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Wall Street Legend Warns: A ‘Storm’ Is Coming

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Photo Credit: BloombergNoted hedge fund manager Stan Druckenmiller, 59, on Friday warned that the U.S. economy is headed for a “storm” that could prove to be far worse than the financial meltdown of 2008.

But first, if you’re not familiar with his name, here’s what you need to know: He’s one of the most respected and successful hedge fund managers in the past 30 years.

Obviously, you don’t achieve that type of success (or notoriety) on Wall Street by running your mouth. That being said, if Druckenmiller, a former partner of billionaire liberal philanthropist George Soros, is predicting serious economic trouble for the U.S., perhaps we should listen.

“I see a storm coming, maybe bigger than the storm we had in 2008, 2010. And really, the reason could happen without people looking as for a lot of similar reasons that we could get into,” he said during an interview with Bloomberg TV’s Stephanie Ruhle.

“But the basic the basic story is, the demographic bubble I was looking at way back in ’94 that started in 2011, we are right at the first ramp-up of this thing that is about to hit,” he added.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Great Sequester Panic

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Photo Credit: Reuters Prepare for the end of food safety as we have known it. For a breakdown in public order. For little children languishing in ignorance. If only Edward Gibbon were here to chronicle the devastation. On March 1, the fabric of our civilization begins to unwind.

That’s when the economy begins to stall and we turn our back on our values, all because the federal government will have to begin to cut a few tens of billions of dollars from the largest budget the world has ever known.

This is the lurid fairy tale spun by President Barack Obama. In the fight over the sequester, he is resorting to the tried-and-true (and tiresome) strategy of every official confronted with budget cuts he doesn’t want to implement, from the commander in chief to a lowly bureaucrat toiling at some school district: maximize the scare-mongering and pain.

In Hans Christian Andersen terms, Obama is the princess and the sequester is the pea. Over the next 10 years, the sequester amounts to a $1.16 trillion cut, or roughly 3 cents on every federal dollar. If we can’t squeeze a couple of pennies out of every dollar, we might as well begin our great national bankruptcy proceedings right now.

This year we are supposed to cut $85 billion from a $3.5 trillion budget. And it won’t even be that much. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the federal government won’t be able to cut the full $85 billion. It will manage to cut only about half that in 2013.

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Panetta To Propose Military Pay Cut After Obama Raised Federal Officials Pay

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Photo Credit: US Army AfricaOutgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta reportedly believes the military should receive a pay cut in order to respond to the budget cuts facing the Pentagon — a position that might strengthen the Republican push to reverse President Obama’s executive order raising the salary of Vice President Joe Biden and other federal officials.

“Panetta will recommend to Congress that military salaries be limited to a one percent increase in 2014,” CNN reports, explaining that Panetta is “effectively decreasing troop salaries next year . . . The decision comes as the secretary is stepping up the rhetoric about dire cuts at the Pentagon if sequestration goes into effect.”

The debate about sequestration did not stop Obama from ending a pay freeze for some government officials, effectively authorizing a pay raise that costs $11 billion.

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Former Reagan Budget Director Warns Of New Housing Bubble

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Photo Credit: Daily CallerThe market may be rising, but according to one expert, all is not well on the home front.

David Stockman, former director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Reagan administration, insists that the housing market outlook is not as cheery as some say.

“I would say we have a housing bubble … again,” Stockman told the Daily Ticker. “We don’t have a real organic sustainable recovery, because in a world of medicated money by the central bank, things aren’t what they appear to be.”

Stockman pointed to artificially low interest rates and speculation in the real-estate market as culprits.

“It’s happening in the most speculative subprime markets, where massive amounts of ‘fast money’ is rolling in to buy, to rent, on a speculative basis for a quick trade,” he said. “And as soon as they conclude prices have moved enough, they’ll be gone as fast as they came.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Tea Party Caucus Leads GOP Charge Against Budget Crisis

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The 2010 landslide election saw a revitalized Republican Party win 64 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives on a platform that rejected the fiscal policies of the Democratically controlled 111th Congress.  One attention-grabbing key to this success was a new political force: the Tea Party.

More than a few pundits were skeptical about how this force would play out when it became institutionalized in the new Congress as the “Tea Party Caucus.”  David Kurtz, writing for Talking Points Memo, called it “no small irony” that Rep. Michele Bachmann (R.-Minn.) would form such an “insidery and cocooned” thing as a caucus in connection with a “supposedly grassroots, spontaneous, and defiantly outsidery … movement.”  Juan Williams of Fox News wrote off the caucus for a different reason, noting that “Tea Party freshmen are all about talk radio rhetoric, campaign slogans and reveling in the widespread discontent with American politics.  They have yet to display any capacity to govern.”

Have any of these criticisms proven true?  Thanks to the National Taxpayers Union Foundation’s BillTally “100 Day Report” on Congress, we now have numbers, not just words, to assess what has happened in the House since January and examine the validity of these concerns.

Since 1991, BillTally has analyzed the fiscal impact of every proposed piece of legislation.  The system then matches up legislation with sponsorship records for every lawmaker, showing what would happen to the federal budget if all bills supported by a given member of Congress—regardless of floor votes—instantly became law.  Thus, BillTally offers a unique, by-the-numbers look at Congress’ agenda.

After 100 days, BillTally results show the average Republican would cut a net of $63 billion from the budget and the average Democrat would actually increase the budget by $6.3 billion.  Both are sharp reversals from the same time in 2009, when the typical House GOPer was not backing a net agenda to cut spending, while the average Democrat was backing a much bigger boost in the budget.

Read More at Human Events by Douglas Kellogg, Human Events