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highplainsdem

(48,718 posts)
Wed Mar 14, 2018, 08:33 PM Mar 2018

2016 Newsweek article on Kudlow: Opus Dei convert, ex cocaine addict, econ moron

From Newsweek, 5/12/2016:


http://www.newsweek.com/larry-kudlow-donald-trump-economic-adviser-459226


God, Cocaine, Money and Forgetting: A Look at Donald Trump's New Economic Adviser


The story of the man who might rewrite America’s tax plan if Donald Trump is elected is, as the mogul might say, really, really fantastic, just terrific.

It’s a story of God, cocaine, money and forgetting—but maybe not in that order. Born at the beginning of the baby boom in 1947, Lawrence Alan "Larry" Kudlow—whom Trump recently turned to for a revision of his tax package—grew up to be lefty, hairy and against the Vietnam War. He worked on Democratic political campaigns alongside Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton future campaign chairman John Podesta before he had his first conversion, veered hard right and soon found himself working in Ronald Reagan’s Office of Management and Budget.

After this stint in D.C., Kudlow returned to the private sector in 1987, headed to Wall Street and spent some years like every other debauched executive with an excess of cash and a waterbed in the tail end of the Me Decade: on weeklong cocaine binges. His drug problem caused him to resign from the investment bank Bear Stearns in 1994.

Conservative intellectual godfather William Buckley, never one to let a fine right-wing mind go to waste, soon scooped him off the sidewalk and appointed him senior economics editor at National Review, the nation’s preeminent conservative publication.

-snip-

But Kudlow kept drinking and snorting, and National Review fired him after a year. He hit rock bottom in 1995 and shipped out for five months in a Minnesota rehab. There, he ditched the coke and booze for good. Upon leaving rehab, he signed up for some Catholic Opus Dei retreats and found he liked the rigor of a conservative, and what some call "cult-like," group that has been likened to Scientology, with ties to fascist organizations in Italy, and which offered spiritual succor to the likes of the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia.

In 1997, Kudlow was on his knees in a chapel at St. Thomas More Church in New York City, bawling and converting to Catholicism in front of the whole lock-jawed National Review gang, including Buckley, Kate O’Beirne and Peggy Noonan.

-snip-

He also dispenses wisdom privately to “clients” through Kudlow & Company, according to his website.

Those investors apparently don’t know or care that Kudlow has been spectacularly wrong on the biggest economic turning points in modern history. Just before the real estate crash that provoked the 2008 global financial meltdown, he ridiculed people predicting that outcome as “bubbleheads” and was still assuring his listeners and viewers after the financial crash that there was nothing to worry about. As late as 2011, he predicted that the Obama administration stimulus program would create “1970s-style stagflation.” Meanwhile, the country has been seeing the lowest inflation in two generations and the lowest interest rates in history.

-snip-
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2016 Newsweek article on Kudlow: Opus Dei convert, ex cocaine addict, econ moron (Original Post) highplainsdem Mar 2018 OP
He's obviously qualified Turbineguy Mar 2018 #1
I was going to ask which came first--the cult or the cocaine-- janx Mar 2018 #2
Interesting linkage Mopar151 Mar 2018 #3

janx

(24,128 posts)
2. I was going to ask which came first--the cult or the cocaine--
Wed Mar 14, 2018, 09:03 PM
Mar 2018

but I made an educated guess that proved to be correct.

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