Steve Rattner and Nancy Pelosi

We close with a parting shot at Steve Rattner. You might recall us heckling Rattner earlier this year during a presentation at an elite investment conference in New York. We were flabbergasted that a guy like Rattner – who made hundreds of millions as a private-equity manager while his clients reportedly made almost nothing – would lecture a room of real investors about the supposed "evils" of income inequality. We booed him and then called him a joke – to widespread applause from the audience. (By the way, Vanity Fair reports about the spectacle in its current issue.)

Our booing, the negative press, and even a corruption indictment for bribing New York State pension officials don't appear to have slowed him down or weakened his impressive self-esteem. He is not only publishing a book that brags about his role in restructuring General Motors (where he arranged for the union to steal 20% of the company, despite the fact that the union's policies and strikes led to the firm's demise). Rattner now says the tens of billions of dollars the U.S. taxpayers are going to lose on the upcoming GM initial public offering are a great stimulus for the U.S. economy. I'm not making this up. Here's what Rattner told Fortune: "If the government loses $10 to $20 billion, that's one of the most effective stimulus programs around."

Apparently Rattner and Nancy Pelosi went to the same school of economics. (Remember, Pelosi said paying for people to stay unemployed was the best way to stimulate the economy...) If the government losing money in bailout after bailout was truly good for our country, why wouldn't the government simply print billions up every day and mail it randomly to people across the country? We could have new billionaires every day!

It has never occurred to these people (Rattner and Pelosi) that when you take money away from profitable and productive people (taxpayers) and give it (by the billions) to failed companies and unemployed workers, you're not stimulating anything but more failure. Or maybe it has occurred to them... but they're merely operating (successfully) under the new rules of Amerika, where everything is done to appease the mob.
Porter Stansberry