of our largest priorities because every crime, and especially terrorism, that's where it's found. >> host: how to spot a terrorist before it's too late, is the name of the book. former fbi special agent john innarelli is the author. this is booktv on c-span2. [inaudible conversations] >> this yearbook tv marks our 20 year of bringing you the country's top nonfiction authors and their latest back books. find us online at booktv.org. [inaudible conversations] >> okay, you ready or not yet? okay. let's do a little test and make sure the people in the back can hear me.

you want to wave at me back there? hear okay? everybody can hear? excellent. well, good evening, everybody. i'm the director of events at warwick's, and welcome to an evening with nomi prins. before we get started, a few housekeeping things to go over. first of all, let me just thank all of you. it's when you come out of your homes and spend the evening with us in support of your local bookstore, it allows us to keep bringing you wonderful people like nomi to the san diego area, so please give yourselves a little round of applause for doing that, because we certainly appreciate it. [applause] we have a lot of exciting things still happening this summer, and we've already -- i'm already doing a lot of things that i've set up for the fall. so if you're not on our e-mail list, get on that. we've got a packed schedule. or you can check out our web site or take one of the flyers, whatever you'd like to do. reminder to turn off your cell phones so you're not that neighbor that gets the dirty look.

during the q&a, sean over there is going to be handing you guys a microphone. so that microphone is for the wonderful c-span that's here tonight. you aren't going to hear yourself through the speaker, but you're going to be on tv. so when you watch this, you want to make sure that you're actually talking into that speaker so that they can hear you. so just wait for sean to hand you that. why we're all here tonight, nomi prins, a former wall street executive, is a renowned journalist, international investment banker, public speaker and tv and radio commentator. she's the author of six books including "all the president's bankers." her writing has been featured in "the new york times," "forbes," fortune, guardian and nation among many others. she was a member of senator bernie sanders' federal reserve reform advisory council and is on the advisory board of the whistle-blowing organization expose facts. she's here tonight to talk with us about her latest book,

"collusion: how central bankers rigged the world." i'm going to read a quick review, paul craig roberts, former "wall street journal" editor and assistant secretary of the u.s. treasury said, quote: the u.s. doesn't have a financial press. it has something better. nomi prins. read this book to understand the central bank conspiracy against the world economy. please, ladies and gentlemen, give a warm warwick's welcome to nomi prins. [applause] >> thank you, julie. thank you, warwick's. i -- one of the great things about writing books is that you actually get to come into all of these places around the country and around the world and see people who read them or will read them and be in these amazing independent bookstores where a lot of stuff happens. and they're super important. i will probably -- and if i don't, ask me questions about

it -- talk about how all this global stuff ultimately impacts everybody at a local level. and, therefore, i just always believe it's important to be supportive of local and also come to bookstores. again, i thank you, warwick's. i thank you, c-span, for being here tonight. you all look great, you'll look great on camera. [laughter] thank you. so what i want to do is kind of take you on my journey to this book and while i was writing this book. and from there, talk about what's happening in the world today as a result of a a lot of the things that the book talks about and is that you're probably experiencing on a day-to-day basis in your own personal economies and then open it up for questions. so as the going back many time thing, as julie mentioned, i was an investment banker. one of the first things i did as an investment banker was go to china. this was in the early '90s, and china was not really on the map in terms of talking about,

you know, whether it's manipulating currencies or involved in trade wars or any of the things that are now being discussed about it. it was a place where i went with a team of two of bankers from lehman brothers which is about to have the ten-year anniversary of its demise coming in september, the start of the financial crisis. and the reason i went to china was because i had been working at lehman brothers on something called the futures and options desk which was sort of the nascent type of financial instruments that ultimately became more and more complex and more and more risky to the global economy and to financial markets. but at the time, i was having this, like, fight with the sales guy on the desk because sometimes in investment banking people try to take credit for other people's work, people try to get other people out of their way. there's a lot of sort of heads that could butt. and i was the analyst. i was the one, like, writing the code and doing can -- doing the

analysis, looking at the numbers, all that wonky stuff. and he was like this kind of flashy salesperson. and every single time i would come up with an analysis for a trade, he would basically take credit for it and try to get paid more because of it. sales people got paid more than analysts anyway, but besides that. and it got to a point where there was a lot going on in the early '90s, and i wanted, you know, some credit for the work i was doing. i was coming in to work at 5, 5:30, i was leaving whenever, i was in grad school, i wanted to have what i did make a point. so i went to management and said i was going to quit. i can't deal with this. like, he's angry, he yells at me on the trading floor. so what they decided to do was rectify this entire situation by sending us on a trip to asia together. [laughter] and they decided that this would be a good idea because either we were going to kill each other, someone was going to survive, or we would wind up friends which, to them, meant we could make

them money. but the point was, that was their decision. we take off on the multiple city/country exposition. it starts in malaise a ya and winds up in china at the people's bank of china and a number of other banks in china where we proceed to try and sell u.s. treasury bonds -- of which they now have a lot, over $1.1 trillion worth -- to the people's bank of china and also to juice it up with these futures and options. if they do with lehman brothers, lehman brothers will make more money, and the people's bank of china will be able to buy them, and everyone will be happy. and in the repeated throughout different parts of asia. we did wind up being friends. he was still in trying to get in front of anything i said. however, we wound up in this sort of, you know, death-defying kind of drive from when we got to the philippines to trying to get to our next country which, i think, was taiwan or something whereby we were going to be

late, we were going to miss the trip. trips were day to day-to-day to day. it was banking. you don't have time for sightseeing. the taxi guy had to get to the airport in, like, 20 minutes. it was 40 minutes away. and, basically, the salesperson said, look, i will pay you a stupid amount of u.s. dollars if you get us there on time. so the guy says, okay, great. he jumps into oncoming traffic on other side, barrels down the highway. i'm in the backseat doing this. he's in the backseat next to me, i think i'm going to die. he probably thought he was going to die. we made it to the airport, we made it to taiwan, and we did become friends. so that's how banking works. [laughter] it is a life or death kind of thing. and that was ultimately how i got to china. it was interesting to me in this particular book, and if you just think of circles of life and finance and just everything, i wound up going back to china for this book. i'd been in between to china, but to go to the same people's bank of china many numbers of years later, to go to the same

great wall of china and to sort of do what i had done, but in this world where everything was different. yet i was doing similar things. and as a result of that, i was able to kind of work the book around what was happening and what had changed many all these years. and what had changed mostly in all these years was the power of central banks throughout the world, the influence that they've had in particular since the financial crisis which is the period for which i've written this book because they've been able to produce in different countries for different reasons a lot of money in order to subsidize the financial systems, the banks, the markets and those particular countries. now, china did it in a different way, and we'll get back to them. the main sort of actor in all of this is the federal reserve. it is the federal reserve, it is the u.s. and the way in which i depict the u.s. in the book is not to give the u.s. or the fed its own chapter. i specifically had it as the main character in all of the

chapters and all of the region which comprise the book which i call pivot countries or regions. and i analyzed them since the financial crisis to see how they behaved relative to fed policy, whether they supported it or tried to go against it. what happened, therefore, to them politically and economically and how the world sort of changed around these pivot countries over these past ten years with some major ramifications that aren't even related to monetary policy but because of monetary policy or the level of interest rate that the fed sets, the level of interest rates that other central banks set and the amount of money that they have conjured or produced to subsidize their markets. and the countries, regions of pivot areas were mexico, brazil, china, japan and then different part of europe including the u.k. doesn't want to be a part of europe right now, and that was actually also part of a ramification of what's happened since the financial crisis. this all started because i was asked to speak at the fed in, basically, the summer of 2015.

so before i started actually researching this particular book. i had written a book called "all the president's bankers," and that had basically gone into the history of american finance, all the individuals involved, the families involved, institutions involved, how they related to presidents and how they basically influenced and created domestic and foreign policy over the past hundred years. for this book it was more narrow. and so when i went to the fed to speak, i had been asked -- they have this annual conference between the federal reserve, the imf, the international monetary fund, and the world bank. all located in washington. and they sort of have this three-day thing where there's a day at the fed, a day at the imf, a day at the world bank. it's not public. there's no television there. but there are central bankers from around the world that come to sort of talk about the issues of the day. and there's always a sort of main theme that's the sort of central theme at each of these given places. so the central theme that i was asked to talk about in 2015 was

why wall street isn't helping main street. and this was a conundrum to central banks, in particular federal reserve who had determined this particular subject matter. when i got the request to speak, i was con paused -- confused because i have been rather critical of fed policy since the financial crisis began and how i believe they subsidized the banking system rather than sort of reformed it. but i asked them, you know, are you sure you meant me? [laughter] and, you know? they said, no, we actually do want to hear this other side, you know? so i'm there, i speak in the morning session, the first day of these three days, and janet yellen -- who is the former chairwoman from the fed at the time -- had spoken first. and one of the things that she had basically conveyed to this room full of central bankers from around the world was that everything was fine. that the banks were sort of reformed, that regulations were many place to sort of protect

the american and, by extension, global population. and there wouldn't be a crisis again. i'm paraphrasing, but this is basically what she said. and then someone from the treasury department came and sort of said the same thing but more confidently. and then a cardinal spoke. and one of the things he said to this room of central bankers was i don't know anything about finance or economics or what monetary policy is, but i do know that there is a world out there that could potentially be in pain and that it is your responsibility to remember the poor. and that was basically what he said. with that, i came on in front of this room. it's at the room where the fomc, the federal open market committee, gets together to determine whether they're going to raise rates or lower rates or keep rates the same. we were all in there, and i said, you know, let's get back to the question. the question is why isn't wall

street helping main street. i said, that's really simple. we get this, right? it's because you never made them. you, the fed, you -- the major central banks around the world never said, look, we're going to give you a boat load of money, we are going to reduce rates and make it very easy for you to access money very cheaply for ten years -- at the time it was a little bit less than that -- and we're not going to ask you for a single damn thing in return. so we don't really have the right to wonder why wall street isn't helping main street. i mean, i just explained to you a little bit about how many years ago wall street sort of in the background was fine having people sort of going into oncoming traffic to get to the next meeting to sell some bonds. that wasn't exactly the business model, but that's pretty much what went down. and so wall street's given a lot of subsidies. and these became a total of $4.5

trillion of something called quantitative easing was a very wonky term. even monetary policy is a wonky term. how much does money cost? how much does it cost you to get money? how much do you have to pay many interest to get a loan? in interest to get a loan at the base level for the banks and for governments in the country. but when you look at whether wall street's going to turn around and saw thanks for $4.5 trillion where you basically gave us money and you bought from us two things, you brought $1.75 trillion worth of mortgage-backed securities which are basically the things that came, became known as toxic assets which were related to subprime and other types of mortgages going into the financial crisis of 2008, and you paid top dollar for them. you know, it wasn't like you even analyzed them. you basically said you, the banks, have a bunch of securities that you can now no longer get rid of because they are completely toxic and nefarious, and they don't really have anywhere near the value

that you said to anyone that they have, so we'll just pay you full price on them. and that's basically what happened to the tune of 1.75 trillion, which is a lot, from the banks. the other part of that $4.5 trillion was that the federal reserve created -- or i talk about this word conjured a lot in the book. somebody actually did a mini review and said if they had a drinking came for the amount of times i used conjured in my book, they would be blacked out before the end of chapter one. i don't know if that's the case. it's used a lot. i didn't dry it. what happened was the federal reserve was able to electronically create money for which they received bonds including these $1.75 trillion in mortgages and the rest as treasuries. why do treasury bonds come from banks? they're a made, they're basically bonds that are created by the u.s. treasury department. they're effectively the u.s. treasury department saying to whether it's a country or an investor or a client of a bank

who's selling these bonds, we'll pay you a certain level of interest in return for you basically lending us for a particular term a bunch of money, going back to china. china has led the u.s. through this process, $1.1 trillion for which the u.s. government pays interest. now, what the fed did was it decided to conjure this money in order -- creates debt for basically no reason which goes to the banks because they are the brokers that are supposed to diffuse it to investors, and it goes back to the fed for which the fed pays interest to the banks. now, if you cancel all of that out, you save a few trillion dollars. but that's not what happened. it didn't happen in the u.s., and it ultimately didn't happen throughout the world. and this is one of the reasons i talk about the term collusion not in a sort of russian, you know, voting sense, but in terms of an actual collusive effort between the fed and the major

central banks of the world to have this process work in such a way that the major banks of the world can all benefit from having money renderedded cheap and fromming from having these s that the banks create. if it was just the fed that helped the u.s. banks in the fall of 2008 and the spring of 2009 and going onward, it wouldn't have been enough money. it would not have been enough to have our interest rates renderedded 0%, so banks receiving money from the fed at nothing and receiving interests they were getting from the treasury department and receiving the subsidy of a total $4.5 trillion to continue to do what they were doing. that actually wasn't enough. it wasn't enough philosophically or ideologically, it just wasn't enough financially. and so what the fed had to do from the beginning of the financial crisis was insure that the other major central banks -- particularly in the g7 -- could

be on the same page. and as a result, all the central banks ultimately -- the european central bank, the bank of japan, the bank of england -- had to render all of their interest rates 0% or negative and also engage in this bond-buying process, this quantitative easing. because reducing rates as they do by setting them wasn't enough, they had to create all this money and take bonds out of the market to create demand for them to reduce rates even further. and what that did was it created $232 trillion -- 22 trillion worth of subsidies for the major banks in the major g7 countries of the world. now, it didn't just stay in the pockets of banks, though a couple years ago when i did the math, banks had on average four times the amount of cash they had on book before the financial crisis, so they've managed to take some out along way. but $22 trillion is more than the gdp of the united states.

so what's happened in this collusive effort amongst the central banks because the fed needed it to keep the rest of the financial system of the world from imploding under the guise that it was the economies of the world that they were trying to save, is still out there. it is still sort of the layer now that buoys all of the major banks as well as the major financial markets. because what does quantitative easing really allow to happen? it allows banks to say, all right, we're going to lend this money cheaply. we're getting it cheap. let's lend it out to companies, to people and so forth, and they will in return pay us some amount of interest, and we'll make what's called a spread between what we lend out which we are getting at nothing and interest that gets paid to us. and they keep doing and doing and doing. rates stay low, the value of bonds is higher because the relationship of prices on bonds

to rates of bonds is an inverse opposite relationship, and then stocks go up. stocks go up because you have extra money that corporations have either gotten because they've borrowed it so cheaply or because they have all this extra cash if they're banks or because they're leveraging, effective libor rowing back from the banks because the money is available. and where do you take it? you don't take it into government bonds because government bonds are paying nothing in the major countries of the world that are all participating in this exercise. you put it into stocks, riskier assets, and you create these financial bubbles throughout the world where the economies that this process was supposed to be influencing at least if not helping, in a lot of ways have become fragmented between the individuals or companies that have been recipients of this process and the ones that haven't. that's created greater inequality, greater economic anxiety. and it doesn't matter what one's political persuasion is, it's not a question of whether the

money should go to one place or shouldn't go to one place. the reality is it's gone to a system of people that were involved and institutions that were involved in wrecking the economy, the financial system to begin with and not been diffused to the rest. because if you had taken $22 trillion now and given it to the real economy, to infrastructure, to development projects, to, you know, building higher speed trains to get from san diego to l.a. or whatever, then you would have a situation where more people are put to work, more engineers were involved in the process, you know, more programmers or technical people were involved along way, more technology was involved and so forth, and you would have a different kind of an economy that was more sustainable. when you just use capital, you know, use free money to peck late with, that's -- to speculate with, that's what happens. and that's sort of where we've gotten to now. but what i talk about in the book is a bigger ramification than just how much money was created to save the banks and the financial system and has gone into the markets and what

happened politically and also from the standpoint of trade wars and everything else that's manifested since this process began. and that's that in the beginning -- and i'll do, again, a very quick sort of tour of my book -- take a country like mexico. our neighbor, one of our major trading partners and so forth. mexico went through something called the tequila crisis in 1994 where, basically, its currently system was slammed, it was kind of an awful mess. and it got out of that in lots of different ways, which is a different book. however, the head of the central bank of mexico at the time of the financial crisis, a man named ortiz, was part of a sort of family of mexican officers and so forth and involved in lots of different aspects of history as well as trying to get out of that tequila crisis. he went to ben bernanke who was the chair of the fed at the time in washington, and said, you know, look, if you do this process, it's going to potentially really hurt the financial system and confidence in the banking system, and

there's going to be sort of major ramifications going forward from that. and ben bernanke ignored him and basically didn't even write about him in his memoirs. he wasn't, like, even a footnote. but he basically went ahead with this quantitative easing process. ortiz went around the world at the time trying to warn people in the act them kick community and -- academic community and throughout the world the types of meetings that were happening, look, if you create a bunch of money and you're not regulating the system properly, it's just ultimately not going to have a good ending. now, he did not get reappointed to be head of the central bank of mexico because be he was not saying what he should have said at the time which is what the fed's doing is awful, and what ben bernanke is doing is very important. instead, he got replaced by a man named car sense who went on to say what ben bernanke is saying is awesome, and it's very important. that, unfortunately, had the impact of creating a lot of

inflation in mexico and a real economic problem in mexico because he was trying to follow a fed that had a very different kind of financial system and bigger pockets as their called -- they're called on wall street in order to liquify or provide money for it. ultimately, he came around. he's now the head of something called the bis, the bank of international settlements, which is kind to have central bank of central banks. it was created in the wake of the crash in 1929 in order to facilitate kind of communication amongst the central banks and create reporting lines and a communication amongst them to talk about how different policies impacted different countries and whether what was done locally made sense globally and the opposite. and he's now kind of more call of the fed. -- critical of the fed. in brazil something interesting happened which was going back to the beginning of 2008, president lula, who's now basically indicted and in prison, but at the time he was sort of a major force in brazilian politics, and he was very concerned that the

u.s. financial crisis would hit brazil, which it ultimately did. and so he had an appointee who was running the central bank of brazil, and he basically was trying to also do a little bit about what the fed was doing, and then he tried not to. he tried to raise rates in brazil such that that there wouldn't be inflation and people wouldn't be able to not afford food and so forth. ultimately, there were shifts in government he left, etc., the new person tried to do what the u.s. was trying to do and what the fed was trying to do, and that hurt brazil even further. now he's back. he actually became the finance minister under michelle temer's government, he was interim president of brazil. now he's running for president. so the other thing about all of this is some of these individuals do resurface throughout these sort of elite roles of, you know, central bank heads, ministry of finance, president and so forth. and he's actually -- he's probably not going to win the presidency, but he's someone who's been around and had the ramifications to his career both

positive and negative from both following and not following the fed. in china going back to my friends at the people's bank of china, it was very different because the governor of the central bank of china from the beginning said -- he was very critical of the policy of the fed, and they didn't try to follow what the fed was doing. instead, and this is actually a ramification of what's going on today, i think, he got very public in the non-g7 community and with some of the allies like japan, and he said we have to worry about this whole rate thing because when rates start to go upper, it's going be to -- up, it's going to hurt our countries, emerging countries and so forth. and what he managed to do more than any other central bank leader was get the imf to accept the chinese currency, to accept into a basket of currencies that's supposed to represent the major currencies of the world. the chinese currency still represents or very little as a percentage of the overall trade of the world, but it got dumped into this basket of currencies

that included the u.s. dollar, the euro which had before that been the french franc and the german deutsche marx the pound sterling from the u.k. and the japanese yen. so basically, it became the fifth member of this four-member group of currencies because of the criticisms that were made against this policy and because other countries were worried too. it goes back to what i saw in that room that day in 2015. i saw a lot of central bankers from around the world that weren't particularly public about whether their country was being hurt by some of the bigger countries creating money out of nowhere when they couldn't and, therefore, creating a lot of anxiety and economic problems throughout the world. they believe that something else had to be done, and what they believed had to be done was more of a sort of unified approach outside of the g7 to developing other currency relationships and so forth. and, again, that wasn't necessarily an ideological shift, that was a shift because of money. it was to reduce the risk that another u.s. financial crisis

might impose upon the world, and it was to reduce the risk of what will happen when interest rates rise too quickly or the fed or any of the other g7 central banks begin to really unwind or sell off some of these securities that they've bought, these bonds that they've bought from both banks and our country, corporations in the european community as well as corporations in japan and actually ask for the money back. which they're not going to do. but even the process of talking about doing a little bit creates instability, and raising rates creates a hardship for the countries and individuals that have borrowed at cheaper rates to repay them, and that creates economic stability in the world. and as a result of that and the anticipation of that, china has managed -- as well as other emerging markets -- to just develop more alliances with each other. not sort of in opposition to a political decision, but in, again, a way in which they can sort of reinforce their own

economies. so when i went to japan from china -- i'm going through the order of my chapters -- japan's very interesting because, obviously, it's a big ally of the united states. from a monetary policy perspective, it was the number two bank, central bank in terms of creating money and reducing its rates to negative and being onboard with the fed policy over the last ten years after the financial crisis. but one of the things that i found there just being on the ground and doing research and journalism on the ground and talking to people who had been involved in a central bank for year, ministry finance in japan for years and so forth, is that there's a lot of alliances that have been happening, actually, for years. even though officially the governments might not have necessarily blessed them, but between members of the central bank community to talk about ways in which they could swab or trade each other's currencies or sort of help if there was a financial problem each other even though they had technically been adversaries really since world war ii. so some of the shifts that they

were beginning to go through were actually happening because of monetary policy, because of economic and financial fears of what could happen in another financial crisis. they've become trade relationships. but they began as currency and just transactional types of relationships where they had no choice but to start to be more friends with each other. and this is what's now happened more publicly. when i went to europe, who has just signed a major trade agreement actually with japan -- third biggest coverage in terms of economies in the world -- they've had a lot of ramifications since this financial policy, monetary policy's been adopted. and that could have been a whole book. i mean, i could have spent, like, years just doing europe. or china. actually, any of these areas. but one of the things that happened there is that the european central bank, and any central bank, made choices. they made choices to use the money they were creating to help

weaker countries or stronger countries. and one of the things the european central bank did was decide -- and, again, this was not a political thing -- but they decided -- i mean, it is. it was a monetary decision and a money decision as well. they decided to do things like create money to help german companies or french companies or the core, stronger part of europe to begin with because the argument was that, well, they're better bets. i mean, you know, if you lend money to someone who's good for it, right, then they're going to repay you. so that must be a good thing. even though this money was created out of nowhere, and if they were good enough, they wouldn't have needed it. but $5.5 trillion worth of money was created by the european central bank to help europe. and it chose not to help, for example, greece. it chose not to really help portugal when it needed it. it sort of had this ongoing thing with italy, but that's mostly because the head of the european central bank, mario draghi, used to be the head of the bank of italy right before

the financial crisis, and he waited to get out of italy and actually work with ben bernanke on a similar policy which still exists in europe. but in making the choice of providing subsidies for, yeah, the banks, ubs, union bank of switzerland or deutsche bank and the countries and so forth involved, that's taking a pool of money from nowhere, it's conjuring money, and it's deciding to play favorites. and that has ramifications. it has ramifications in europe between the weaker and stronger countries to begin with and the fractious nature of the e.u. which has other issues, but from the standpoint of that inequality that's been sort of imposed upon it. and it also, i think, manifested in the brexit vote. because one of the things that happens historically is that whenever there is economic anxiety amongst a group of people or countries or people that can look at immigrants

coming in and, therefore, damaging their own job potential or look across the border and see problems or whatever it might be, they want to vote for whatever doesn't exist. you know, they want to vote out of where they are because governments involved aren't listening, and they aren't helping. and so the first thing you do is you sort of blame what's going on around you, and then the next thing you do is you blame the government. no one blames the central bank. i mean, i was in the u.k. talking to parliament a couple months ago about some of no stuff -- of this stuff, and that weekend there were all these people demonstrating in the streets because wages had just been registered as the lowest in 17 years relative to the cost of things, so lower than they had been going into the financial crisis. and there were some other measures by which they were the lowest in decades. and everybody was sort of marching outside of, you know, part of london, and no one was marching in front of the central bank.

which is a very imposing building, you know, to be -- you know, in london. but no one was doing that because you don't really think, well, we're going to march outside the fed. if you're inclined to march outside of these central banks because the level of influence that they have, i think, is not really fully understood in terms of how what they do impacts all of these other things. and so in the case of brexit when the u.k. voted to split and they're still dealing with whatever might happen from that from the e.u., the idea was that the e.u. is just basically not helping them economyically for different reasons. you know, because immigrants were coming in, making decisions in support of the e.u. countries rather than sort of the u.k. on the outside. whatever it was to anyone who voted for that, the reality is there was a lot of economic instability that was imposed upon the u.k. by the central banks who did create almost a trillion dollars, $800 billion, worth of money out of nowhere to not put into the real economy.

and this bothers people. i mean, i think here as well. one of the things that our election in 2016 showed is that there were a lot of people and there are a lot of people here who just feel very disenfranchised economically. and how they choose to vote is very much a by-product of who they think can help them. and so one of the ways in which governments shift is because of this. in germany, this is happening. there's a lot of swings to nationalism throughout the world, and a lot of the swing from helping everyone is basically helping yourself. it's what banks do all the time. but when you do it on a country by country basis or on a people basis, that isolationism sort of by definition doesn't allow, you know, partnerships to be built better and to help sort of everyone gain more economic or financial stability as a result. so i look at, to conclude, a lot of how these extra factors have

really come out of this ability of the fed and by demand or collusion or extension other g7 central banks to basically fabricate -- in an unlimited manner. these are people that are not elected, they are appointed. and the money that they've been able to create and use is technically unlimited. they decided, the fed, to stop at $4.5 trillion. i mean, we they could have stopd at 3, they could have stopped at 10. there was no actual legal limitation on any of this which means if there is another financial crisis, it can continue. and it can continue to have sort of deeper ramifications than the ones that i think are tied to, you know, someone creating a whole artificial supply of money that goes to some people and not others, that has manifested since the financial crisis. we're now ten years since that financial crisis, and these types of issues and these types of connections from the

standpoint of central banks creating money, not taking it out, not trying to restructure the systems, not creating infrastructure or other types of longer-term financially-beneficial and economic growth ideas and sort of actions really has, ultimately, very high ramifications on geopolitics, on trade, on people, on economics going forward and on potentially another economic crisis or financial crisis around corner. one of the things i wrote about in my first book after i left wall street, after i left goldman sachs was a book called "other people's money." and in it i said that if we don't change what we have -- and this was after a period of a lot of corporate scandals in the beginning of the 2000s that were fueled or financed by the same banks that ultimately were at the center of the financial crisis of 2008 -- then we're going to have a fall. there's just no way around it,

and it's going to be tied to securities that aren't marley understood or -- particularly understood or regulated by the people like the central banks that are supposed to understand and regulate them. we're not really that different right now except for the fact that there's more debt in the world, and there's more of a subsidy that's artificially sort of bolstered the financial system by these central banks than there was beforehand. and so that's something that it concerns me. it's one of the other reasons i wrote this book to explain how all of this sort of connects and also to, hopefully, get more dialogue amongst people on, you know, everywhere in terms of what's actually happening and how we can protect ourselves and what kinds of policies should be created and people should be instituted in order to make those kinds of changes. ..

there is a microphone going around that allows your voice to be heard. >> if you are ahead of it, what would you do? >> here's an idea or quit i would like to do, not just at the feds that some of the other central banks because we are where we are, because we do have rates that are so low they have come up a bit and we have this massive book of assets if they get pulled out-- [inaudible] i think what should happen is that we should really do with these subsidies were supposed to have done, which is to create real growth and infrastructure development. there is a way to do that which is for example to create an

infrastructure bank to take money that's already there, debt that has been extended and to use it which banks to everyday as collateral, assurances for other types of finance that can be raised or money that can be raised to actually go through projects and actually build trains and bridges and highways and do the kinds of things that is technically this money was supposed to do. if the fed had said 10 years ago -- [inaudible] with men have annoyed everyone? if you say well we will cut some of that because unfortunately financially we cannot go back. we can divert that capital to the stuff we said it was supposed to do to begin with and it's not that hard to do from a banking perspective. it's actually quite easy and that's what i would suggest doing to the fed.

i have and to different congresspeople as well as other legislators throughout the world, but it's a way to get out of this mess and get to the solution that it was all supposed to have been created to get to. >> at think you. thank you for visiting us here and i like that idea a lot. we do need infrastructure for the future. i'm remembering back to there's also a political situation after the subprime crisis which led to the greatest recession since the depression and we had 10% unemployment in the economy was in horrible shape and it was spreading around the world and yet after an early 2009, i

think, fiscal stimulus of about $780 billion in congress changed over they weren't going to allow another dime of additional spending in terms of fiscal policy, so it seemed like the fed whose job is to look after inflation and unemployment both almost had no choice but to start creating a big money supply because there was no fiscal capability at that point and so they started buying bonds and so on the one hand people were worried it would be hyper inflationary with 4 trillion. on the other hand others believed that's what helped us crawl out of what could have any depression.

why aren't we using, i mean, that's now-- first of all a lot of that money the 4 trillion didn't really make its way into the economy. it was basically sitting on banks balance sheets, but again siskel wasn't really an option for government spending which a more traditional way to do infrastructure. how, policy wise, with that even happened because now they are trying to reverse the quantitative using, so how could a program commence whereby the banks were somehow enticed or forced or accommodation to create an infrastructure bank with all that cash and use it for infrastructure for the future? >> @they good question. so, the banks won't do it on their own will any more than they have done over the last 10

years. they don't need to. however, the way it could work is for an actual act of creating a national bank or infrastructure bank and our country doesn't have one. other countries do. one way for example china-- it's usually allowed for infrastructure building, not just within china but throughout its regions and what former partners of the us like argentina and brazil and so brought because it has the funding and once the funding for that rather than put it into the financial markets which is what has happened here. it would have to be something that's chartered either through state legislation for in states, but more so at the federal level and actually i have spoken with a number of senators and congresspeople on both sides of the aisle because there is positive about an structure of the both sides of the aisle. when is your not creating more debt, so from a conservative

perspective of acknowledging that a lot of debt has been created over this decade this would be a way to take that that's been created in sort of divert it to not necessarily sell it off and hurts the level or the value of bonds, but basically to use it, so that has to be an actual act and that is something there is interested, i think, because that's and b on the democratic side there's-- not that it's either or, but it is working out this way that there's this idea rather than have another financial crisis if the fed does get back to any sort of normalcy how do we do that in a way that doesn't deflate real economy and sort of real jobs and so forth, so it has to be a legal-- legal construct and be funded-- it could be funded in different ways, but to me it makes sense. it has to be something, i mean, if i were to structure it

tomorrow different sides of the aisle, different sectors and ideas of projects and there's like a certain amount of funding and it goes, trains and sort of bridges and ports. one group that's interested because they want more funding for some of the port areas, so there is interest in trying to find a way rather than having an argument every time within the walls of congress to say we want to budget this can we trade this for this and the defense part of this in the social bit of that. rather than do that say there's an actual financial construct out of the banking system though they can fund together. private banks are welcome to find a bridge with national bank. and work as they did to build highways or whatever together. but it does need an act.

>> thank you. your comments are very interesting and the question i have is related to sort of this question of the mobile crystal ball and what you have witnessed in terms of your life experience working in the financial sector and based on what you see currently given both the political assignment and what's going on with fed monetary policy. what you anticipate in the future. i hope it's not an unfair question. >> it's a great question. a couple years ago i anticipated a potentially difficult financial crisis to occur when the european central bank promised it would stop its quantitative easing, which was a couple summers ago after it had had to do a lot of it when it was a crisis in europe that began in 2012 so there's been sort of ins and outs on a global basis, all really global.

i bought the time at which things would really go on the rails would be when these banks really stopped their program. what happened was they didn't stop their program because they knew this. the problem is they don't have an exit plan. the problem is a short end and explaining and doing a lot of things they don't want to have to do because they would much rather get out of their positions, go into the private sector and call it a day and say what i did at my time of the central bank work because there were studying-- nothing catastrophic during my time. i think that means there's another crisis of brewing. however the timing i don't know her because i do know from my experience looking at this stuff over the last 10 years and not

having been available in crises before that is that central banks have become used to their ability to provide money when they need to to smooth over any abrupt edges and so the fed now starts to raise rates. it's supposed to raise rates three times this year and minute set for and now i believe it says it's not sure. i personally believe it will be three. if you do things too quickly it hurts emerging other markets and so there is this-- it's like a peter taught her and we are in the middle. there should be another crisis because there is too much debt and its subsidized by not real stuff. on the other hand, there's a lot of power and influence and desire to keep things up and balanced, so as a result i think there should be a crisis. nothing has formed since the last one, but because it's been and can be armed not sure when. >> i'm sorry. this is not new because we have

known to follow the money for generations and it always ends up with the bankers. who has benefited from these trillions of dollars because there's always going to be someone who has carpet bags. there will always be someone who has-- that money is somewhere doing something. i'm listening to you and i love listening to you, but the question for me is why? why would you put the world's economy in the tank deliberately admitted deliberately try to shore it up? if there was a financial benefit to someone somewhere. >> so, this goes-- really quick, in the wake of the financial crisis i wrote a book and it was before a lot of the-- it was like in the beginning. came out in 2009 so i don't even know what i predicted, but i did talk about exactly what was going on and how it would grow to this-- to fix the system and

the math was such that. the amount of subprime mortgages that lined these toxic assets that failed was about a half trillion dollars, so just think a half. of the amount of assets that us banks created off the back about half mixing and matching and moving some around was 14 trillion, so a half 14, but that what they did was they went money to lots of places and lots of other institutions including like the ones down the street, investment banks on top of that so that they could buy those assets. so, the math worked out that it was about normally tend to one. it was much more than that, debt -- but to make it conservative that meant a half trillion subprime mortgages was supporting 140 trillion dollars worth of financial dust. as a result of that it was

imperative for the fed to come up with some way of sort of writing that tied by creating a enough money and reducing the cost of money as well in order not to have all of that completely implode. that met some borrowers did implode. some could borrow more cheaply in payout but they had borrowed to begin with to buy that stuff, i mean, a lot of things happened and needed to happen in order to save the financial institutions that ultimately were left standing now, we could of done this in other ways. we could have just paid a half a trillion dollars to the mortgages that lined all of this stuff in there would've actually been no other crisis and it would have been really much cheaper, but that was the mentality and i think the lack of understanding of how banks operate, but certainly that was more of a political ideological decision was to we need this, we need this solution to help these

institutions because otherwise the entire economy would implode forever. sort of, and that's why the money went to save a lot of the financial creations of this pre-economic crisis in different ways and since then it's gone into the stocks of these companies. it's gone into the cash balances of these companies. it's got into buying other companies. it's going to creating the most historic debt but the world and consumers have a face since financial eyes institutions were created to provide them lending, so that's where it's gone. where it hasn't gone which is why it's a really good question is into stabilizing and growth in the train and that bridge and that whatever. that's where it hasn't gone.

>> it seems like the last four or five recessions has been caused by banks prophecy new line seems to pay any attention to supervising the bank send it out that they have had these legislations watching more closely, dodd frank i guess and now they are-- should they have program to qualify people to watch what they are doing or maybe make the banks a utility in avoidance of these crises quite a part of even having a portion that become a nationalized thing to do the things they are supposed to be doing more of would be at least a way to diffuse that and we should have extra matriculation for the banks, i mean, they have paid hundreds of billions of dollars off the money they have received very freely into settlements and signs of fraud they have committed in the past, i mean, if you look at a man,

with the wells fargo, they have paid multiple billions of dollars including recently for a portion of which four trading bank accounts and stealing money from their customers and stuff and if you do that including auto loans and other things and if you are like a person who steals a bunch of cars up the street you will probably get indicted and go to jail and if you do it over state lines you definitely will have a felony conviction if not indictments, so that hasn't happened and so to deregulate them further or the idea of any congressperson on any side of the aisle deciding it makes more sense to give them more latitude with a arty have like 800 subsidies with which to operate just doesn't make sense in going back to your question when there is a crisis that will be a part of it banks haven't stopped doing what they were doing into the subprime crisis with other more

complex assets. they are just doing it now with corporate loans. corporate loans in these mechanisms are being bundled at record levels, so it's not mortgages anymore. it's all the loans that given to corporate and so to deregulate them or at least not to watch is going on with these clo's is really a crisis in the making. >> thank you. can you give us women's analogy of the dodd frank and the second question is about the debt. what is borrowing-- when is enough enough cracks? >> dodd frank superquick was a 2010 act committed to dialback some of the risk of the banks

and the idea was that they would have to set aside-- one of the ideas, what more of their own money so if there was the government wouldn't have to come in and take care of it. it didn't actually get created in the wake of knowing how much was available from the fed or how much would be available from the fed, so that didn't enter the substantive idea, but it was the idea that banks would-- you know if emergency like the crisis happened we need to have more set aside so we will handle it on our own and there was also because of it came out of the consumer financial protection board, which has done a lot of good. it's done about $12 billion worth of getting back stuff that's been stolen-- well, frauds in different type of activities that been committed against consumers by banks in the years since 2010. with the dodd frank act didn't do a separate banks. an act of 1933 and the height of the great depression which was

designed by the government as well as by the makers to separate the deposits and loans of people and companies from all the security's creation trading and speculative activity so that our deposits and loans would it be the collateral for all the other stuff and so would therefore when there was emergency it couldn't be the collateral for the requirement of extra help in that emergency. that hasn't been done or could i wasn't a part of dodd frank. bringing it back in a modern form was on the platform about the democrats and the republicans in the 2016 election. but, it has been pushed. republican sort of dial to back from it and democrats also dialback. there is an act-- bill called hr 790 in congress that's been going around the house about 70 or 80 signatures across the aisle that acts to reinstate the

siegel act in a similar act going on any bill in the senate that's championed it to do the same thing on a bipartisan basis , but it has not been done yet so that's kind of what has happened from those two things. >> thank you so much for your excellent presentation. i just want to go back real quick to your-- some of the things you highlighted in your book about $1.1200 that we have with china. any thought on trade? any buzz-- validity or is it hype? with a be willing to call it now that? >> the reality of money over politics, money in the pocket of the person of our country is that's when you have something that's valued at a certain level , if you sell it you lose money even if you want to do that politically. so, from the standpoint of china

, if they decided for some political reason to sell our love their treasury bonds they would be shooting themselves in the foot economically. that's why they aren't you doing it and that's why they won't do it. they might buy less in the future and that's actually more of an economic decision, i mean, if you think a country inherently might see another car races from the financial system it has a rectified in the future or whatever and you want to protect yourself from the risk you might buy less treasuries going forward at the percentage of what we have outstanding and the amount of debt we have outstanding, but you will not like dump your treasuries. i think russia said something about dumping their treasuries recently, but the-- russia doesn't actually owning a lot of treasuries and so the impact to them and to the world just from a sheer price level on treasury

bonds which would be very limited in the bigger countries that oh memo to do it for their own sake. >> hello. very interesting. you talk a lot about china. we talk a lot about the united states, but what economies in which countries really concern you? let me throw out one, venezuela. which give you hope? let me throw out one. any thoughts? >> i actually write this annual 10 points to look at over the year thing on my website in january and venezuela was certainly a point of problem for financial perspective and something to definitely look at as with argentina, which has had its problems and continues to have its problems as well as

does turkey. in terms of brighter points, i mean, you look at something like iceland, i mean, something that countries which we may have the opportunity to sort of separate themselves financially from the main curs that had operating in their country or investing in our country into the financial crisis and decided not end as a result at least are able to govern their country from the standpoint of their decisions that make sense for the country as opposed to having to potentially payouts money that they don't have two outside investors that don't necessarily need it for going back to the negative on argentina, one problem argentina had was that a lot of the debt that it had borrowed was also entangled in a lot of things, hedge fund operators that were involved in the subprime crisis and extracted very tolls from the country and what happened when you're just doing a transaction fight-- and you want your money

back and either a court door's central bank or group of sort of super entities decided it was okay ultimately it hurts the real people in the economies of the countries in the financial elements and people that were involved to use from investing standpoint. you know, don't try to take the money out. >> thank you. can you hear me? oh, okay. good. to brief questions. i don't remember the author of the book. the name escapes me, but it was pretty disturbing to me. in the title was confessions of an economic hitman. >> john perkins.

>> correct and the second thing i'm sure what you are talking at this very much related to what his job was poor years-- four years, so i've come to the conclusion that two or 300 years things haven't changed. whoever is in power with a lot of influence, a lot of resources usually money wins. always, you know-- things haven't really changed except for the few periods in history when there was some sanity. >> actually, i looked at the period of the 50s as a period of that kind of sanity, i mean, obviously there was a lot of the

problems, but from an economic perspective because the finance in the country and the finance for the country, the banks for the country as well as the government were someone on the same page in that they were actually trying to collectively build the country and they actually kind of wanted to do that. today's banks and banks before that on this lack of need or desire, requirement to actually do that and when there is too much which often there is an history there is too much of a separation between the money and what needs to happen in order to sort of help a long-term type of growth or the real economy and it's too distorted and that's when you have crises and have economic and revolutionary types of people. the periods where someone is on the same page for example people

and ideas and governments and financing and it tends to be more stable, but there is definitely-- greed has a way of changing history and certainly the more money that's available, to the fewer hands more destabilizing-- destabilizing it is to everyone else. where-- [inaudible] >> thank you. i really thank you all for coming out here. thank you to more works for hosting and i hope you enjoy it when:-- "collusion". [applause]. >> before we go anywhere you know my routine, so those of it you that have your book and

those of you that don't back away because i like the picture of our crowd. >> that's nice. >> there you go give me a nice wave perfect. thank you. she will be signing books over here, so just head over here and have your books signed. thank you all for coming out tonight. appreciate it. [inaudible conversations] >> you are watching the tv on c-span2, television for serious readers. here's tonight's primetime lineup. first, black youth project 100 director charlene carruthers offers her shots on how to shift mainstream ideas on race, gender and class. 7:45 p.m. recounts but double experiment, 1800 experiment by

thomas down that challenged isaac newtons theory that life is been a particle's. 8:30 p.m., "new york times" correspondent talks about the american serving in afghanistan and iraq. 9:30 p.m. eastern, manhattan institute fellow heather mcdonald talks about her latest book. focuses on identity politics and college campuses. on book tvs afterwards program at 10:00 p.m., obama administration education secretary arnie duncan discusses successes and failures of schools in america. as we wrap up our prime time programming at 11:00 p.m. with phyllis' reflection on her work in the feminist movement. that all happens tonight on c-span twos book tv, 48 hours of nonfiction author and books every weekend, television for serious readers