David Stockman

David Stockman is the ultimate Washington insider turned iconoclast. He began his career in Washington as a young man and quickly rose through the ranks of the Republican Party to become the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street.

At the podium, Stockman’s expertise and experience cannot be matched, and he has a reputation for zesty financial straight talk. Defying right- and left-wing boxes, his latest book catalogues both the corrupters and defenders of sound money, fiscal rectitude, and free markets. Stockman discusses the forces that have left the public sector teetering on the edge of political dysfunction and fiscal collapse
and have caused America’s financial system to morph into an unstable, bubble-prone gambling arena that undermines capitalist prosperity and showers speculators with vast windfall gains.

Stockman’s career in Washington began in 1970, when he served as a special assistant to U.S. Representative, John Anderson of Illinois. From 1972 to 1975, he was executive director of the U.S. House of Representatives Republican Conference. Stockman was elected as a Michigan Congressman in 1976 and held the position until his resignation in January 1981.

He then became Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan, serving from 1981 until August 1985. Stockman was the youngest cabinet member in the 20th century.
Although only in his early 30s, Stockman became well known to the public during this time concerning the role of the federal government in American society.

After resigning from his position as Director of the OMB, Stockman wrote a best-selling book, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed (1986). The book was Stockman’s frontline report of the miscalculations, manipulations, and political intrigues that led to the failure of the Reagan Revolution. A major publishing event and New York Times bestseller in its day, The Triumph of Politics is still startlingly relevant to the conduct of Washington politics today.

After leaving government, Stockman joined Wall Street investment bank Salomon Bros. He later became one of the original partners at New York-based private equity firm, The Blackstone Group. Stockman left Blackstone in 1999 to start his own private equity fund based in Greenwich, Connecticut.

In his newest New York Times best-seller, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America (2013), Stockman lays out how the U.S. has devolved from a free market economy into one fatally deformed by Washington’s endless fiscal largesse, K-street lobbies and Fed sponsored bailouts and printing press money.

Stockman was born in Ft. Hood, Texas. He received his B.A. from Michigan State University and pursued graduate studies at Harvard Divinity School.

He lives in Greenwich, Connecticut, with his wife Jennifer Blei Stockman. They have two daughters, Rachel and Victoria.

“ … Stockman is a distinctly angry man with a lot to say … he believes that the American government as badly lost its way … because crony capitalism has perverted policy making and upturned free market principles. As a result, the country is drowning in debt that will eventually bring it down and destroy the credibility of the Fed.” — Financial Times

Stockman’s vision in creating David Stockman’s Contra Corner was that it be “the place where mainstream delusions and cant about the Warfare State, the Bailout State, Bubble Finance and Beltway Banditry are ripped, refuted and rebuked.” Toward that aim, Stockman has brought together leading contrarian thinkers on politics, the economy, and the financial markets in the Contra Club section of the website, in addition to featuring his own analysis and musings about the current state of the world in Stockman’s Corner.

The site also features Contra News and Views–the thoughts of other leading contrarian writers, History Pages revealing the true facts of how we arrived at the current state of affairs, rather than the whitewashed version so often found in mainstream publications. Also featured will be a gallery of David Stockman’s favorite economic charts illustrating critical factors and trends in the economy that are never addressed by mainstream economists and pundits. The site also offers the Contra Bookstore featuring books by David Stockman and an assortment of titles which he recommends.