Mike Whitney: Is Cheney Betting on Economic Collapse?:
Wouldn’t you like to know where Dick Cheney puts his money? Then you’d know whether his “deficits don’t matter” claim is just baloney or not.
Well, as it turns out, Kiplinger Magazine ran an article based on Cheney’s financial disclosure statement and, sure enough, found out that the VP is lying to the American people for the umpteenth time. Deficits do matter and Cheney has invested his money accordingly.
The article is called “Cheney’s betting on bad news” and provides an account of where Cheney has socked away more than $25 million. While the figures may be estimates, the investments are not. According to Tom Blackburn of the Palm Beach Post, Cheney has invested heavily in “a fund that specializes in short-term municipal bonds, a tax-exempt money market fund and an inflation protected securities fund. The first two hold up if interest rates rise with inflation. The third is protected against inflation.”
Cheney has dumped another (estimated) $10 to $25 million in a European bond fund which tells us that he is counting on a steadily weakening dollar. So, while working class Americans are losing ground to inflation and rising energy costs, Darth Cheney will be enhancing his wealth in “Old Europe”. As Blackburn sagely notes, “‘Not all bad news’ is bad for everybody.”
The fact that a guy who has spent a lot of his life in government service has $50 million to worry about is interesting. That’s a pretty big windfall from a short period in private life. Not many of us do that well.
The original piece goes off on the plutocrats and swindlers — you can insert your own pejoratives — but what does it say that someone with as much influences as he has and, dare I say it, so little time to spend that loot, is more interested in socking it away than in investing it in the economy he claims is doing fine?