we understand the differences, similarity of cultures across the world. no matter what. i'll just walk around will bring you the news and current affairs that matter. ah, hello there, i'm the saw, the attain, the how the headlines for you here on out of era. the policy of, if you refuse, prime minister, be osman has won a landslide victory in june 20 fast elections. he's held it as a historically inclusive election. his 1st policy, 1410 out of 436 parliamentary seats that shows him a 2nd time in office. but the vote was overshadowed by an opposition boy called ethnic violence and the conflict in the northern region. and guy was one of 3 of ethiopia, 10 regions where voting didn't take place. catherine soy is in the capital,

addis ababa? this announcement really come as no surprise prime minister obvious. be amid, as far as the party has been leading from the very start. and it's also an election really that has been voice quoted or was born quoted by on some of the countries biggest opposition parties in the lead up to the election. some opposition. 7 leaders was arrested all for voting does not take place at all in dozens of constituencies because of security problem. so some on a list of been talking to assume they're very worried because now that the parliament is dominated. 5 by members of parliament, of prime ministers, prosperity parties could be very hard for the m p. 's to properly hold the prime minister and government to account to ask the tough questions. they're saying that what we might see going forward is more opposition from outside parliament. the

widow of haiti is assassinated, president has his political enemies and organizing his killing to stop democratic change. monte moiz, who was also injured amount attack, was speaking for the 1st time since the husband of now was shot dead at their home . on wednesday, practical hand is in washington dc and says he will get help from the united states, but not what's been awful. sending in the us military was always going to be a tough ass keeping in mind. president joe biden, bringing troops home from afghanistan, telling the american public he was going to do a costly deployment to haiti, not something the public would likely support. so that seems like that's off the table. the us says that they're going to send millions and aid. they're going to allow refugees from haiti to stay here program that the former president wanted to get rid of. they're going to send people to help with the investigation from the federal bureau of investigation, the department of homeland security. but definitely said in the message of the military is not an option. what the u. s. wants to see is some sort of political

stability. they've been pushing for the elections to continue to happen. is early as september, opposition leaders on the ground. so it's not possible to do that because there's so much chaos on the ground with gangs running wild and this investigation. continuing an important point out, we still don't know who was behind the murder of the haitian president and start you if us confederate general robert e. lee has been removed from the city of charlottesville, virginia, many black times masters. the board has gathered there to witness the removal of the monument. it was at the center of a violent white supremacist rally 4 years ago. at least 8 people have been killed, an 8 others injured in a large explosion in somalia as capital market issue. a car bomb targeted police commander, colonel 500 mohammed aiden. he survived the attack. aiden was appointed back in april of the his predecessor was accused of calling for a true police in bangladesh. have arrested the owner of a factory where at least 52 people died. in a fire, he and 7 others have been charged with murder. the blaze broke out in the building

on the outskirts of the capital dot call on thursday. officials say the may next. it was locked forth in many of the stuff to jump from windows to escape. several countries pledged a to june as easy as it baffled a record. breaking surgeon covered 19 infections and death. more than $8000.00 cases have been registered and the last 24 hours right now aren't in a lead brazil, one nail at half time of the corporate america final. and we're janera. if they say in front, it will be argentine is 1st major title in 28 years that match though as being played in front of just $7800.00 fans that 10 percent of the american stadiums capacity because of the 19 restrictions there was widespread criticism of the decision to even allow brazelton stage the month long events. the country has the 2nd highest code, the 1900 death told after the us. well those are the headlines i'll have more after the bottom line. oh

hi, i'm steve clements and i have a question. his 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 shop the company stock up from about $20.00 a year to almost $350.00 a share in a few weeks. that means if you'd 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, gets 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 winds, 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 firm, 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, it's a little bit more nuanced. what you have to remember is that wall street has a vested interest in keeping you plane, 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 pumping and 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 is 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 does a 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 once 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 single 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 talk 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 cuz a 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 rate. we've always had different words for the difference this time is that now the fcc 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 sci fi 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 are you 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 position. 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 esoteric, doesn't mean it be regulated. now richard, vague secretary, banking and security. so 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 scc 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 alternately 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, 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've ear into is you look at their business profiles. 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 securities 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 li just 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. they 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 or a 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 now. so 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 in the, 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 that 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 return 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 any time 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 a brokerage accounts last year with a 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 and cheery and it's hard when people, you know, i'm 46 right i'm, 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, i, me see, i think, you know, we, you, 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 lying

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 fundamentals, 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 say, you know, i've, i've spent some time on youtube videos watching this guy there is called trays. trades actually don't know, his last name betrays trades. 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, at 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 have 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 careful examined. let me, let me put up a tweet from senator elizabeth warren, the sweet reeds for years. the same hedge funds, private equity firms, and wealthy investors. dismayed by the game, stop, trade 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 lee, i 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. well, that's always going to happen. it wasn't the fact that there was a housing, you know, but what everybody thought, but that

a place like lehman brothers or bear stearns, were 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 that 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 natural 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 vague, speaking of people who've seen it all, you know, you've seen it all, but is there a danger, you know, as we think about react since 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 council 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 at 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 that. 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 didn't 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, or we anywhere near that right now. or do you think we're largely in a healthy place? separate the stock market in the economy because there are 2 different things. 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 be healed, 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 watched 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 was helpful to when i talk to younger people who are very interested in

this, is it, i remind them that this has 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 that they get into this. 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 as we want, it's not backed by anything. why is it still the reserve currency?

what do we need to do to keep it in 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 vague. secretary of banking and securities for the state of pennsylvania and lee munson 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, the corona virus pandemic has altered modern society as governments have grappled with soaring cases, contact, tracing, and huge data collections are causing concern amongst civil rights activists. people in power investigates the ever increasing powers of governments and businesses as they access peoples most personal data and asks, what is being done to regulate the flow of sensitive information under the cover of cove it on a jazzy data odyssey the world and picks the fascinating story of a prisoner exchange, negotiated through intermediaries on behalf of us and israel,

a story of brinkman ship and bartering, a captive israeli soldier for palestinian prisoners as recalled by meteors and players from both sides of a prisoner exchange. on out his ear. oh the hello there. i'm sorry the a t a in the hall with an update for you here on algebra. the policy if you appeal prime minister i'll be, i'll spent, has won a landslide victory in the june 21st election, assuring him a 2nd term in office. the vote though, was overshadowed by an opposition boy called ethnic violence and the conflict in the northern region. catherine sawyer, in the capital, addis ababa with mol. this announcement really come as no surprise prime minister abe's post be amidst, as far as the party has been, lead.