cover today go to youtube dot com slash our team america or go to our website r.t.e. dot com slash usa don't forget to follow me on twitter at meghan underscore lopez and have a great night. in his first t.v. interview since his inauguration what if what if mitt romney gets in a could you work with him. will work with whoever gets elected as president by the american people but if it will only be as efficient as it is allow it to be bloody or putin speaks exclusively to our t.v. . good afternoon and welcome to capital account i'm lauren lyster here in washington d.c. these are your headlines for thursday september sixth two thousand and twelve e.c.v. president mario draghi well he did it he announced

a bond purchase program in the eurozone with no set limits but why should you pinera thinking about your future your retirement carell super mario the latest policy response our guest says you can afford not to pay attention to the macro economic landscape if you're trying to figure out how to protect yourself in this new economic environment she will explain plus senate candidate elizabeth warren had some tough words for wall street c.e.o.'s in her d.n.c. speech last night saying despite wrecking the economy they do this. still strut around congress no shame demanding favors and acting like them we should thank them. i hear you ms warren but is it a little naive to think that the candidate you elect president or into office for that matter will really change this situation we would argue yes and this is one example of the problem with political rhetoric when it comes to finance and the

economy because if you believe it and think everything will be fine or you can trust political institutions to take care of you you may not do so well we'll have more and isn't this the answer. how do you know we're talking about this earn you a black belt in investing well susan fuji investor and editor in chief of kung fu finance is here to make the case that it is let's get to today's capital account.

the united states treasury department this week announced the u.s. national debt has surpassed sixteen trillion dollars but how exactly are we supposed to wrap our heads around this millions billions even trillions are bandied about as though they were pocket change but can we really conceptualize what those numbers amount to well our guess is going to help us she put it into seconds and here's how they talk in a million seconds was twelve days ago a billion seconds was thirty two years ago and a trillion seconds well hey that's it you're just short of thirty two thousand years ago thirty two thousand so sixteen of those i can't even imagine which is why some can't imagine how the u.s. will tackle this level of debt in any credible sustainable or even possible way and the questions are unanswered as to what happens when interest rates rise and the

government has to pay more towards interest less towards other things what happens if the glow loses faith in the currency somewhere in between there it's in these kinds of questions many of our viewers i think it safe to say ponder quite regularly especially when it comes to figuring out what kind of safety net exists for them during these very unstable economic times and our next guest has made it her mission to help individual investors figure out how to build their own safety net and save themselves she's going to tell us how she things that people can do just that she is susan fuji editor in chief at kung fu finance and she certainly seems to be a black belt in investing she's going to help us figure out how to train for ourselves if the average retail investor is trying to figure that out so first thanks so much for being on the show. thanks for having me lie and it's reality here yeah it's great to have you and what i love about your story is that now you're an ass you see

a credit investor which i'm pretty sure means you've done very well it wasn't always the case for you though so i do want to hear your story in your past life before you were coming through finance girl because i think many people could relate to it at a time when student debt is surpassed a trillion dollars in two trillion dollars and americans were tired savings evaporated during the recession so tell us who was coming through finance girl in her past life. sure i'd be happy to i think my story is probably not unlike a lot of americans and even citizens worldwide out there i graduated college in one thousand nine hundred six and i was fortunate enough at the time to get a pretty good job because the technology industry was booming at that time so i started working for intel corporation and part of my pay was in stock and i didn't know anything about investing i was completely ignorant i i talk a lot on my website about the four levels of learning a new skill and the first level is unconscious incompetence where you just really

don't know what you don't know and that was me in one thousand nine hundred six i was clueless and unfortunately i didn't get much smarter all the way it's one thousand nine hundred nine i fancied myself though this genius investor because the stock market kept going up and so i bought cisco shares at like seventy dollars they're less than twenty today and i bought microsoft microsoft very high and a bunch of other really silly silly investments but i really didn't know i didn't know what i didn't know and basically you know the nasdaq crash happened and i of course lost almost all of my money and that was a big wake up call for me huge wake up call yeah i know you said you know you started your first job you racked up lots of debt too that's something i can certainly relate to i got out of college i thought hey you know i did everything right i i worked hard went to a good school came out realized way journalism doesn't pay anything racked up a lot of debt just to pay bills i didn't have any personal finance knowledge at all

now you know a few years later i'm the mantle of journalism is what i gravitated towards but that's me you took a very different corners well you did something about it what did you do after this experience where you lost all your money. sure i think first to be honest i sat down and cried and said oh my gosh how did i let this happen to myself but you know i'm not one to wallow thankfully you so i actually got really angry and i channeled that anger into action and i just decided to make it my mission to get really educated and to take action so those are the two big things i got educated and i took action so i you know like you said about personal finance at the time i didn't have much first personal finance knowledge either i had racked up about ten thousand dollars in credit card debt and i just really wasn't even focusing on my money i was in the you know the dot com boom days the party never stops let's buy

another round of drinks for all my friends and really wasn't focused on my money yeah yeah but once that crash happened and took all my money and i really decided this is it i've got to get educated i refused to let this happen to myself again so yeah i did it my mission and for you getting educated wasn't watching jim cramer and figuring out what is stock picks were it was a very different education and just to give one example you read a lot about monetary history not something we talk about on this show but why would something like that so important to learn about. yes yes for me i started by reading actually every book i think that robert kiyosaki had written and i went a step beyond that and i read every book that he recommended and one of those books was the creature from jekyll island i think you had been on your show you did and that book yes that book changed my life really did i had then this i think product of sort of mainstream america i had gone to public school i thought the government was always looking out for me and in my best interest and the fed was there to you

know maintain interest and maintain inflation you know three percent level or lower and you know eccentric cetera and i thought that they were on my side and that book truly open my eyes to another world and through that that was my big introduction i think into gold and silver and austrian economics versus keynesian economics and i found casey and you know yes i really started to get interested in some monetary history right and you know just before i get more into some of the things that you talked about since that was your passion and kind of this is the information that you got in the mission that you have been on just don't give us the play by play necessarily but just give us a sense of what your financial investment track record is now it's pretty good it seems sure. they hate you yes i you know to be honest once i discovered. it in austrian economics and gold and silver and i think once my eyes were open to that side of you know our economy and my learning and my earning really exploded so

i was fortunate enough to find gold and silver many many years ago and you know i've also diversified our investments into foreign real estate and private placements and other things the more you are educated the more you are able to participate in investments that are for more sophisticated investors. and that's really a big part of it and that's where you are today i want to share with our audience why you believe it's important for many more people to understand and to be educated and try to fill. about figure out how to be self-reliant and i can bring up a graphic that actually is from your website that you used to illustrate this and it's the retirement stool that people used to be able to sit on you argue social security is one leg for a one k.'s the other that came to largely replace employer pensions and personal savings so what is your argument here that these legs literally no longer exist any of them or that they're so fragile that one can no longer rely on them as support in planning their future exactly yes exactly that so social security is

more or less bankrupt it really is i mean i certainly don't count on it being there for my retirement in twenty to thirty years and the defined benefit leg is really a thing of the past i mean when congress passed that say act and forced everybody really into the four a one k. they took away that safety net of you know getting that that monthly paycheck when you retire so those two legs are completely gone and the average for a one k. balance now according to time magazine is forty thousand dollars and that's enough for a year of college maybe but certainly not thirty years of retirement so that leaves the third leg which is personal savings and unfortunately in america personal savings as you know pretty abysmal it's tough we've never learned how to invest we've never been taught how to invest either so it's difficult and so what do you think that people need to. know now because i read one thing that you said you said you know you didn't used to have to be a good investor as an individual bester now these are different times and you do is

that really your point. it really is exactly you know before we could count on that three legged stool to support us and any sort of additional investing we wanted to do was just gravy but now you know two out of those three legs are completely gone and the third leg is really just up to you it's the personal savings and so i really feel it's vital that people learn how to become financially independent and not dependent on the government or social security or your financial advisor or your brother and somebody else to take care of you i mean unfortunately you just really need to take control of yourself today and become personal personally responsible for your own financial future and later in the show we'll get into your suggestions for that what you're doing about that but you mention personal savings one of the legs which we know is very difficult to do right now because interest rates are so low which is in large part due to the federal reserve which brings me to the issue of the macro economic environment and also what you refer to as the politicized economy i couldn't agree more that these are more relevant than ever to

investors but why do you think that the individual investor really needs to be conscious about these issues. today yes yes well unfortunately we are now in a time period where a little sized economy as i call it is really affecting all the decisions we make as investors when ben bernanke he opens his mouth or even thinks about opening his mouth just reading in between the lines of what he says moves not only the stock market but also the precious metals you know way up and way down it's very volatile and it's all just based on what this one man is saying and to me that's highly politicized but it's very vital that you take that into consideration as an investor because it truly affects your investments you know and then with the global economic crisis well yeah yeah so we'll talk more when we get back from a break we're going to we're going to go to break for a few minutes we'll have more with susan fuji editor in chief of kung fu finance because still ahead we'll ask our guest how the mainstream media the financial

media can cause problems for individual investors but first your closing market numbers. in his first t.v. interview since his inauguration. both of so you can be the u.s.

and its allies went into afghanistan used them she just now they're looking forward to getting out. speaks exclusively to our t.v. .

welcome back before the break our guest was telling us how she went from being broke and not understanding anything about really investing to educating herself opening hours of to an entire new world and building a good life for herself and she argues that everybody needs to be thinking about doing the same thing because you cannot be financially dependent on the government or your employer for a nest a personal savings that's up to you but also it's subject to things like low interest rates courtesy of the federal reserve so now let's hear a little more of the problem and then personal lucian's she's susan fuji editor in chief at kung fu finance and says i really wanted to to ask what role you think this plays an individual investors mistakes and problems and mis guided sense of what to do both in the mainstream financial media and establishment wall street firms how do you think those play into problems or you know to be fair solutions if there are any. sure i'd be happy to so i think that there is

a big myth perpetuated by wall street which goes something like this this is very difficult and very complex and much too hard for you so therefore you should give all your money to us and we'll take care of it for you. and i think that tends to work really really well for wall street and it makes them a lot of money but for most individual investors it really hurts them and this happens often with a four a one k. where you know most people look at their four one k. options first of all they don't have any idea which one to choose from and a lot of times all of those options are kind of equally terrible they're hifi mutual funds and they're really not something that's going to be able to support you in your retirement anyway and as far as the mainstream media goes typically by the time jim cramer is recommending it all the smart money is already in or out as the case may be and so i just feel at that point you're it's much too late you know to have the courage to not have the courage. and also one that know what about the

role of statistics because we know what's going to get a lot of play tomorrow all over the news is going to be jobs numbers but you say hey sometimes these stats these these data releases that are so all blown up are really pretty irrelevant or just not what the focus should be. yes exactly i think first of all a lot of government statistics can really be traced back to that famous quote about blah darn lies and statistics and so on t.v. but it's really true i mean statistics can be used in so many different ways to try to support an idea and you sound very impressive when you come out and say you know thirty two percent of all people do x. y. z. but a lot of times the statistic is completely meaningless or the data behind that statistic is just wrong so you know i have a chart on my website recently of you know kind of the pac-man statistic which was you know seventy six percent of this chart looks like pac-man and thirty two

percent does not it's just a lot of times just meaningless and yeah so the point is who cares now tell us why what you're doing which is kong flu finance is the antidote to all of this what you argue is misinformation or just not helping anybody figure out the right way to invest. sure well so come to finance is a site first of all it's by individual investors for individual investors so it's a place where we retail investors muppets as a whole street would call us can go and really talk amongst talk amongst ourselves and really learn and figure out together how the smart money really does invest and so that's one thing i love about it comes through in chinese means excellence in any skill achieved through hard work and practice so it's really all about mastery i tought it's the answer i get rich quick site i talk a lot about just a lot of mastering your mind because i think at least fifty percent of investing is learning how to master your mind so doing things like self-discipline and being

a disciplined investor those things are equally as important as to understanding the ins and outs of how to value a stock appropriately or how to get into peer to peer lending so i try to divide my time talking about both of those because they're both very important and it's all about doing your homework and knowing what you're getting into and also you know focus on alternative investments why is that and we hear about thrown around a lot what constitutes an alternative investment. well and alternative investment is something i think that's just slightly outside of the mainstream so when most people think of investing they think of stocks and bonds but unfortunately the stock market it's been so i almost want to say corrupted over the past you know many years that nowadays more trades take place on the stock market by machines than they do by individuals even big institutional investors i mean there's just so much high frequency trading that it's really difficult to even trust that your bid

or your ask is getting filled properly. so that's that's sort of stocks and alternative in the bond market right now you know interest rates are so so low and treasuries could conceivably be one of the biggest bubbles on the planet right now and so i don't necessarily think that's a great place to put your money although many people are rushing to the supposed safety and security of the united states treasury bills to do that but so i spend a lot of time talking about alternative investments which would be things like peer to peer lending tax liens real estates gold and silver precious metals mining stocks sure so but just things that are slightly different and i think you can really earn a lot more money by investing in some of these alternatives and you can in the traditional you know stock market arena and before we go we just have a minute but for our guests who are sitting there that may be or excuse me our audience the members that aren't professional investors they're not seizing but what you're saying is really resonating with them what are maybe some really finite just sure examples that you can give of things that people can do because i know

you are an advocate of physical gold but not in a gold bug kind of way and also cash and trailing stops i believe so just a minute if you could sum it up. sure yet so first of all i think the most important thing that anybody could do is to really focus on taking action like even if you just spend five minutes a day or two fifteen minutes a day if you can spare it set a timer and spend some time just focusing on your money you would be amazed what that will get you over the course of a month that can take you far whether you're working on your personal finances or on your investments just five minutes a day and you'll be way far ahead as far as three things people can do right now i think to just sort of buttress themselves for the coming future i think definitely everyone should own a little bit of gold and silver and know i'm not necessarily a quote gold bug i view it as an investment i think one day when real interest rates rise that will be time to sell but right now with all currencies in a race to the bottom it's a great thing to have in your portfolio i definitely recommend using trailing stops

i didn't even know what these were when i started investing i had not a clue and coming up with a good exit strategy and then of course maintaining cash this is another myth perpetuated by wall street which is you should be you know fully invested at all times but if you're fully invested at all times when things go on sale you can't take advantage of it don't have some cash and there's many reasons to believe there could be fire sales with all of the turmoil we see across the globe so thank you so much for being on the show and really sharing your story and all this great information with us that was susan fuji editor in chief at kung fu finance us. before we go let's wrap up with your feedback is it a little while we're on break haven't been able to talk to you so here is an e-mail

i received the subject line was something symbolic about this they said i don't know how many monitors you guys are run in there but at the very moment you have bill murphy on c.b.c. has well i'm just going to show you. we should tell our audience that normally what is it for forty three in the afternoon we do not see this kind of it here at the new york stock exchange but for some reason a lot of curators stuck around so thank you thank you very much. kim carr dash c.n.n. our viewers that now there's real financial journalism you guys need to up your game that's from david gone again he is one of our viewers at a gore financial and david. we will try to moving on speaking of bill murphy he was on talking about gold manipulation as the chairman of the viewer responded said lauren i don't understand why banks would want to manipulate the silver and gold prices i mean if they truly care about making profits they should be front running

the crowd and not going against the crowd right what incentives are there for them to short or manipulate silver or gold prices when they risk losing big time this is from dearest we on you tube now the answer to this is it could be that they're doing both the allegation is that they're taking short positions with the strategic objective of driving the price down and getting out all over leveraged speculators and then they can go in and buy and see upside on the flip side so that's one argument and then there's also bill murphy did respond and said that it's not all banks it's the gold cartel which includes j.p. morgan and also the federal reserve and now he says that they are always short this school guard talent trade against the speculators in a collusive fashion they wipe out speculative longs and cover then do it all again they've made good money over the years in his view they meaning these banks that are part of the gold cartel are working with the fed and u.s. treasury who have a vested interest to suppress the precious metals because of their barometer effect

and how their prices affect public confidence the dollar and interest rate so i hope that helps and on that note one of our viewers said capital account is with a capital awesome thank you so much for giving billing data airtime i've said it before but i'll keep saying it capital account is the best financial show on television are going to never been on television there is simply no debating this vacation seems to have recharged the cruise batteries and it shows that's from a racer seven six two two it's so fun and i thought maybe my mom rode it so thank you it was really nice and i am glad that they cation paid off in your view because it sure was nice from our perspective now with chatter of federal reserve action after jackson hole last weekend in the f o m c meeting which is coming up next. week of course we interviewed bob inglis on the role of shadow banking on inflation that was on monday and one of our viewers said shadow banking should be renamed responsible banking as there is no government insurance involved but actually in point of fact what bob was saying is that there is an implicit government backing

and this is why shadow banking which would normally be a deflationary force as liabilities contract can actually turn out to be inflationary as shadow liabilities are transformed into currency through central bank monetization in the case of a crisis so that should clarify that now on the subject of whether a lap dance is that art worthy of tax exempt status which new york's highest court is debating as we did yesterday a little bit with one of our viewers with one of our viewers grads said dance is an art lab dance obviously is a dance i rest my case now i didn't see what the court ruled or if there was a rolling but we'll see what they say i have time for one more so one of our viewers said can you guys do an audio only podcast this was luminati great idea hey if more of you guys weigh in and we get a response to know that there will be an audience will try to look into that i do have time for one more someone says i want to hear yours that i had the most boring two weeks in a long time during our vacation turbo trana fifty thousand channels but nothing to

watch thank you sorry we had to go on break but we're glad are back and now you do have some to watch and that's it for today though thank you so much for watching and make sure to come back tomorrow in the meantime you know you can follow me on twitter at lauren lyster you can give us feedback on the show any you missed and goes to scribe at capital you tube dot com slash capital account you can catch just an h d on hulu and for everyone here thanks so much for watching and have a great night. if you if. you.

mean. in his first t.v. interview since his inauguration we'll talk about those not so you might just as well one time tomorrow all of its inmates and bring them to syria to do the fighting there practically the same going to people bloody near putin speaks exclusively to r.t. . you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom hartman welcome to the big picture.