Stanley Druckenmiller a legendary hedge fund manager sat down for a rare one-on-one interview with Bloomberg Television’s Stephanie Ruhle, saying that he’s decided to speak out now because he sees “a storm coming, maybe bigger than the storm we had in 2008, 2010.” Stanley Druckenmiller said that the mushrooming costs of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, with unfunded liabilities as high as $211 trillion, will bankrupt the nation’s youth an pose a much greater danger than the debt currently being debated in Congress. He said, “While everybody is focusing on the here and now, there’s a much, much bigger storm that’s about to hit…I am not against seniors. What I am against is current seniors stealing from future seniors.”
Video and excerpts below:
Druckenmiller on why he’s speaking out now:
“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. 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.”
On U.S. demographics:
“Something remarkable has occurred since 1994 until now, which is entitlement spending, or let me say transfer payments to be a little more correct. Transfer payments which were 28% and 60, and were 50% when we were in the budget mess in ’94. Lo and behold, they’ve gone up to 67% of government outlays. But they haven’t gone up because of demographics. They’ve gone up because the seniors have a very, very powerful lobby. They keep getting more and more transfer payments from the youth. But the demographic storm is just starting now. It reminds me of ’05 when people just extrapolated housing prices going up for 50 years…Everyone sorta lives with their rulers in the past and doesn’t look at coming changes. So what’s going to happen is we now have a working population, this is the way entitlements work, where the current workforce is paying for the benefits of the seniors. And since 2000, we’ve had about 4.5 to 4.8 workers for every retiree. By 2050, that number will drop to 2.4 workers per retiree. Another catchy way to say it is by 2030, the average population of the United States is gonna be older than the average Floridian right now.”
On who is going to stop seniors from stealing from the next generation:
“You asked me why I’m here. And I think people like me and others need to speak out. It’s about the future, not about the present where the problem is. And let me just say one thing. I am not against seniors, okay. I love seniors. Unfortunately I’m going to be one in the not-too-distant futures. What I am against is current seniors to me stealing from future seniors.”
On who should be blamed for hurting the economy:
“It’s hard to tell who’s going to be blamed– if we don’t act and this occurs…There’s plenty of blame to go around. If I had to analyze how do we get into the financial crisis, I would say it started way back in the ’90s when then-Chairman Greenspan refused to address the dot-com bubble, came up with some new theory of productivity and therefore we’re not going to have a problem, so all these NASDAQ companies who were never going to earn money went to hundreds-of-times earnings and then of course, we had a major bust. And instead of taking a recession and having the cleanup…they needed an offset. So they created the housing bubble. So now by hindsight, everybody says, ‘Well, you had these horrible Wall Street actors,’ and I’m sure there were quite a few horrible Wall Street actors. And I don’t doubt that they were part of the problem. In fact, I know they were part of the problem. But I also know it was negative real interest rates for 12 outta 20 years that enabled these actors to do the things they were doing and incented, yes, incented them to go out and gamble the way they were gambling.”
On gridlock in Washington:
“I’m pretty frustrated. This sequester thing– if you just look at how it came about, first of all, every five minutes all the suffering and all this horrible stuff is going to happen in various sectors if this goes through. But there’s three things that are not on the table in the sequester. I know you’re gonna be shocked by this. Medicare, social security and Medicaid, okay.”
On why Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are not on the table:
“I’m sure it’s because of short-term politics. The problem with politicians is, they really only do have a four-year life cycle. The rest of us should have the responsibility to look a little further than that ahead. But yeah, I don’t know whether ‘mad’ is the word. I’m extremely frustrated by their refusal to deal with this problem. And the sequester thing, I think the president made a deal. It was a deal so they would extend the debt ceiling, which they did, all right. I am very much for tax reform. But I don’t think it should be part of this particular thing and we should be parading out the crowd we’d been parading about to say how horrible this is going to affect the economy. Let me tell ya, I don’t know what the economy’s going to do. But it’s just a little ridiculous to say a $600 billion tax increase over ten years and $150 billion increase in the payroll tax is going to
