flock. anyway. [laughter] >> all right. huge fed day. huge market day. but we end it with a smile and laugh. >> always. >> that does it for us. >> you got to laugh. thanks for joining us. bulls & bears starts right now. david: hi, everybody. thanks for joining us. joining me on the panel today, liz peek, zachary carabell, deidre bolton and jack howe. the dow plunging nearly 900 points right after the federal reserve announced another rate hike this afternoon. it actually went down about 500, but there was a 900 point swing. this despite calls from the president and others to leave rates alone. so folks, did the fed make the right decision? >> well, i think the betting was that they would raise rates, and the betting also was that if they didn't, the market would tumble because everyone would read it as a negative sign about economic growth. so yes, i think they did the right thing. they did turn a little dovish

looking at projections for next year, cut the expected number of rate hikes next year to two, but the markets at that point were factoring in only one half of a rate increase next year. so the market didn't like this very much. but my guess is this will settle out. actually the best thing that came out i think they changed a lot of the very very moderate gains in -- or changes in growth estimates going forward, but the long-term growth, they moved up to 1.9% versus 1.8%. they had shaved near-term estimates, but i actually think that is a very positive indicator. a lot of discussion about that. >> i thought the fed threaded the needle nicely here. then investors took that needle and threw it in the garbage and took that and threw it in a bigger garbage. i don't think there was anything that was going to make investors happy. you have to find this balance between, you know, you don't want to signal -- investors really would have been panicked that maybe the economy is a lot weaker than we thought if there was no hike.

here you see the slower course for rate hikes going forward. there's every opportunity for them to take a pause at sometime next year if conditions change. so i don't see anything really here that should have spooked investors. >> i'm with you, jack. i feel like the fed was in a situation, had they not raised, i think then the sell-off would have been blamed on oh the u.s. economy isn't strong enough to absorb this kind of increase. but, you know, it was just in a rough spot. i mean statistically also i guess we should point out, right, since 1960, the fed has only been able to engineer a soft landing one time. that was greenspan in the 90s. so this tight rope is a pretty tough job to do. i know some people say just get rid of the fed all together. but while we do have the fed, and while we are paying attention, it's a tough job. >> look, the markets have a pretty infantile relationship to the fed. constantly looking to the fed for some sort of big brotherish

guidance of now it's all safe or now it is dangerous. and the best that we can hope for i think in the coming year is less of that, meaning if the fed is only going to raise once or twice, and we can see what it will wind up doing, market is becoming much less dependent on the fed as a signaller, especially since the rates are remarkably low by historical standards, and they will remain that way, as well as the fact there's a global interest rate environment that is a lot lower than even what the fed is raising up its short-term rate to. you know, the fed should not be a determinant of market prices. a lot of companies have issues. a lot of companies have virtues. most of those are not going to rise and fall based on 25 or 50 basis points -- david: i was wondering about the virtues of powell. while he was speaking, he literally was saying an answer to a question that it was a good thing for the federal reserve to come out and speak, while he was saying that, the market went down 500 points. >> he also mentioned that they watched markets which i think kind of surprised everybody. the fed is supposed to be

independent not only of president trump or whoever is in the white house but also sort of market indicators like what the dow jones is doing -- david: but you didn't believe they ignored markets? >> no, but it was more open. they dropped the neutral range on interest rates from 2.75 from 3, that means they can quit if they get to 2.75 next year and say okay now we're there which i think is kind of good news. >> that's a great point. they added in some flexibility for themselves. they didn't back themselves into a corner. but i think part of the why the market's reacted as such. we all know when the fed raises rates the prime rate goes higher. all the borrowing that american citizens do, it gets more expensive. i think along with the market volatility that we have seen since october, there are a lot of worries about how this is going to affect people's mentality, maybe even what they spend. i know i'm connecting some dots that maybe do or don't need to be connected. if you have an auto loan, a mortgage, a home equity loan, a

credit card balance, you are going to pay more starting now. >> what you are seeing is people are clearly not buying homes as much as they were. much fewer mortgage origination. a lot of people are waiting to see the end point. no one wants to do it if they think it is going to get a little higher. they don't know where it's going. this always happens in an up or down cycle where people pull back and say i don't know where this is going so i'm going to pull back. there's not a lot of evidence that there's huge credit quality contraction. there is not a lot of evidence that banks are lending less or getting fewer requests. there's a complete stock market convulsion based on the factors that everybody has been talking about for a long time, the fed is just one. david: did we believe powell when he said he wasn't at all influenced by the president? >> yes. david: you do? he can ignore that as noise? >> absolutely. >> look, it is not powell making this decision. there are a whole lot of people sitting around a table. i really don't think any one of them would have the gall to say wait a minute, the president doesn't want us to raise rates,

let's not do this. >> it was anonymous. >> markets would have had to have fallen completely off a cliff or data, massive unemployment month to month for the fed to change its data trajectory. two months of really rocky stuff, trade war heating up, markets uncertain, all these things this is not going to alter it. frankly, if you step back from the market today, they did change their trajectory and they did say look, things aren't looking quite as good as they were. we're going to slow this thing down. >> zack, i think the market was ahead of them. again, i was astonished to read this morning that the market was pricing in half a rate increase next year, one rate increase, not a whole rate increase. i think even though they have turned a little more dovish, it was not enough. >> let's remember it is not that easy to look at the historical record and say what are these hikes going to mean for the market because we haven't quite had this period where we went ten years with no interest in our bank accounts. now pretty soon people will see 2 1/2% rates just in a regular savings account. next year sometime they will see

3%. that's going to be like spotting big foot, and we don't really know how stock investors are going to react to that sudden -- david: and we don't know specifically what the rates -- i mean, look, we could have a serious problem, maybe not a full-fledged recession, but a real drawdown. one indicator of that by the way wasn't just the fed saying it. it was fedex. the company fedex was down 12% today, 12%, partly as a result of lay-offs that they are planning, partly as a result of what fred smith, the founder and the head of the company has been saying about a global slowdown. so who knows if there is a real global slowdown leading to a recession, we may not see higher rates. >> fedex -- they say this is international problems. the u.s. economy is very strong. nothing to worry about in the u.s. this is overseas problems. david: can we afford to ignore overseas forever? >> every ad i see for this company talks about how connected the world is. we're a global economy. we are in it together. we are closer than we have ever been before.

i don't know how we stay so isolated and so healthy in the face of weakness overseas. >> fred smith who has been a visionary and i think amazing ceo for decades, he put a lot of blame on a lot of factors. he blamed the trade war. he blamed politicians. he blamed tariff policy and tax policy. when ceos start blaming everybody else for their business not going quite as expected, you usually do need to look at the company. david: he's not an elon musk kind of -- he's the reverse of elon musk. >> i'm not suggesting that what he said doesn't have merit. i'm saying ceos who deflect attention from their own particular business issues by casting aspersions on a global environment, look, there's always a problematic global environment. he has navigated through a lot of these. this was unusual -- >> we did have sink -- we did have synchronized global growth a year ago. now we have synchronized

global -- david: deidre, you mentioned the fact that some people are talking about getting rid of the fed. do you think that's a fantasy in the minds of libertarians, or do you think it is a real possibility it could happen? >> no, i think it is a fantasy. most libertarians would love to -- it is not the worst idea out there; right? but i think for the moment, the fed is here to stay. and if you speak with anybody who traded through 2008 and the credit crisis meltdown, they will tell you, you know what? okay, the fed is sort of the easiest punching bag in the room to kick or punch. but guess what? there are times where there's utility there; right? so maybe it kind of messes up market sentiments for a little bit but it does serve a purpose. >> one other thing, jack was talking about some of the uncertainties, how unusual this time is, i would also throw in the fact that the fed is committed to winding down their 4 trillion dollars balance sheet. that is something we have never been through that before as far

as i can recall. david: that's a great point. >> that's a big deal. >> yes, it is. david: it was specifically when powell mentioned that the market really began to tank. >> what's fascinating about that. i did a piece about a year ago for the washington post that said the fed is a great crisis manager and not such a great stasis manager. the balance sheet issue is an interesting one. the fact is they don't have to unroll that balance sheet. >> they are. >> they have elected to. they think they should. given no one expected them to increase it to the degree it was, 4 trillion dollars, that's very discretionary. they are clearly making the choice they don't like it, but they don't have be making that choice. david: the president referenced that in a tweet the other day. 50 bs as he called it. -- 50 b's as he called it. calls for the removal of ceo mark zuckerberg growing louder

by the day, but he's not going anywhere any time soon. we will tell you why. you may be surprised. that's next.

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david: another day, another damaging story on facebook. today it's a new york times blockbuster saying the company gave access to user day to top tech companies. there are growing calls for the ceo to step down, but can't be overlooked. he owns well over 50% of the company's voting shares. so he's not going anywhere any time soon. if this wasn't the case, though, and this was any other company, would mark zuckerberg still be the ceo right now? what do you think? >> well, david, i think the way that he structured it and that graphic you just put up for the viewers pretty much tells the entire story. he is almost impossible to fire. now, what some people have said is perhaps he shouldn't be chairman and ceo. perhaps he should give away some of that power, but it does not seem like he has made any moves to even consider that. at least we haven't heard anything. but this list of companies that got to see your data, your connections, it is pretty long. i mean, none of them are too scary, but microsoft, amazon,

apple, yahoo! bank of canada, netflix, spotify, mine it goes on. -- i mean it goes on. essentially they have the data. they have the connections. if you used facebook recently, yes, to answer your question, i do think if this were any other company, investors and the investment community would be pressuring him more. listen, they built a machine they can't control; right? now at what point does somebody else even want to step in there? >> yeah, i mean, first of all, never say never. travis at uber and uber is not a public company had a huge control of the voting shares and he was eventually forced out. so things could get bad enough at facebook that the pressure would mount on zuckerberg. step back for a minute, there is a degree to which the american public, maybe the investing community too is realizing very late to the game, that all of these companies and facebook above all have made their money based on the free use of other people's data. that is what these companies are based on. so the fact that these are revelations, it's more of a rolling series of oh my god,

there's casablanca -- david: forgive me for interrupting. in this case it was data harvesting of information done without the consent of the users. even after you went through the long form that normally click on, it did not have consent of users. >> what facebook is claiming is that the user agreements for the companies that they allowed to, ie, you apparently could click spotify which would allow spotify to enter into an agreement with facebook. i don't know what the legality of this is. they are claiming that the companies who did this, spotify in particular, netflix, that users for spotify had consented to spotify entering that agreement. >> it is even hard to talk about it. >> i know. >> the problem here and the reason the stock got absolutely hammered today, it looks like another violation of the 2011 consent decree. and there are people being quoted who are really knowledgeable about how well this works which we really aren't who say yes it was another violation. i think people are beginning to think at some point, if not in

the u.s., in the eu, they are going to get tagged with a monster fine for all these violations. how many times this year has facebook come out and apologized and said we're going to do better and yet these things keep happening, even in this year some of these violations were taking place? that's not acceptable. >> i hate being pushed into a corner to being the facebook defender. it always seems to happen to me. with a dual class structure, i would call it scandalous david except you for for a company and so do i. people don't mind until things go wrong. with facebook, using what they know about, people to sell advertising, they've been doing that television for how many years. if you know your viewer is rich, you sell ads for financial products. facebook is better at it than everybody. we are going to need new regulation for that. i think facebook will ultimately work with government to create a set of regulations they can live with. when that happens, i think you will get a big jump in the valuation. david: there may be one thing

that makes this different. we have had a lot of revelations. as liz pointed out, the ftc had a consent decree and if they did what the new york times says they have done, they've gone against that decree. you don't mess around with the feds. >> that's absolutely fair. there is a degree to which we're all sort of continually revisiting the early years of the internet when it was famously said you have no privacy, get over it. if you post something on facebook, your phone number, your kid's birthday or you're going to travel, that is in fact the equivalent of a public posting. >> that's true. i want to pick up on something liz said. she's quite right. keep in mind that europe brought microsoft to its knees, right, 99, 2000, calling it a monopoly. it took microsoft about a decade to recuperate from that. we have a professor scott galloway been teaching at nyu and saying europe will go after our big tech; right? they don't have the bragging rights the origin story that we have oh we created it here so maybe our lawmakers legislators might look the other way for a

little bit of bad behavior, but in europe they have all of the problems right and none of the brags rights. -- bragging rights. they are not afraid to go after these companies. if facebook wants to be on that continent, they have to follow those strict rules which just passed in may. >> it's like free money, no consequences, but europe is not going to kill that cash cow. they are going to keep hitting them over the head for cash. >> meanwhile as we debate heavily over who has a right to our data and what privacy do we have a right to, you have an ecosystem in china where much of that data is being used much more aggressively for, you know, technological innovation that you may find threatening or you may find innovative, but it is a completely different data matrix. in a weird way, as we go through these saying oh my god what are we going to do about it, they are harvesting data for -- david: they are a communist country. >> -- pay that fine. >> i don't think we want to go

there. >> i'm not suggesting that we want to go there. i'm simply saying that this is yet another example of where there's a differential -- david: let it be clearly stated zach is saying we should not go the communist route. i want to put that out there clearly. >> as a shareholder you have to know that facebook will have to at some point pay fines on this. >> i would say one other thing which is if zuckerberg is -- guess who is on the griddle here is cheryl sandberg, again, missing in action and it seems to me they have been sort of making various moves to put her -- throw her under the bus, and my guess is, she will be eventually the person who falls, if anyone does. david: all right -- >> they should float a monthly fee saying you can use the service, keep your data private, pay us each month and watch how many people say you know what? my privacy is not that important. i will take the free stuff. david: thanks. as congress fights over 5 billion dollars to fund the border wall, our government just pledged to send more than twice that amount to mexico and central america to stop migrants

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david: as congress haggles over 5 billion dollars for a border wall, threatening a government shutdown in two days. our government has now pledged to send double that, more than 10 billion dollars, what's being called economic development aid, to mexico and central america, in an effort to stop migrants from coming to our border before they leave home. but wouldn't a wall be cheaper and more effective? joining us now is vanessa newman, president and founder of asymmetrica, a political risk firm that deals with latin america. she was born in venezuela, knows a lot about latin america. i covered the region for 12 years. i can't tell you how many -- at least a dozen of these billion dollars development projects that added up to a total waste of time and taxpayer money. would this be any different? >> no, depends on how it is administered.

i do think you need to tackle the problem at its source because even with the wall, they will find other ways around it. you need to start putting the pressure -- the problem is the migrants, a number of things, push factors, violence at home and the gangs and corruption. you have such violence because the police are corrupt. so if you are going to give aid, you need to tie it to development, training of police and law enforcement, better intelligence cooperation, and all of that so that the u.s. can also tackle these problems from an intelligence perspective at the source. also, smuggling people has become a business for the drug cartels. so not only do they want to leave, they target the people who want to leave, and then say to them hey, we'll get you there, just pay us some money. and if you don't succeed the first time, you can keep charging them over and over again. so those are the layers of the problem. and i think you really do need to tackle it at the source. unfortunately, it's still the corruption. this is latin america. it is the corruption and the

security. david: jack, go ahead. >> you know, we call this 10 billion dollars in aid, but everything i see about this money, it sounds more like financing to me. they talk about a public private partnership. they say the projects have to be commercially viable. and they have to serve the interest of the united states. i'm not sure i quite know exactly what those are now, but if it's reducing immigration or illegal immigration, what have you, where do we find something that turns a profit and does that? where is the money going to be spent? i'm not aware of projects like that. >> well, hey, public private partnerships are the way of the future. what are the key performance indicators on this? i don't know. i think we would like to see that. unfortunately, the u.s. has a very complicated relationship with all of latin america. i do think that if the u.s. money is going to be spent on it, then it's very a reasonable for the u.s. to demand results,

to demand that these governments share intelligence, that these governments produce, you know, employment for their people and this that employment has positive impact for u.s. business. i think that that's actually not a bad way forward and probably more productive than the wall. i know i'm probably in the minority opinion here. but i do think -- it all depends on how it's implemented. the devil is always in the details and in the fine print, which we need to see. >> vanessa, i think that's totally right. i'm sort of with jack. i do not see how with that amount of money, we're going to have any impact at all on the central american governments that are corrupt, that have really no interest in helping us correct this problem. i do think there's a possibility of partnering with mexico. we have mutual interests here. they have an interest in bolstering their southern border and prohibiting these people from coming across it and maybe helping us solve another problem, which is processing

would be migrants or asylum seekers in mexico who want to come into the u.s. isn't that a more likely path to follow? >> yeah, possibly, possibly. the thing is, you know, i have done -- i have worked in guatemala. years ago we were doing training on the tactics -- asymmetric warfare tactics that the drug cartels used. as i stepped outside my hotel room to go to the seminar that we were leading, i had to step over puddles of blood from the shoot-out that had happened while i slept. and doing really see that this situation -- i don't really see that this situation has improved at all. already we were spending billions of dollars. unless you really strengthen the institutio institutions, but of course it does also come down to the drugs. americans need to stop using drugs, you know. then the problem is so big. then you need to tackle the corruption. i do agree with you that mexico is a better partner. and with the new president has

sworn to go after the drug cartel finances, and we do have a new joint intelligence center with the dea, based in chicago for u.s. drug distribution of the cartels. all of that bodes quite well for the relationship. and i can't disagree that that's probably a good way to spend the money. >> ironically and the money -- since you could say we're going to provide 5 billion dollars of financing to mexico and then perhaps they can provide 5 billion dollars to pay for the wall so that we will pay mexico to pay for the wall. [laughter] >> you know, the united states has for many years been providing aid and development financing around the world, and that was an essential part of cold war strategies, you build alliances and build a robust economic community, you give a little and get a little. so i don't think you can say this as a necessary aspect of

building both our security and our interests, even though as everyone has pointed out, these things have frequently fallen down into corruption which is the money goes out and you have no idea where it goes. >> we just remember the dizzy days of 2016, when the crowds were chanting build a wall and the president is saying mexico is going to pay for it. i guess he should have said and we're going to create a public private partnership for financing, technically you can call that mexico paying for it. i guess that's not quite as -- >> not good at a rally. >> i was going to say, vanessa, if you could start clean slates, what would you do? [laughter] >> not consume drugs. i mean, i don't know. >> is there anything that can be spent in any way that is more efficient? >> i don't really have -- no, i really can't think of something right now. i mean, financial intelligence, it's all about the money. unfortunately, until the u.s. can really get into the

financial intelligence units of the northern triangle countries, and then know what's going where, whether it's the politicians or the drug cartels, you are never going to get to the bottom of this. david: without the rule of law, all this money i think is going to be misspent. the money ends up in switzerland. you ask where it goes. that's where it goes. it goes directly from the corrupt politicians to switzerland. from our pockets originally. >> even money we spend on our own domestic projects. >> it is not as bad. >> the point being it is difficult under the best of circumstances. david: a third canadian man was detained by china today. is this retaliation from china from the arrest of one of their company's ceos? we will talk about that next.

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david: after canada arrested huawei's cfo, china almost immediately detained two canadian nationals and today canada announced china is now holding a third canadian national but didn't reveal who it is. how will this affect u.s. china trade negotiations next month? what do you think? >> look, this is why you have to be very careful when you arrest a leading official of another country, even if the law is on your side. again this isn't just the cfo of huawei, it is the daughter of the founder which as many people said would be a little bit like the chinese arresting steve jobs' daughter if she had been the cfo of apple in china. the issue is, this is why you don't do this unless you have planned it and done it in a cogent fashion, from what we now know this wasn't done with great forethought from the white house at least or within the administration. you expose a lot of people to a lot of vulnerability in terms of a tit-for-tat. right now it is canada. obviously if she were to get

extradited to the united states, it could be u.s. executives in china. i suppose this is china's not so subtle way of saying if you do this to us, we can do it to you. >> i think what happens as well is we may have given up a negotiating point, right, because now the issue is about releasing these canadian nationals -- releasing the cfo of huawei and not necessarily what we want. just put another factor into play, and to your point, zach, perhaps at a bad time because now the conversation is about them and not ip theft which is very real and many businesses have been facing -- american businesses on chinese soil have been facing for three decades. >> on the other hand, just to push back on both of you, if this person, who is the cfo of huawei has broken american laws, it is perfectly acceptable and i disagree with zach, i don't think this is something that was sort of seat of the pants, they were waiting for an opportunity to arrest her in a western country that we had extradition rights with. and it seems to me if she's

broken laws, this is perfectly okay. what's not okay is china grabbing people off the street which by the way they do kind of randomly, and i've had american friends who are heads of companies who have been told don't come here because it is not a rule of law country and right now it is a pretty dangerous place to be. that's not acceptable. >> this wasn't seat of then't pp pa -- this wasn't seat of the pants. it was a two-year-old investigation but it was not coordinate at a policy level, with the consideration is this the greatest in american interests to pursue this right now? >> i'm not sure if that's true. john bolton knew about it. he was at the trade talks down at the g 20. >> right in a normal policy environment, this would have been something where different interests involved in the u.s. national security and economic establishment would have debated whether this was the right sequencing of events. there's no evidence that took place and bolton himself said look i knew but i didn't -- there was no meeting of do we do this now? >> so far this looks like the

world's most polite hostage crisis, and let's hope that it stays that way because, you know, liz makes a good point, what happens if top executives start becoming concerned about travel to china? i mean, does trade take a further blow between the u.s. and china because of that? >> and also, there is a difference -- i am disagreeing with liz on this, are you enforcing laws that have a policy prescription? u.s. iran sanctions are policy. no one is arguing with carlos ghosn being arrested in japan for tax evasion. there are some questions about is that politically motivated or not? it is not triggering the same global response because domestic tax law and evasion of it is seen as something that sovereigns have a right to do. when it's about policy, you're in a much grayer zone. david: the pressure is on the canadians right now because the canadians will eventually presumably be the ones to extradite here, if we pursue the extradition. the whole thing might be dropped. and that might be the end of it; right? >> well, it was interesting to

get one of our allies involved, right, and not come, you know, it's affecting canada, so now perhaps there can be increased tension between the u.s. and canada in some ways, it's just messy. david: we have to leave it at that. elon musk unveiling his latest prompt, is it just another whacky idea or could he be on to something? >> what this really amounts to is an actual solution to the burden of traffic. this is something that i think will actually work.

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david: nothing is boring about elon musk's latest venture even though it is called the boring company. musk unveiling the company's first prototype of a high-speed tunnel. hillary vaughan has more for us on all this. hillary? >> hey, david. well, elon musk saying he thinks he's cracked the code for a better commute and all of this hinges on this tunnel that he dug under haw thorn, california -- hawthorne, california. that's the start. we went on a ride along down what was essentially a car elevator that took us from street level to the underground tunnel level. the plan is to have cars traveling through these tunnels going 150 miles-per-hour and

completely escaping the gridlock above them on the road. there is a catch, though. only electric and self-driving cars are allowed in the tunnel, but it is not just for tesla cars. musk says he created essentially a bumper that can fit over the front tires of any self-driving electric vehicle that will allow people to drive through. so it's also street friendly. but musk says these tunnels have a lot more potential than just cutting through gridlock. it could change how cities operate and how they are built entirely. >> i think it's a great idea -- >> a lot of interest in utility tunnels, where a municipality can get a big tunnel and then put water mains and electricity lines inside the tunnel and then they can actually service -- like if there is a water main break, instead of it flooding the main street in the city, they can actually go into the boring company tunnel and fix the water main. >> musk has dumped over 40 million dollars of his own cash into this boring company project.

but he says he's reached out to cities -- cities reach out to him, at least 20 over week, interested in these tunnels whether it's the passenger tunnels or this utility type tunnel that they are also exploring. >> i must say i'm very disappointed that we're not moving towards flying cars. that's my sort of first hope in the revolutionary age. i'm hoping elon musk will go there too. i guess the question is making it only for electric cars, does anyone else think that's kind of cheesy because after all regular cars go through other tunnels, so it is quite possible that any car could go through here; right? >> i think part of the issue that elon addressed this yesterday saying that if you have a vehicle that's emitting emissions that actually takes up the oxygen in the tunnel because they are basically the size of a car. there's not much more room. there's also not oxygen pumping into these tunnels that are supposed to be relatively long, so the idea is that it's safer for everyone, but again, this does fit in line with his other

company tesla. so it makes sense that he's kind of creating a need and also a major perk for people that drive these electric cars and get these autonomous vehicles. >> it's deirdre, i saw something that cars can only go 35 to 55 miles-per-hour? >> that was in the test-drive that we did. we ended up only going 40 miles-per-hour on this run. but the idea is that once it's built to scale, and it's longer than a mile long, you will be able to go unto 150 miles-per-hour, but one thing that's important to point out here, it's the engine of the car that's driving you through the tunnel. you are not on a sled or a skate that's shooting you through the tunnel. your car is just driving you at this speed. so your car has to also be able to go 150 miles-per-hour, otherwise it is not going to work. >> it sounds like an interesting idea. i guess all i have to do is wait like 25 years for electric cars to become more popular and then this can become a big deal. it is kind of contingent on that. i hope if it works out, he gets

around to it, i'm not an expert, i'm going to go ahead and recommend he puts in a second lane in his tunnel. i mean, sometimes cars break down. do you want to be stuck in a single file line while we're waiting to get these cars out of there? i don't know. i hope that's what it looks like. >> somebody who gets nervous in water park tubes, the claustrophobia of this is astonishing. if you are going to pay attention to one erratic billionaire who speaks before he thinks, i think it would be much better for all of to us pay more attention to elon musk not because he's right in fact he's clearly wrong a lot but at least he's passionately engaged and occasionally nuttily engaged in trying to break through how we are doing things and to move toward how we might do things. david: you have to give him credit for that. >> hillary, i'm wondering this particular 1.14 mile tunnel cost 10 million dollars. does that mean the entire project will be about a 10 million dollars per mile? because that would be kind of

prohibitive, wouldn't it? >> so this tunnel was built with one type of boring machine. they are actually on to their third generation boring machine that's coming out that's supposed to be the fastest, the most efficient, the best ever, and that's really the key here. it is not the idea that we can build tunnels in the ground. that's not a new idea, be -- but the speed and the efficiency is what makes this project in musk's mind feasible for revolutionizing public transportation because it can be built so quickly and basically a tenth for what he says public transportation costs today. david: he says this would eliminate traffic. he calls traffic acid on the soul. i have to agree with him on that. he does think outside the box. we have to give him credit. hillary, thank you very much. great to see you. >> thank you. david: a new jersey college is up for sale and a chinese company is looking to buy it. we'll debate whether they should be able to, coming next.

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david: a chinese company partially owned by the chinese company wants to buy a music conservatory in princeton, new jersey. it's called the westminster choir college. should the chinese-owned come anybody allowed to purchase a u.s. college? >> we have no idea what the

rationale is. this a huge need for china to diversify its investments. i think one of the ways you could have continued to intertwine china in a way that would constrain their abird to do the certain things toys allow their strong desire to invest directly in the united states. once you own stuff in a place, much harder to detach from that place where you own stuff. >> it's a musical college. that's the focus of it. but to your collective found it, it's not far from princeton, university. there is a lot of work being done there. i think if the trangs action is transparent i have less of a problem with it than if we weren't all talking about it right now. >> the question is, is it really

transparent? why do they want to own a choir company. we have been talking about princeton being the location for physics. david: the whole concept of the atomic bomb wasp invented the in the advanced studies in princeton. >> i think we should take that seriously. david: are we paranoid? >> i just hope my 39 credits from westminster choir are still worth what they were. i think this is a natural first step. i don't see this as being vital to our national security unless we count fine singing as vital to our national treasure.

>> the question is proximity. david: it's not cheap. they are spaying 50 million and an extra $16 million to upkeep it. maybe we are just being paranoid. however, it's worth investigating whether their interests are more on spying on what the university is doing. >> i'm sceptical of the proximity argument. if that were the issue they would obtain electronic leal. >> do you really want the united states to judge all of the purchases that happen in the united states whether it's china or russia or wherever on the basis of our paranoia? >> yes, i think we have to. i think it's been 20-30 years where we ignored very real problems. not just the theft of intellectual property. hacking and infiltrating our

networks in every possible conceivable way. i'm happy people are on this story and paying attention to it. >> i i have heard some cyber experts talk about russia as carnivores and china as omni voirs which underlines liz's point. but i think now they are both omni voirs. >> we need to lower notes i can sing to. i am not quite as concerned. but let's see what happens. david: fox news has done a big expose' on this whole thing trying to find out why a chinese company would be interested in a choirp college. >> i just heard them sing the messiah at lincoln center. it was fabulous.

david: gang, thank you very much. that does it for bulls and bears. we'll see you tomorrow night, thanks for joining us. >> the president has a responsibility to keep the government moving forward and he has a responsibility to get border security. >> the president would have to tax the american people to fund his wall. >> we are relying on a congress that has proven they are willing to come up and make the move. liz: the republican party getting blasted for being about more profile than courage. for caving to democrats and not giving trump the border security he wanted. but the deal only keeps the government open until february when the dems take the house.