House or Congress.

Subscribers tell us Contra Corner helps them maintain clarity and sanity amid the hurly burly volatility of present day economic and political life. Still, our aim is not about predicting exact turning points but about understanding probabilities, risks, and second- order consequences that the consensus misses. That edge matters for investors, business owners, savers, retirees, and citizens who refuse to outsource their thinking to the taking heads of the cable news channels or the self-serving talking points of government officials and politicians.

1/30/1981 President Reagan and David Stockman meeting on the economy in the Oval Office

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For one-fifth of the price of a Starbucks’ cup of coffee, you gain access to independent, experienced analysis unavailable from legacy media or partisan outlets. Annual memberships offer the lowest effective rate; monthly options provide flexibility. Start your membership today and receive immediate access to the current 12-year archive, new daily issues (typically five per week, with occasional breaks for travel), and the peace of mind that comes from seeing through the UniParty fog and the Wall Street bubbles and baloney.

America’s challenges are structural and bipartisan in origin—and are now compounded by a reckless megalomaniac in the Oval Office who is turning the already failing process
of UniParty misgovernance into a veritable circus and clown show.

At the end of the day, America’s severe challenges will not be solved by election cycles or soundbites, if they are ever mitigated at all. Still, navigation through this minefield requires clear-eyed realism, historical literacy, and intellectual honesty. That is the mission of David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

So Buckle Up. The road ahead is bumpy—but informed readers are better positioned to navigate it. With best wishes for clear thinking in turbulent times,

David A. Stockman

 

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