i am max kaiser this is the kaiser report not only are there men eating seeing calls but did you know that there is a season for it and we're in the men eating sinkhole season stacy. well max i wish we were in a man eating sinkhole season up here in new york so he could suck us away into the heat instead of all the snow and rain and cold but i want to look at the ripple effects of supply chains around the world in this globalization system falling apart and as represented by wal-mart but i also want to look at the sinkholes that are the the very fabric of the markets around us as capital is thrown into the sink holes of ever increasing cost of extracting oil and natural gas of providing clean water to these booming cities around the world the first headline max is ripple effect of wal-mart sales could hit suppliers wal-mart's

warning that stores are starting to experience a slowdown reeses questions on its impact on this vast network of suppliers the nation's largest retailer said the payroll tax hike and delayed income tax refunds had hair sales in the last two weeks of january february sales were also impacted yeah well that's absolutely correct the wal-mart model which has been to destroy the supplier by squeezing them and by essentially offering slave made goods to americans have brought their margins down to razor thin so wal-mart is a business model that's a say a mile wide better and steep and now that in steve proffitt that they were able to extract by exploiting chinese. labor by exploiting distributors that is evaporating along with all the other moisture that man made global warming is evaporating and the company wal-mart as

a result is finding it more difficult to book profits so i would imagine that within two period a long period of time will see the company start to convert those walmart stores into prisons it will be wall prison to put into prison all the people that are now running with their electronic food stamp cards for baby formula and burgers but they've been cut off and wal-mart saying we're like no more no more and we're so come on we're mc wal-mart prison. now we recently covered here on the case report the fact that wal-mart sales have had their worst month ever and part of the reason is the payroll tax hike they claim so again will go over that number here in this quote workers earning the national average salary of forty one thousand dollars are receiving about sixty dollars less each month at the moment so because of the sixty dollars less per month and member and this is something that you've often talked about is that americans have you know their incomes have been declining for decades now but that's been masked by the decline in prices of oil about war much but now

it seems that we're hitting that peak point where every even sixty dollars a month is kids discretionary income in a huge way to these the bottom of america this was americans are going to return to being hunter gatherers because this the walmart spread on the access that they were able to extract by leveraging their own non jobs with trying to cart upon credit card evaporated so instead of sitting there in one place trying to bang the doors down to get some cracker from wal-mart they're simply going to become hunter gatherers and as a band of feral americans show up with the next on and look for food and grime for sued yes that's what i call the wal mart a quarter. these are the the roaming indians on the plains of america who were hunter gatherers essentially going wherever the dead buffalo were before them they

were turned into horse meat buffalo burgers and ostrich lipped wal-mart until the destroy the country they destroyed the economy the wal-mart's put them all together you stuck amanda in and you end up with hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars on the forbes four hundred list what do they do for america they destroyed it the founding fathers if they're alive today they said those are the people that we need to get rid of now we're going to look also at the fact that in america we seem to have this too big to fail model across the whole spectrum of the economy and we see this in the supply chain even being affected like this now experts say that wal-mart supplier should be worried by their declining sales david high a professor of supply chain management at the university of arkansas sam walton college of business says soft months set up ripple effects throughout the supply chain was such a big player has a soft money it has a big effect on the whole system so again member of the fact that here in new york of course j.p. morgan goldman sachs citibank bank of america all these big banks operating out of

wall street they when they when liquidity dried out the whole system tell apart and it looks like here we're seeing the same thing across the supply chain across america because they have hundreds of suppliers of various products to wal-mart yes wal-mart invented just in time poverty so you find that your your electronic benefit transfer card runs out of credit the second you are approaching the front door of wal-mart just in time poverty and by the way the supplier that was issuing all those shavers and products and plastic that were coming in from overseas they're not being paid there are experiencing just in time poverty and the politicians who are on the payroll of the wal-mart family who they buy with their money so they pass laws to make it easier to destroy the economy they're going to find themselves out of jobs to begin to find themselves just. time poverty thank you walmart now another thing hitting the consumer. shops at wal-mart anyway according to the article is the price of gasoline has also increased by more than

thirteen percent in the last month alone and most of the country's one hundred sixty million workers are seeing smaller paychecks since the payroll tax cuts expired last month so gasoline prices up thirteen percent but of course the financial news it am in the mainstream news only focuses on the fact that the dow jones has had an all time high right because a wal-mart family owns dow jones stock so the wal-mart family's wealth is going up the gas is going up people can't get to wal-mart anymore the price of food is going up so people can't have the free money from the government to buy the wal-mart food anymore by the way the food stamps are engineered by j.p. morgan so it ends up as a wal-mart's going to get a bailout that's what i predict by twenty thirteen twenty fourteen the wal-mart family with their six hundred billion dollars or so in net worth are going to go crying to the government for a bailout because they can't make a payment on some planet they're buying in some parallel universe thank you walmart family disgusting slugs so of course many americans claim that wal-mart is

a great free market capitalist company and it's a sign of how great capitalism is but this next headline regarding wal-mart suggests that it looks like sort of the soviet era in terms of shelves are empty while march struggles to restock store shelves as u.s. sales slump wal-mart stores incorporated already struggling to woo shoppers constrained by higher taxes is getting worse keeping shelves stocked the retailers us chief told executives according to minutes of an officer's meeting obtained by bloomberg news and they also bloomberg calls them previously a paragon of logistics i think they meant to say cancer of retail you know this is the problem we have a monoculture when you have one dominant player that's come in and destroyed all the competition all the mom and pop. got destroyed all the competition i got wiped out because of wal-mart squeezing the suppliers by manipulating markets by manipulating the politicians they end up as a model culture now the monoculture is sick and now when they go down they're going

to take the entire huge workforce with them remember it's the biggest employer in america that the military so even the military that goes in for uncle sam to secure oil assets and slave labor for wal-mart to pass in to the consumer in america is going to go out of business because you got a monoculture defeat only ill with a cancer of retailing that can't possibly survive anymore so thanks again wal-mart slobs so bloomberg speaks to evelyn cruz a department manager in a wal-mart supercenter in pico rivera california and she said that comments from the us chief executive officer bill simon where he said that we were running out of stuff and we couldn't stack them we couldn't resupply our shelves she said that these were dead on and she said quote there are gaps where merchandise is missing we are not talking about a couple of empty shelves this is throughout the store in every store some places look like they're going out of business yet these japanese tourist they show up at

these wal-mart locations and they see these empty shelves and i think it's one of those lovely tells in tokyo so they just get out their sleeping bags and started shacking up this is think about when you go to america is going to survive by procreating you need more people to see the social security because he's king so wal-mart becomes incubate or everybody will go there or strip naked and procreate that's how it's going to save the economy with wal-mart baby factories it's an incubator it's not a retailer it's a hatchery so let's move on now from this to the supply chain shocks there to the sinkholes that we see around the world and this is something that delta verb or who you're speaking to in the second half has been really good at highlighting and the and the sinkhole first look at is in california now california is one of the big agricultural producers for the united states. and here we have california waterboard urges lawmakers to act a night trait contamination in drinking water a new report from the state water board calls for the legislator to enact new fees

to pay for measures designed to clean up nitrate contaminated groundwater especially in major agricultural areas such as the salinas valley so california is an agricultural produce of three billion dollars a year right now cost thirty six million dollars a year to provide fresh water to these poor communities where they're relying on groundwater which is contaminated by all the the nitrates in the fertilizer the water board needs to be water boarded to get with the program here because the fact is that water is a declining natural resource and there's no way you're going to get around the fact that price of water is going to go up now what's happening on wall street stacey jamie diamond and j.p. morgan you've got lloyd blankfein of goldman sachs you've got the banks in europe they're going to create water futures and water derivatives and securitised water to make it something that only a sheik and in saudi arabia accept at all the one guy who's not in the top general just guys in the world ha ha ha ha ha all he was

a good little ponsonby you know the top ten on the forbes list hall ha i also think i was overrated and citigroup bailed you out all the one wad saudi arabia turkey or whatever that you think you are you're a fake so two point six million californians relying groundwater so we're looking at the sinkhole of the cost therefore that has to go into it and in this case it looks like farmers are going to have to eat the cost monterey county farm bureau executive director norm groot said additional taxes or fees and expense of regulations would place an unwise burden on an ag industry already struggling in recent years who said he hadn't fully n.y.c. report in its recommendations but said local farmers have been bracing for a fertilizer fee and this is something we've seeing in europe of course with this horsemeat scandal as well the sinkholes is the farmers are saying that. they're not actually making any money anyway from the beef market so if they have to pay for extra fees to make sure that the the products going into the burger and various

other ready meals is actually beef and not horse that they can't they also have to give up right and don't forget fertilizer is a product of the petrochemical industry it's commerce from oil. and so as a price of oil skyrockets because ponce or opposers no good investor overrated idiots like that all the water in saudi arabia who can't make a run two nickels together are going much much higher just like the oil that's what you know best get out of the banking business all the while you're over rated all right stuart thanks so much for being on the kaiser report thank you don't go away much more coming your way stay right there.

welcome back to the kaiser report i'm max keiser time now to turn to get to where burg known as gale the actuary gail welcome to the kaiser report well thank you good to be back again all right gail tell us about the problem of investment sinkholes whether in saudi arabia china or america what are the sinkholes you write up about and why are they now a problem. well i think what happens is that we end up spending more and more are trying to extract resources of various types already in terms of just trying to provide water that we need for a society in that case the arabia they end up putting in very extensive. desalination plants well when you get these desalination plants what you get back

to is well now you have the water that you previously could have gotten from here i prefer respect those that were first were getting he pleaded so we can't continue to use the aquifer water we have to use a desalination water is just that many times more expensive so what happens is we make this huge investment and that investment is made because of the pleading resources but when it comes right down to the welfare of the people is not all that much better we're just spending a lot more for investment right so there's a couple things going on here you have resources that are being depleted at the same time costs are going up and you end up with a compound in effect and you use the image of a sinkhole and in the case of saudi arabia you certainly see that also we see this in china correct. yes i think you can see that kind of thing there too they have

a severe wider problem and i think that you know has they need to use. more earth or everything more workers more everything out there costs are going to be going up to now we're told that fracking is going to save the energy industry it'll make america an energy independent but fracking is one of the sinkhole like problems and that the life expectancy of a typical fracking project is not very long and the water needed for fracking projects is enormous and the water resources are being pressured all around the world correct exactly that we're using it right now in the baka and well we're using it many different places for their shell oil resources and i know of shale while there was a mention in the block and that the water they were using was for a river that was

a tributary to the mississippi river and the mississippi river is very low so you go oh my goodness so this is kind of hard what's contributing to our river problem situation but china has been mentioned as being i shall reducer constantly but they are very wired. and how they will find water to do that fracking is really uncertain yeah the images coming out of china of cities that are blanketed and pollution that is really shocking when you take a look at it clearly that's going to cut into their ability to be productive at some point i wanted to switch gears for a second and talk about something else you've written about which is minimum wage and this is something that doesn't get enough attention at all when you talk about minimum wage a little bit as you're doing a recent piece. well i think what's happening right now is the total amount of wages that our workers are collecting is declining and this is really

a competitive situation with the rest of the world and there's also the fact that the employers are spending more money on their energy resources when they find themselves needing to do is trying to. conserve resources of all sorts so they consider grows the human labor as well as the other labor and what happens is they end up cutting back the number of employees now we can raise the minimum wage but i think we still have this issue there are dollars and wages that we're paying in total is going down ok so this would be another type of saying call and that wages real wages are declining regardless of what the policy is on minimum wage the real wages are declining but of course those wages are required to create the purchasing power to support an economy it also would create some savings to create

the capital basis for a capitalist economy but policymakers seem to believe that wage earners are not important anymore and they seem to believe that simply training security is back and forth between banks and generating phase that's all we need in an inner economy your thoughts well i agree with you that seems to be when they think is the case and they are proud of what they think is that. jobs can be created out of nothing that you know we can just each other's hair much more often but of course leave a neat scissors for that and then we probably need to have a way of transportation back and forth to go to the hairdresser. and in real terms what happens is not at all like once in their models we really need. well and other energy resources we need she well another energy resources in order to make our

current economic model work ok now you mention a concept peak wages so this would fit into what you're talking about here but i wanted you to expand on that a little bit tell us about your thoughts on peak wages. well we look at the wage situation and what i was doing is looking at the total wages paid and really this was my private employers has hosted government wages because you can keep manufacturing government shops as much as you want but. we're slow and you print money but when you look at the private. and their wages that they generate they seem to. stay in your decline as soon as well prices get high and really the time where we were generating good increases in wages is back when well was the quibbling over thirty dollars a barrel or less in two thousand and twelve dollars so we really need very cheap

oil it's not just a little bit lower priced a while it's a lot lower price still are right so the leverage that came from the oil all you can i guess you could call it revolution that's about one hundred years old or oil is a remarkably dense energy efficient substance that powered one hundred years of growth but it also gave rise to an enormous global credit market because the oil extraction business is very expensive and of course as the easy to get oil has been depleted and you need to go offshore or you need to go into the tar sands or you need to go ever deeper into the earth's crust the cost go higher the credit goes higher you end up generating this enormous global credit some might call a bubble so how does that also tie in with oil because if oil prices are not efficiently able to be extracted on a cost basis anymore to generate enough growth to support any kind of reasonable

wages then can't we also say that the concurrent credit bubble that's been formed these past twenty years is way over extended and perhaps about to pop. well i think that credit is reaching a limit that what's happened is that the amount of credit that has been extended to all of the different people around the world not just the people but the businesses and the governments it can't really grow it wages are growing so i think this is a big limiting factor on where we're going right now well it sounds like you're talking about a condition of peak credit and if that's the case then what's keeping the bond market as high as it is around the world what keeps the u.s. treasury bond market the the british pound sterling deal to market what's keeping these bonds afloat if if in fact we've had

a situation of peak credit. well i think her what's happening is that the countries are buying their own but you're quantitative easing and so that they keep some of these bonds on the market and so that keeps the thing kind of keeps the market go away but you know end up with a situation where you can't stop this quantitative easing without a real problem because you know bass was holding the market to gether right carol what you're describing here seems to go completely against what ben bernanke has been saying lately ben bernanke is saying we're going to keep engaging in quantitative easing until that unemployment rate gets down to six nap percent and as you are describing here the conditions for wages are such given the constraints on both the ecological front and on the credit front i don't seem to be going forward in any material way in reminds me of what milton friedman said

a while back while he was still alive that there is no connection between monetary policy and employment so what is bad bernanke you talking about when he says we're going to keep the quantitative easing spigot open until unemployment gets down to six and a half percent i thought is that make any sense to you. well i guess what he's saying is we're going to keep it open indefinitely you know we're all going to be in a race to the bottom and see how much. we can buy back ourselves but you know at some point this is just an unsustainable game there doesn't make any sense going forward if you are let's say a running the central bank a what would be one or two policies are running the the country's economy as a whole what would be wanted to policies that you would bring about to kind of change course if there is anything at this point and no one can do. i'm not sure that there's anything he really can do what's really happened is we put into cot

into place how does it involve spending too much money much more than we can afford we can't possibly collect enough taxes to pay for the social security and medicare plans that we promised and the equivalent programs in europe or japan you know there's a lot of things that you know that we really majorly have to change and the computation just won't cut out with it right so i think over the do the work they do the same calls as you described and the articles that you're writing really a point to constraints in the economy and that that message does not go over well in a country like united states which is brought up to believe in this ever ending cornucopia of westword expansionism and to outer space of necessary that the same to be

a complete philosophical disconnect between the reality of the resources and their constraints and the philosophy or the ideology they find coming out of washington your thoughts. yes i think you're exactly right that. washington would like to do it as a whole to believe you know we're all going to be happy electric cars tomorrow we keep motoring and problem at most as well it's maybe like fuel supply situation but we'll get it fixed with a few more battery operated and wind power or whatever the thing of the day is. the cut of that thanks so much for being on the kaiser report thank you i write on our finite world and you can subscribe to my twitter through the actuary all right kelly actually fantastic and that's going to do it for this edition of the kaiser report with me max kaiser and stacey armor i thank my guests

warburg known as the gal the actuary until next time ask after saying oh yeah i want to say i mean as reported our t.v. dot ru bio. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything you thought you knew you don't i'm tom or look at the big picture. of the. technology innovation all these developments around russia. the future of coverage. potentially deadly blizzard taking aim for the northeast

it's expected to hit stunning in a few hours from new york to maine we have team coverage of the storm. but what we're watching is the very heavy snow moving into boston proper earlier today it was very sticky you can see it start to become much more powdery down the line there's still a lot of snow out here a good place for snowball fight. decent it is going a pretty incredible day there and even record snowfall throughout what's been like nobody's allowed to be driving lessons for them urgency here are exceptions. to the mission of three cretaceous three transfer judges three a regime and three just three stooges and free.