i agree with joe, the saturday night live thing was ho hum and not even very funny i didn't think but look, will smith, will smith will survive this , but joe mentioned earlier and i think it's true, his brand is forever tainted, because he was always playing the kind of lovable guy. he's not a lovable guy. maria: joe concha, liz peek, great to see you both have a good monday we'll see you tomorrow, "varney" & company begins right now stu take it away. stuart: good morning, maria, good morning, everyone. almost everyday, elon musk makes a headline. today, a blockbuster. he's bought a 9.2% stake in twitter. you own that big a chunk of a company and you can start calling a few shots. two weeks ago he took issue with twitter and free speech, maybe hopefully, he'll change twitter 's censorship of conservative opinion. there's plenty of speculation he will buyout the whole company. he could afford it. it would cost him less than

$40 billion. he's worth 270 billion. twitter stock up, tesla stock also up. if musk has shocked wall street, i have to tell you that putin's army has shocked the civilized world. the liberation of towns from russian occupation reveals atrocities, women and children lie dead in the street, and eye witness says they shot everyone they saw. in response, zelenskyy wants tougher sanctions, he appeared at last nights grammies. the europeans remain divided on cuts off russia's oil & gas exports, here's my question. how can president biden push zelenskyy to make peace when ukraine has been so brutalized? the stock market seems divorced from the war this monday morning stocks are little-changed again dow down maybe 30, nasdaq up maybe 25. bitcoin losing a little bit of ground not much, down to $46,000 a coin. oil just above the $100 a barrel

mark, 102 to be precise. gas, very slowly coming down 4.18 is the national average for regular but diesel still way up there. it's above $5, 5.09 to be precise and interest rates were right at the 2.4% level, 238 as we speak. in other news, there is other news, no slaps at the grammies last night. lots of deliberate feel-good stuff and that powerful presentation from ukraine zelenskyy where he talked of russia's genocide. you'll see a few big rigs outside the white house. it is not the freedom convoy. it's transportation secretary pete buttigieg reporting to the president all the progress he's made with the supply chain crisis. monday, april 4, 2022, "varney" & company is about to begin. we really have to get right to this. ukraine's president zelenskyy

accusing russian forces of genocide. take a look at these images. mass graves, destruction, this is the town of bucha. i've got to tell you lauren on a monday morning it's very hard to see these images. lauren: it is, it is, they are mass graves 40 feet long, hundreds of people just piled in there. they aren't fighters they are civilians, the elderly, women and children. there are also three bodies they found of men some had their hands bound and they were shot close-range in the head, execution style. it's the shear brutality of the russian forces. it's coming to light. the world can now see this. while russia says it wants a u.n. security council meeting today to discuss the provocation by ukraine, so the question is, when you see this on the screen, do these images galvanize the west to do more? stuart: well they are certainly izing galvanizing the west in opposition to this brutality but whether or not, can you now push peace talks when the russians are brutalized ukraine, like this?

lauren: no, you can try, you can also recategorize how you're calling war, a strategic defeat is what the administration has been using, maybe make it an actual defeat. maybe really try to push russia back and retake that territory and maybe don't concede. right now there's 60 russian reserve troops being brought in and they will focus on the south and the east, going to try to go for odesa, which was struck the very first time, that's the key for the black sea region and russia would want that strength. maybe pushback more. stuart: let's see. maybe we should. will we, i don't know. lauren thanks very much indeed. charles hurt joins us this morning, same question. can you push peace on a country that's being brutalized like this? >> well i think you had it exactly right. i think these images, they are absolutely horrifying and they do galvanize the west. i think everybody agrees that the tactics that we're seeing out of russia are absolutely appalling. of course the larger question is , you know, what do you do about it and how do you sort of

walk that line without getting into a protracted proxy war and let's not forget, you know, some of the biggest losers in a proxy war are the people who live where the proxy war is being carried out, so it's a very tough question, but no doubt, i think you're exactly right. it does, you know, these images do galvanize everyone. a couple things we can say with absolute certainty, one is russia did invade ukraine, which they aren't supposed to do and their tactics the things that we're seeing that they've done in ukraine are absolutely horrifying and certainly plenty of war crimes on top of that. stuart: well, let me change the subject, charles. i find this so horrifying that, you know, i don't want to deal with it head-on at this moment. it's just sickening to see it so let me change it to this. hillary clinton, she weighed in on president biden's job performance. watch this.

>> from my perspective, president biden is doing a very good job. i think that his handling of ukraine, passing the american rescue package, the huge infrastructure package, i'm not quite sure what the disconnect is between the accomplishments of the administration and this congress and the understanding of what's been done. we need to get out there and do a better job of telling it. stuart: charles i have to make the observation we're seeing a lot more of hillary these days. what do you say? >> yeah, yeah, it's kind of amazing, because nobody has lost politically more than hillary clinton has, yet i think for a lot of democrats, after a year of joe biden, they are sort of looking around and thinking okay , well maybe, you know, she's at least not joe biden and so i think she is getting a lot of airtime but my goodness for her to sit there and talk about what a great job joe biden is doing is pretty comical. obviously, i don't think anybody who has gone to the grocery

store and paid a grocery bill or anybody that's filled up their car at the gas pump thinks that joe biden has done a great job, but i guess that's kind of what you would expect from hillary clinton who has never managed to , she's had all the advantages , she has been crowned the next president however many times and it just never works out for her. maybe she should try a different line of work. stuart: [laughter] okay, all right, charles thanks very much for being here we'll see you again real soon, charles hurt on a monday morning. a reporter from axios highly critical of president biden's economic record. he thinks the president's accomplishments are irrelevant like hillary clinton. lauren: he thinks that because gas prices are so high, that's all americans see when they see the sticker on the gas pump they blame president biden. watch this it happened on cnn. >> when inflation is where it's at, when you see gas prices going where it's at, we can talk about jobs report here, talk about the latest pce numbers or cpi and all this bloomberg

reporters can get into the weeds but there's one number they can't change now and that is what the plaque says at the local gas station and that number is high and that's a daily jobs report that voters that americans, consumers see everyday, and there's nothing the white house can do about it other than bring down the price of gasoline. lauren: i think that's where the enthusiasm gap comes in because now republicans but all americans might be motivated to vote for a change in november. right? stuart: well gas prices really hit home. they just do, and they obliterate any other consideration when you're paying $4 at the pump. lauren it's time to check futures. we open up in 22 minutes it'll be not much price change. jason katz with us this monday morning. jason, it seems to me the war is not the main mover of stocks these days it's more like inflation interest rates. what say you? >> well, look. i think it's critical not to be dismissive over the war, especially as sanctions get the grip gets tighter and the implications from a

standpoint of not only inflation , because it's all intertwined but what it means as far as the economy in europe, but you're right. the focus has shifted to the fed and their reaction to inflation, and look, your viewers have to appreciate this and i'm sure they do. stocks follow earnings; however, stock prices are calculated in the context of where interest rates are so it's no wonder there's a lot of angst and focus shifting back to the fed's reaction to what's happening with respect to inflation. stuart: i'm pretty sure that western europe certainly germany is headed towards recession. i don't know whether you would argue with that or not but europe seems to be on the brink of recession and my question is would that flow back here? would our economy slow when there's slows? >> clearly, there's an inter connection and they are on the precipice of a recession and the yield curve here in united states is suggesting that , but remember, the yield

curve inversion and that seems to be the focus of everyone in the financial circles is really more of a potential symptom than it is a disease. put another way, if you sneeze, you don't necessarily have a cold, so i caution against over- interpreting these in versions. they historically have a very long and uncertain lag. in fact it's usually 22 months after an inversion and yes, they predicted the last six recession s but they've also predicted the last 12 of the last six recessions so take that with a grain of salt. stuart: any new money i come into i'm keeping it in cash and that's my story and i'm sticking to it jason. am i doing okay? >> you might be a negative seven or 8% return in the short run doing that but i guess in the next few weeks you might be okay. stuart: okay we'll see jason thanks for joining us see you again soon. >> thank you. stuart: the ceo of jpmorgan that be jamie dimon, america's best known banker has come out with warnings. lauren: he had the plan for the

president to drill more and get gas prices down. shareholder annual shareholder letter and he said look, the economy is healthy, the consumer is strong. okay, but then he spoke of and i'm quoting, a confluence of events. you had the war, sanctions, interest rates that might be hiked more aggressively than the market expects that can potentially create this explosive situation for the economy, and dramatically increase the rates, the risks ahead. in terms of jpmorgan's exposure to russia, he pins it at about $1 billion. stuart: $1 billion, a mere billion, okay got that. check those futures again, please. we are heading south for the dow , but only by 20 points. we've got to go up about 30 for the nasdaq. again, have to tell you it's not that much price movement, earlier this monday morning. why don't more people trust the media? bill maher has an idea and its got to do with hunter biden. roll tape. >> now two years later, the new york times, and the washington post have come around to say okay, there was something there. it looks like the left wing

maybe is buried the story because it wasn't part of their narrative and that's why people don't trust the media. stuart: a time of reckoning for the left wing media, you can be sure we will cover that. these images from bucha, ukraine , horrifying. how can any peace agreement be worked out after this kind of atrocity? we'll talk to the former nato ambassador kurt volker, he's on next.

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it can power hundreds of devices with three times the bandwidth. so your growing wifi needs will be met. supersonic wifi only from us... xfinity. stuart: russia accused of massacring civilian, images released showing a destruction and a mass grave in the town of bucha. alex hogan is in ukraine and

what do you have for us, alex? reporter: hi, stuart. well, ukraine has taken back kyiv, but this regain territory is showing the extent of the damage and the brutality on the ground. now, we do want to caution that these images are difficult to see. body after body in the streets, in fields, and by nearby buildings, the ukrainian forces have regained this captured territory and say that this looks more like a horror scene than anything else. the mayor of bucha, a town outside of the capitol, says that about 300 people, civilians , have been killed. images of men and women executed in the streets, their bodies left next to buildings, and even in this mass grave, where the city has nowhere else to now put these corpses. ukrainian president volodymyr zelenskyy speaking out saying he wants every mother of russian troops to see these images, and know what has taken place. >> why did you try to kill

ordinary peaceful people in an ordinary peaceful city, why were women strangled after their earrings were pulled out of their ears how is it possible to rape and kill them in front of their children making fun of their bodies even after they died. reporter: and while some of this territory has been taken back, it is not safe to return. zelenskyy warning residents of the physical dangers of going back like land mines and trip wires and left behind military equipment that you see there just littered in the street and now this is on top, of course the psychological damage of going bag and seeing all of this in-person, what used to be their peaceful towns. as russian forces retreat in the northern part of the country , they will likely need considerable time before they can regroup to shift to other parts of the war. amid continued reports that troops are disobeying orders and now the regional military administration reporting that forces are also leaving suni, in the northeastern part of the country, and they are shift ing their focus

specifically to the eastern side of the country, but that does not mean that the rest of the country is untouched, just here on the western side of the country in lviv, last night, there was an attack about 80 miles from where i'm standing stuart? stuart: alex hogan in ukraine. thank you alex. all morning we've been showing you the pictures of these atrocities as russian troops retreat in ukraine. curt kurt volker joins us the former nato ambassador. mr. ambassador, can you force peace on to ukraine after its been brutalized like this? >> well, you know, everybody wants peace but you don't want peace to be a recognition that russia can survive, that they can tell people like this , take territory and get away with it so at this stage, we have to be doing everything we can to help ukraine push the russians out of their country, save as many lives as possible, and as quickly as possible, so time is of the essence really. stuart: does that include increasing pressure and sending more attack weapons to the ukrainians? >> yes. let's give up this false

distinction between offensive weapons and defensive weapons. when you're fighting inside your own country, to protect your own people, and to push invaders out of your country, there should be new distinction between offensive or defensive weapons. they should be given everything that we can give them in order to drive those russian forces out, especially after seeing kind of images that we've just seen. stuart: as these images appeared yesterday and over the weekend, i noticed that germany' defense minister is talking about we really need to stop taking russian oil & gas. i mean, there's a divide on that in europe, of course, because it would really hurt the europeans, but they seem to be moving more and more towards very harsh sanctions on russia. will they get there do you think >> i think they will. i was very encouraged by those remarks from the german defense minister, the italian prime minister also called for an embargo on russian gas and oil. i was in brussels last week with meetings with european union.

they are already on track for a two-thirds cut in oil & gas imports and therefore revenues to russia this year, but i think that's accelerating now into a full oil embargo within the next few weeks they can do it and there's a spot market for oil so this kind of thing that we've seen is now going to give them a push to go ahead and do it. stuart: can putin stride across the world stage after this? i mean, assuming -- >> not at all. stuart: no, not at all? >> no way. no one will want to be seen with him, no photographs, no meetings , none of the international gatherings he be invited to. russia is a pariah state as long as vladimir putin is in charge. stuart: what about the chinese? >> i think the chinese are also feeling very uncomfortable about all of this. they have not weighed into support russia militarily, they have not spoken about the war, they are trying to just keep a distance here. china ultimately has its own ambitions in asia, particularly with respect to taiwan, and they don't want those conflated with

the kind of brutality and aggression against a sovereign state that russia has demonstrated, so the chinese are holding back. stuart: mr. ambassador, thank you very much for joining us as usual, i'm sure we'll see you >> stuart, thank you. stuart: yes, sir, thank you. the grammies were held last night. president zelenskyy made a surprise appearance, what did he say? lauren: it was a bunker in kyiv and he said his musicians wore body armor, not tux seed os. >> we defend our freedom to live on our land, we're fighting russia which brings horrible bombs the death, silence. we have music today to tell our story, tell the truth about the war on your social networks, and support us in anyway you can lauren: so john legend performed afterward during the performance and joined by three ukrainian artists all wearing blue and yellow the colors of the ukrainian flag which was a nice tribute. stuart: it was indeed and

powerful presentation too. thanks, lauren. quickly check the futures please still got a mixed picture here, no significant price movement at the opening bell unless, of course you're talking about twitter. we'll be back. ♪

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stuart: all right, futures present a mixed picture dow down 20 nasdaq up 30, that's it. keith fitz-gerald joins us this morning, you've seen the news, keith, that coal has bought a 9.2% stake in twitter, for 2.3 i think or $2.8 billion what do you think his strategy is? >> boy, you know, this has gotta be one of the most interesting developments i've seen in a long time. i have no idea what this strategy is, but he is undeniably one of the most brilliant ceo's on the planet. i wouldn't buy twitter but this makes me want to buy more tesla, because he's a man with a plan even though we don't know what it is. stuart: there's speculation he might take twitter private and change their censorship you'lls, their algorithms, completely.

i'd cheer the guy on if he's doing that. >> exactly because here is the thing, today's world is all about controlling the narrative and we know that he loves to taunt the establishment and i would argue rightly so, in many cases so this would give him a platform to do that and he's certainly got the cash. it be a rounding error in his checking account. stuart: [laughter] true now a 9.2% stake, it's said to be a passive stake, but he's going to make filings in the next few weeks which i think will open up his true strategy, what he really wants to go with this. do you want to speculate for me? >> i agree because here is the thing. the word passive and elon musk don't belong in the same sentence so i think we're going to see this is something really innovative as the world hasn't thought about and do something really cool. stuart: let me change the subject. seems to me that the war is no longer the driving force in this market. what do you say? >> i would agree with that. i think the world is shifting back to the fed. the world is shifting back to the headlines we've got earnings

on deck in about two weeks, so we're in what would ordinarily be a lull between earnings numbers, but the war is going to dragon, people are beginning to come to terms with it but you buy on canon, you sell on trumpets and that's playing out yet again. stuart: the bear market rally is over. that's according to an analyst at morgan stanley, apparently an important guy, the bear market rally is over, prepare to get defensive. what does keith fitz-gerald say about that? >> i think his timeframe is a little different no disrespect. i haven't read that particular article, but i'd have a hard time believes that because history says what you want to do counter counterintuitively is weighed into it and you want to go swimming when the water pulls down because that's how you raise all boats. stuart: yeah but i'm not prepared to do that. >> i know it's tough, it's scary, that's undeniable, but history does show that if you have the capacity and the guts, optimism is how you profit, pessimism have a very hard time

making money. stuart: keith thanks for being here as always, we will see you again real soon. here we go. 20 seconds to go and we start the trading this monday morning. >> [open bell ringing] stuart: none of the markets are outstanding, the major subject is elon musk buys a chunk of tesla, and stock price jumps, buys a chunk of twitter what's he going to do with it? trading has begun, and we're ever so slightly lower. the dow is off 40 points but i see the vast majority of the dow 30 are in the red, they are being sold at this point, but the loss is limited a mere 40 points s&p 500 pretty much the same story but actually up a tiny fraction, the nasdaq composite, that is up about one- third of 1% so have a look at big tech maybe doing okay if the nasdaq is doing all right and yes they are. microsoft, apple, alphabet, amazon, meta all on the upside. now, i want to go after, not go

after twitter, but i want to talk about it, because elon musk has bought a 9% stake. susan is with us this morning. does this mean that musk is no longer interested in starting his own social network? >> maybe twitter could be it and as you mentioned just a passive investor so 9%-plus stake costing almost $3 billion, so i took a look at the individual and the largest twitter stockholders, vanguard had 8.3% so that makes elon musk with 9.2, the single-largest twitter shareholder. now it's interesting, because remember he wrote a week and a half ago that given twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles, fundamentally undermines democracy, so it's interesting that he actually bought the twitter steak in those shares, 11 days before this tweet. so he kind of knew what he was doing. stuart: he's got a strategy. >> so passive right now but that could turn active very

quickly as you can imagine and he has 80 million followers on twitter so what i'm thinking is that if he's the single-most influential person on the platform anyway, why not profit off that? why not make money yourself and also be more influential when it comes to decision-making. stuart: he could easily afford to buyout twitter entirely. >> i think twitter is worth what 40 billion something like that? he's worth 200 billion himself, however i would say he has a lot of his cash tied up in spacex and tesla. that requires a lot of re investment and that's why he lives in just $50,000 house he says. stuart: so he says, all right i want to stay on musk. let's talk about tesla, because i think they just came out with some record deliveries. >> they did so in the first quarter of this year, tesla delivered 310,000 cars in the first three months, and that's double last year. model 3, model y, they have 95% of those first quarter deliveries, and that's actually slightly less than what wall street was calling for.

not that big of a miss to be honest i thought it was still pretty strong given the covid closures at shanghai and delayed opening of berlin but elon tweet ing this that it was an exceptionally difficult quarter due to the supply chain interruptions and china's zero- covid policy but are you ready for the austin, the rodeo this week because the gigafactory is opening and he's doing that with a big party , of course. no word yet on when the actual, the cyber truck will roll off it won't be this year. stuart: austin, texas plant opens this week? >> yeah. stuart: producing this week? >> producing this week and that's on top of berlin and that's why analysts expect tesla to deliver 50% more cars this year. stuart: one more factoid. one out of every four luxury vehicles sold in the united states today are the tesla model 3. >> i believe that. stuart: that's his penetration of the luxury market.

>> i believe that especially with the ford numbers i'll get to that in just a bit. stuart: let's go on to this one china's big tech stocks rallying big time again. >> that's adding to the rally that we saw at the end of last week and the reason is because we seen more indications from beijing and china they are willing to keep u.s. financial ties in place and that means opening up the audit accounting books so these big names like alibaba, and the like can stay listed here in new york, because remember that these stocks were under pressure on threats of delisting and think of all of the costs involved, and yeah that be stock negative but now china's willing to cooperate stock. stuart: china softened a little bit. >> yes well given what's happening with the covid spread and shutting down in china and the gdp so they need some help. stuart: let's see. hertz. i know that they ordered lot of teslas. >> yes they are. stuart: now i understand they are ordering from another vehicle maker. >> from sweden but they are going public in the u.s. via

spac, with guggenheim so that's why it's up about 6%, 8% i saw in the pre-market on the back of this news so hertz was going to order 65,000 of the tesla competitors, a five-year deal on top of the 100,000 tesla cars on order, and this is really a signal that hertz and the other rental companies are going to go green. you have to give the clients and customers what the they want so they are looking for a 20% mixture of their fleet to be electric, so i also want to show you neo as well since we're on the electric trend, upgraded today, ubs calls it a buy worth 32 and ford just released their u.s. sales numbers down by a quarter in march, higher than february so there's sequential improvement from covid but still stuart: i have a question, i wonder if you can ensemble answer it. >> yes. stuart: if you rent an electric vehicle from hertz do you have to have it fully charged when you return it? >> i believe so good question because you have to fill up the gas tank when you return it or buy into their gas program.

stuart: fascinating. let's go to starbucks, because howard schultz is back. he's canceled the stock buyback program? >> that's right so they had this $20 billion dividend stock buyback program in place, and two-thirds of that was going to go to stock buybacks. they don't have that much more to buy back to be honest to be part of that program. i was looking through the number of shares that they repurchased which is 31 million, so you could do the math. they only had 17 million more shares to buyback, so only half of that but still, i mean, the fact that howard schultz has to step back in again as starbucks ceo, i think this is the third time he's come back, right? and don't forget starbucks, the stock has underperformed their competitors in the last 12 months and there are concerns about labor, they voted to unionize and of course, just foot traffic in general and profit margins have been shrink ing with inflation concerns stuart: got it susan good stuff. now take a look at the dow winners, stay there, susan. i might need help.

salesforce, apple, walt disney, chevron, home depot, got it. >> interesting. fantastic. stuart: the s&p 500 led by norwegian, the cruise lines are back, royal caribbean, what's with that i don't know. >> where is the yield this morning on the 10 year because we've been talking a lot stuart: slightly below the two year. >> by 13 basis points, which is a wide margin. stuart: the inversion thing. >> so i think there you go, 240 so maybe that's what's helping the return to cruises. stuart: really? >> in terms of value and travel let's see. stuart: all right, okay. nasdaq winners, meta platforms look at that, 2% higher back to almost $230 a share, very interesting. i'm intrigued about that meta thing. >> facebook metaverse? stuart: yes. >> i'm intrigued by the fact its come back from sub-200 looking at what, 10%, 15% recovery there. stuart: very fast too. susan, great thanks very much indeed. coming up dr. fauci, well, he was once upon a time, he was a

believer in natural immunity. watch this. >> she's had the flu for 14 days should she get a flu? >> well no if she got the flu for 14 days she's as protected as anybody can be because the best vaccination is to get infected yourself. stuart: well, my how times change because he's not saying that now, is he? we will get into that promise you. the only age-group still forced to mask up in new york city's public schools are toddlers. two to four-year-olds, they still got to wear a mask. former education secretary bill bennett takes that on shortly. russia's status as an energy superpower on the brink because of putin's war according to the energy expert daniel yergen. what are the implications of that? well, daniel is here to explain. ♪

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stuart: yes, gas prices are indeed surging, and searches for electric vehicles on the internet, the searches up 170% from february to march. that tells you something. madison all worth at a car dealership in new jersey for us. does that dealership have more electric than gas-powered vehicles on the lot? reporter: stuart, they're not even close. they have four electrical vehicles here, that's compared to about 160 normal gas vehicles that they have, and those four ev's they actually still need new batteries so they aren't for sale yet so demand for electric vehicles is way up but getting your hands-on one is difficult and also expensive but it's not just ev's the car market in general is struggling to keep up with that demand. j.d. power telling us normally they have three to 4 million cars available in the u.s. in a given year. right now we have less than a million so it's really hard to get your hands on one of these

vehicles whether you're buying ev or gas. i'm here with the gm, bill bren ner. bill i want to talk to you first about ev's, you have four not yet for sale what are you hear ing from customers is there that increased interest in buying electric? >> constant lip we have people coming in everyday looking for what's happening with electric and seeing all the press about where we're going with electric and they want to be part of it. reporter: so when it comes to electric versus gas there is a big price difference, j.d. power says it's about 8,000 on average so making up that difference can take years depending on your driving habits, so ev is high but what are you still seeing with gas vehicles considering the upfront cost is lower and you take a lot longer to makeup that difference? >> it's still a big demand for regular vehicles or ice vehicles as we call them now internal combustion engines makes up most of our market and will for a number of years and just a matter of moving ev into part of that market and growing it. reporter: so something i want your take on we're seeing that car sales quarter one are about 18% lower this year compared to

last year. with high demand why is that still happening? >> still supply chain issues for us mostly chips so just a matter of getting the right chip s to the right cars, normal ly we'll have 300 cars in stock here, we're at 160 at the moment. reporter: thank you so much, so that chip shortage also creating other problems, gm and ford halt ing production on some vehicles really difficult to get your hands-on a car now. stuart: it sure is, madison thank you very much indeed. all right, look whose here. daniel yergen, the world's premier oil expert, and he joins us this morning, daniel, great to see you again. >> thank you, stuart. stuart: i read your stuff, your op-ed, you say that russia is losing its status as an energy super-power. okay, i accept your reasoning. i just want to know, so what? what are the implications if it's no longer an energy super power? >> well it's very significant in my book the new map i explain how russia uses being an energy superpower both for its role in the world, how key it is to

putin's position and how central it is to its relationship with europe, so russia is going to continue to be a major energy producer, but part of half of its oil export, much of its gas goes to europe on the basis it's a reliable supplier. the europeans don't regard it as reliable supplier, newly-released they don't want it and overtime we'll see a lot less russian energy going to europe and that hits the russian budget which depends upon oil & gas for half of its revenues and going to affect russia's position so instead of an energy superpower i think russia will end up being a reduced energy power. stuart: today, and this weekend, after the revelation of these atrocities or alleged atrocities in ukraine, the europeans are saying you know, we've really got to take harsher measures against russia and germany's defense minister is actually saying we've got to start considering cutting off russian oil & gas coming to europe. if they did that, if they just stopped taking russian oil & gas , what happens to the price?

>> well the prices go up, particularly the prices of oil will go up, and actually, natural gas, not so much in the united states but in the world to sort of lng prices, but right now, what's happening at the gasoline pump is very much determined by what's happening with russia's war in ukraine and the response to it, and so if you suddenly cutoff russian exports to europe, there's going to be a scramble for barrels and one thing we need right now, stuart, we need governments to really be working with industry to manage the logistics to keep the supply going. stuart: in other words you're saying we should be drilling a lot. >> we should certainly be doing that and by the way the united states we'll have hearings this week adds more oil, new production this year than all the rest of the world combined and we need cooperation between governments & companies to manage the logistics, the supplies, to get the barrels where you need to be, to be efficient in the system, getting more oil from canada, more oil from brazil will be very

significant, and increased in production in the united states is going to be centrally important. stuart: daniel yergin, knows what the he's talking about, we'll see you again soon. thank you very much and by the way do you notice the price of oil went up to $103 a barrel as that interview progressed. americans living by the southern border have been crossing into mexico for cheaper gas, but i understand that mexico's cut back. lauren: they have, because so many californians for instance are driving south of the border and filling up because it's cheaper there, because mexico had a gas subsidy so they ran out of gas, literally, and they are ending that subsidy to not incentivize u.s. citizens, driving down to save, it's amazing. stuart: do you happen to know if they cut the sub id it across the whole of mexico or just in the border? lauren: just in the tijuana region, but when you look at mexico overall, their budget, they budgeted oil at $55 and they are obviously selling it at double that, so they have this windfall of income because they produced energy.

they can do that for their citizens, because they are making money when it comes to oil exports. stuart: not for our citizens. lauren: not for americans it's for the mexicans. stuart: coming up what happens when you meet the ranking member of the house foreign affairs committee? we'll ask, that be congressman michael mccaul here on the show coming up. the fda has approved a fourth covid shot for people over 50. dr. marty makary not happy with that decision and it doesn't much care for dr. fauci's turn around on natural immunity either, the doctor coming up shortly. ♪ (fisher investments) in this market, you'll find fisher investments is different than other money managers. (other money manager) different how? aren't we all just looking for the hottest stocks? (fisher investments) nope. we use diversified strategies to position our client's portfolios for their long-term goals. (other money manager) but you still sell investments that generate high commissions for you, right?

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first psoriasis, then psoriatic arthritis. it was really holding me back. standing up... ...even walking was tough. my joints hurt. i was afraid things were going to get worse. i was always hiding, and that's just not me. not being there for my family, that hurt. woooo! i had to do something. i started cosentyx®. i'm feeling good. watch me. cosentyx helps people with psoriatic arthritis move, look, and feel better. it targets more than just joint pain and treats the multiple symptoms like joint swelling and tenderness, back pain, helps clear skin

and helps stop further joint damage. don't use if you're allergic to cosentyx. before starting, get checked for tuberculosis. an increased risk of infections—some serious —and the lowered ability to fight them may occur. tell your doctor about an infection or symptoms or if you've had a vaccine or plan to. tell your doctor if your crohn's disease symptoms develop or worsen. serious allergic reactions may occur. it's good to be moving on. watch me. move, look, and feel better. ask your rheumatologist about cosentyx. stuart: here is an op-ed in the wall street journal, fda shuts out its own experts in authorizing another vaccination boost. who wrote that? dr. marty makary wrote it and he's with us this morning. all right, doctor, what's wrong with the fda's decision? >> well, this is very bizarre, there's a lot of things that just don't make sense. first of all they bypass their own experts, many had said publicly they aren't on bother with the fourth dose. they also gave pfizer more than they applied for. pfizer asked for an indication and people over 65, the fda

bypassing their experts said here is a market three times bigger, recommended for everybody over age 50, and finally, they are sitting on cov axin's vaccine and novavax and these use traditional platform, and covaxin is believed to give broader protection against variants and so why are these not being authorized if covaxin's data came out almost a year ago and so many people are saying look if you're going to recommend a vaccine, how about do one of the applications that's sitting around already approved the w. h. o. in many countries. stuart: it's just undermining confidence in the public health authority that's what seems to be going on and here if i may, just jump in for a second here is something else that undermine s confidence. back in 2004, dr. fauci came out , as a believer, in natural immunity. watch this again, please. roll it. >> she's had the flu for 14 days should she get a flu? >> well no if she got the flu

for 14 days she's as protected as anybody can be because the best vaccination is to get infected yourself. >> she should not get it again? >> no she doesn't need it because it's the most potent vaccination is getting infected yourself. stuart: dr. makary, dr. fauci now doesn't seem to accept natural immunity. maybe that undermines confidence in the cdc even more. >> that's certainly one of the reasons why confidence is at an all-time low, natural immunity is in all of our textbooks in medical school. it's one of the basic principles of immunology so to suddenly disregard it or to ask the question, we don't know if natural immunity applies to covid-19, when we have really not seen reinfections in the first year, and we've not seen reinfections result in severe illness in year two, i mean, natural immunity is not the riddle of the sphinx. this is not something complicated we needed to decode. this applies to every virus and when you look at the cdc's own website on the chicken pox vaccine they say don't get the vaccine if you had

chicken pox in the past. stuart: i can't follow it. i really can't. i can't believe that we're firing people who didn't get the vaccine because they thought they got natural immunity and that was not accepted so they are fired i can't believe we're doing that today. >> we need to hire them back. stuart: absolutely we should yes , sir. thanks for joining us. >> thank you. stuart: still ahead, steve forbes, adam carolla, bill bennett, texas congressman michael mccaul the 10:00 hour is next. ♪

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♪. stuart: i think the lyrics to that are say something, say something. he repeated that about a dozen times at the top of the song. we return to music these days. i'm not sure say something 20 times over is quite what we want. anyway, good morning, everyone. lauren: you better say something. stuart: is that justin timberlake? i think it is pretty good. say it again, 10:00 eastern. nasdaq is up 164 points.

big tech doing pretty well. the price of oil moving up, now you're at 1$3 -- 103-dollars per are barrel. bitcoin still a little depressed around 46,000 as we speak. the latest numbers, on the factory ors, lauren. lauren: down 0.5% for the month of february. that was as expected, however new orders for manufactured goods in february fell for the first time after nine months of increases. stuart: okay. lauren: if you pair this from the manufacturing report from ism on friday, orders are now below inventories. there is not that much demand or as much demand as we had seen for manufactured goods, if you're looking at the two surveys together, that tells me a slowing of the economy. lauren: morgan stanley said, bear market rally is over. stuart: those numbers did not have immediate impact on the

market. dow still down about 40. nasdaq still up 160. now this. elon musk loves making headlines. he likes being the center of attention. he made a big slash this morning. he has brought 73,476,000 shares of twitter, 9.2% of the stock. what is he up to? i hope he shakes things up. two weeks ago musk sharply criticized twitter about free speech. he tweeted this, quote, given the fact twitter deserves as defacto public town square, failing to adhere to principles of free speech undermines democracy. what should be done he asks. when you spend 2.billion on a company stock, you make waves. he could demand changes to twitter's censorship rules. i hope he does. twitter banned a sitting president, donald trump. there is speculation that musk will buy out the whole company,

take it private. it would cost him less than $40 billion. he is worth 270 billion. musk's car company, tesla dominates the electric vehicle market. one in every four vehicles sold today is tesla model 3. his company neurolink. they're going strong. go for it, elon. you have done wonders with technology, go straighten out social media. second hour of "varney" just getting started. ♪. stuart: well, let's see if jeff sica who is with me in new york this monday morning, i wonder if he agrees with me. you have to straight own out the social networks what do you say? >> i definitely think he needs to straighten out twitter. i hated twitter. i think it's a cesspool. elon musk in the past, i've been

kind of hard on elon musk, i really love this guy right now this is such a baller move what he is doing buying this stock. he could in fact as you said in your monologue, he could in fact some day buy twitter and talk, turn it into a venue for free speech. so elon musk to me is the free speech maven right now and the world needs him and first thing he has to do when he get as bigger position in twitter is clear out some of those, i don't know whether they're communists or exactly what they are but he has to clean house an bring in some free speech libertarians that are going to make it what it should be. stuart: you will be betraying your age because back in our day always refer to the communists. those communists. that is what you would say.

you just used word again. let me ask lauren, do you think musk should jump in there to straighten out social media. >> he is a breath of fresh air. he is common sense to a lot of people. he says what he feels, what he thinks, sometimes it is what other people are afraid to say. i think he could buy all of twitter. i think he might cfra thinks too. stuart: supposing he takes over twitter, says from here on out, we'll expand the number of characters you can use on twitter, expand the number of characters to 420. what would be your commentary on that? lauren: that is a lot of reading for people that hate us. push to legalize marijuana and criminalize it. at the federal level. stuart: serious subject here. the housing supply crisis, rents out of control. i think this is very bad news for our cities. what say you. >> yeah, i mean right now what's

happened is a lot of people that are living in these apartments, you're talking about 40% of the population that rents. they were giving incentives to pandemic. those incentives are now coming to an end. so the landlords who have been taking losses now face, do we have to raise rents and the biggest problem here, stuart, is supply and demand. because of inflation it is costing so much to build. in new york city alone rents are now at a higher level than they were pre-pandemic. it is not because people are making more money, the city is doing better. the city is doing awful. our crime rate is up 60% this year. what it is, there is a need for supply. a lot of people have been starved out of the housing market and it is not available. stuart: you can't build in the cities. the regulations, rules, regulations, permitting process, you can't build. >> it is treacherous right now, you can't build.

try to get people, somebody has a job going now, waiting for electricians showing up. they expect 20 or 30 a day, two show up. so you can't get anything done. it has gotten to a point right now where you know, you have cities like miami that the average person is spending upwards of 50 to 75% of their income on housing. that's tragic. stuart: that is impossible. you can't do it. >> right. stuart: very bad news for the cities. glad we got that in. jeff sica, appreciate it. the media is finally covering the hunter biden story. look at this headline from "the washington post, the hunter biden story is an opportunity for a reckoning. all right, listen to this, bill maher mocking the media for burying the hunter biden story. roll tape. >> so the "new york post" got ahold of what was in the computer and you know, because the "new york post" is a

republican paper and "the new york times" and "the washington post" are the democrat papers. twitter, canceled their account. can't even report on this story. two years later "the new york times" and "the washington post" have come around to say okay, there was something there. it looks like the left-wing media just buried the story because it wasn't part of their narrative, that is why people don't trust the media. stuart: you got that one right, bill maher. look who is here right now. lisa booth is with us this monday morning. >> hi, stuart. stuart: hi less is a, -- lisa. >> how are you doing. stuart: i'm doing well. will the media get its reputation back. >> i don't, look, i'm not giving any of these people credit. i'm not giving bill maher credit. war was bill maher when it mattered? there is no bravery or honor coming to the conclusion after the fact and damage was done. they knew what they were doing.

media, big tech, stopping us sharing critical information before an election. former intel officers, who lied to us, former heads, james brennan, john clapper, intentionally lying to the american people, trying to claim it was russia disinformation. there was malicious intent to thwart and election and it did. media research did polling on this, looking at swing voters in seven states, found 45% had no clue about the biden family business dealings. 9.4% would have changed their vote had they have known. so i'm not giving any of these people credit for lying to us, for trying to shape an election. these all bad actors including bill maher. stuart: nothing happens unless there are indictments following what went on with the laptop. are we getting indictments? >> i have no faith in the system. you have 51 former intelligence

officials blatantly lying to the american people. these officials are corrupt. we're lid by corruption from the media to government officials to joe biden himself. if you look at this joe biden was the big guy. he was trying to get 10% of the cut of these business dealings. go back to his time as vice president. he was flying hunted hunt around on air force two to cut business deals. they're in on it. joe biden bragged using taxpayer money, weaponized, to get prosecutor general in ukraine fired who was investigating buriesma. the hope there is any sort of reckoning, i would love, but it just seems a little pollyanna. stuart: oh, dear. great to have you back on the show, lisa. we haven't seen you for a while. i hope you come back soon. lisa booth. >> thank you, stuart, take care. stuart: former president obama heading back to the white house. what is this for? lauren: first time he left office in 2017. about the affordable health care

act, obama care. tomorrow he will stand with president biden and vice president kamala harris to celebrate the 12 year anniversary. that is weird, 12 years. there is a message here. inflation is a hot topic. that was a win for democrats 12 years ago. you might hear the president take additional action on health care to save american families hundreds of dollars a month. we might see a further announcement and health care with inflation messaging these days. why are you smirking? stuart: convoluted logic, 12 year anniversary. what is 12 year wedding anniversary, paper or something? lauren: was that five. i think the popularity of obama is something that president biden needs right now. stuart: that is the point. lauren: to get him to come to the white house to stand together with him, his former boss, that is a big deal. it might help his low approval numbers. stuart: that is the on joke tiff i'm sure. all right, lauren. you're about to cover some of the movers for us niu.

lauren: not new. stuart: not new. they are electric. oh, the scooter people. right. lauren: we put that in there so you wouldn't get confused. i thought you would say the electric car company nio. niu, international sales tripled. excellent news, up 7%, red cat make drones. lauren: deal to sell 15 of their golden eagle drone units to a nato them per country, i'm not sure which one, for deployment in ukraine. it is a cheap stock, $24 today. stuart: red cat makes mass at this drones. mcdonald's, interest down. they're a dow stock. helping to take the dow down a bit. >> proctor & gamble and mcdonald's is down 62. that is why the dow is down. they were downgraded at a firm but you have wendy's is higher at last check, but they lowered

the earnings guidance at the end of the year but it is up because after buyback. that down at wendy's is buying into mcdonald's. stuart: i haven't invested in drive-thru since i lost my shirt in boston market 20 years ago. bacon jalapeno. lauren: you are buying into that. stuart: that bit i like. moving on i think. lauren: i'm done. stuart: border agents arresting multiple ms-13 gang members and murderers. bill melugin has the story in our next hour from the border. vice president harris tries to distance herself for president biden's controversial call to remove putin from power. watch this. >> he said that vladmir putin should no longer be the leader of russia. do you agree. >> america's policy has been and will continue to be focused on the real issue at hand which is one, the needs of the ukrainian

people, but also insuring that there will be serious consequence for vladmir putin. stuart: okay. 2 1/2 years to go. more than two million ukrainian refugees have fled to poland. many are heading back despite the dangers. we've got that report too. that is coming up next for you. ♪. for investors who can navigate this landscape, leveraging gold, a strategic and sustainable asset... the path is gilded with the potential for rich returns. your record label is taking off. but so is your sound engineer. you need to hire. i need indeed. indeed you do. indeed instant match instantly delivers quality candidates matching your job description. visit indeed.com/hire

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call... for $1500 off your kohler walk-in bath. visit kohlerwalkinbath.com for more info. stuart: interesting market situation here. the dow is down about what, 90, 100 points? but the nasdaq very strong gain. you're up 128 points there, 14,300. refugees in poland, some want to head back to ukraine but

the mayor of kyiv asking residents to delay their return for several days. alexis mcadams in poland. why the delay? reporter: well, good morning. people are heading back, stuart, as you mentioned, thousands of ukrainian refugees back by the day. this border crossing is still busy with people coming in fleeing from ukraine, we saw the horrendous images, if there is word to describe it out of bucha and mariupol. some people want to be reunited with their families. this busy border crossing is still seeing people coming and going. volunteers say they have more people heading back into ukraine than the people coming into poland. the busy crossing at the poland, ukrainian volunteers. there were at the peak 140,000 crossing into poland but now thousands are going home. look at video carrying their belongs, young children, thousands heading out of poland.

ukraine's president has a stern warning for the refugees telling them it is not safe to come home. >> i want to see my family first. i want to see my mother, my father, my grandfather and i don't see anything dangerous in my town. it was bombed three times but i just want to go back home so bads really. reporter: you have to understand they want to be reunited with their families, stuart. seeing those horrendous images coming out of mariupol and coming out of those other communities, seeing innocent civilians targeted and killed, hands tied behind their back and thrown into the streets, people might not have seen the images yet. some volunteers tell us there are is misinformation about troops withdrawing making some people think it is okay to head home. why the mayors of kyiv and president volodymyr zelenskyy says it is too soon to come back. stuart. stuart: got it. we'll talk to you again later.

joining us now, dan hoffman, now, dan, former cia guy. dan, i don't think you can push peace on zelenskyy in the face of these atrocities that are coming to light. i think we should go to win what do you say? >> i think we absolutely should be helping ukraine more so they can win. right now they're staying in the fight but you know, we haven't given them enough military equipment so they can actually win. you're right, if russia has committed massive atrocities on the civilian population there in ukraine, it is beyond these towns of bucha or remember the maternity ward bombing in mariupol. russia left behind mines as they departed, as troops departing kyiv. we need to be prepared russia continues to launch long-range missiles indiscrimenantly attacking targets in kyiv and its surrounding areas. stuart: how does this end? i keep hearing stories maybe there will be a coup in the

kremlin that sounds really farfetched to me? >> i would say i have a fairly low confidence that that might happen but this is vladmir putin's war and at, you know, the realities on the battlefield will reflect how the outcome proceeds, what sort of options there are and when the russian military decides they're done taking orders from the kgb guy in the kremlin to target ukrainian civilians and commit atrocities then that is when potentially you could have an end to this. when vladmir putin's inner circle realizes that the economy, russian economy which has cratered, but not cratered enough. there is more we can do. remember they're still exporting oil and gas to europe which needs to stop. the inner circle may decide that putin's interests are not aligned with theirs. you might see the movement there for the moment vladmir putin is hell-bent carrying this war to the finish. president zelenskyy says he wants to restore ukraine's

borders before the war. the question for the intelligence community, the biden administration, what is the tipping point, how can we influence by giving the ukraine the military equipment they need? stuart: have ukrainians not gotten military equipment they need? >> they need more javelins. they need more stingers. they need anti-ship missiles, s-300 aircraft and there is long list and we haven't given them enough. stuart: we have been talking this for a long time. >> we sure have. stuart: you can't tell me they got the airplanes or whatever s-300 aircraft system they, kamikaze, they didn't get the weapons, didn't have them? >> right. reportedly at the got some of the switchblade drones which are good but they don't have enough. that is where this administration, look, there is a moral and ethical component of this. ukraine is on the geopolitical fault line on the idealogical

struggle with democracy we have to support and a dictatorship and totalitarian dictatorship on the other side. where do we stand? this is important of issues military equipment putin not allowing us to do the right thing until it is resolved. i hope congress raises it. stuart: dan hoffman, always good to see you. sigh again soon. >> thank you. stuart: vice president kamala harris was pressed on president's controversial remark, calling for the his removal. stuart: what did the vice president say. lauren: it was word salad. questioned by msnbc, i say joy reid didn't let her off the hook easily. >> he said vladmir putin should no longer be the leader of russia. do you agree? >> america's policy has been and will continue to be focused on the real issue at hand. i've been to poland, romania, been to europe three times in the last four months.

>> no luck getting you to weigh in whether he should remain? >> listen, let me be very clear, let me be very clear. we're not into regime change, and that is not our policy, period. lauren: should have said that at the beginning instead of one of those long drawn-out word salads instead. then you have her deputy chief of staff, michael fukes is leaving later this year. number 11 since june. stuart: that just announced today? lauren: yes. 11 key people surrounding kamala harris do not like working with her and are leaving the vice president's office. stuart: oh, dear, that is collapse. lauren: one way to put it. stuart: a cnn anchor calls out the white house for blaming rising gas prices on putin. roll tape. >> americans just don't buy this is related to the war in ukraine and most of it prankly is not. the white house is trying to do, to do both, blame putin, blame the oil and gas companies but americans just don't agree.

stuart: wow, that was on cnn. we'll deal with that a little later in the show. before the pandemic 70% of its shoes sold in america came from china. new balance tried to change that. ramping up production in america. the ceo is on the show next. ♪. meet jessica moore. jessica was born to care. she always had your back... like the time she spotted the neighbor kid, an approaching car, a puddle, and knew there was going to be a situation. ♪ ♪ ms. hogan's class?

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♪. stuart: the nasdaq still holding on to a very healthy lead this morning. it is up over 1%. almost 160 points higher. the dow has turned positive too, up just eight points. some movers on the market today include iron spark. what is iron spark? lauren: this is a blank company. they announced a deal with lifestyle brand hype beast, backing by tom brady, tony hawke, jonah hill to take it public. plans to do that on the nasdaq next quarter. iron spark shares up higher. it was up in the premarket by 30%. stuart: it settled down, didn't isn't. lauren: really. stuart: what is pinterest, i know they're moving? lauren: 7%, snap is higher too,

other social media companies like meta, that elon musk twitter news reinvigorating sector. snap is down 20%. pin is down 30% year-to-date. stuart: anything moving in the oil stocks, oil companies? lauren: oil stocks are higher. exxonmobil is not because the largest oil company. they say the cost of them leaving the liquified natural gas plant in russia will cost it four billion dollars. that is not what shareholders want to hear even if the move is for moral good. stuart: let's talk shoes and footwear, shall we? lauren: let's do it. stuart: before covid 70% of the shoes sold in america were made in china. new balance trying to change that. they're bulging up their u.s. manufacturing and joe preston is the ceo of new balance and joins us now. joe, thanks for joining us this morning, we really appreciate it. did you have any choice about this because it must be hard to get product out of vietnam and china? you had no choice but to build

in america? >> well, good morning, stuart. new balance had a long-standing commitment to domestic manufacturing. we've been making product in the u.s. for years and we are the only athletic manufacturer that produces here in the states. we have five factories in the states, two in massachusetts, three in maine. one we just opened up last week. it's a new facility. we added 90 new jobs. we'll bring that up to over 200 by the end of the year. for us it is about a couple of things. first of all it is about craftsmanship. because we make products we believe it helps our quality cores. it is also about community. our ownership it always has been about community, about jobs, american jobs, about american manufacturing jobs. stuart: okay. does it make economic sense? it was always traditionally it has been cheaper to produce shoes in vietnam and china. what about the economic questioning here, can you do it at the same price in america? >> well, there is, obviously the

industry is very competitive there is always pressure for profits but so despite those pressure for profits we've always maintained and have grown our domestic manufacturing footprint. what we also think it helps make us getting closer to the consumer so we can make changes to trends, that sort of thing. we're also buying equipment. we're hiring associates. we're creating training. we're creating the processes so that when we do work with our contract manufacturers we know, we're good partners and can make a better product. today with the supply chain crisis that we're seeing out there, you're seeing inventory that is literally taking so much longer here to get into the u.s. that's obviously tying up cash. so clearly i think other companies are seeing the need to on-shore. stuart: is there any sign that this supply chain crisis will ease at all in the next say year? >> i don't know about next year but i can't see it for the next six months. i have mean still today it is

difficult to get containers. it is difficult to get them into the ports. the amount of ships that are waiting offshore. once you get into the ports just shortage of truckers here in the u.s. does make for a challenging supply chain. stuart: you are going to have a problem with inflation? because your inputs must all be going up in price and manufacturing in america would, which probably has a higher labor cost, you will have to raise prices, aren't you? >> well we have selectively raised prices. we have had to. you see wages in the u.s., inflationary pressures here, raw material prices are certainly impacting us but it is not hurting our demand. last year we grew over 30% t was up double digits over 2019. we're is 4 billion-dollar company, we're seeing momentum into 2022. stuart: that is interesting, still strong momentum heading into this year? >> we do.

headed in the first quarter. we were constrained by supply frankly. we could have grown even more than we have but we had a strong start to 2022. stuart: joe preston, ceo of new balance, we'll remember that name. we do appreciate it, sir. >> you got it, stuart. stuart: labor unions picked up big wins at staten island facility and starbucks elsewhere in the country. dan springer in seattle. dan what is behind the recent uptick in union activity? reporter: how are you doing, stuart, good morning. there are a lot of factors why we're seeing organized labor flex muscle in the private sector like we haven't seen in decades. a couple of reasons the pandemic and record corporate profits. as you said amazon workers at a distribution center in staten island are the first in a country to vote in the union but unlikely to be the last. there is another vote late they are month at a different new york city warehouse. teamsters union, announced a multiyear, multiyear effort to

unionize warehouse workers and drivers. it has 1.1 million workers in the u.s. the union says the time is right for big gains. >> they want greater pay, greater staffing, run safer work places. that is a big issue at amazon. reporter: amazon issued a statement saying quote, we're disappointed. we believe having a direct relationship with the company is best for our employees. we're evaluating our options including perhaps a complaint of undue influence by the national labor relations board. but it is not just amazon. nine starbucks stores voted to join a union tied to the behemoth. seiu. one of those stores is a few lattes away from the corporate headquarters in seattle. 900 google workers are in a union focused on social justice. they got the company to end a defense contract using its attar official intelligence. two apple stores are working towards bringing in a union. rei workers in a new york city

store voted in a union a month ago. with 25 million people quitting job last year, workers have increased power. >> market in labor policy people are going back to work have more leverage. certainly because employers can't find workers to fill the positions vacated or been created since covid. reporter: combine that with record profits, we had $365 billion last year made at apple. you see that workers want a bigger piece of that pie but you also have the danger of increased prices as you increase the cost of labor. we've also have a lot of people who don't want to see their union dues go to all the social justice reasons. a lot of people at these places won't want to join unions. what will happen to them? stuart: we'll figure it out. dan springer. thank you very much, dan. los angeles county wants to give some residents $1000 a month for three years. business owners say these handouts will make labor shortages much worse. we'll have a report on that from

california. former president trump back in rally mode slams president biden for fueling inflation. we'll tell you what trump thinks biden needs to do to get the economy, our economy back on track. we'll be back. ♪.

stuart: on the market the outstanding feature is a very solid rally for the nasdaq composite that means big tech largely, up 160 points right there, 1.1%. that is the markets. here is politics. sarah palin returning to politics. she is running for congress. she has big endorsement. i know who it is. lauren: former president

donald trump endorsed her for alaska's only house seat. sarah shocked me and endorsed me in 2016 and we won big. sarah is smart and will never back down. i'm proud to give her my complete, total endorsement. this is big. 40 candidates are running in june's special election primary to fill the seat vacated by the death of long time congressman don young. palin is a household name. she fits message republicans want to send now, jobs, american values, revamping our energy policy. among the 40 candidates, she has trump's endorsement. maybe she gets it. maybe not. stuart: let's find out later. thanks, lauren. next one, trump blasted president biden on record inflation. this was during his rally in michigan. all right, lauren, you've seen the speech. what did he say? lauren: i want to point out this was saturday, day after friday march jobs report.

the white house patted themselves on the back even though we have companies saying we can't find workers and workers saying we can't keep up with inflation. here is president trump. >> if joe biden was serious about fighting inflation and helping the middle class the first thing he would do is walk into the white house briefing room and announce that he is immediately and completely returning to pro-american emergency policies of a president named donald john trump. it's very simple. [cheering] so simple. so simple. lauren: well, one food thing about trump's presidency is that we did have, we were exporting oil. we had super low gas prices and i have heard this in "the wall street journal" i heard it from an did i puzder this morning on "fox & friends." if you did what trump did to the oil companies and industry crude prices would fall $20 a barrel just like that. maybe it is so simple. the left will not let joe biden

do that but that is what the former president says he should do. stuart: i tend to agree with him too. los angeles county will pay some residents $1000 a month for three years, no string attached this. is the universal basic income program. kelly o'grady in california. you're at a restaurant. is the owner worried he will find it hard to get and keep staff? reporter: very worried, stuart. i mean he is already struggling to find and retain quality workers as is. los angeles is just the latest county to explore universal basic income. at least 26 regions across the country are exploring or have implemented similar programs. now listen, the los angeles county program is pretty small. it is 1000 randomly selected people receive 1000 a month for three years. they must be over the age of 18, live in qualifying community, make less than 58,000 for a single income household and 96,000 for a family of four. amidst rising inflation many are

questioning whether the handouts will even make a difference. some are questioning whether they will lessen the willingness to work. i'm here with the owner of gastropub bread and barley. tell me how difficult has it been to find and retain workers so far? >> you know, kelly, it is hard in good times, normal times without the social experiments to find good people. hospitality business, restaurant, it is damn near impossible to get good people to come into work. i understand it. it is a lot of work. it is hard. these are entry level positions, rely on people in school, young people willing to do that, to make not necessarily a living to support their family, to learn how to work, to learn how to come into the workforce. i don't see how this will help us. it is already really hard to find good people. how is this going to help? reporter: thank you so much, carlos, i appreciate it. i want to mention the economists said the pandemic stimulus checks we're seeing and the current labor shortage is an

example of how ubi could potentially damage the economy as well. stuart: all right, got it. kelly, interesting stuff. 1000 a month for three years, no strings attached. what are they thinking? kelly, thank you very much indeed. see you again soon. the mayor of new york says children have to wear masks in schools. we're talking toddlers here, your honor. parent are rightfully outraged. we got the story. the house voted to decriminalize marijuana at the federal level. former drug czar bill bennett says that is a bad move. he will make his case after this ♪. ♪ ♪ we all need a rock we can rely on. to be strong. to overcome anything. ♪ ♪

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and treats the multiple symptoms like joint swelling and tenderness, back pain, helps clear skin and helps stop further joint damage. don't use if you're allergic to cosentyx. before starting, get checked for tuberculosis. an increased risk of infections—some serious —and the lowered ability to fight them may occur. tell your doctor about an infection or symptoms or if you've had a vaccine or plan to. tell your doctor if your crohn's disease symptoms develop or worsen. serious allergic reactions may occur. it's good to be moving on. watch me. move, look, and feel better. ask your rheumatologist about cosentyx. stuart: the house did vote to decriminalize marijuana at the federal level. former drug czar bill bennett is with us this morning. bill, welcome back, good to see you, mr. secretary. you're against this. why do you oppose the legalization of weed? i would have thought it was a bit late. 18 states have recreational marijuana you want to ban it now. >> it is further permission to use marijuana. would remind people, while a lot

of people think it is harmless it's not. first of all this marijuana is not your father's marijuana. the psychoactive ingredients have been dramatically increased. more young people are in treatment, stuart, for marijuana than all other drugs combined, and as the former secretary of education and drug czar, let me tell you this, we know that one thing marijuana does to young people for sure is hurt, even destroy their focus and their attention. now do you think focus and attention are important in school? well they sure ought to be and they sure are. combine this, this is i think the crucial point, with what is going on at the border. we're losing 300 people a day to fentanyl. now they're going to drop title 42 which will increase the number of people, maybe double it. so what are we going to have? 600 people a day, young people die from fentanyl? then we add to that marijuana?

this is just stupid policy. i understand the difference between marijuana and fentanyl but this is not helpful and not smart. stuart: but at the moment, look at, just marijuana, the ball is rolling towards more and more use of marijuana recreational use of marijuana in more and more states. the momentum is against you at this point, right? >> yes. momentum is against me and the ball is also rolling towards lower student learning and achievement. you might have noticed during covid and our scores are down. we're legalizing marijuana, saying young people, go ahead it's fine. meanwhile the chinese are moving ahead in math and science. it is just stupid policy and destructive. stuart: i just hope you got time to just comment on this one. in new york city children ages two to four have to wear masks, if they're in school of any kind. what do you think to that? i don't see the reason for that

for toddlers. >> child abuse. we know kids were the victims, the worst victims of covid in terms of the effect it had on their lives, their ability to learn, their ability to interact and this mask mandate for young children is cruel and unusual punishment. they don't need the masks. the masks interfere with them. you can't see these little children smile. the whip continues. the punishment of children since covid has been extraordinary, now we'll get even more. stop, for god's sakes, stop. >> i wish we had more time, mr. secretary. >> me too. me too. stuart: you address the issues of the day in vital dynamic way. let's get more time. >> i'm available for half an hour anytime you want. stuart: if you're not careful, mr. secretary, watch out. see you again soon.

>> thank you. stuart: listen to this, chronic absenteeism reported in new york city schools. tell me how bad is it? lauren: it is bad but we might not be capturing all of it. in new york city it is 40%. it might be higher. stuart: what? lauren: when you have to quarantine you report to remote school. they current you as present and don't know what you do. stuart: absentee 40% in new york city, on any given day 40% of the public schoolkids are not in public school? lauren: chronic absenteeism mean students miss 10% of the year or more. stuart: okay. lauren: when it is trending in that direction, these are the statistics of kids who have been out what is considered too much. stuart: good lord. lauren: because they fall back on the assignments. they're not excited about coming to school. we're seeing, number is even higher in l.a. as you just saw. eastern places like wisconsin, the number is only, only 15% but it is rising. what we're hearing from a lot of older kids especially. they feel like they don't belong

anymore. they're depressed. they don't want to come in. it is easier to report online do nothing for the day. a major problem. they need to reverse it fast. stuart: thanks, lauren, good stuff. still ahead, texas congressman michael mccaul, adam corolla, retired brigadier general mark kimmett, steve forbes. the president is stuck, surrounded by crises but he either can't or won't change course. i will take that on in "my take" after this. ♪. s meet a future mom, a first-time mom and a seasoned pro. ... ntment here,

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>> these images they're absolutely horrifying and they do galvanize the west. the larger question is, you know , what do you do about it and how do you sort of walk that line without getting into a protracted proxy war. >> everybody wants peace but you don't want peace to be a recognition that russia can survive. we have to be doing everything we can to help ukraine push the russians out of their country, save as many lives as possible, and as quickly as possible. the time is of the essence. >> overtime we'll see a lot less russian energy going to europe, instead of an energy

superpower rush russia will end up being a reduced energy power. >> elon musk is the free speech maven right now and the world that needs him, he has to clean house and bring in some free speech libertarians. ♪ i feel good, i knew that i would now ♪ stuart: i love this song, yes i do it's 11:00 on monday, april 4, all day by the way. check those markets, you'll be pleased to see the nasdaq composite is up almost 200 points that's 1.3% that is a very solid gain right there. the price of oil, we had it at 103 earlier, now it's 102.81 it's up on the day, the 10 year treasury yield, well that was around 2.4% now it's 2.41% got that. now this. the president is stuck surround ed by crisis he either

can't or won't change course. we could all see the problems but the biden team dithers, unsure what to do. you get the feeling we're slid ing down a nasty slope, heading in the wrong direction, but incapable of doing anything about it. how about inflation? what's being done? not much. biden's playing the blame game. the border? still open and it's going to open up even more next month, central america is moving to north america. gas prices, there's no action plan. no crash program to produce more american energy unless of course it's a windmill and now, we have russia toes its in ukraine, for all the world to see. will biden continue to push zelenskyy to make peace with war criminals? and all these issues, it's important to remember the president leads a badly- split party. the left won't let him drill or build pipelines. aoc won't let him close the border and there are a whole lot of democrats who don't much care for involvement in foreign wars. throw in a good measure of in

competence in the identity conscience cabinet and you have a president who is stuck as crisis consume his administration. an aging president, a vice president in whom there is little confidence, and a bitterly-divided democrat party. it's a very troubling time. third hour of "varney" starts now. white house chief of staff ron k lain, some call him the real president, he says the president, the real president, president biden, is confident hunter biden didn't break any laws. watch this. >> of course the president's confident that his son didn't break the law but most importantly, as i said that's a matter that's decided by the justice department by the legal process, it's something no one at the white house has involvement in. stuart: we need peter peter strzok and he wrote the book red handed about financial corruption in china and he joins

me now. you've been following the hunter biden story very closely, so i've got this big picture question. what does president biden, what did president biden know about hunter's business dealings and when did he know it? >> well here is what we know, stuart and this is based on the corporate records that we have available, the hunter biden laptop. we know that joe biden -- stuart: okay, look we've got a problem here, when you get a freeze frame like that of your guest you know that you can't go forward with interview so we'll hold on for a second let's see if we can restore peter, and the full video and audio. we'll work on that. let's go to the market for a second. he's back, is he? let's make sure we've got this. peter, are you there? are you there? we've got a problem here. that's what happens with live television. now, 40 years ago when i first

got into this business, if that kind of thing happened, you'd lose your temper. you don't do that, you don't look really annoyed, an audience doesn't want you to look annoyed when things go wrong so what do you do? smile and say that's live tv don't worry about it. lauren: what about the break? we get annoyed and lose your temper during the break? stuart: certainly not, wouldn't do a thing like that so what do we got here? the market. always a good standby. fortunately we do politics and money and the markets a great standby, so look at that. the nasdaq is now up the producer says we're going to try peter one more time. so put him back on the screen. let me ask the question. okay, peter can you hear me? >> i can hear you, stuart can you hear me? stuart: yes, sir, i can. i can see you clearly, so i'll repeat the question. you'll have to have a short answer because we've used up much of the interview time with the problem here, so, what did president biden know and when did he know it? go. >> we know that he was getting money from foreign sources,

because joe biden was a beneficiary of that money. we know that joe biden was meeting off the books in the white house with hunter biden business partners. there's simply no conceivable way that joe biden was ignorant about what hunter biden was doing and that's why this calls out, in my mind, for an independent council. we had that during the trump adminitration when donald trump and his family was being looked at in the russian investigation which ended up absolving them of any kind of responsibility or guilt. we need the same thing here. the ron klain quote that you played earlier, where he says this is a justice department process with no involvement from us, who appoints senior justice department officials? president biden does so this needs to be looked at independently at the department of justice and not be done by the political appointees of this president. stuart: we got there eventually. peter you delivered your message , well-done indeed.

peter we'll get you back soon, i promise. thanks so much. >> thanks stuart. stuart: the administration is considering more sanctions against russia. steve forbes joins me now. steve, this is you're thinking about what more could be done to hurt putin. i'm thinking in terms of the europeans saying we don't want anymore oil & gas coming out of russia. do you think we could actually go that far? >> oh, i think so, stuart. we should do to russia what we did to iran several years ago and that is continue to sell the oil but the money goes into an escrow account and the only way they get that money is if they pull out of ukraine, and is putin going to shutdown his oil fields? not so easy. it's not like a light switch so those are the kinds of things they should be doing. they should also be applying secondary sanctions. anyone who does business with russia is going to be sanctioned , and on the weapons front. deliver those migs. deliver those a-3 hundreds. deliver anti-missile ship weapon s so that ukraine can win

this war. we should settle for nothing less than enabling the ukrainian s to win this war absolutely throw the russians out. it's morally reprehensible this administration is not going all out for ukraine which is ultimately our freedom as well. stuart: i'm glad you're saying this , steve, because i sense that over the weekend, when we started to see these awful pictures of the atrocities in ukraine, i think the public opinion started to turn, especially in europe and also here. i think we're at a turning point anyway, i want to talk about your book. it's a new one, the title is " inflation: what it is, why it's bad, and how to fix it." so can you just, i know we've got limited time, can you give me one good way right now to fix inflation? >> well two. one, the biden administration get out of the economy's way, especially on energy and two, the federal reserve stop creating excess money and start selling those bonds they've been buying and money creation in the

past year and a half. that's how you start it. stuart: but there be quite a reaction in the economy, rates rise doesn't the economy head south? >> well the rates are rising anyway. there's only, a person can only work for so long and by letting the economy adjust quickly the economy will recover very quickly, and the more the federal reserve dithers, the harder it's going to be so again the meredith tosses muck things up stop the economic malpractice and let the patient heal. stuart: if we don't take any measures like this , does inflation get worse as we go through the summer and fall of this year? >> you'll see inflation this summer and this fall, but you also could have the danger since the fed is sitting on $1.7 trillion of cash they are sitting on which banks have access to, you could see the kind of monetary inflation in 2023 we experienced in the 1970s so you'd have supply side inflation and also monetary inflation. lethal combination. stuart: yes, i remember it and

so do you, but of course we have to remember that the 1970s were followed by the 1980s the era of ronald regan. let's never forget that. >> 2024 is coming. stuart: i knew you'd remind me steve forbes see you again real soon. >> thank you. stuart: there's one standout stock today that's really moving and that is twitter up 24.9%. go through the story. lauren: so it is surging because tesla's elon musk took a 9.2% stake. dan ives of wedbush, says this is just the beginning. elon musk will build-out his tentacles, transforming social media, and i'm raising a question, do we need absolute free speech on the internet, because bank of america says advertiser-supported models require some sort of censorship to operate successfully. meaning that brands aren't going to spend big money when a corporate executive could say whatever they want on the

internet. i'm just bringing it up as part of the discourse we're having about what you should and should not say online. stuart: well i do hope that elon musk does something about twitter, which banned a sitting president from its lines. i mean, and i think that's in tolerable, out of the question get rid of it. are we done? yes, okay. lauren: we have two more movers. stuart: nio, as in nio. lauren: yes the electric vehicle company they upgraded to a buy at ubs and that is why the stock s up 8%. look, the reason here is ubs says they are down 44% in past 52 weeks. this is a new starting point, they are starting to deliver more and newer models, so it's like a refresh if you will. stuart: roku, came down badly when the pandemic ended. lauren: because demand was pulled forward but now they have extended a multi-year distribution agreement with amazon, so it's the amazon touch sending the stock up just about 7% so their customers can access prime video and tv apps on their roku devices for longer now.

stuart: if your stock is in the same sentence as amazon it probably goes up. lauren: yup about right. stuart: all right, yuma, arizona knows well. it has seen a 579% spike in border crossings compared to last year. that number could get even higher once title 42 ends we've got that full story for you. the white house says climate change could cost us $2 trillion by the end of the century. we'll breakdown the numbers. the president of ukraine accusing russia of genocide after women and children are found dead in the street. we have that report from ukraine , next. you know liberty mutual customizes your car insurance, so you only pay for what you need? like how i customized this scarf? check out this backpack i made for marco. only pay for what you need. ♪liberty. liberty. liberty. liberty.♪

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stuart: truly horrific images coming out of ukraine, innocent civilians massacred by russian troops air outside of kyiv. alex hogan, alex? reporter: stuart these are difficult images to see and we do want to caution any of our viewers of how graphic some of these photos are before they see them. the bodies of men and women, some bound by their hands, other s bound by their feet, seemingly tortured and executed. there are also reports of rape of people who were in these areas, these were civilians, these were not fighters. neighbors speaking out about how they, like so many others, had been hiding during russian occupation and now ukrainian forces are retaking this land only to find the destruction of these towns, the decimation of these buildings, and the atrocities of the killings that we see in these images. ukrainian president volodymyr zelenskyy speaking out about the horrors that this town has witnessed. now with more bodies than there is space, there is now a mass

grave being built with bodies either put in plastic bags or covered with dirt. sometimes their shoes are the only thing that stick out giving an image of what has taken place in these towns. world leaders quickly condemning these actions calling them war crimes. the mayor of bucha blasting russia for what has taken place in his town. >> and in relation to the civilian population, the russian s have in fact demonstrated that they were deliberately killing. they actually got a green light on their safari from putin. they were actually shooting down the ukrainian nation. ukrainian people. therefore, i have no other term to qualify that other than genocide. reporter: russia has denied all of these accusations. instead, pointing the blame at ukraine, saying that these were the actions of ukrainians on the ground. now, a lot of backlash over that , again world leaders are condemning all of this calling

it war crimes. meanwhile russian troops continue to move out of the northern part of the country around kyiv and chernihiv focusing on on the eastern part of the country the most contested area we've seen is the dontesk region. stuart? stuart: i think the world is stunned after what's being shown after this weekend alex thank you very much indeed. president biden just returned from delaware. he spoke briefly to the press about putin. roll tape. >> this war, he is a war criminal but we have to gather the information, we have to continue to provide ukraine with the weapons they need. this guy is brutal and what's happening in bucha is outrageous i think it is a war crime. stuart: that's the president moments ago in d.c. former u.s. assistant secretary of state brigadier general mark kimmitt joins us now. sir, can ukraine win and by win

i mean pushback russia's military much further? >> well, let's be very clear. the ukrainians have fought brave ly. they fought well. they have been equipped with western equipment and they imposed significant damage on the russians. there's no doubt about that. i am concerned though that if putin continues to throw in thousands and thousands of troops without regard to casualties, and millions and millions of artillery rounds that eventually, this war of attrition will fall into russia 's favor. stuart: so shouldn't we turnaround and supply the ukrainians with the military equipment they need to push them back? you can't let them sink. >> well, i think it's also clear to understand that we had decided as a nation whether right or wrong to do this by, with, and true nato and unfortunately with nato, you always get the lowest common denominator so if you want to

keep this coalition through nato together you've got to get everybody to maintain consensus and the consensus has been that they will provide everything that is needed up to that point where the nations inside of nato feel that the war would spill over out of ukraine and into europe. stuart: well that consensus hold now that we're seeing this brutality, these atrocities , which maybe repeated doesn't that change the equation when you see stuff like that? >> well it certainly could. i'm reminded of inside of bosnia in the old days. unfortunately while there was moral outrage screaming, the best that could happen that came out o of that was war crimes, the international criminal tribunal for yugoslavi a. i think we're hearing that come out of president biden at this point but aside from bringing justice not only to putin but to those generals ordering these massacres i don't think at this point nato is

willing to go much further than the boundaries they've already established, i wish it was different but let's be realistic stuart: so this drags on for a long time to come, is that the bottom line here? >> look, there are two wars going on here, stuart. one is the war of attrition, where both sides are supposed to wear each other out physically but there's also the battle of wills going on, the war between zelenskyy and putin, and at this point, it would seem to me that putin has the upper hand and zelenskyy is starting to see the cost this is taking on his people and his nation, and i'm afraid that zelenskyy will be the first to blink in this war to save further lives, to save the infrastructure inside of his country and in that case, whether it's only eastern dontesk, up to dnieper, i think putin will declare a victory. stuart: got it general mark kimm

itts, thank you very much for your ex! expertise. exxon-mobile suspending its liquefied gas project in eastern russia. exxon says it's going to exit their operations there or stop any new investments that's why exxon stock is just a slight bit lower today. the white house says climate change could become a massive part of the federal budget by the end of the century how much does the white house say is going to cost? how on earth do you make a projection for the rest of the century? lauren: the answer is $2 trillion and they figure the cost when we respond to wildfires, floods, other natural disasters, hurricanes and they say that's anywhere from let's say 25 billion to $128 billion a year, and they say that cost at the end of the century in today 's dollars is $2 trillion. stuart: do you think you could reasonably label that just scare tactics? lauren: in a way. stuart: great big number on it, a number which you have no way of knowing anything about it, but make it a big number and

scare everybody. lauren: yeah and that's why we saw a huge increase in the budget that the president requested for fiscal year 2023 of $45 billion now to get with climate. stuart: i don't know where they come up with these numbers i just don't see it. how do you know what the wildfire situation is like in 2072 how on earth do you know that? lauren: you don't but you use what you do know and try to forecast ahead. stuart: okay, got it thank you very much lauren. check those markets here we go. the nasdaq up 200 points i'll call that a rally, we got a move up for the s&p 20 points higher. have a look at the sports betting stocks, they're all higher, significantly so. of course the ncaa men's championship game is tonight. north carolina goes up against kansas. caesar's sports book has the jay hawks as the 4-point favorites now you know, it's on tonight. now this federal agents make a massive drug bust on the southern border. 92 pounds of cocaine worth

hundreds of thousands of dollars , we have the story. the president wants congress to approve $22 billion in emergency funding. congress is talking about giving them 10 billion. hillary vaughn has the latest. how much are they actually going to get? hillary vaughn will sort it out. ♪ money, money, money, money ♪

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♪ you make me want to roll my windows down and cruise ♪ stuart: florida-georgia line, good country music. i listen to it on occasion, and i'll listen to it. lauren: congratulations. stuart: you're actually looking at nashville, because we are playing country music and it's 58 degrees and sunny right there , if you like the music we play on the show follow us on spotify, just search "varney" & company. all right, susan is back. i want to hear the latest on twitter, which is the stock of the day. >> so music to the ears of investors as you like that? stuart: good segway. >> i've reached out to twitter for comment on elon musk's 9%

reveal this morning, and his stake, yet to hear back but if you think about it 9.2% is a $3 billion purchase by the richest man on the planet. single-largest shareholder in twitter right now, and also by the way, remember this poll he put out on twitter. he tweeted this to his followers , 80 million of them about twitter's fairness and whether or not it adheres to free speech. now, most responses here said no , 70%, in fact, so a lot of people are thinking passive investment right now, that could turn active very quickly for elon musk. stuart: okay, what's the counter -trade on this? >> the counter-trade is digital world so that is the spac behind trump's truth social, selling off today. you had two executives at truth social leaving after missing the end of march deadline to be fully functional and we're only talking about the iphone addition and i think dwac and truth social really missed out on an opportunity to monetize off a huge engaged community,

80 million voted for trump. stuart: and now you might have musk taking over or certainly doing something about twitter, which banned president trump way back when. >> yeah so there's a lot of talk about whether or not he might bring back or allow twitter to bring back on to the platform trump, especially ahead of 2024. stuart: fascinating. will he take full control and if so why. >> yes. stuart: fascinating. let's have a look at big tech we've got them on the upside today. >> looking at the commentary on twitter and some of the investment notes this morning, and they are calling this the recession trade , we know the 10 year yield s are lower than two years so that yield curve inversion, which some say means we might get a recession, but you also want to buy into companies that will be able to raise prices in a high inflationary and flowing growth environment and you definitely get that pricing power with the likes of apple, microsoft, nvidia, and the like. stuart: okay well i have seen big tech rally very nicely today i've got to say that.

>> high growth as well those stocks and gains are good look at the other ones like square. stuart: but china stocks, now they rebounded enormously from their lows. >> yes, and continuing the rally from last week, because china confirmed that they are going to change a proposing that we will change confidentiality rules to allow audits of u.s.-listed chinese companies, so remember the u.s. had threatened to de list some of these names like alibaba if they couldn't get access to the proper audits and the proper information, but this is an olive branch from beijing on the fact they are willing to open up the books for u.s. authorities to look into that's stock positive. stuart: but if that happened, open up the books, american investors would get a clear look at the finance of chinese companies. >> yes, but i don't think for in the big companies, like the alibaba i'm not sure that will change that much but it's a nice, secure kind of reassurance stuart: okay, got it susan thanks very much indeed.

lawmakers closing in on a deal for more covid funding. hillary vaughn is with us. hillary, congress wants to give them what, 10 billion. biden wants 22 billion, sort it out what are we going to get? reporter: stuart that's because republicans do not want to include the $5 billion that president biden requested for a global vaccine effort but they are willing to pay for other things like putting part of that $10 billion that there's this general agreement on to essentially pay for therapeutics that would treat covid, study long covid and tweak vaccines so that they actually respond better to new variants of covid but the ballpark figure that $10 billion being negotiated right now between republicans and democrats in the senate really the key that republicans want to make sure is clear, that money that goes out the door is traceable. >> if this should pass through

the senate and through the house , i want to make sure that there is transparencies that not only can we see how those dollars are being spent but the public can, and that, the dollars that are being re allocate only go to covid and not other pet projects coming from the left. reporter: so there are some skeptical here on capitol hill about the need to spend more when millions of dollars in covid relief is still sitting un spent and some of the ways that states are spending it are on things that are unrelated to covid but democrats point out that this is not another round of relief. it's funding for vaccines and other necessities. >> we're shifting in terms of how we look at managing covid going forward. we are always going to need to have resources to make sure that we have available therapeutics, vaccines. reporter: stuart, to pay for all of this , of course republicans want to make sure it's paid for and this isn't extra spending because there is so

much left unspent. some of that is going to pull from approved aid that went to zoos and theaters to help them survive during the pandemic that really just sat dormant and a lot of it was unspent and still is unspent. stuart? stuart: give up the money from the zoos, i would have thought that might help, you know what i mean? hillary thank you very much indeed. look whose here, i need an economist. we found him, there he is, steven moore is with us. look, i've got a question about inflation because i think that's the major story of the day. is inflation going to speed up this summer or cool down? >> well, a lot of that depends on what happens in congress with all of this spending and you just were talking about the covid relief spending. stuart, we spent four to 5 trillion, not four to 5 billion, but trillion dollars at the federal level fighting covid and this idea that congress needs to authorize 10,

20, $30 billion more when there's hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars that's un accounted for is absolutely nuts to me, and by the way, i think it's pretty easy to connect the dots between this massive multi-trillions of dollars of spending that's been happening under biden and the acceleration of the inflation rate, so i'm looking at what's going to happen with these spending bills biden still has not given up on his build back better bill, though it looks dead for now, so i'm looking at an inflation rate of remaining in that eight or 9 % rate through pretty much the rest of the year, and those are dismal numbers. stuart: yeah, they're really dismal numbers eight or 9% inflation lasting all the way through the end of this year, that be really upsetting for the market, i would have thought for the economy. i mean, i would have thought eight or 9% inflation. you sustain it that long, what happens to the economy? >> well, you know, i'm old enough to remember what happened

in the late 70s and early 80s when we had that snowballing inflation rate and let's not forget, that ended with one of the most severe recessions that the united states has had since the great depression, that what i call the mini depression of 1982. now, there's some disagreement about what actually caused that recession, but the fed, because the fed has been so behind the curve in terms of fighting this inflation, remember nine months ago they were saying it was transitory, they've put themselves in a very precarious situation. they don't have any good options right now, but i do believe it's time for them to start raising rates. the other thing, let's not forget, last week, stuart, the biden administration proposed $2.5 trillion of new taxes. that's according to the wall street journal. $2.5 trillion. now, thankfully, it looks like those tax increases aren't going anywhere, but again, these

policies that are coming out in the biden administration all point to the direction of higher inflation, not lower inflation. stuart: got it. stephen, thanks very much for joining us we'll see you again soon. >> okay. stuart: stephen moore. denzel washington breaking his silence about the slap heard around the world. he says he couldn't just sit there and ignore what happened. we've got the report on that. an average of 2,000 migrants a day sneaking into the country. border patrol says some of them are violent criminals. even murders. bill malujen has the report from the border, next.

♪♪

at usaa we've been called too exclusive because we were created for officers. but as we've evolved with the military we've grown to serve all, who've honorably served. no matter their rank or when they were in. a marine just out of boot camp or a petty officer from '73 and even his kids and their kids. usaa is made for all who've honorably served and their eligible family members. are we still exclusive? absolutely. and that's exactly - why, you should join. stuart: a major drug bust at the southern border. what did they find? lauren: 37 packages of cocaine weighing 92 pounds in a white

van, the cbp customs and border patrol searched it, street value $715,000. the question is, was that laced with fentanyl? more than 100,000 americans died last year from overdoses, two-thirds of those overdosed deaths linked to fentanyl, typically made in china, sent to mexico crossed into the border. stuart: lauren thanks very much indeed. more than 300,000 illegals have entered the country, just in the last six months. bill melugin is at the border, he's in the border town of lajoy a. what are you seeing there today, bill. reporter: stuart good morning, c bp sources tell me you mentioned 300,000 got-aways in last six months i'm told there were more than 62000 just in the month of march alone. you do the math on that that's upwards of 2,000 people sneaking past our border agents every single day and we'll show you why that's such a concern if we could pull up this graphic right here. just last week, during a five- day stretch, agents here in the rio grande valley sector

report they arrested a mexican man convicted of child rape, a mexican man convicted of rape in indiana, honduras man convicted of murder, mexican man convicted of attempted murder, two ms-13 gang members with a conviction for cruelty to a child. again, that is one single border patrol sector over a five-day span, then late yesterday if we can pull up this mugshot, border patrol in the tucson, arizona sector reporting they arrested this convicted sex offender, a previously-deported mexican national who they say snuck across the border in a group of 12. his previous conviction was for aggravated sexual battery out of the state of kansas. meanwhile, illegal crossings continue non-stop take a look at this video we shot over the weekend. in eagle pass, texas, before we started the drive down to the rio grande valley you see dozens of migrants crossing illegally into texas, with dhs sources telling us saturday alone the del rio sector saw more than 1,600 illegal crossings,

including more than 200 in just a 45-minute span there, in eagle pass and meantime, oklahoma senator james langford says with reports that title 42 will be dropped next month, the biden administration has no idea what is coming. take a listen. >> everyone knows this is temporary. everyone knows that it was temporary from the very beginning but they had a full year to be able to plan for what happens when they bring it down and their plans seems to be we'll just move people across the border faster. reporter: and stuart with more than 300,000 known got-aways at our border since october 1 just to put that in perspective that is a population roughly of the size of the city of cincinnati sneaking past our border agents in just six months we'll send it back to you. stuart: all right, bill, star reporter great stuff, thanks very much, bill melugin. congressman michael mccaul joins us, republican from texas and the ranking member of the house foreign affairs committee. congressman it's great to have you with us. just let me ask you this.

you're from texas. what happens in texas when title 42 is lifted? >> 500,000 illegals in the next five weeks, that's 100,000 per week. this is really unsustainable, we're actually approaching since the beginning of this administration almost 3 million people that have crossed illegally into the united states and who are these people? we don't know, and per your prior reporter, these are convicted felons, you know, all sorts of bad actors. i was a federal prosecutor down in texas and i dealt with this , but this is the worst i've seen and now to lift title 42, which will now open the floodgates, and not to mention most importantly, stuart, the fentanyl. we have apprehended, seized enough fentanyl to kill the american people seven times over. there are so many young people dying today because of these

fentanyls and i know we're very focused on ukraine as we should be, but we also need to be focused on this problem, this epidemic that we're opening the floodgates to. stuart: but why, i mean, i don't know anybody who wants to lift title 42. i don't know what lobbying group says oh, you gotta lift it now. i don't know anybody whose saying that and i don't know anybody whose saying what we can do about this. we've known this problem for a long time, nothing is done. >> no it started when he rescinded the migrant protection protocol, remain in mexico, that i worked very closely with the trump adminitration when i shared homeland security foreign affairs to get that done, and that actually worked. it was working, and then he rescinded this and now we have this massive , you know, problem down there and so for the life of me, we mandate that little children have to wear masks at school and out on the playground and yet we're just letting in randomly all these people that

we don't know anything about. i mean, how do you absorb this , stuart? what are we going to do with these people? it's a major human trafficking phenomenon. the likes of which we haven't seen in our lifetime, and it's going to have long term ramifications. stuart: it is, i wish we had more time, congressman, because this is a huge challenge for america in the immediate future. please come back and see us when i've got more time. i really appreciate that. mike mccaul, thanks so much. ukraine's president zelenskyy, yeah, he made an appearance at the grammies last night. comedian adam carolla is here with his take on the grammies, but first a look at some of the nights performances. ♪ f it's not burnt brown pellets. the farmer's dog makes it simple to feed your dog real food. it's real meat and veggies.

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"why can't i lose weight?" for most, the reason is insulin resistance, and they don't even know they have it. conventional starvation diets don't address insulin resistance. that's why they don't work. now, there's golo. golo helps with insulin resistance, getting rid of sugar cravings, helps control stress and emotional eating, and losing weight. go to golo.com and see how golo can change your life. that's g-o-l-o.com. stuart: one of the presenters at the grammies last night took aim at the slap around the world. he poked fun at will smith, and he said comedians were told they had to wear helmets while telling jokes at award shows. adam carolla is a genuine comedian and the author of the upcoming book "everything reminds me of something", i like that title. adam, welcome to the show. everyone seems to be on their best behavior last night.

is hollywood kind of walking on egg shells do you think? >> it be nice if they walked on egg shells instead of on clouds, which they normally do. it's also funny that i'm in los angeles, the grammies are traditionally in los angeles, but because of covid, they moved it to las vegas. it's interesting, to me, and all these places that have all these covid regulations, all they do is pick-up the event and move it to florida or move it to texas or move it to vegas, in this particular case, and then nothing happens. i never understand why they aren't able to figure that out two years into this thing. stuart: i was surprised when denzel washington offered spiritual help to will smith right after the slap. i was surprised, because you don't see much spirituality in hollywood now do you? >> well you see a lot of spirituality but not a lot of religion, you know?

you see a lot of mindfulness and retreats and yoga and things, you know, half of these guys probably have spiritual shamen who lead them, but there's not a lot of traditional religion, that's for sure. stuart: i think i'm done with moral lectures coming at me from hollywood, how about you? >> yeah, i was done with moral lectures coming at me from hollywood 20 years ago, but that's what the they do. they just project. they are some of the worst narcissistic people in the world and then they put a pin on with a rainbow on it and somehow all is forgiven. stuart: what do you think should happen to will smith? >> you know, there's the court and then there's the court of public opinion. he's already being punished by virtue of the fact we're talking about him. his reputation is tarnished, that will live forever.

we don't focus enough on that in our society. there is pay a fine, be suspended, be incarcerated or you could be jussie smolette. he could do six months, three months, a week, no time. his life is ruined. he ruined it, so there is an element of sort of cosmic pay back, and that's us all thinking something is wrong with will smith. stuart: you're a comedian, but there's nothing funny about the grammies, or the oscars, right? >> well there was some comedy in the oscars i suppose. it's kind of a weird thing now they can't go back to how it used to be, they have to do this quota system and they did x amount of women and women of color and it's just this weird algorithm that i think confuses a lot of people, and puts people off. i think people just want to go who's funny, who's available, you be the host. i wrote for the oscars for two

years, i wrote for jimmy kimmel, he was funny, he's available, he hosted. now, its got to be some sort of thing involving your heritage. stuart: you've got it. adam, i'm sorry i'm out of time love to talk to you all day, adam carolla, good guy. see you again soon. >> thanks. stuart: 11:56 we're running late , whose portrait is featured on the $2 bill? any ideas hamilton, jefferson, grantor kennedy the answer after this.

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stuart: okay, whose portrait is featured on the two dollar bill. guess? >> thomas jefferson. stuart: jefferson. i would have said that. who is it? the answer is thomas jefferson. the last time 2-dollar bill was printed in 2003. >> why? stuart: didn't catch on. time's up for me, neil. it is yours. neil: when they say you're phone any as two dollar bill. well the two dollar bill is real. what you're saying it's real. so i never understood -- stuart: wait a minute, neil. hold on a second i distinctly heard susan li laughing at your comment about phony as a two dollar bill. i heard that. >> you know, it was funny t was funny. neil: i could understand him having impression you were laughing at him. yes. i'm very sorry about