Cheney thinks economy sucks

Posted by Evan Derkacz at 12:06 PM on August 24, 2006.

What's that expression? Money talks, bulls**t walks...

Via a tip to PEEK, I was directed to a May report that flew under my radar: Are Dick Cheney's Money Managers Betting on Bad News?

According to Kiplinger's, the Cheneys, who may be worth close to $100 million, have invested the vast majority of their wealth overseas, in markets that do not fluctuate based on the U.S. dollar:

Vice President Cheney's financial advisers are apparently betting on a rise in inflation and interest rates and on a decline in the value of the dollar against foreign currencies. That's the conclusion we draw after scouring the financial disclosure form released by Cheney this week.

The Cheneys' money is not in a blind trust but, according to his advisers: "the vice president pays no attention to his investments."

Perhaps. What we DO know is that he and his boss pay no attention to the well-being of the economy at large. Besides, what's nearly as flabbergasting as the possibility that Cheney chose to invest outside of U.S. markets is that he didn't bother to direct his money managers to keep his money domestic. Oh Dick.

Here's a clip from an interview with Ron "The Price of Loyalty" Suskind (emphasis added):

He talks to Dick Cheney at the end, after O'Neill says, "We really need an economic policy, we don't really have one." And he confronts the president and says, "We don't need this second giant tax cut." And Dick Cheney says to O'Neill, "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter. We won the midterm elections. Our due is another big tax cut." And I paraphrased the end. This stuns O'Neill because all of the facts, as O'Neill has read them and many others, show that deficits have guided fiscal policy for 20 years. Those are the kind of dialogues that define this man's journey and really the journey of many in the building.

Evan Derkacz is a New York-based writer and contributor to AlterNet.