i know what's really happening to the global economy with my stronger no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune into cars report. it have you want us to you live here moscow top stories now past the hour exactly the launch of julian assange his very own interview shown on t.v. cause it's called diversity with the first episode lauded and luth for talking to a cast largely frozen out of the mainstream media. photos of u.s. soldiers posing with body parts of dead afghan suicide bombers immersed in a series of scandals involving american troops and the behavior in a war zone. one hundred days before the start of the summer olympics in london there are accusations of sponsors are using the campaigns as a p.r. campaign to improve their own tarnished reputation. now as promised we head to

washington studios capital accounts it's on the next. good afternoon our welcome to capital account i'm lauren lyster here in washington d.c. it is your headline very profound two thousand and twelve amid high oil and gas prices u.s. president barack obama even though neither the oil secular leader is proposing more regulation. we can't afford a situation where speculators artificially manipulate markets by buying up oil creating the perception of a shortage and driving prices higher. but how much is speculation really to blame for the rise in oil prices is the problem the defiling of the dollar is declining purchasing power and what about regulators failing to regulate the rules already on the books in the first place we'll talk to commodities expert dr steven levy about all of that and while we're on oil is the argentinean government's move to take

control of its largest oil company. just by the political fallout the latest example of the increasing tension between energy and economy as oil becomes more scarce and expensive and as the global economy is on life support built on debt will economic growth increasingly depend on energy control and a record number of americans are reportedly denouncing their citizenship or handed over their green cards many say it's for tax reasons that's right it's tax day in the u.s. we'll talk about the international backlash against i.r.s. let's get to today's council of town.

all right u.s. president barack obama in the face of higher and rising oil and gasoline prices that we've seen went after evil oil speculators today and he wants congress to pass more regulation he wants lawmakers to do the following you want them to fund a six fold increase for surveillance and enforcement staff at the commodities futures trading commission to put more cops on the beat overseeing the oil market he wants to empower this the f.t.c. to raise margin requirements for traders oil positions and raise the penalties for market manipulation to ten million dollars from a million dollars i have some proposals how about getting the cops already on the beat to enforce the rules already on the books which appeared majorly lacking in examples such as the m.f. global bankruptcy and stiffer fines for manipulation ok what about going after the accusations of manipulation already going on which we had a guest just recently talk about in the silver market as for the price of oil and

what's really behind that in christe creases that we have seen what the weak dollar let's take a look at prices ok this is where oil is at when we went to air crude at one hundred four brant crude at one eighteen and a gallon of gas the average at the pump that people are paying it is three ninety two now one of our friends from daily reckoning charles catlike calculated that if the dollar since two thousand and two had been as good as some other currencies these would be the prices that we're looking at for oil and gasoline of the you want eighty two dollars or three ten and then the euro the japanese yen and the swiss franc ranging from sixty three to seventy seven dollars for a gallon of oil and for or excuse me for a barrel of oil and between two fifty and two ninety four a gallon of regular gas so quite a difference there to talk about all of this month's really behind these oil prices

and the politics dr steven levy chairman and c iowa believe capital management and author of red alert how china's growing prosperity threatens the american way of life he is quite the commodities experts are really excited to talk to you today dr les balkans the capital account thanks for being on the show. thank you so much lorne pleasure being here yeah so first let's get to kind of the premise of obama's speech today which is that oil speculators are presumably behind or possibly behind the rise in oil prices we have been seeing my question to you wouldn't we all speculation both of pressure up you know push the price up and down. yeah i mean maybe the speculators are behind the fact that the dow is gone from eight hundred fourteen thousand i mean you know there's so many things wrong with this kind of statement i just want to add to what you had said before about pricing oil as if the dollar hadn't changed or an error of pricing and in swiss francs if you priced oil in terms of gold it would probably be around i'm guessing fifteen dollars i was

just doing it in the head calculation would have gone up as a at all because gold has gone up more than oil since the beginning of the century so yes has gone up but other currencies have gone down and the reason oriel has gone up as much as it has is that it's scarce and if it's scarce the last thing lauren you want to do is prohibit price increases because the only way pappa listen works is if you have real price increases inducing other forms of energy or other if it weren't for the price increases in or out just to give you one example in this country you would not have oil fracking today you do have oil fracking now there's a lot of things wrong with fracking but you do have it and it is incremental supply and you do have cars sands producing oil again lots of things wrong with lots of things wrong with fracking they're not going to solve our problem but if oriel had been let's say eighty or ninety dollars

a barrel there would be no fracking i mean and so this is showing you how these markets work they're working very well and for obama to sit here and say that we want to discourage high prices is the same thing as saying we want to discourage alternative energies we want to discourage more drilling and exploration for that hard to get hydrocarbons it just makes no sense whatsoever except in the political context in which he's speaking when dr levy if you want to talk about speculation just a hair of the white house a little more don't they play a role in it whenever they stir grammars that obama will release search engine oil supplies every time that oil prices climb. of course and there's an ongoing rumor echo with you will i mean obama supposedly has said sat down with the french and the europeans and they've agreed that a particular point in time they will release strategic petroleum reserves this is i can't tell you how silly this kind of thing is i mean those reserves are to protect

us against the real rainy day i mean a stormy hurricane like day and anyone looking at the middle east in the past couple of years the arab spring how much money the saudis are paying for security and incidentally the saudis probably need or look around ninety or one hundred dollars in order to maintain all those security provisions anyone looking at the chaos in the middle east and saying that well we really don't have to worry we'll just release the oil now because we think it's a little bit high this is the kind of nonsensical policy that is led to the sort of problems that we're in right now and we are in very very deep problems with respect to energy and other resources and we talk about those problems do you think that's what is going into the price of oil that this is about this study of oil that's what we're seeing in high prices at the post just back elation. of course totally i mean you know the international international energy association for instance.

issues reports and they don't make up anything if anything they're super bowls on oil but i think for about the last ten quarters in a row or oil inventories in the developed world have been lower than five year average is to me that doesn't speak of abundance that doesn't speak of speculation it speaks of honest to goodness scarcity especially when you consider these low inventories are occurring in the context of no growth in europe negative growth in europe and anything but soaring growth in the u.s. so that i mean there is a serious situation here and it is called oriel scarcity and to try and solve it by releasing reserves from the strategic petroleum reserve is so much the wrong message i mean it could not be more wrong it is really just selling our future and almost giving up on energy is something that we need in this economy and what about the solutions i mean we keep hearing about natural gas why doesn't that play more of a role and an alternative q oil. well it should be but it would take

a tremendous build out of infrastructure in order to get natural gas really working i mean right now the only real where you can substitute natural gas for other hydrocarbons is in electricity generation and maybe a little extent in trucks in buses etc but really a car fleet that uses natural gas is just know we're on the horizon i mean that would just cost zero massive massive amounts of money but to the extent that we can substitute natural gas for coal we are doing it but you know make no mistake lauren natural gas right now is price much too low i mean you're porter on previously had a very very good point about these well casings i mean they're they're just you know going to continue to pollute water people that are living near these wells there's just no way around it fracking itself may not be dangerous but they're well

casings are very dangerous and the leaks from the well casings and the fact that we over threat and the fact that the large i mean all you have to do is look at chesapeake which is the leading company that's dedicated to fracking it's making new lows day by day it's only existing because it's been able to sell assets another leading frac or in the oriel arena or continental resources which i happen to like as a company right now but still long term no better on it because their cash flow continues to get more and more negative fracking is can't go into all the details right now but it basically is something like a ponzi scheme you need more and more and more rigs to increase your production and eventually you run out of rigs and you run out of production that's interesting and i think you were talking about greg palast an investigative reporter who was on our news you have to switch gears just because i do want to get really a little bit more nuanced on the dollar issue when i brought up the price that oil

and gasoline would be at if the dollar had cut or excuse me if the dollar performs like other currencies have i question what our oil prices because the value of the dollar is down. well you know i would say that the two are interrelated you know if i were on one side of the debate or the other i'd rather say that the dollar is down because or a list scares and when resources get scarce whether it be the dollar whether it be any other essential resource you have to print more and more and more of their currency in order to afford the scarcity and the dollar is no way of basically resources are being rationed now today and if you don't have hard currencies to ration you're basically in a contest of who can print more money and you're seeing that with all the currencies in the world and you made those comparisons comparisons lauren at the beginning of the show i think from daily reckoning yes when they said if it were

priced in swiss francs etc i'd be a lot lower and again i go back to what i said did it or overpriced in goal which is a currency i mean you know actually in its day facto currency oriel today would probably be around fifteen dollars a barrel or eighteen dollars i'm doing the calculations in my head so don't shoot me if i'm off by a little bit that i want to hold but yeah yeah you know i do want to get into this combination of current things that are hard very much a debt based money system of currencies that have asked elated in continuing to print and put liquidity into the system of the economy combined with the scarcity of energy when we look at that announcement or a news item such as argentina announcement i want to get to that happen in just a bit but before we do out one of the issues i only have a minute but on the net relation when obama's talking about cracking down on oil manipulation bringing more people in to do that what about the manipulation allegations that are already going on and don't really seem to be really pursued in

a case of something like the silver market i know you're a precious metals expert. well yeah i mean you know super market is much easier to manipulate the market because it's very very small it doesn't take a whole lot of money to manipulate the silver market now i have not eyewitness to any of the manipulation in the silver market but if you were going to look at manipulation i'd certainly start with silver rather than oil but you know that said silver also is going to become a very scarce commodity because it's essential to solar energy and the chinese see this and the chinese i think are going to be accumulating have been accumulating i think they're going to aggressively accumulate silver and i think that's going to preclude a lot of the manipulation that you may or may not have seen in so for so far that's really interesting we're going to go to break dr lee but i want you to stick around stay right there because there's more i want to ask you are we will have more with dr levy author and chairman and excuse me author and chairman and the iowa of lead capital management also still ahead you know the saying they say nothing is certain

in life but death and taxes they no one said anything about being taxed to life we'll give you our three cents on the growing trend of people working abroad did now think their u.s. citizenship the first your closing market numbers. shows that so much there's a huge musician on the market can the u.s. and it's going to stop the downward diplomatic spiral with iran and seek ways out of the current deadlock more talks are. well. technology innovation all the developments around. the future are.

welcome back let's talk about this tension we kind of got to before the break between energy and economies so argentina has moved to seize control to nationalize its largest oil company y.p. at the spanish company repsol is the controlling shareholder and the company madrid others are angry for obvious reasons despite the political fallout here's what the argentinean president reportedly said about this move she said we don't choose and nationalizing model but we promote a model focused on recovering on excuse me on recovering the sovereignty of the country's resources so the question i have you know harvey what have you see this is this an example of the global tension between energy and the economy that is oil is being depleted and the price rises controlling astral reeses resources to

control your energy future is needed to control your economic future as a country or even as a company i want to ask that to dr stephen leeb chairman and c i o of lead capital management and author of red alert how china's growing prosperity threatens the american way of life so dr lee we have this announcement i'm just curious if you see this is kind of an example of a bigger picture issue of this tension between energy and the economy the tension between wanting to grow grow grow grow but having ever depleted resources that are getting more expensive. well lauren on many counts the answer is yes it is a it is absolutely an example of the kind of tension and you're not just seeing it in argentina i mean you're seeing in an in australia where they're starting to raise taxes on miners i mean you know it's common sense that if you have something in the ground which you think is going to go up in value why should you sell it today if you think you can sell it for twice as much tomorrow so i mean that's sort of the common sense the issue of scarcity of resources once people become convinced

they have something that's just going to go up in value i mean then they're just giving it away if they're selling it today for whatever the prices are in argentina and also to an extent all over the world what you have now is that you know where is the headline inflation is not really worrisome when you talk about the lower level of incomes in this country i mean you had a guest from occupy wall street on the show i think preceding me and you know he's making a lot of i thought interesting points well one piece of data that his just not left my head is that in america the bottom twenty or thirty percent of this population in america is living is spending over fifty percent of their income just on energy and food so they are basically living courtesy of the largest of the government they don't have enough money don't make enough money when we're talking twenty to thirty percent and their percentage is probably going to grow they're experiencing

wild inflation because the essential is of life are very very expensive now in argentina what you have is probably even a worse situation i don't know the numbers chapter and verse but if it's twenty or thirty percent in the usa it's got to be at least fifty or sixty percent in a country like argentina and what this says to the leaders of argentina is you know we should gain control of this because we may want to subsidize it we may want to you know make it you know make this company not. profitable because it's going to really harm us if we continue to sell this excuse me this oriel profitable crisis it's going to really upset our populace they're not going to be able to drive we're not going to be able to irrigate we're not going to be able to do a lot of things that oil allows us to do so that by taking control it gives them much more control over the prices now is this a long term solution absolutely not it's

a solution borne out of desperation yes absolutely there is nothing good about it but you know you raise the question between energy and nation and national security you cannot separate the two if you don't have control of your energy supplies you do not ultimately have national security on many levels and that's just the way it is and i not just nation is this corporations too i saw an interesting report that delta is on the verge of buying a refinery they're buying a shuttered refinery in philadelphia are trying to bring that this can help them save some of the billions of dollars that they spent on jet fuel each year so does this a military for corporations. well yeah obviously i mean you know basically the refined products in this country like gasoline are have risen even faster than oriel and one reason is that it's very hard to build a refinery and i don't think we've built a new refinery in this country for twenty thirty years i mean it's a long time so that you know by the time you translate the oriel into gasoline into

diesel fuel and to listen to all these different things it costs you a remend is amount of money and you know again you're losing control of your fate if you don't own you know at least one of these tools one of these products in the supply chain and i think delta you know if they can get away with this and do it at a reasonable price i think it's a very very good idea but it doesn't really solve the essence of the problem which again is oriel but it certainly will give belt a little bit more peace of mind and i think their shareholders as well it's interesting i just have one quick question i know it's a big issue but if you just have any quick thoughts on this tension if you think we're going to see increasing nationalism increasing wars as we think on trees grow and grow and grow need more and more energy and less of it. well you know i hope we can get around this without any sort of resource wars but the way we're headed right now trying to develop hydrocarbons is no way of doing it china right now is

doubling their their expenditures on power within the next four years they are building out smart grids they control wind energy they control such a solar energy they are the biggest factor in nuclear energy they are on the verge of controlling desalination this is a model i hate to say that we should be following and if we don't follow this model i just think we're going to be very much out of luck and i think our strongest card right now unfortunately is our military it's the reason that i think saudi arabia is beholden to us how long that lasts i don't know but once china has two or three aircraft carriers you know the equation changes and you know china's military i think made the cover of the economist within the last i don't know three two or three weeks you know this is a very dangerous situation because instead of cooperating with the chinese we are basically following a totally different course and in fact we're helping them but because by producing this oriel this fracking oriel we are keeping if anything or

a prices artificially low and benefiting from bad doctor leaves so many interesting points would lead to follow up law to save the rest of the conversation for another day we're out of time i appreciate you being here that was dr steven levy author and chairman and the author and chairman and c.e.o. of leave capital management thank you. all right let's wrap up with a loose change we have a loving cause he may very very nice for joining us again today filling in for dimitri and shannon in the control room to talk about something that we talked about a lot on this show the lengths people are going to try to keep their money they've afraid of government overreach here is one of our gas and salo are talking about

what a traditional safe haven switzerland's how that's been affected by the reach of the i.r.s. listen to this. for american citizens is no longer safe haven because the purpose is it is impossible for anybody holding american passports to open the account in switzerland and i was in and what constituents. well it turns out that breach of the i.r.s. is affecting a lot of us this in that are lining up to hand over their passports get rid of their citizenship they live and work abroad they don't want to be taxed twice the u.s. is one of the only countries who tax their citizens on income earned abroad the number of people getting rid of their citizenship alone it's at a record the record since the i.r.s. started publishing the list in one thousand nine hundred eighty eight hundred people last year reading about that well i mean it's very interesting obviously they have been publishing this list for that long. but this is always been a policy of the united states and i think that people aren't really paying higher taxes right now taxes have gone up so to me it's kind of just interesting because

maybe people have less money out of this massive financial crisis and so maybe they've just chosen their priorities and realize that we're in the past it actually made sense for them to keep their us passport page two sets of taxes they could keep that u.s. citizenship and live wherever they wanted to be. maybe they realize that even if it was a good many words that i want to keep my money because we've seen the i.r.s. increase its reach like on solar was talking about switzerland just won't even let americans open bank accounts because you've seen the i.r.s. get names of clients from u.b.s. american clients with accounts over there i mean it's just it's reached new levels and i feel like this is a really good hard fact that we're seeing to back up what a lot of our guests anecdotally tell us what do you think i think regardless of how much money i make i want to be taxed. yeah yeah i mean when you go to the policy right yeah if you want to keep your us citizenship then you shouldn't have to also pay taxes abroad but i want to have

a green ok listen i'm. an adult teams closed a casino may have hit the jackpot take a look at this. commissioner roger goodell could should authorize teams to sell casino ad space on stadiums in radio broadcasts and in game big programs the new revenue could bring in an extra forty six million dollars a year for some teams so traditionally the n.f.l. has been very vocal in its anti gambling stance but they want these so i don't know is this a credible or are you cool with this is it too hard to turn down by i think it's a little hypocritical but i mean the n.f.l. the business but if they're going to try to claim that you know their problem with gambling is they don't like gambling only specifically what has to deal with the n.f.l. and with their business but then we're just going to place these ads in the nose where people might be tempted to gamble i mean you're kind of asking for it yeah i can and you're a shareholder why don't you tell us how you feel. i mean i'm not allowed to bet on

n.f.l. games anyway or else i would probably be imprisoned oh come on i kind of thing that the i was the only suits coming up regarding concussions and players getting injured and things like that and this is a money making scheme in order to protect themselves from all those suits that are obviously going to cost millions of dollars you don't think they already have enough money yeah that you know he's doing very well from what i hear it's oh i major growth industry as far as media spencer one of the only protect themselves yeah well i don't know but i think that it does remain to be seen if this is a continuing trend that vice sells and it's just too hard to turn down in these tough economic times that's all we have time for thanks so much for being here a lot and shannon of course as always and thank you for tuning in do not forget to follow me on twitter out lauren lyster give us feedback on the show at youtube dot com slash capital account ever and everyone here at the so thank you so much for watching come back tomorrow and have a great night.