for joining our team with me parents at half past the hour these are your headlines the crowds grow wider in egypt troubled to election violence well as over banned religious candidates with the ruling military seeming to be the only ones to benefit. hillary clinton pitches for china's support on north korea and iran but they you want to smile at terry's asia pacific build up as support for chinese dissidents and leave beijing where. and police crackdown on an anti all sturdy rally in barcelona as major european central bank heads to head this week there to discuss the state of spain's spiraling debt. ninety minutes in washington

d.c. next first lauren lister's on the money to see if it all adds up in capital account stay with us. good afternoon and welcome to capital account i'm laurin the star here in washington d.c. these are your headlines for may second two thousand and twelve nicolas sarkozy and challenger francois alone face off today in the live french election t.v. debate and what's reportedly seen as the climax of the campaigns with elections in france and greece this weekend the results have the potential to send shock waves across the european debt landscape was speak with former diplomat and investment banker edward harrison about how politics in single countries could impact the global economy meanwhile what did outspoken and famed fund manager you henry tell a panel about europe at the milken institute global conference yesterday about his

concerns take a listen but the thing that i fear is for scottish confiscation of my also its. clients lawsuits. he also thinks we're a year away from the french nationalizing their entire banking system we will discuss and speaking of confiscation foreign financial institutions are reportedly frantically preparing and shelling out serious money to comply with u.s. tax relation regulations take a lesson. the legislation is all about the disclosure of information that they have with respect to their u.s. accounts but the way they do it it is the foreign account tax compliance out and as u.s. citizens are shunned by swiss and german banks facing these rules reportedly more evidence comes out that american ex-pats are lining up to give up their passports we'll discuss that let's get to today's capital account.

so the euro zone crisis is under control until it isn't until leaders lose control which could be the price to pay for politicians who have presided over default in the sense that hugh hendry describes it take a listen the politicians chose to default on their spending or positions to their citizens in order to order the part with their financial creditors and so of course what we are seeing is that as time moves on the politicians are being rejected. and speaking of rejection elections in france and greece this weekend look like they could see incumbents replaced

incumbents who introduced tough reforms with candidates who are proposing growth with a different president that has that predisposition in france they could change the balance of power in parliament in the case of greece so let's talk about what impact this would have on the eurozone crisis solutions and the crisis itself here to do that is edward harrison founder of credit write downs because you are always so in the nitty gritty of europe that you can really break this down for us and we haven't had a chance to do that with you recently so let's get right to it with elections in france and greece this weekend what would happen to the eurozone crisis solutions and the eurozone crisis itself if say francoise hollande did win the presidency in france or if there was seats gone by the far right or far left parties in greece. along thing is a lot more interesting just because it was. merkel and sarkozy together you

know having some bond over policy and so basically it was germany and france dictating to a certain degree i don't know if you saw that young who's the head of luxembourg he was on his post as the head of the e.u. group saying that he was sick and tired of germany in particular saying that they speak for you know we're having to shell out we speak to the creditors etc in fact he says you know it's a wider thing it's seventeen nations within the eurozone we have to make it that way and so if along gets in there basically the more cosy pact which is very much on the austerity side is going to give way to growth you can already see star cozies sort of talking about that but a lot is definitely on that path and i think that's the train that europe is moving to use a growth some like you hendry say nationalization of the french bang. system he's worried about confiscation of assets is that a legitimate concern and what would the impact of that be on investment in europe

will it's always a legitimate concern i mean down the lawn obviously when things get tough i think you already see confiscation in bolivia and in argentina for instance with which is a spanish company they've had assets confiscated in both those countries but you know that's a different situation than in europe i think in europe things got to get a lot worse and you know you have to have a real depression where they're going to you know the banking system is collapsing before you have any sort of compass so you are in disagreement with him that french banks could be entirely nationalized in a year that was the timeframe you gave i don't think that's going to happen ok well then let's move on to what you do think is going to happen because i want to stay on this political subject for another moment because you think that the old law and issue is a lot more interesting than the shift and greek parliament but one thing that is interesting that has been a trend that we've talked about before is that as europe has attempted to integrate further with more fiscal unity and

a fiscal compact and have those be the solutions within certain countries we've seen a rise in nationalism and movements that are far right extremely right wing in holland for example the dutch freedom party was the party that led the government to fall when it withdrew from talks over austerity which then a caretaker government passed in france kind of one of the big stories was that in the first round of elections the national front the extreme the far right party saw unprecedented support with their candidate marine le pen and there was and then and for the first time and greece the far right party the neo nazi party is expected to for the first time gain seats in parliament so do you see this trend as significant and gaining steam or you know one hundred percent and i was in a say in france they're going to be in parliament for the first time i think since one thousand eighty four ninety six so you know in both places they're going to. representation the far right and really would have boils down to is that you know

the e.u. is this superstructure on top of national sovereignty saying that we're to strip you of your national sovereignty and in fact we do it in such a way that it's so obvious that you don't have any right you are going to be billed out and i have to go on undergo austerity use you know twenty five percent unemployment and we're going to give you even more austerity those are the kinds of things that lead to a nationalist type of response is just a natural thing what i do want to get to austerity with you because i want to have a more in-depth discussion on what really is behind the criticism of austerity and if that's really what the problem is but as far as these far right parties these nationalist movements what is it really about because while yes they run in some cases on protectionism on abandoning the euro economically there is also a very strong anti immigration stance like i said the party in the golden dawn party in greece is a neo nazi party so what is that about which is which is kind of the prominent

theme that we need to pull out of what these movements signify who basically in economic downturns people look to the other as being responsible for problems basically you had everything going fairly ok in the euro zone and suddenly had a crisis and now everything's falling apart and people are looking for ways to figure out why this is all happening and things that they would put up with before they're not going to put up with and all of these simmering tensions that you saw with immigration we already had the problems with the veil and so forth and schools and threats and things like that those are going to boil over and people just because you know we don't want that anymore there was there were already simmering tensions with the e.u. in places like holland you know. already had a. movement but now it's. then crystallize as a result of this economic economic depression so you see them very much enter

twined the anti immigration stance and the economic situation in these countries you know one hundred percent what happens is that the economic downturn causes people to revalue how they see the political spectrum and they're much more willing to look outside of the mainstream for of for people who have answers to the problems because obviously the mainstream parties don't have the answers that we wouldn't be in the situation if that were the case for a edible i guess a more main to be seen what actual impact that will have on the eurozone crisis and all of these internal politics how they inform the mass of the euro zone crisis but let's switch to economics because we did get the global manufacturing purchasing managers index out the p.m.i. which showed that euro zone factories sank further into decline last month peripheral readings were weak i guess that's to be to be expected but they the core also saw not below zero they saw their drop below the market signals expansion also

china complected numbers one measure shows growth one shows a contraction so do you see these numbers as pointing to a global slowdown and what is their significance so global world slowdown the places like china those numbers are weak and we can brazil they came out they were fifty one the other forty nine which is contraction india's numbers although they were at fifty four they were also weak and the eurozone across the board was below fifty they're in a recession so you have all of these countries you know weakening in terms of their growth even the united states has shown fairly weak growth. with the unemployment numbers you only get about two hundred thousand jobs per month over the last six months that's not going to cut it going forward so what that says is that we were synchronised global slowdown and any sort of exogamous shock will be a very negative event and any shock and shock from anywhere will. exactly will potentially be the one that catapult the system down because you have weak points

at all points on the spectrum china you know australia is also weak in terms of their housing market their bank their central bank cut rates by fifty basis points just yesterday. europe is weak and i think the united states is incredibly strong most of the law and way it's just you know is that how kind of difficult of a situation where i am but it sounds like you're saying any of these factors could be the dominant you know everybody is looking at europe but there are a lot of other dominoes that could fall to speak of dominoes falling one thing i thought was interesting about that p.m.i. was that the netherlands was weak and the netherlands is one of these examples of an economy in europe that was strong that did benefit from the euro because their currency was a stronger currency and then they benefited from having cheaper exports cheaper goods under the euro now they're facing a slowdown they're in a recession they are having to pass these cuts to meet the euro zone's deficit to g.d.p. targets what's the significance of

a country like the netherlands in their situation to you well it shows that the eurozone the economic policy that they have is flawed in that. when there's a downturn there's no fiscal space whatsoever because all of the countries are users of currency that means that they're creating the currency that means they can be installed unlike the united states where they can just print more money so what it means is that not only does the private sector but also the public sector has to they have to cut when when the going gets tough and so that's what's called pro cyclical it means that you know when the economic cycle goes down everyone is cutting at the exact same time and that makes it a much more severe economic cycle and when you look at europe as an integrated marketplace whatever is happening in france that's happening in italy or spain it's going to have an impact on what's happening in germany or the netherlands. so they're not going to be able to escape and we see that that's that's true and when we come back i want to talk

a little bit more about this issue of cuts of reforms of austerity and the criticism of it along with what some of these actions will mean in the long term if it's different than what it is in the short term so we're going to go to break and when we come back we will have more with edward harrison founder of credit write downs also still ahead student loan debt may be roughly one trillion dollars in size meanwhile college presidents pledge a fortune of their salary to poverty we'll give you our three cents on this fire name but first your closing market numbers. science technology innovation all the developments around russia we've got the future covered.

thank you. welcome back let's talk about austerity because we got into it a little before the break but i really want to kick the wheels on this one a little bit so let's take spain for example in spain one in four spaniards are unemployed the country is back in recession i don't even want to talk about the youth unemployment there are facing major major issues people are using this to say that austerity is the problem that austerity doesn't work but the point that we have made is that austerity won't solve the problem but maybe neither will spending this is about a massive overhang of another guy's word

a real true four letter word debt d b t so i want to really ask edward about this because i think it's going to challenge me here so at word what i want to know is is austerity the problem in spain or is this really about something that neither austerity will fix or spending will fix this is about a massive overhang of debt in spain for example the non-financial private debt to g.d.p. ratio is two hundred thirty percent do you think i think that you're on the money with the i'm not going to say anything that you're not saying i don't think there's anything wrong with austerity purse meaning that you know if you have a recession and you need to cut back it's a normal garden garden variety recession then so be it that's what you have to do in the eurozone because. otherwise you'll be insolvent if bondholders won't buy your stuff but at the same time you know we hugely private sector debt there's a there's an effect a feedback loop that happens to basically means that the government sector is

cutting and so when the government sector is cutting that means the private sector has less money to spend and if they have a high debt levels they're going to cut as well so you get these cuts and at the same time that that leads to more cuts and then that causes asset prices to go that causes the collateral for banks to be less banks which are already leveraged as a result of the debt that we're taught. you know about can become insolvent and then you have a system crisis that's exactly what's happened both in united states and in your but doesn't there need to be a discussion when there is this kind of debt default forgiveness because there is such a massive debt that at some point it becomes odious and you have these situations where austerity is just a term to meet in order to pay back the banks and you have central banks papering it over on the other side so isn't there a bigger conversation to be had here grew there is and you know the clip that you should have you henry he gets to the point is that you know the european

governments are in the thrall of the creditors they're basically are in their you know on their promises to their people in order to pay the banks back on one hundred cents on the dollar yeah you know that leads to this downward spiral that we're seeing and it just can't go on at some point going to get either defaults what they're going to have to be default or you know and or you're going to have to have what steve keen calls the jubilee yeah. exactly let the banks suffer let the investor suffer so you know i'm robbing from the people i think politically what's really going to happen is that we're going to continue down the lawn of trying to give the creditors as much as they possibly can and that's not going to work it's going to create more crisis and then at some point we'll have defaults like we did in greece but more people are going to default other countries are going to default and then at some point the crisis will get so big that they'll start to think about debt forgiveness that's when potentially the specter that you have to stalking about in terms of nationalization and. ok what about something

like the u.k. which isn't in the euro it doesn't have these targets that the e.u. imposes they impose what some would call austerity on themselves public cuts to get rid of the deficit by two thousand and seventeen aiming to at least they're now in recession again the recession the economy recently contracted point two percent do you think this gives critics of austerity firepower. yeah definitely one hundred percent because they are doing something that they don't have to do they have more fiscal space they could actually do something unlike what the united states is doing which is basically just propping up the mess to create more deliberate gene in the private sector in order to facilitate you know a rebirth of the economy because obviously as long as these economies are indebted people are going to want to go into more debt so if you just try to get people to spend money and spend money they're not going to be able to deal leverage we're

going to still have the problem with the debt and i hear what you're saying the current trend that i have is that how do we know what part of the u.k. going into recession has to do with whatever measures they have put in action so far that would be called austerity versus what is from the reduction in their exports because of the contraction in the eurozone how can you isolate these different pieces to really know what's going on what the true story is we can't entirely isolate the two pieces but i think you know so we can you know we can we can never know in the economy so i don't know who may not have been there already but again they definitely see the difference between the u.s. and the u.k. the trajectory as being emblematic of the difference between the paths that they have taken and you know a year and a half ago that will see the u.s. and the u.k. are going on different this would be the best a real time experiment that we have you know you can never have a perfect experiment in an economy because of too many moving parts of the

difference in their philosophies and what we've seen is the u.s. . philosophy. keeping growth versus the u.k. philosophy which is causing growth to contract right now but how do we know that in the longer run this isn't going to ultimately lead to more sustainable growth that is the big point i think that we agree that you know if you're not going to do love scenes you know the u.s. position right now. this is just to continue spending in order to keep credit growth go but that's unsustainable what will happen is the next recession will see that that's unsustainable that's the same thing all over again boom and bust boom members over and over boom and bust so we'll have to see how this experiment does unfold what the ultimate. conclusion is about it but i appreciate you being here to try and really pull out what this austerity argument is what even is austerity that was at work here and founder of credit write downs thank you thank you.

all right let's wrap up with juice change i've got dimitri and shannon to talk about more confiscation i guess you could argue you heard hugh hundred talking about europe let's talk about what the u.s. is doing because foreign financial institutions are gearing up to comply with that or the new foreign account tax compliance act if you don't know what that is here's a little background on the law taking effect in two thousand and fourteen. country services organizations should be focused on the code because if we want to do business with the u.s. and we need to be for compliance the legislation is all about the disclosure of

information that they have with respect to their u.s. accounts but the way so this requires foreign financial institutions to report information about their u.s. account holders holding fifty thousand dollars or more to the i.r.s. the penalty is a thirty percent withholding tax on outbound profits on their u.s. investments and there's also a huge cost to compile to comply reportedly millions to billions of dollars that may be spent by these banks in order to comply so it's a windfall for businesses that help with compliance but u.s. passport holders expatriates abroad are questioning if being a u.s. citizen is benefiting them any more is really worth it they're lining up in record numbers to turn over their passports and new numbers continue to come out as bloomberg reported just new ones that we hadn't seen that seven hundred eighty ex-pat patriots gave up their nationality at u.s. embassies last year and in this with capital for example they are trying to get as many people on board to kind of process these requests because they're backed up you know why after world war two having an american passport being an american

citizen was a giant asset now it's become a liability if you are actually giving up their citizenship because they're deemed toxic in switzerland if you're an american citizen banks don't want your talks yeah you're a liability for them and and so you know this is a war against individuals it's a windfall like you said for companies that make money from from this and it doesn't it's going to take someone like mitt romney but it's going to affect someone else who wants to open up about become abroad not. because they want to they're living abroad and lobby whatever on attacking exactly right now it's too much of a pain for these for these banks to comply with what the u.s. is requiring all of the telephone over it seems is nine eleven and this is the financials the financial version of that where it's reaches all over the globe. let's move on to some debt that maybe hasn't raised all over the globe but it sure become a huge problem here in the u.s. the student loan debt what someone call a crisis it's turned into

a political football in recent weeks has president obama's best attempt at sympathy for students that are dealing with their one trillion dollars of student loans take a listen. we only finished paying more for student loans about eight years ago think about the present the united states. oh. ok. i mean it's smart but i don't know that the president can really empathize with students that are completely drowning in debt but it also seems that twenty eight college presidents don't really get it either it's quite ironic they've pledged to give over some of their salary to fight global poverty you donate five percent of their salaries meanwhile their students are drowning in debt and in fact show that data shows that a quarter of millennialism don't even make enough money to cover their basic needs so that speaks to both the problem of debt and the problem of when they get out of college with the kind of money they can actually make you know well the universe is

a rock at the educational system. the universe is the meanest it's a rocket it's socially just a passport that you're paying for to use to travel around the workforce in america if you want to white collar job but you don't actually learn the thing and most of the universities and the onus is on you to learn no i mean i think that in the debate i generally listen i have i have a genuine bone you want to call it so what so do you regret your education i mean that's a loaded question i mean do i really i don't regret the education because i made the most of it but the point is that it wasn't it wasn't the system the bang for the buck i got my the best education ever got was from barnes and noble ok going and reading books from their going online experience it was not university it really wasn't right shannon what i want in your news throughout my classes or professors it's true sorry for your parents you probably paid for it shannon full disclosure on capital count my parents and. for most of my college but the my college president is one of these twenty eight that is giving away five percent of the salary but. that helped with my student loan yeah yeah i mean i think that the

real point here is the irony in the this huge issue of student debt and that maybe it's not being addressed really by anybody before we go let me just play you what the dallas fed president has been out saying. i'd rather have instead of a giant behemoths bank. i'd rather have five to twelve or whatever the number is smaller banks that used to be the behemoths bank they are smaller institutions who can compete so he's talking about his plan to break up the too big to fail banks he put up another presentation on the dallas fed's website about this we only have a second but what do you think raises the straight suck the oxygen in the room kill these giant too big to fail banks j.p. morgan and everyone take your money out your money out of these banks ok get it out there we go will leave it there that's dimitris plan and along with the dallas buzz we'll see if any of them ever pan out that's all we have time for for now though thanks so much for tuning in don't forget to follow me on twitter out lauren lyster

and give us feedback at youtube dot com slash capital account from everyone here at their shows thank you so much for watching come back tomorrow and have a great night.