A former United States Politician who served both as a Republican U.S. Representative for the state of Michigan and as Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan, Stockman's opinions on financial matters are taken seriously in the media. Last year around this time, he urged CNBC investors to sell everything because he saw "a recession coming down the pike in 2017."
This recession never came to bear (though it presumably still could with just a few weeks left in 2017), but he's still considered to be a respected voice on how to be financially savvy. And he's now convinced that many investors are headed straight towards a cliff – especially those who are putting their faith in making bit returns on Bitcoin.
"From bitcoin to Amazon, the financials, the Russell 2000 and most everything else in between, the casinos are digesting no information except the price action and are relentlessly rising on nothing more than pure momentum. The mania has gone full retard," he wrote in a recent article published to his blog, David Stockman's Contra Corner.
"... Bitcoin is neither an outlier nor a one-off freak; it's a poster boy for an unhinged financial system where honest price discovery, two-way markets, fear of risk and financial discipline have been completely destroyed by the central banks."
While admitting that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have the potential to become solid forms of private money and payment systems that exist "away from the grasping hand of the Deep State," he also says that many of them represent "runaway bubbles" that "eventually generate their own demise."
Just in the year 2017, Bitcoin, in particular, has seen unprecedented increases in value relative to the U.S. dollar. On January 1, 2017, the price of Bitcoin had just topped $1,000 per coin. Fast-forward to December 1, 2017, and the price of Bitcoin blew right on past $10,000 per coin.
This might seem like a tremendously promising investment for people on the sidelines to consider, what with such massive increases, right? Wrong, according to Stockman. After pulling the data points showing how long it took for Bitcoin to go from $0 to $1,000 – 1,789 days to be exact – he then compared this to how long it took for Bitcoin to jump from $10,000 to $11,000 – and everything in between.
In essence, the price of Bitcoin has been increasing exponentially ever since day one, an indication that it has reached "mania" levels at which every individual and his mother is now trying to snatch their piece of the Bitcoin pie. Eventually something has to give, and Stockman predicts that it's going to get really, really ugly.
This exponential sequence, he says, "is not the birthing throes of a new money being born; it's just another iteration of the same old lemmings stampeding toward the cliff."
Commenting as well on President Trump's new tax plan during a recent segment with Fox Business' Neil Cavuto, Stockman had a similarly sour view of what it will realistically bring about.
"This is an economic dud, it is a political landmine and it is an ideological imposter parading as a Reaganesque supply-chain tax cut when it's nothing like that," he's quoted as saying. "It's a wish list of businesses and Wall Street."
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