that these countries are bringing and we know we have to have that to be able to move forward and they're bringing the long of health, access to education and access to divisitn making bodies. they did a study on supply versus demand and they couldn't immediately get why it consistently got a high grade of people as opposed to building courthouses and training judges. the answer was clear. it was access to justice and the ability it have someone's conflict and the ability to walk away was the biggest gift one could make to the community and this is what we've learned and we've applied so we've made a lot of progress in that sense and we had lots to go and certainly listening to the demand side is equally important.

>> when i was at the central hospital at port-au-prince teams were arriving in this wild and very encouraging ad hoc way and jeeps would roll up and nurses and doctors would pour out, trucks would roll up with equipment and put on private planes in florida and so there were traffic cops, basically. doctors who sent people where they were needed for two of the most heroic nights that i've ever seen in my life, but even the traffic cops didn't quite know what to do when the church of scientology team arrived and he said what do you guys do? and there were a large number of people, and people don't believe in psychiatry, and they sort of quickly put their heads together

and the teams got sent out to do massages when which they did for the next several weeks, but it worked. instead of saying we don't need you guys here or go home or we're not sure what to do with you, was there this sort of feeling, look, some hands showed up and people showed up and let's put them to work, and i thought good for you, there were scientology practitioners giving out massages and not psychotrophic drugs. is there something someone was dying to say when someone else was talking? >> at the risk of being sentimental, i was at a meeting on friday with the president of liberia, and i think for all of the cases where we look at these humanitarian crises and say it's

impossible, the president commented about the progress they made in nine years, and i would ask all of us to remember that as painful and ugly as some of these things are, liberia a decade ago was one of the most horrific places on earth. ten years is a lot of time and a lot of blood spilled, and i think what keeps all of us going is those successes, and so i would just hope to leave us with that thought. it takes patience and time and takes political leadership, and i think what we've been able to see in our life times is it's entirely doable. >> and hope. and hope. >> and love. [ applause ] >> good to see youio.

tomorrow here on c-span3, a hearing looking into the budget request to congress, defense secretary leon panetta and general martin dempsey testifying before the senate appropriations subcommittee and live coverage begins at 10:30 eastern. and also tomorrow j.p. morgan ceo jamie dimon testifies before the senate banking commit bet multibillion-dollar trading loss and the implications on the dodd frank law and live coverage on c-span and the note that jamie dimon will be on capitol hill and c-span3 plans live coverage before the house financial services committee. pulitzer prize-winning author travels to research his new back

barack obama, the story. he travels to kenya to examine the president's family tree. book tv will give you exclusive pictures and video including the trip with the author from 2010. join us at 6:00 p.m. eastern and your phone calls, e-mails and tweet for david maraniss on c-span2 tv. earlier today the press club hosted the economic challenges. three journalists who cover the economy for politico, the economist and "barron's" provided analysis on multiple issues including uncertainty among u.s. businesses, and the debt crisis and federal reserve ben bernanke's job performance. this is an hour and 15 minutes. >> related to the presidential election. so please keep watch on press.org for other events and

aga again, i just want to thank you for braving the weather this morning. so i kind of think the next five months will be pretty interesting as we see how obama and romney duke it out, and i think our panelists would agree, as well. i just want to show you the front cover of the economist and the sinking ship with the world economy and that's one testament there. and at "barron's," and we're getting red flags about the possibility of sequesterment in january that could lead to $1.2 trillion and trillion with a "t" folks of spending cuts and for me, the most telling element that economics matters to

washington, d.c. is that i hear that politico is hiring some economics writers. so if you have any questions on that maybe he can shed some light. we have some newsmakers coming our way. this week, but we have economic data coming out today and jobless claims and retail sales, industrial production and the fed meets next week. we know that the house and senate have been getting geared up, and i'm pretty sure that bill clinton will continue to annoy and confound president obama. so we have a terrific panel this morning and i have to start out with some brief introductions. immediately to my left we have ben white who is wall street columnist for "politico." previously he was with "new york

times" and the f.t. and our local rag "the washington post" and he writes the morning monty column which everyone should sign up for and it's a great way to get an early round-up on the news. ben is based out of new york so we thank him for make the trip out for this event. greg yip is our u.s. economics editor for "the economist" and greg covers topics such as financial and monetary policy economics and financial services, and greg will take all of the questions about how to create a proper banking system and last, but certainly not least is jim mctague who is washington editor for barons. correct me if i'm wrong, but

you've held that position since 1984 which is you've seen many administrations since bush i. >> and i was stockbroker for merrill lynch ntsb since the '80s so i've been in the private sector as well. >> we'll definitely learn a lot from all three of these gentlemen. join me in giving them a welcoming round of applause for joining us. [ applause ] we'll start off with questions for our panelists and i'll turn the microphone to you so you can ask your questions when the time comes because we are being taped. please do hold the microphones close to your mouths and state your name and if you can please make sure if you can state your question as a question and not

as a statement that would be great. first, let me turn to greg for our first question and ben and jim, please chime ins as well with, if you like. >> i think you wrote the current weakness in the economy is getting harder to identify. that we see culprits like gas prices, gdp, job growth, but what we're hearing is pretty mixed. so is there going to be a tipping point? >> yes. i think the point i'm trying to make there is three years in a row now we started that the economy started with a head of steam and that petered out by summertime and by this time last year we had a spike in oil prices because of the turmoil in libya and the tsunami was disruptive to supply chains and also as summer approach weed had the showdown with the debt ceiling and bubbling in the background was europe. we can say that's the reason

why. and when it started to happen this year it was perplexing because you could point to anything equivalent. they weren't up as much as a year ago and they peaked in april and they've been moving down ever since. yes, there were problems in europe, but at least until the spanish banking system became the focus of our attention and it wasn't on the radar until a few weeks ago and it came too late to explain why the economy wasn't slowing down. as you look around it's difficult to identify, and the one last fiscal tax -- and that was taken care of a few months ago. as you look around it's difficult to say which is the single reason, but if you look around the world and step back a bit it's striking the extent to which uncertainty with the overused words in both politics and economics and it's pervasive that businesses and markets hate uncentery and uncertainty is a fact of life and every business

has to wonder and it's never certain about whether the product will succeed and whether the government will interfere with what they do and the extent to which political actors themselves are factors in the economic outcome this year, and i think it's probably without precedent for those of us who have been covering for a number of decades now. in europe, whether or not the eurozone collapses is more or less in the hands of german voters and the chancellor of germany as the cover more or less implied and here we have the confluence of fiscal events occurring in the end of the year and the republicans and democrats agreed to pile everything on to the lame duck session. we'll have a referendum and then they'll decide what to do, and in the event we were discovering it wasn't so smart because when people know there was a gigantic event coming and next there will be a good year or bad year, the incentive is to wait or delay, and i suspect that will

intensify as the year comes along and it has been seen the impact of that uncertainty happening. while i don't think it can explain why things are weak now, the confluence of that plus what's going on in europe and china and the emerging markets which were certainly the last haven of strong, economic growth and brazil, india and china, and in china they're waiting to see whether the legendary ability like stop and start growth on command holds up this time. if you're a business person and i had a blog where i posted china avoids a hard landing by 80%, the odds that it avoids a collapse at 60% and the u.s. avoids the fiscal cliff. each of those, vents the odds are that things will work out okay, but if you multiply the fact that they're all going to be okay. you have a very strong incentive

to sit on your cash and not do anything. so i think that's kind of the story this year. it's always been the case that the economic outlook affects the politics and i don't think the politics are driving economic outlook right now. >> you see in the surveys that there's no center owe leaders upon final demand and there's no sense that there will be demand for their products going forward the rest of this year. why add a lot of workers when you're not sure what the demand is going to be, there's also the fact of the 2012 presidential election and it will be very close and what tax policies will look like going forward in the next congress. we talked about overhauling the tax code and pretty much every congress now it won't happen and there's certainty with the tax rate of any given investment is going to be. every possible area and so

you've got again another short spike in hiring followed by a whole lot of layoffs and not a whole lot of hiring to get productivity out of an existing workforce and i don't think there are indications in any of the data that we'll get strong run to job creation and the 2012 election is determined. >> i would say that the problem is too much certainty. i wish it was uncertainty because that's mild, but if you rdz this issread this issue of ""barron's," they're pessimistic and they have naked fear. they're saying get out of the stock market, raise cash. sit tight. europe will collapse and there will be a spillover into this country. there is that in the stock market, number one. number two, when you travel around this country, and i think this theory is reflected that

yesterday's bed figures show that the wealth of the average family has to collide and wages are flat to declining. there's a wage deflation in the marketplace and young people can feel it. when you go back into the market and you get paid a fraction of what you're accustomed to make. if you are graduating from college and you have an internship for a couple of years. it's a painful adjustment, and the middle class and the poor and they're recovering from three to five years or so. >> everyone is still seated and nobody's crying so it's all good. let me toss this question to

jim. do you think romney if he's elected president will keep bernanke around? >> no. i don't. history will judge whether ben bernanke will be. the new president will want his own appointee at the fed. and i don't believe that ben bernanke will stick around. that's a very tough job and he's due for a vacation. >> is he to blame, guys? is there any blame? >> romney is on the record saying he wouldn't support bernanke staying on the job, partly for the consumption of the republican campaign where bashing ben bernanke was the number one job of the gop presidential candidate and he had to come out and say ben bernanke's fault? no, i don't think so.

he's sort of used the traditional tools and the tool box of the fed to keep interest rates very low and tried to stimulate the economy, you know, with what measures he had available to him and the open market's committee and they continue to do that. the next thing is do they act to have the quantitative easing to keep rates low in an extended period of time. it's hard for me to think about laying the blame for our crisis and subsequent low and painful recession for ben bernanke and there is a different view on the panel. >> i have a different view. it was a good try. he tried to inflate the stock mark market. he tried to inflate the real estate market. you would raise money if you department your money in a cd

and both these efforts have failed and the housing market still has more down side and we've seen the stock market give back all its gains since the beginning of the year. the dow was up since we had the latest round of spanish banking concerns and i wouldn't lay the subsequent decline in the stock market on bernanke. >> if bernanke has blame it's since 2006 on the board on of governors in terms of calling for tougher regulations for the important banks which fed the crisis. since the crisis, he's behaved in a sterling fashion in terms of executing how they know in terms of how macro policy should work. he provided the central bank is the only one that has provided and he did that and he provided as many dollars as the rest of

the world needed when they were in short supply. i shudder to think that it would have been the lender of last resort. he could have been criticized for not having done enough to have used the tools available to support demand. what you have is a situation that, jim, the way it all works and to save less and that's how it works and basically changes the incentive to suspend now or suspend later and when you have an agency, there's a limit to your ability to stimulate that factor especially when you have these gigantic headwinds than their homes are worth and they cannot respond to the low interest rates as they typically can, and good macro tells us and we simply haven't had that.

a good question for bernanke is the extent of the approach of the election comes in terms of whether he is more aggressive and does he do another round of quantitative easing at the june meeting and even on deep background they will never, ever admit to politics being a factor in what they do and yet, i can't help thinking that when they get up in the morning and being looking at themselves as they brush their teeth, do do i really want to be ripped to shreds? how is my decision going to play out publicly? even if they, in all sincerity, say that no, politics do not influence my decision, the political process will filter what it does and transform what it will be to the rest of the population. so if there are enough people looking at the fed's hyperinflation, some people will actually think that and that

will frustrate the very purposes it has. so after a quantitative easing, too, there were a lot of accusations leveled at the fed by brazilians and the lead up to the commodity and the research is theoretical and imperical and say that it is not true. could it be 100% not true? if that's possible isn't that hurting what the fed is trying to do? you have to take these multiple things into consideration and it's just another iteration that we are in uncharted territory in how politics drives economic decisions. >> he's done a wonderful job, ben bernanke of postponing the inevitable depression? he's debased the currency. the purpose of debasing the currency is to inflate housing and the stock market. it worked for a while. it's run out of gas and look at the housing market and look at

the stock market and he's like a quarterback that had a brilliant fourth quarter. >> it is exactly to the inflation rate. >> if you look -- if you're holding currency in a bank with the arrest inflation -- >> the whole point is -- >> the whole point is to punish savers and to punish your grandma for having a certificate of deposit. >> i don't think that's true. >> to incent her to buy a casino or to scoop up a condo in miami and make money that way. well, guess what happens? you cannot make money in the account, and you cannot make money in the condo market and the stock market. great plan. >> we're having fun.

we talked about greece and nobody know what's cure-all is for the united states. the question that comes to my mind next is will the united states ever have its own sense of austerity and will we have our own sovereign debt crisis? >> i don't think we necessarily will. we have a $13 trillion debt and it's not by any stretch of the imagination. we've grown out of these things before and it tends to recover and then start growing again and the debt seems like less of a concern, but obviously, we have long-term, structural drivers of the debt and social security and medicaid in particular and we don't seem to have a political system that's equipped to deal with those things and they're

not, i don't think, entirely complex and we could have a congress that's not so polarized and not so seemingly incapable of addressing those long-term drivers and taking the decisions that would reduce the growth of those programs coupled with recovering economy. i think it could make it not that difficult of a problem to start to really reduce the annual deficits and the size of the national debt and we could stop talking about this as a constant issue. the problem is that there's no indication that they're going to get a congress like that and we could have just complete, political gridlock and incompetence, but there's nothing product rally in the u.s. economy or in the size of the government that is not solvable. we've seen multiple debt reductions come up with

reasonable plans to do that. they then get beaten down on the left and the right and the right saying we can't possibly raise any taxes and raise the eligibility ages and we can't do what needs to be made and these are not impossible to solve problems. for many reasons we have a political system that at this point it's incapable of doing it, and i don't know it's whether a chance in the campaign finance laws in a way to allow the policy to be done in a reasonable fashion. we're not a lot like greece. we have much bigger, broader, more diverse economy. and we're not like italy for that matter, or spain. we can handle these problems, i think, if we get political leadership that's capable of doing, but we haven't been able

to do that. >> it's hard to solve the debt crisis. i'm not aware of a developed country of having a debt crisis. the closest i can think of is russia in 1988. the reason spain, greece and italy, if you look at spain, the debt ratios are lower than ours and the reason why is that ten years ago spain gave up the right to print their own currency which means it took off the tables the two ways the country takes advantage of a gem and that takes up the room by shrinking government, as jim will confirm, as expense of your debtors. it's not nice, but it works and one thing you don't worry about is you get $100.

it's actually done so, but the damage that it's done that. and you have the shot that crisis has. there's an argument that's not such a great thing. without that market, the americans will never weak up to the fact that they're having in tax-suspending policies and for the political reasons, and the debts keep growing and that steadily crowds out public investments and more and more resers over the economies that are devoted to unproductive and parts of government spending and keeping retirees supported and the lifestyle to which they're entitled and that drives down the economic growth rate of the country and you end up like italy albeit without italian

debt crisis. >> we've had austerity in this country before and jimmy quacar and ronald reagan were presidents and they exceeded with the plan of paul volker to have interest rates when the rates were 11% and 12%. that was a period of austerity. some americans didn't like it. i remember the construction industry, some 2 x 4 of the wes a white house are in protest. people talk about the dysfunctional congress. this congress did not materialize out of thin air and the voters sent them there in 2010 and it was a message that the voters wanted an end to the government spending and they wanted austerity. i believe that we'll reach an