to bring the squadron taking on the arms trade in his fight for justice, for innocent palestinians, and their families made in france on old jersey. oh, hello, i'm down, jordan and doe with a quick reminder, the top stories here on to 0, anti government protests taking place across cuba demonstrates without demanding more action from the government of poverty, the economy, and the corona virus pandemic. the president miguel diaz can choose the united states being responsible for the unrest. theresa reports. oh yeah, we're not a free, candid, thousands of people in the streets of havana. root is like this one happened across the country, expressing frustration over been demick restrictions, and the worsening economic prices on the island nation. he bought a lot of it. we are here for the repression because they are killing us with hunger

. the houses are falling and we have no homes. they have the money to build hotels while letting us go hungry. the past year and a half has been difficult for us economy as if and then we have had a devastating impact on the tourism sector. the country was forced to carry out major economic reform. in the past week, the amount of coven 19 infections rose sharply in the province of my dancers, were hospital so struggling to cope. doctor se they are in desperate need of oxygen in bed to treat patient. president miguel, you can blame the us embargo for the situation and ask government supporters to take to the streets law may be gaining or go. so how do you, we are not going to admit that any counter revolutionary motion re sold out to the government of the united states, sold out to the empire, receiving money from the agencies, allowing themselves to be carried away by all these strategies of ideological subversion, to provoke destabilization in our country, there will be

a revolutionary response. we call upon all the revolutionaries of the country all the communists, to take to the straits, to any of the places where these provocations are going to take place. today from now on and in the following day, the security forces arrived soon after the protest started. people were arrested and some classes broke out between pro and anti government demonstrators. date security beat me and my daughter a minus they beats us because they were walking down the street protests like this one are uncommon in cuba. this is the biggest one to take place since 1994. doing what is known as this press period, right after the fall of the soviet union were many, there were an example of the changing time on the caribbean nation. and how many i no longer afraid to speak up. that he said, well, i just he to the honey contagious delta bear, and he's being blame for a rapid rise in corona virus infections in se, asia,

indonesia is recording more than 35000 cases a day highlander going into lockdown for 2 weeks while south korea has imposed tougher restrictions. washington is wanting china that any attack on the philippines and the south china sea will draw a us response under neutral defense. treaty repeated warning comes as hundreds of activists in manila rallied on the 5th anniversary of ruling against china's claims . the territory in the south china sea, a 50 truck convoy carrying vital food and medical supplies is on its way to go on to the region. ethiopia government said this week that it was allowing miniature in flight to cry, for they must go by the capital to be searched. the un says food shortages they have worse than dramatically. despite a ceasefire, some 400000 people are estimated to be in famine with another 1800000 on the bridge . a former police officer turn notorious gang lead as asking his supporters to join must protest in haiti. jimmy cheers,

accusing opposition parties. a plotting given monies to murder us has been the delegation to hasten to assist in investigation into assassination. italy have beaten england to win football european championship for the 1st time since $900.00 . 68 highland in london, finish. and $11.00 drawer after extra time. but it was italy who then held in to triumph in the penalty shootout. and billionaire richard branson has officially reached the edge of space fulfilling a lifelong dream and making a dramatic step forward to release branson and 5 others travelled aboard his virgin galactic wing. the rocket ship for a few minutes, the crew was weightless. that was the headline. news continues here on al jazeera after the bottom line station. thanks so much and bye for now. i

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 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 rally, 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 a 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 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. 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 that's 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 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 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 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 it. 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 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 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 cops, 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 squeeze 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. and just because it's esoteric, doesn't mean it be regulated. now richard vague secretary of banking insecurity, 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 c s. c 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 veer 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 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 or 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 that let you know what the reasonable projected earnings are of a company are what the price should rearrange the price 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 the 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 a pension fund, a very large pension funds that 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 and 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 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 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 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 soon, so that they might have a chance as they age and get into their peak 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 and that thinking other than 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. any 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 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. c that there was a housing, you know, but what everybody's thought, but that a place like lehman brothers are very sterns. 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 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, you know, there's a lot of terrific folks that are either come from the la been that are either attorneys or have 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 and debt, private sector debt in economy before, or we anywhere near that right now. where 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 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 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. busy 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 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 right much as we want. it's not backed by anything. why is it still the reserve currency, right? 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 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, an extra digital killings and a north african capital. i had someone breaking into our house. i heard people shouting so full masked men for not only the eyes and hair were showing al jazeera world, his red eye, witness accounts of the dramatic story of the assassination of major p l. o. figure kelly was here in a secret israeli operation. assassination in tunis on al jazeera. ah morning allow government al jazeera as a you know,

the news. hello, i'm down, jordan and joe hall with a quick reminder at the top stories here on al jazeera, thousands joined red anti government protest in cuba. demonstrations are demanding more action from the government of poverty, the economy, and the current virus pandemic to 0 to gotten in the capital havana with more does the process with hundreds and hundreds of people at various points throughout havana and keep in cities. so it's what it's underlining, this is the biggest political protest and i can pick up.