Stockman: Markets in store for huge correction if Fed doesn't raise rates

David Stockman is not a fan of the Fed. In fact he claims that the Fed is on a “jihad” against retirees and savers.

The former Reagan budget director and author of “The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America” visited Yahoo Finance ahead of the Fed announcement to discuss his predictions and the potential impact of today’s interest rate decision. “80 months of zero interest rates is downright crazy and it hasn’t helped the Main Street economy because we’re at peak debt,” he says.

Businesses in the U.S. are $12 trillion in debt. That’s $2 trillion more than before the crisis, but “all of it has gone into financial engineering—stock buybacks, mergers and acquisitions and so forth,” according to Stockman. “The jig is up; [the Fed] needs to get on with the business of allowing interest rates to find some normalized level.”

While Stockman believes that the Fed should absolutely raise rates today, he isn’t so sure that they will. But even if they do, he says they’ll muddle the effect by saying “‘one and done’ or ‘we’re going to sit back and watch this thing unfold for the next two or three months.’”

This all fuels an inflationary bubble on Wall Street, according to Stockman. “This massive money printing we’ve had has never gotten out of the canyons of Wall Street. It’s sitting there as excess reserves.”

According to Stockman, the weakness of the U.S. economy has been due to a lack of investment over the past 15 years and inflated labor costs in America that can’t compete on a global scale. “Simply printing more money and keeping interest rates at zero do not help that problem.”

Zero interest policies, says Stockman, are leading to the global economic turmoil we are currently experiencing. “In the last 15 years China took its debt from $2 trillion to $28 trillion… it’s a house of cards with an enormous overcapacity and enormous speculation and gambling that is beginning to roll over,” he says. “It’s just the leading edge of a global deflation that I think is underway as a consequence of all this excess credit growth that we’ve had.”

If the Fed raises rates and doesn’t mince words there’s going to be a long-running market correction, says Stockman. If the Fed doesn’t raise rates there will be a short-term relief rally but eventually the markets will lose confidence in the central bank bubble and we’ll be in store for a “huge correction.”