Stanley Druckenmiller, former chairman & CEO, Duquesne Capital Management; was on CNBC this morning. The famous former hedge fund manager who rarely gives interviews also appeared on Bloomberg last week, as well as CNBC in late February. Stanley Druckenmiller issued dire warnings over Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, Fed policy and more. Druckenmiller argued that seniors were basically stealing from the youth through current entitlement programs. He says that the big increase in entitlement spending over the past decade is NOT due to demographics. He believes that the coming problems will be due to demographics, but the spending increases over the past four decades had nothing to do with an aging population. Druckenmiller says $16 trillion is not the problem (it is much larger) and is at least $70 trillion and possibly as much as $211 trillion. He had scathing criticism for GOP presidents back to Richard Nixon. Video segments and computer generated transcript can be found below:
fo next hour we put together a power panel to examine the health of the markets and the economy, tell us what needs to be done in order to fix some of the big problems that are out there, as well. stanley druckenmiller is former chairman and ceo of kane capital management. ken langone, jeff canada is the president and ceo of harlem children’s zone. and kevin warsh is the former federal reserve governor and distinguished visiting fellow at the hoover institution. gentlemen, welcome. we are so pleased to have all of you here this morning. we have a lot of ground to cover. why don’t we start with this market at this point, and ken, the question is, is this rally for real? i don’t know. you don’t know. why? because i think there’s too many factors out there that you can blame one way or the other. i don’t know. you like — i do know low interest rates are driving people into the equity markets for a return. you think it’s a little bit of a false rally because of — i’m just saying what’s driving it, where the energy is coming from is people looking at their returns on bonds, and the high risk in owning bonds because if rates go the other way, and they will, you’re going to lose a lot of money if you’re in ten-year or 15-year or 20-year bonds. was that handkerchief you showed when we’re going to show you, probably, that’s when you probably should have put it away. but if it makes you — does it — is it made out of old water bottles? no. it’s real, joe. it’s not absorbent. only cotton is absorbent. go to a restaurant and spill a drink, and try and pick up the water. just pushes it around. 28 seconds to tell one of his stocks. right. you know, druckenmiller might actually know something about whether e market’s going up. i don’t even — i does. i’m admitting i don’t know. i’ll tell you why i’m confused. when they did qe-1, the game plan was to own stocks until it ended. right. sure