I don’t much care for Stan Druckenmiller.

He’s smug. And not smug like I’m smug. He’s billionaire smug.

In May of 2021, when too many regular investors were making money in equities for Stan to happily countenance, he went on business television and called everyday people “monkeys.”

He’d say that’s inaccurate. And maybe it is. But only technically. Let’s take a trip down memory lane. It’ll be fun.

In May of 2020, as stocks were in the process of logging one of the most spectacular rallies in modern history, Druckenmiller said, in public, that the “risk-reward for equity is maybe as bad as I’ve seen it in my career.”

That was, with no exceptions, the worst high-profile (albeit unofficial) market prognostication I’ve seen in my “career.”

The chart also includes annotations for two Jeremy Grantham warnings which — how should I put this? — didn’t pan out.

Stan’s multitudinous stans gave him a pass. In fact, the Druckenmiller fan club never so much as mentions that unfortunate quasi-prediction, or if they do, they’re quick to note that Druckenmiller added a caveat: “The wild card is the Fed.”

But he put an asterisk on his asterisk, which is to say Druckenmiller intimated that the Fed wouldn’t be able to rescue the economy, nor stocks. “The consensus out there seems to be: ‘Don’t worry, the Fed has your back’,” he said, in the same 2020 remarks, before effectively ruling out a V-shaped recovery. “I just think [it’s] a fantasy,” he said. “I pray I’m wrong.”

Well, guess what? Druckenmiller’s prayer was answered! There was a V-shaped recovery. Allahu Akbar! But it didn’t always seem like Stan was pleased that God heard his appeal.

Two months later, in June of 2020, Druckenmiller confessed to CNBC that he “made all of 3% in the 40% rally.” “I missed a great opportunity here,” he conceded.

What a shame, right? He really needed that money! After all, he’s not a real billionaire. Mark Zuckerberg. He’s a billionaire. Elon Musk. He’s one too. MacKenzie Scott. She’s a real billionaire. I don’t know what Stan is.

Actually, I do. He’s an old curmudgeon. You can tell by his signature curmudgeonly smirk, which he employed three years ago while lampooning Neel Kashkari who, in an admittedly hapless attempt to justify the Fed’s policy stance, said this:

For my friends on Wall Street, and I have a lot of them, I hear from them all the time complaining about the Fed’s policies that are mucking up their trading strategies. I have zero sympathy — because there are still eight to 10 million Americans who want to work, who ought to be working.

That didn’t make any sense. Exactly nobody on Wall Street was complaining about QE and ZIRP. Just the opposite.

Druckenmiller let Neel have it. “I don’t know who Neel Kashkari’s talking about. I have six outside money managers who are up a lot more than me,” Stan told CNBC, in 2021, before indelicately noting that “a monkey could make money in this market.”

Suffice to say Druckenmiller wasn’t referring to his pet money managers with the “monkey” remark. And he damn sure wasn’t talking about himself. He was talking about you. And “Roaring Kitty.” And all the other homegamers whose lucrative meme stock exploits briefly made people like Stan look like rank amateurs.

I stopped covering Stan’s CNBC cameos years ago, just like I stopped covering Jeff Gundlach’s “Fast Money Halftime” interviews with network straight man and self-consecrated “judge” Scott Wapner.

The problem (my problem) is that I can’t pretend to care what these “legends” have to say. Contrary to popular belief, high finance isn’t my natural habitat. I found my way into it by accident. These aren’t my “legends.” They’re your legends. You’d pay a small fortune to have lunch with them. They’d have to pay me to have coffee, and I wouldn’t stay long.

Even if I could pretend to care what these guys have to say, I couldn’t pretend they’re going to say anything meaningful during their semi-annual complain-a-thons with Elmo, Abby Cadabby, Grover, The Judge, Mr. Snuffleupagus and the rest of the gang in Englewood Cliffs.

Notwithstanding my reluctance to waste my time (and, more importantly, yours) with “legend” banter, I did take a moment in November to satirize Stan’s “Bush & Bush“-esque fireside chat with Paul Tudor Jones at the Robin Hood conference. During that tittle-tattle, Druckenmiller said the following about Janet Yellen:

When rates were practically zero, every Tom, Dick, Harry and Mary in the United States refinanced their mortgage. Unfortunately, we had one entity that did not, and that was the US Treasury. I guess because political myopia or whatever, Janet Yellen was issuing two-years at 15bps when she could have issued 10-years at 70bps or 30-years at 180bps. I literally think if you go back to Alexander Hamilton, it was the biggest blunder in the history of the Treasury and I have no idea why she has not been called out on this. She has no right to still be in that job.

Needless to say, that was red meat for the finance Twitter crowd, most of whom have metamorphosed into raging right-wingers after more than a decade of unwitting self-indoctrination. The financial media loved it too. It was click manna from heaven.

As it turns out, though, it wasn’t that Yellen suffered from “political myopia or whatever.” It was that Stan suffered from not knowing what the f–k he was talking about. “Or whatever.”

Because, as one former deputy director of Treasury’s debt management office patiently explained a few days later, “thinking of the Treasury department as a corporate or household debt manager is a deeply flawed comparison” for a very long list of very important reasons. He went into laborious detail.

Fast forward six months and Druckenmiller doubled down on the Yellen clout-chasing in what, with apologies, feels like an effort to stay relevant in semi-retirement.

“Everybody seems to get it but Yellen, who just keeps spending and spending,” Druckenmiller said during his latest cameo on CNBC, this time for the network’s (aptly-named) “Squawk Box” program. “I think it’s dumb politically because it’s causing inflation and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the average American is getting hurt by the inflation.”

I’ll grant that “average Americans” are getting hurt by inflation (read “The Divide” if you haven’t yet), but here’s the thing: Yellen doesn’t spend. Congress spends.

I don’t know what Stan’s hang up with Yellen is, but it’s quixotic. Or it’s propaganda. I can’t decide which. I’d like to think the former, but when he says, as he did Tuesday, that Yellen’s “using tricks” to “manipulate” the curve, he’s trafficking in inflammatory rhetoric, accidentally or not. Every single week, Wall Street strategists make the same general argument, only without the incendiary, conspiratorial tone.

Druckenmiller also went after Biden on Tuesday. And Bidenomics. “If I was a professor, I’d give him an ‘F,'” Stan sneered, before weighing in on what the economy might look like if Biden wins again in November.

“I’m more worried about stagflation, with all the government spending, with the way the Fed seems to have reignited financial conditions,” he mused. “I think the inflationary outcome could be there.”

What can I say? Hopefully Stan’s just as right about that as he was about stocks four years and 80% ago.

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