Former White House budget director David Stockman isn't exactly jumping head over heels for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

Her flaws: "she thinks war is peace; deficits don't matter; the baby boom is entitled to the social insurance they didn't earn; and that the Fed's serial bubble machine is leading the nation back to prosperity," he writes on his blog.

"Actually, it's leading to the greatest financial bubble in human history. After 75 months of ZIRP [zero-interest-rate policy] and a decade of Wall Street coddling and subsidization by the Fed, the windfalls to the 1 percent have become unspeakable in their magnitude and illegitimacy."

The Fed has kept its federal funds rate target at a record low of zero to 0.25 percent since December 2008, while its balance sheet has mushroomed to $4.5 trillion through quantitative easing.

"The day of fiscal reckoning is being forestalled by an artificial, destructive and unsustainable monetary regime that has drastically lowered the true cost of the national debt and monetized trillions of public debt with central bank credit plucked out of thin air," Stockman says.

"Hillary Clinton's sell-out to the Warfare State is not just about war and peace — even as it fosters the former and precludes the latter. It's also about the nation's busted fiscal accounts, its languishing main street economy and the runaway gambling den that has taken over Wall Street."

Now that Clinton has officially entered the presidential campaign, speculation is rife as to her economic agenda.

"The big unchecked box when it comes to Hillary Clinton is where she stands on issues related to corporate power and economic populism," Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, tells The New Republic's Danny Vinik.

"Is she willing to really challenge powerful interests when that is needed to help the whole country?"

Vinik's take: "if her comments over the past year are any guide, then the answer to that question is no." Indeed, "Clinton has long cultivated close ties to Wall Street," he notes.

The securities and investment industry contributed more than $7 million to Clinton's presidential campaign in 2008. And since she left the Obama administration in 2013, Clinton has earned big bucks giving speeches to Wall Street firms.

She will try "reaching out to progressives without infuriating Wall Street donors," Vinik says.
"But it probably won't work. The left doesn't want their candidate to focus exclusively on mobility. They want one to focus on stagnant wages and breaking up the big banks."

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