April 5 (Bloomberg) -- David Stockman first came to
prominence as Ronald Reagan’s publicity-prone director of the
Office of Management and Budget in the early 1980s. In the
decades since he was fired from that job, his career in the
leveraged-buyout business has been of no great distinction
except that it included an indictment for fraud. (The charges
were dropped and he paid $7.2 million to settle a civil case
brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission.) Now here we
are discussing his new book on the corruption of American
capitalism, “The Great Deformation.”
The interest in his book and in the long column promoting
it in the New York Times on March 30 are a tribute to something,
I suppose. I’m not quite sure what.