dimensional capital city ever changing and yet forever defined by its turbulent past. stephanie deck meets the linens and takes you on a journey, exploring the identity and legacy of europe's rebel capital. took out his era. the news. hello, i'm mariam mossey and london with a look at the main stories now. and a taliban delegation is visiting moscow, insisting that it's open to sci fi with the afghan government. the group claims it now controls 85 percent of the country leading key crossings with iran. they've captured a, a town on the border with tucker menaced on. and they also claim to be in control of the majority of the area near g kissed on, sorry, hierarchy has this report now. signs of time changing, itala bonds,

routes lie in the resistance. the 1979 of the invasion of afghanistan, now sending his senior delegation to moscow to discuss the future of its country. the group says it's in control of 85 percent of afghan hist on the delegation is pledged to consider a sci fi with the government, and stop its assaults. if ongoing talks in casa succeed, and if certain criteria are met, give the se in the conclusion is both sides. prisoners should be released, the blacklist should be removed. there must be no attacks on the provisional capital city districts should not collapse. there should be no military activities and populated areas. a space of trust should be built among guns and 90 days must be allocated for negotiations so we can arrive at or result bounce. reality on the ground is fall from that. as the group has made major gains in the last few months, taking advantage of a power vacuum of us and foreign troops leaving it claims to be in control of more

than half of the $400.00 afghan districts across more than 20 provinces, including board towns this week more than a 1000 da scan troops fled into g, histone after italy bon offensive in the north, along the border. tyler bond fights is also on thursday. captured, a keyboard are crossing with iran. russia has warned it will use force if any cross border violence occurs, but the never miss shamika taliban has quickly taken many board districts. and now has control of about 2 thirds of the board with tajikistan, which is a russian military base and touch guest on is equipped with everything necessary to help the republic if needed. additional measures will be undertaken in the spirit of the russian public alliance. to prevent aggression or territorial provocation. last week, the afghan government told all does there it's won't collapse as a result. but the tyler bond says it wants to lead and inclusive government that respects minorities women and men in education, unemployment. the tal about have demonstrated no appetite whatsoever for any

concessions they and they have consistently told their own membership. the men who are fighting on the ground is that they have one on the ultimate goal, which is complete military victory and re establishment of a taliban dominated government without any form of coalition with any other parties . in moscow, the tyler bond said it wants humanitarian support to continue in areas under its control that agencies are struggling to get medical supplies into have gone as on many health workers fleeing the violence and escalating a conflict. append to make the continues to spread. and now a natural disaster in the form of the recently declared drought. and all these events are unfolding in the context of one of the largest and longest standing humanitarian emergencies in the world. afghans of the said most displaced population globally, and yet to see a peaceful solution to decades of violent thought, a height of al jazeera,

the un security account, was extending a mandate for a deliveries to northern syria. by 12 months the program was due to expire on saturday. nearly a 1000 trucks from turkey bring supplies and millions of syrians every month. russia wants the a to flow through damascus to its allies in the syrian government, but has agreed to compromise in last minute talks with the us. and international manhunt is on the way for 8 remaining suspects me a nation of the haitian president of an atom weighs heavily armed hit score monday moiz at his home on wednesday, both the u. s. and columbia of offered to help in the investigation and indonesia is just reported a new daily record of covert cases, more than 38000 in the space of 24 hours. the hardest hit nation in se, asia, the bottom line is coming up next. ah

hi, i'm steve clements and i have a question. is wall street rig to favor the rich and powerful against the small investor? let's get to the bottom line. ah. the new york stock exchange is the biggest stock market in the world, dealing and trillions of dollars. hundreds of millions of people look to it to make money, whether they have $1.00 to invest or billions. earlier this year, individual investors got together online, especially on the website, read it, and coordinated an investment in game stop altogether. that's a company that sells gaming merchandise. they shot the company's stock up from about $20.00 a year to almost $350.00 a share in a few weeks. that means if you had invested $10000.00, you'd have already made $200000.20 days since then. of course the price went up and then it went down a bit. they did something similar with the movie multiplex theater chain amc

theaters. i love the theaters, but what they found is that the hedge funds in big companies, they were routing against, actually made hundreds of millions of dollars as if the rules don't apply to them. so is it any wonder that household investors wonder if the game is rigged against the little guy? is it like a casino, where the house always wins? should the public trust the markets and what are the regulators doing? fortunately, we're joined today by people who have all the answers. richard vague, secretary of banking and securities in the state of pennsylvania, which regulates the financial institutions in the state. he's the author of a lot of books on the economy, most recently, and illustrated business history of the united states and li months and who worked as a traitor on wall street and moved on to new mexico to found his own wealth management for portfolio. wealth advisors, he's the author of rig money beating wall street at its own game. gentlemen, it's great to have you both with us today and let, let me just start with you and ask you, you know, just point blank. are the markets by their design rigged against the small investor?

i think i would say, if we're having beers, i'd say yes, if you really want to get in the way of a little bit more nuanced. what you have to remember is that wall street has a vested interest in keeping you playing, just like a casino doesn't want you to lose all of this money. but the issue is, is in regulation. the issue is, is in the execution of how wall street actually works. so when you're thinking about a time of high volatility or thinking about these read it boys pump into dumping, i think the individual investor has to remember that it's always been a wild area. regulators, it's always a cat and mouse game. we're always try to keep up or catch up with what's going on . so for the individual investor, what we call the little guy, they have to think a little bit more like an institutional investor. and start having this mentality that they're just these main street people and look at not what hedge funds are doing, which is really just a code word for speculation and gambling and have really leverage beds that usually blow up. and then we've got to get back to, you know, what is a large pensions do?

what does calpers do out in california? the big institutions have best practices to prevent their money being taken advantage of, of some of the senior parts of wall street. the problem is, is that wall street doesn't message that the individual investors, wall street always messages to individual investors. that this is a very complex game. this. this is somewhat like a casino, and you have to keep coming back every single day to get more and more information that's really completely useless. and i think that when you look through that different lens and have that paradigm shift and think, i'm going to start thinking like a pension fund, because in general, we don't see pension funds getting duped by wall street as much as individual investors. before i jump to richard and ask, you know, what should we have in place by way of good governance? and you know, i want to just just go one step further into this lee, which is to say, i spent some time looking at games stop and amc theaters,

which i said i loved going to the theaters and want to pay attention. but when you began looking at the evaluations of these firms, you could no longer talk about the fundamental business performance of those firms, or how they'd been impacted by the pandemic. instead, you were looking at social media hype, or you were looking at the claims of big firms like sit are goal, which were out to short these companies. in other words, things were going on in the turbulence. in media about the med had nothing to do with the fundamentals of those of those stock performance. where is the fcc in this? and, and, you know, when you sort of see the manipulation on all sides, isn't that something that worries us, even though it wouldn't worry that pension fund? well, i would have to say, where was the fcc pre read it? so i know this is going to be shocking. good, lot of people don't know this, but back in the day, like before, corona virus, hedge fund managers would get together at private dinners,

usually in manhattan or connecticut. and you sit around a room and everybody talks up their ideas and they collude. right? it's kind of like keep your recording vices outside. let's talk about this. let's all get together. and this has been going on for 100 years, you know, honored years ago used to call it a bare raid. we've always had different words for it. the difference this time is it now the scc can ignore it. it's no longer a small group of money. people who go in with rich people's cash and make leverage, specular bets. it's average people who got money from the treasury from all those stimulus checks and they're doing it out in the open. and this is a very different thing for regulators, because now all of a sudden they can see who's doing it. and now they're finding that there's thousands and thousands of thousands of traders doing what hedge funds had done all along. and so i think that it's realistic to expect the fcc to say, hey, the virus is literally airborne on what's going on with manipulation. it's not just

a small group of people, right? it's widespread. and i don't know, i would have to be a regulator right now because what he's supposed to do, stop free speech. but on the other hand, it's technically illegal to try to, to do some of these bear raids and try to kill the short positions. we need short sellers in the market. i understand that most retail investors do not short stocks, but short sellers are the cogs the true cops of capital. they're the ones that find the bad companies that have problems. and if you start killing them off, one short squeezed at a time one game. so when a m c, you scare them off and then you don't have anybody in there creating balance a just because it's s o tear, it doesn't mean it be regulated. now richard vague secretary of banking insecure is i'll tell my audience, you used to be c, e o of, of a bank. you help create what i call the affinity credit card business. you know, all those points, hotels, planes, that's an industry you're, you know,

both sides of the aisle governance and the private sector. and i know that you're not responsible for monitoring or managing these markets from the state of pennsylvania. but i'm interested in someone who knows the banking and securities fields. well, are there missing parts of the scaffolding and you know, infrastructure surrounding investment today that you think we need you know, being a security regulator as a hard job. the se fcc has a hard job because there's millions of investors out there being creative, inventing new things, constantly. and it's hard for regulators to catch up and stay current, much less just cover the waterfront. so i oldham only thing that investors need to look out for themselves and be cautious themselves. it's a buyer beware, marketplace it's, it's true, as you said, early on,

the big clients get better treatment than small quiet. but that's not just true in the stock market and on wall street. that's true. in every industry i can think of . so if you're an individual investor, you just need to look out for yourself. do your homework a be aware that manipulation exists and will continue to exist as long as you're going to be in the markets. what do you think, richard? that when it comes to some of the issues around these mean stocks, one of the things where you, we're into is you look at their business profile, there's a lot of information about these companies online. and all of a sudden you see that, you know, there's 140 percent of their stock that is owned by institutions. and you say, how can an institution own 140 percent of a company stock, or what is, what are synthetic shares? there's a whole universe of things out there and gary gansler, the current head of the security exchange commission, has indicated he wants to come down, come out and shut a lot of that down,

shut down what is called naked short selling. so i guess part of it is to understand that, you know, retail investor, a small investor, beware the market. but another part of it is whether or not, you know, as, as leaders said, the s c c. prior to this moment had been allowing hedge funds to get away with stuff that really was clearly market distorting. do you have any sense of that from your, from your purch? you know, everybody looked out for themselves. so big institutions look out for themselves. it's not their job or their business to take care of the little guy. so i think folks are justified being concerned. but a lot of the things you're talking about here, whether it's the mean stock or other price takes leave of reality. and there are fundamentals and analyzing a stock that let you know what the reasonable projected earnings are of a company are what the price should rearrange. the price should reasonably be in.

as a result of that. and you as an investor, ought to know that. and what folks do here is they chase price, they chase momentum in a way that takes leave of any reality. and it's, by the way, it's not just little guys. i heard a presentation, you know, i'm on the board of a couple of pension fund, a very large pension funds. that's why i see this in practice. and you know, even within those hallowed halls, in theory, those folks get carried away by fads and trends as well. i heard a presentation recently where someone was talking about out earnings didn't matter as much as they used to. and of course, that's the warning. but they said it was a straight thing when they, when you interact with your investors and they see, you know, what's been going on in the markets and i, i've taken a quick dive into your book and i love your work and writing you, you're basically saying that, you know, in this, that, you know, to understand how you make money or how you preserve your capital in these markets,

is to understand, as you said, how pension funds are doing an understanding what antenna they have that are out there. and they look at these, so what is the biggest gap between those smart investors that you have outlined and how you try to advise your clients and the rest of us, ted are not as equally tuned in i think a lot of it has to do with the generation gap, and i know that's not what people want to hear, right. young people don't want to hear that they have no experience. they don't want to hear that big coins fake or that game stop with a dying company that really should have been sold off, split up. and you know, the cash returned to shareholders. because we went through a recent period last year where we had like a, what was it, a 16 day recession. i don't know anytime in the last 400 years and i studied the markets back all the way back to, you know, the duddies india company. and we rarely have situations where you have this

primary below up this low, and then it just pops right off with no retesting of it. and what that means is, is that you have a lot of younger people. they opened up brokerage accounts. these are people under 40 millennials who open at brokerage accounts last year with the stimulus checks. right? this isn't a judgment. this is just a how this sort of came to be and they could do no wrong. stocks only go up anytime stocks go down, you buy it and everything is beautiful in sherry and it's hard when people, you know, i'm 46, right. i'm. i think i'm the young guy here in the room. but i'm still from the old ways in the old days, right. where, you know, obviously i think, you know, we, you study the balance sheet and i was taught that from a very early age, with the advent of the fact that i'm just going to reach, you know, it's like i got everything here, right? people are not going down and to the library and checking out the value line pamphlets to talk about earnings that come out each each quarter and it gets mailed

to you parcel post. it's just a video game, right? and so we've made robin hood has made the whole market of video game to a very young set of people. i think that we have to remember that it's going to in badly, maybe. and those young people are going to learn the same lessons that the baby boomers today in their sixties learned about 21 years ago in the dot com crisis. which, you know, things don't go to the moon. and when you have companies that don't make any money, what do you think that's going to happen longer term? so i think the, well, i'm concerned about it. i also think the flip side, the silver lining is we're bringing in a whole group of young investors. are going get burned, really bad shoed so that they might have a chance as they age and get into their p career earnings. they might learn a few things from us. old guys like the fundamental, what a price earnings ratio is. and the fact that there is history and the fact that we

trade on our phone doesn't have anything to do with human nature. human nature, the only constant in markets. everything else, you know, is fungible. as we'd say, you know, i've, i've spent some time on youtube videos watching this guy called trays, trades actually don't know, his last name betrays trade. and his argument is, there's a mathematics to this that can also work for the small investor and the mathematics are that some firms are so overly shorted. so many synthetic shares out there that at some point those, those shares, which are limited in supply need to be covered. and so that the mathematics no matter a, no matter what the fundamentals beneath that firm are, ultimately will create a payoff and what they call kind of a, you know, major short squeeze in this. richard. is there a flaw in that thinking about looking at the, you know, what the other side of it is that the math can go back both ways. there is no flaw

in that thinking other. then you don't know when it's gonna reverse. and there's any number of folks that i know many of my friends over many decades who've seen something that is obviously absurd and irrational and jumped in. and i think the old saying is something like, they can stay irrational for longer than your capital will laugh. so even there, i think there's a, there's a buyer beware that needs to be carefully examined. let me, let me put up a tweet from senator elizabeth warren, the suite reeds for years. the same hedge funds, private equity firms, and wealthy investors. dismayed by the game stop trades have treated the stock market like their own personal casino, while everyone else pays the price. i guess the question i have now is one is a political one, because if you were both here in washington d. c, there is this worry that if you get people that are in the governance and

regulatory field that far from these markets, it will ultimately further corrupt the system in favor of the big players against the small. so i'd love to ask you your thoughts on the political dynamics between those, you know, what, what elizabeth warren is trying to say is we need people who are not market believers to help run the governance of this country. i just, i can't even begin to tell you how wrong that thinking is. nobody wants to burn their own ship down. what casino starts the day off and says, how can we blow up this casino so that nobody comes in ever again? how can we screw the poach? and we have to remember that the only crazy thing that happened 13 years ago in the great financial crisis of all 8 or 9 was not the fact that a bubble was created. oh, that's always going to happen. it wasn't the fact. c that there is a housing, you know, but what everybody's thought, but that a place like lehman brothers or bear stearns,

we're actually going to burn down their own pirate ship by not thinking about tomorrow, and whether their leverage is going to kill them. that was a very one time event. it occurs every once in a while, but we color our judgment back. then there are still a lot of animosity and resentment about the money that was printed to sure those banks. and i understand why, but we have to understand that people who work in markets like me, like other, the whole community of, of market professionals. we only want one thing. we want markets to function properly. we want them to be healthy, so that we can keep making money. and the very idea that you're going to bring in people who have decades and decades of experience with markets. they want to keep going. and if they know they're going to make it corrupt, because when you have corrupt markets, they don't function properly. and that's what politicians don't get. they do know it, but they want to go to their constituents and say, listen,

you never made any money in the market because you don't save any money in the market because you don't believe in the market. so why not bring other people who feel like you and maybe we can kind of shut this down and make it worse for everybody else. you need to have people with 345 decades of experience. you've seen it all going in there and try to make markets functional when they're functional. the little guy can make money. the big guys can make money, and the speculators and all the other people out there, you're never going to do anything about them. they're always going to be there. richard, big speaking, people have seen it all, you know, you've seen it all, but is there a danger, you know, as we think about reactions to some of what we've seen in the market that we can, you know, do the proverbial throw the baby without out with the bathwater that we can make mistakes of over socializing our response to you know, bubbles. you've written a lot about bubbles in economic crises, almost as if they're just a natural part of what we see are unfortunate,

but crashes happened bubbles happen. but what is your account? so when it comes to smart governance, i did not worry about the investment banking industry and banking industry's ability to take care of itself. i do not worry, they were going to bring in some folks from outside the industry who, who are emphasis, suspicion about the industry and that that is going to destroy the industry. the industry can take care of itself. i think frankly, it's healthy to bring in folks that don't have 4 or 5 decades of wall street or banking experience during, you know, there's a lot of terrific folks that are either come from the la been that are either attorneys or had spent time thinking is elizabeth warren has about this that, that bring a perspective to the process that i think will have value. do you think, richard, that we are given your experience writing about economic crises?

do you look at the u. s. economy right now, and, you know, maybe these markets as being frothy enough that we ought to be worried about it. you've written about, you know, the, the massive expansion of loans in debt, private sector debt in economies before. are we anywhere near that right now, or do you think we're largely in a healthy place to separate the stock market in the economy because there are 2 different i don't think the economy is in a dangerous place. i think i don't think we've created excess or over capacity. we've actually got the opposite problem and a lot of sectors right now. so i think the economies in reasonable shape needs to heal some more. the stock market kind of on the north end of the valuation range, no matter which way you look at it. so you're, i think there's reason to be cautious about where the stock market is going to go and to be prepared for correction. let me give you the last word in this fascinating conversation, but there are new things out there, crypto currencies. you mentioned bitcoin a moment ago. you know, we watch,

do you know, saturday night live and you on mosque and you know, the dodge coin are, serge, if you will, this little dog, you know, with the digital currency. what should our investors or looking at some of these new instruments in the wealth game be worried about what would you counsel stay away from it all? well, i mean, in general, i'd say stay away from it all. i understand bitcoin is the granddaddy of them all. there's institutional interest in it, and i just because it's fake and not real, doesn't mean people are going to trade it. right. and so i think that what the investors need to understand is that these are the overall unregulated markets, right? these are things that have no intrinsic value, right. and so they're not cash, they're not security. they're not anything they've just been invented out of space . i think it's helpful to when i talk to younger people who are very interested in

this, is it, i remind them that this is happened before, right. we've had things like beanie babies or collectibles or things that really didn't have any value. that they suddenly become very valuable. i hate to tell kids because it was before they were born. but hundreds of years ago, we used to think the tulip bulbs had some intrinsic value beyond growing a pretty flower and there was too bold mania. so every generation has its own little thing, but they get into that. there's that they take ownership of and i think kobe had a lot to do with it. the good part about crypto is it, it's making younger people. think about what's money, what is the nature of money? and so that they can maybe learn a little bit as their criptos blow up about why it is that the dollar that we can just print much as we want. it's not back by anything. why is it still the reserve currency? what do we need to do to keep it a reserve currency?

and of course, that suggests that we all believe america should be the dominant player in economics going forward. well, leave just checked off something on my bucket list, which is to have the word, you know, beanie babies mentioned on my show. so thank you so much for that. i'd like to thank you both for being with us. richard big secretary banking and security's for the state of pennsylvania and li months and founder of portfolio, wealth advisors. thank you both. thank you. so what's the bottom line? is wall street rig? yes. is this new know, insiders mostly the rich and powerful or sometimes just the plain greedy. you know, they find creative ways to manipulate the market and make millions, sometimes billions of dollars. people with money usually will do anything to get what they want. and like any market when someone, when someone else has to lose, and guess who that is. so should folks trust the markets with their livelihoods. they pretend to be fair and free a product of supply and demand. but come on, that's not the whole story. be careful out there folks,

and that's the bottom line. ah, a new generation of young people, more politically engaged than the one that came before. welcome to generation, change a global feelings and attempts to challenge and understand the ideas and mobilize youth around the world. in south africa, women who are at the forefront of the walk in a ration you never ever get tired of developing resistance strategies and ignites of passion. stand up and flight generation change on al jazeera, escaping a wall, finding a new identity, confronting the reality of racism, religion, and the struggle to be accepted,

al jazeera, tells the story of what it's like to be lebanese and color strangely a home. once upon a time in punch bowl on al jazeera oh hello, i am i am noisy. and on the, with the look at our main story, now, taliban delegation has been visiting the russian capital moscow, insisting that it's open to a sci fi with the afghan government. then out claim to control 85 percent of the country including an important trade route with iran. 2 thirds of the board with just on and a key town near the crossing with tuck menaced on. meanwhile, the humanitarian situation is deteriorating. the w. h. a warning that it continued fighting is made it difficult to reach at least 18400000 afghans.