David Stockman has turned into a bit of a permabear of late and he’s at it again, predicting that a 40 percent market crash is inevitable and the ongoing rally is being led by nothing more than “day traders, chart monkeys, robo machines.”
Stockman was a Republican politician in Michigan who also served as Ronald Reagan’s budget director, and he’s been predicting a big market crash for a while now.
He is no fan of President Donald Trump — recently calling him a total economic ignoramus — and he was all gloom and doom again Tuesday in an interview with CNBC. Not even a 20 percent rally since December’s lows has changed his bearish prognosis for the market as a whole.
“This is just day traders, chart monkeys, robo machines. This has nothing to do with rationality or investment analysis on any reasonable time basis,” Stockman said on CNBC’s “Futures Now.” “There’s no Trump boom. We’re near the end of this cycle. Recessions haven’t been outlawed. It will happen in the next year or two.”
Stockman was on the show talking about what he sees in the market and promoting his book, “Peak Trump: The Undrainable Swamp and the Fantasy of MAGA.”
“We hit peak Trump and peak market at 2,940 on the S&P back in September,” he said. “I think that’s the peak for a long time to come, and I think Trump foolishly embraced the stock market.”
Stockman said the S&P 500 will plunge to 1,600 or lower, a more than 40 percent drop from its current 2,799 shortly after the opening bell Wednesday on the East Coast.
Stockman has been warning investors for a couple of years now of a massive sell-off that hasn’t happened yet. Of course, that doesn’t mean he’s wrong but two years ago he predicted a “horrendous storm,” and last year he called it a “daredevil market.”
And he’s sticking to his guns in 2019.
“We’ve got headwinds coming from all over the world,” he said, “and you can see it in the export data, in the European economy, in the big troubles going on in China, (and) you can see it in our own data, which has been really weak.”
He also noted the exploding national debt, which has grown under Trump, whose own budget office projects will be more than 50 percent higher when he leaves office in 2025 if he’s able to win a second term in office. And that’s only if a lot of wishful thinking on the administration’s part comes to fruition.
“It is a huge risk. I mean it’s actually crazy time that this market and Washington, both ends of the Acela corridor, are totally ignoring,” Stockman said. “We’re going to go into a fiscal crisis in the 2020s when the entire baby boomers are retiring and Social Security and Medicare are soaring that we won’t come out of. That’s the big elephant in the room.
“We should be having almost no deficit at the top of a business cycle. We have a serious problem of unhinged central banking, and we have a Washington that has totally been euthanized by cheap yields on the debt. And, they pretend you can borrow $4 trillion at the top of a business cycle and live to tell about it.”