Ben Bernanke was right.
He put the money in,
and those who expected inflation were wrong.
I was wrong; I’ve admitted this on the air; I wrote a column about it.
That’s Larry Kudlow.
2008 housing crisis “expert,”
former television personality, tennis aficionado,
and the current Director of the National Economic Council under President Trump.
Lawrence Alan Kudlow was born in 1947 in Englewood, New Jersey,
where he attended two private schools.
Kudlow’s family owned a textile business, where they seemingly made a ton of dough,
reportedly replacing their Jaguar frequently.
His parents were also ardent supporters of the Republican party,
but it didn’t take long for Larry to reject it all.
Following high school, young Kudlow got a Porsche and revved that engine
outside of the nest and on towards the University of Rochester.
‘Kuddles’, as he was known to his classmates, was a star tennis player in college.
And unfortunately for Larry’s Jaguar-loving Republican parents,
he joined the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society.
He quickly took on the identity of a radical antiwar organizer,
avoiding the draft due to asthma, and became a leader of the national protest,
Following undergrad, Kuddles joined liberal Democrat Joseph Duffey’s 1970 Senate campaign
where he worked with recently admitted Yale law student
and aspiring professional saxist, Bill Clinton.
[Sax wails]
Duffey lost, and the young student-Democrat got his first taste of defeat.
It wouldn’t be his last.
In 1971, Kuddles found himself at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs
at Princeton University, where he studied politics, economics, gained an affinity for the taxpayer
and left without completing his master’s degree.
As the war in ‘Nam came to a gut-churning halt, the grad-school dropout joined another senatorial campaign in 1976,
this time, Democratic candidate and former Nixon staffer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Moynihan won and Kuddles finally had his second victory, the first being his Porsche.
Getting his first taste of the political climate as a devoted Democrat,
he was hired by the New York Federal Reserve as a junior economist.
This opened his eyes to a promising career on Wall Street and domestic bliss with his first of three marriages in 1974.
At 28 years old and change, Kuddles became the chief economist at Paine Webber,
one of the biggest stock brokerage and asset management firms in the country,
After becoming a force on Wall Street,
he left Paine Webber and landed a chief economist gig in 1979 at the firm Bear Stearns.
It was around this time that Kudlow began drinking heavily.
Apparently everything but that econ degree.
After Reagan defeated incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election,
Kuddles became so enamored with the star of Bedtime for Bonzo and his conservative ideas
that he joined the Reagan revolution shortly after.
REAGAN: I’m not made of sawdust!
He hopped on the administration as chief economist of the Office of Management and Budget.
Watching Reagan from up on his pedestal, he discovered that the road to economic stability is paved by tax-cut legislation.
Or so he thought.
I think the Reagan tax cuts on the overall economic program were a success.
As Art has already mentioned,
nothing in life is perfect. Nothing in economics, nothing in social sciences,
nothing in marriage…
In 1983, David Stockman, the president’s budget director controversially referred to Reagan’s tax cuts as a ‘Trojan Horse’.
Kudlow agreed with Stockman, according to Stockman,
that the president’s tax cuts were negatively impacting the economy -
and ended up leaving the White House in 1983.
As the ’80s came to a close, he moved back to Wall Street,
rejoining Bear Stearns, where his personal issues began to catch fire.
As work travel picked up and his demons rose to the surface,
his addiction to drugs and alcohol continued,
reportedly including cocaine.
In his own words, he
He took a leave of absence in 1992 and went to a treatment program that included
“spiritual counseling, introspection, and group therapy.”
After rehab, he signed up for a few Catholic Opus Dei retreats,
a group with ties to fascist organizations in Italy,
often compared to Scientology.
The villain in the Da Vinci Code is literally a member of Catholic Opus Dei.
Each breath you take is a sin.
It’s unclear whether or not Kudlow was trying to find the Holy Grail.
Two years later, without the Holy Grail or an econ degree,
Kudlow missed an event where he was ticketed as the keynote speaker.
Rumors of a relapse fluttered around, but Kudlow claims he was only sick.
Days later, he negotiated a position as senior economics editor of the National Review.
A job he was let go from a year later after his crippling addictions got the best of him.
Regardless of his personal strife, Kuddles was red hot.
He was continuously offered to partake in speaking engagements and even starred in his own Cadillac ads.
But of any high profile economist in Washington, Kuddles was arguably the most stubborn.
Or delusional.
In 1993, he claimed that
Not only was his prediction dead wrong,
but the economy went into an eight-year expansion and 21 million jobs were created.
In 2002, while arguing for the war in Iraq, Kudlow wrote,
But instead, the market fell.
In July of 2008, he noticed in the current economic data,
In September, the stock market took a nose dive into the abyss with stocks losing nearly half of their value in the upcoming months.
The housing crisis, or Great Recession of 2008,
was one of the worst instances of economic devastation since the Great Depression.
Bear Stearns was no match.
And this was only the tip of the iceberg.
In 2001, he was a featured host on CNBC’s America Now,
renamed Kudlow and Cramer the following year as Kuddles and Jim Cramer,
the guy who once admitted to — and encouraged — shorting the market became permanent hosts.
Finally, the commercial Cadillac star would find his way back to the limelight.
We’ll have it all tonight on America Now.
CRAMER: Don’t you dare miss it.
[both laughing]
KUDLOW: That was really bulldog, arrr!
Throughout the 2010’s, he was prominently featured on multiple regularly aired business and political programs,
most notably The Kudlow Report, becoming one of America’s most recognizable economic personalities.
In 2018, WWE superstar Donald Trump appointed him as the Director of the National Economic Council,
succeeding former Goldman Sachs executive Gary Cohn.
Trump seemingly looked at Kudlow’s track record of consistently being wrong at every turn and decided to put him in charge of America’s economy.
Whoops.