Larry Kudlow is Still an Idiot

The Great Recession

One Loonie fell today, and another rose. The Canadian “Loonie” tested 2018 lows against the dollar when existing Canadian home sales crashed to their lowest in five years. On the same day Loony Larry Kudlow rose to a new chief position at the White House, more than justifying recirculation of the following article:  

Lampooning Larry Kudlow is like shooting fish in a supermarket.

I ought to be embarrassed at going after dead prey and scaring innocent people. Now one of Trump’s chief economic advisors, Kudlow is a Washington-Wall-Street insider to the core of his mousy, shriveled soul: A turncoat Democrat — who, in his early years, worked on campaigns alongside Bill Clinton, John Podesta, and Michael Medved — Larry Kudlow has flipped as big as you can flop.

Kudlow began his career as a junior economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York under a division that handled open-market committee operations. Kudlow also worked as an advisor to Freddie Mac and was employed many years by Bear Stearns until they wouldn’t have him any longer because of his cocaine habit, which he maintained at a cost of $10,000 a month. His alcohol addiction was much cheaper, so he should have stayed with that. In the process, he burned his way through two wives and moved on to a third.

Larry, in other words, has lived his entire smelly life inside the beltway of Washington, DC, and at the heart of the establishment’s world of finance in New York. You cannot spend your entire life in the fish barrel and not stink of fish. Guilt by association is a fallacy, of course, but Larry Kudlow has a lot of associations worth noting if you can stand the stench long enough to count them all.

After turning from Democrats, this switch-hitter of high principle became one of the founding fathers of supply-side economics. During the Reagan administration, Kudlow worked alongside David Stockman in the Office of Management and Budget to plan and produce Reagan’s budget. (Stockman was rapidly able to see the truth about the plan’s failed presuppositions and moved on. Larry remained behind as high priest.)

Larry Kudlow is also a TV personality who has regularly matched wits with his cohost, Jim “Crazy” Cramer, another giant talking head from whom I store quotes in my “idiot box” for occasional use in articles about the world’s most odious economists and fiasco-ridden financial advisors.

Read the rest here: The Great Recession