enough time to make tens of millions of dollars all and each of us and speaking of economic reports the trade balance was released this morning and it was the best in years meaning the u.s. is exporting a bit more than previously unfortunately them our kids will give chairman bernanke a more evidence to taper money printing bond buying i'll be raging down quantitative easing or q me and just a bit and more evidence that the wealthy are leaving the q.e. titanic the market private equity firms representing some of the most sophisticated investors in the world are snatching up companies they then load them up with that in pay themselves with the loan money called dividends this trend is up sixty two percent compared to last year at this time and last year was itself a new record according to a prominent fund manager are different deals are like trading out a home equity loan and then using the money to go on vacation and you don't use the money to do anything productive in the house like we do our room doesn't went out

and spent the money it's nice work if you can find it indeed i'll be discussing corporate cheaters in the search for an on this point system with author dan ariely in just a minute and here is what's in your prime interest. how much do we cheat and who treats more bankers or politicians these are the questions asked by researchers at mit now in one experiment they provided students with twenty math problems after a few minutes the subjects were told to count how many questions they got correct person. struction that they shredded their paper they'd then had to report how many

questions they got right thinking no no no if they lied now what the test takers did not know was that the shredder was rigged on average people responded that they got six questions correct when they actually only got four so earlier i spoke with then areally one of the researchers who conducted the experiment and author of the honest truth about dishonesty here's what he had to say. and this difference between four and six is not due to a few bad apples who cheat a lot it's due to the fact that lots and lots of people cheat just by a little bit actually from a rational perspective does not enough bad apples the number of people who cheat in a big way even when there's no consequences is not that high but we all have the capacity to cheat a little bit and surprisingly to cheat a little bit and feel good about ourselves well let me ask you who cheats more bankers or politicians yes so this is or this is a good question i would say that the vast majority of people predict that it's

going to be politicians but it's actually bankers in our in our examples in our experiments the bankers cheated twice as much as the as their politicians and i think it's because we have this idea about politicians from the news and we see all kinds of misbehaviors of politician and of course there is misbehavior of politicians but politicians often go into debt fields like many other professionals with the hope of doing something different in the world with some idea of making the world a better place and so on later on other things happen but it's idealistic profession in general and they cheat less than bankers well we've seen throughout history and we can go to john lord the charles ponzi scheme more recently large corporations have taken on the role of deception so in the past few months we've seen banks charged with mortgage fraud money laundering and huge american money manipulation and not much different than we than we saw in the one nine hundred ninety s. in two thousand so my question is will there ever be an end to bad bank behavior.

so i think it's a question of regulation and i think the main problem is that we don't understand the incentives for being dishonest so as long as we think or you know there are good people and bad people and as long as we punish the big bad people nobody would go into it imagine that we took banking and we had a death threat. l.t.s. for misbehaviors of bankers right so basically people would go into banking and if they did something terrible we would execute them the standard thinking is such a big punishment will basically eliminate all bad behaviors but the reality is we don't see these effects if you look at the us for example when you look at states that have the death penalty in states that don't have the death penalty we don't find a big difference in crime rate that it's because people don't think about the long term consequences imagine you go into a situation and you get paid a lot of money to see reality in

a slightly distorted way wouldn't you be able to actually see reality in a slightly distorted way especially when reality is complex and difficult and has lots of variables in it the problem is that we create a situation with banking that has so many conflicts of interest and so many reasons for people to distort the reality that the big punishment the potential for a big punishment at the end of the day is just not powerful enough to overcome this distortion so i think we can have better banks but we need to think about regulations very differently we need to think about how we eliminate the biased incentives to see reality in a biased way rather than worrying about the punishment at the end of the day words but some of these regulators that interest turn a blind eye there for instance think bernie madoff it was laid out for them they just didn't do anything about it so is it possible that our system of bureaucratic regulations can ever work. so he no i like i like to keep an optimistic hope and think that it might that it might work and you know it's kind

of interesting when you look in retrospect i talked to lots of people that worked at enron when you look at it in retrospect you could say oh it was there all along we should have seen it all along the problem is that the moment you didn't want to see it and because you didn't want to see your reality was actually quite different . you know i don't know if you like any particular sports team but every sports friend knows. if they go to a game and the referee is calling a call against a team they can't help but think they were freed evil vicious stupid blind something like that we have a desire to see the world in a certain way we and we have the tremendous capacity now later on you could say i could have done it all along i think in the made of case it's probably the same thing in the enron case it's the same thing in many others in retrospect you say oh it was all out there but at the moment people probably did not want to see this reality and we had the tremendous capacity to reframe what we see in a way that is compatible with what we want to see there is sort of there was

a lot of reframing going on because the evidence was truly your compelling but i want to get to a couple predictions that you made in two thousand and nine during the credit crisis you said we're going to have serial money printing out the fed so what is through your pressure and through your lens of behavioral economics what you see for a future. so it's so i think my my biggest concern with this long financial crisis is a lost of trust. you know if you think about the dot com. bust for example and this was a case in which you could as an investor could have said i should've known you could have said there were signs things have happened and i should have known i think the world we're in right now since two thousand and eight which is a long long time is a world in which we have to recognize the unpredictability of the world around us and the fact that nobody really seems to know what's going on and there's an old

experiment on what's called learned helplessness and if i can take a minute i'll just describe it if. in this experiment they took two dogs one dog was in one room and the dead dog heard the bell and then got electrical shock a bell electrical shock a bell shock the second dog was in a different room there was no bell they would just getting the electrical shock at the same time that the first dog was getting so bell for the first one shock for both of them bill shock for both of them after a while of doing this they took the two dogs they put them in a different a paratus in a room with a partition light came up and if the dog moved to the other side of the partitions no electrical shock they said on their side shock the first dog very quickly figured it out they explore they figure out the jump they learn the relationship the second dog basically gives up the second dog lies on the floor whimpers and just kind of take the shocks passively and this is the idea of learned helplessness that when we don't understand the nature of the world we don't listen what the

cause and the fact we just lose hope and we lay on the ground whimpering and i think this financial crisis for most people have been like that we followed the rules we invested in housing we bought the house we put money in the market we did exactly what everybody told us in office under the rules kind of change and nothing seems to be working in the way that people have told us all along we should trust them and i think the nature of trust in the system has gone down dramatically sort of it's really sad it's terrible. sad because there's a group of people who were kind of getting close to retirement had some money lost a lot of it in the market took it all out and are basically very hesitant about going back in and therefore missed all the a gains on the way on the way back so we have this i think crisis of trust that we really haven't dealt with you know there's been all kinds of attempts to try and figure out. the financial system maybe some regulations around the edges but the essence of it which is the trust in

that system has not been repaired and i think unless until we repair it we really can't hope for much improvement. when we have one more study that's kind of light hearted it involves place in cans of coke in cash in a refrigerator and what was the result of that. yeah so we looked at what happens when you put kind of coaxing refrigerators and people come in and not surprisingly the coke disappear very quickly we put bills of one dollar bill in the refrigerator and people could have taken this bill gone to a vending machine get a coke and change nobody ever touched the bills and the interesting thing about it is to ask the question of when would you feel that human behavior and ethically would you take ten cents from petty cash box box what about taking a pencil from work home what about downloading some ease some illegal file of something and it's interesting that it's not the financial consequences of those actions but it's the immediacy of confronting the fact that we are acting this

honestly that is stopping us and the sad news about this i know you want a good light hearted but the sad news about it is that we're moving to a society that looks much more like cans of coke that we're dealing with people over great distances over the internet we're not dealing with money directly with dealing with the river tubes and option and so on and what we're finding is that as these distances increase people have an easier time to both behave this on the street but think of themselves as on this. that was my interview with dan ariely author of the honest truth about dishonesty coming up period breaks down quantitative easing is it simply monetary dopey and i do many rubble from breaking over amazon's foray into the field of those who buy in by the barrel along with their student hamburgers.

led. to the. economic ups and downs in the final months day of the london deal sang and the rest of the life so in the case it will be everything we own all plenty. of.

the i'm. going to the new will. be. the face by peter limone. mum. a pleasure to have you with us here on our team today i'm sure.

major league baseball has banned alex rodriguez of the new york yankees for allegedly using performance enhancing drugs one of the greatest baseball players of all time is facing the bench for the remainder of the season and this could cost up to thirty one million dollars iran has denied any wrongdoing but what's ironic about this is the biggest doper of our time the u.s. government continues to skirt away without the liberation or scrutiny the federal reserve started quantitative easing in late two thousand and eight following the financial collapse and has attempted to stimulate the economy with trillions of dollars of asset purchases but has it worked and what exactly is it well let's break it down quantitative easing is an unconventional monetary policy used by central banks to stimulate the national economy with standard monetary policy has become ineffective it is implemented by buying financial assets from commercial

banks and other private institutions increasing the monetary base in the us the federal reserve controls the supply of the u.s. dollar and has a number of tools to meet its goals of price stability and maximum employment first use in japan over a decade ago quantitative easing is used as a last resort today nearly four years later it's still in full force q.e. simply put is when a central bank commits to purchasing a fixed amount of assets this could be government securities like treasury bonds but in the us the fed also buys mortgage backed securities to prop up the mortgage market which our economy is largely dependent on what you might wonder where the fed gets all this money. simply creates it by crediting the bank accounts of its member banks. well two trillion dollars of this freshly minted money currently sits at the fed earning one quarter percent interest the fed controls the monetary base

or the actual amount of dollars both digital and cash and existence however banks can choose to loan this money and increase what's known as the money supply the fear is that the fed will lose control of those extra two trillion dollars spring high price inflation here is federal reserve chairman ben bernanke speaking about quantitative easing at the most recent press conference. a second policy to be employed by the committee's asset purchases specifically the committee has been purchasing forty billion dollars for a month an agency mortgage backed securities and forty five billion dollars for months in treasury securities. quantitative easing in the us the first began in late two thousand and eight and response to the financial collapse as we've coined it q.e. the fed it continued buying a six hundred billion dollars in mortgage backed securities but after the first dose the markets tanked and the fed announced another round dubbed q e one in march

two thousand and nine and in stop there q.e. two was announced in two thousand and ten with an additional six hundred million dollars was stimulated financial markets such as the stock market but failed to do much to the general economy in two thousand and twelve the fed went all in and announced q e three an open ended economic performance enhancing asset purchase program of forty million dollars a month for the un for seeable future but i don't even that can stimulate the markets enough because the fed then roughly doubled it to eighty five billion dollars a month just a few months later and this is where we are now here's a clip of bernanke outlining the goals of q e three. and our program of asset purchases was initiated last september the committee stated the goal of promoting a substantial improvement in the outlook for the labor market in the context of price stability and noted it would also be taking appropriate account of the

efficacy and costs of the program. but they are taking into account the efficacy and the cost of the program let's first look at efficacy and november two thousand and eight when he was launched the national unemployment rate was six point eight percent it rose to as high as ten percent since the fed started injecting the financial reins of the economy and today is that seven point four percent still higher than when we started looking at unemployment numbers its efficacy is questionable looking at g.d.p. q.e. has not done much for the economy either last quarter g.d.p. only increased one point seven percent i was two percent is considered stable growth by most economist the fed also said they are taking into account the cost of the program as we can see on this graph of the monetary base which shows how much money the fed has digitally created from q e it has more than tripled since two

thousand and eight the fed has spent more than estimated two trillion dollars on all the q.e. programs q e three alone has been estimated at eight hundred billion dollars and i burn a stack of the new york times points out with the money spent on q e three the fed could have given every homeowner in the country a ten thousand dollar loan at a near zero rate of interest or with that money the fad could have given every citizen of the u.s. nearly twenty six hundred dollars according to alan blinder as a lender of last resort the fed has the authority to lend money to any person government or company it chooses but it's chosen to fill the reserves of the biggest brains. all this monetary doping will eventually have to come to an end just ask a rod and the twelve other baseball players who are on suspension for allegedly using performance enhancing drugs at least the v.a. to use on behalf of the entire nation's financial brains so continue this

conversation follow me on twitter at period in our two you. then it's great to see you again this is manny from breaking the set. no comments on the chairs today no i like the chairs i've decided ok good let's get to refer stuff like if you like on millet online retail giant may we suggest a struggling newspaper industry amazon c.e.o. jeff bezos recently bought the washington post in a two hundred fifty million dollars deal newspaper revenue has drastically declined over the past decade so what's to gain why what's to gain as well bezos is doesn't exactly have a great track record other than amazon of making like successful business ventures

what's to gain is a lot are you believe this is the best time to be purchasing political influence in washington post is definitely one of those fears of political influence but are going to have to give up some of their lobbying power probably i mean their bit involved with this internet sales tax to spew exactly that's probably the best reason that they'd want to and that's why you know when it comes to something like amazon i'm less fearful of what it means to them having so much of a influence in this in this marketplace i mean they had already ninety percent of the market before they got in a dispute with apple over their their tablet so they could definitely dominate here and maybe there's just a strategy that they want to prioritize content and kind of get rid of the print content the real question though is where whether or not this is a this is a good thing and whether or not it's a good thing that you can apply across the board because when it comes to something like amazon the like their big thing right now would be the internet sales tax you know having having an in with the washington post where they can lobby and have that much more influence on kind of their stance on the internet sales tax ok that's one thing and that can be up for debate but when it comes to other

entrepreneurs other than amazon with it's not just sales that i like that i hope. others say them trying to buy up the chicago tribune in all those other other publications along with that that's when this really starts becoming a business i'm no fan of the koch brothers what about apple or google buying up the miami herald or something like that i mean we'd really have to look at it on a case by case basis what would apple have have to be lobbying for may be the standards in the video or else on the i mean just think lisa jackson's so there's a lot of revolving door issues here so definitely these big companies feel that they need to cozy up to the government and sure washington post is one of these ways i say good friends on all right let's get to our second topic according to bloomberg u.s. beef production is expected to hit twenty one year lows but not to worry as a solution a surge in b prices is already in the works scientists in the netherlands are introducing the in vitro burger by taking stem cells from cows they plan to form

thousands of muscle fibers create the first petri dish burger is this the future of food i bet you want i mean i don't know as long as they are the name from in vitro burgers i mean that sounds disgusting i mean i think ultimately it is editorial discretion yeah that was all you guys you could have maybe change that a bit you know i think it's a great thing i think that this is the kind of thing that kind of shows you that there is hope for the factory farms and doing away with these massive factory farms i think that ultimately i maybe they and scale this could be good for carbon emissions we know that you know cows are the reason why there's global warming that's science ok so i think it be true burgers are definitely way of the future but they're going to animals and animal lovers out of all of this too because we don't actually have to kill animals in order to do this so i don't know stance on this is going to be absolutely yeah that would actually be a good conversation to have with some right we have i think a minute and a half for one more topic we have to get to twitter twitter has been in a tight spot recently last month twitter turned over information of users who

tweeted anti semitic remarks to french prosecutors then twitter for. he in the u.k. for failing to effectively handle your users posting abusive and threatening tweets now twitter has also caught flak for its censorship policies in brazil so what's the right balance here and social media and twitter the right balance is protect freedom of speech i don't i get it i don't think that twitter should be kind of you know removing didn't like what they hear it's so-called private company but they also have to worry about the governments exactly and that's where i think we really need to draw the line because you know if you look at the trend of twitter and when it comes to freedom of speech in protecting people's privacy they been relatively good about it there was a recent case with an occupy wall street activist who was making some tweets and they were wanting to see some of those direct messages and i think that this is the right balance is respect probable cause and then you don't leave it up to the company's discretion you know i'm not so worried about twitter as facebook maybe it seems like i'm not i'm not even worried about whether or not there's probable

because they're interested in facebook and there's something called x. keyscore and everything that we've learned in the n.s.a. leaks shows is that it really doesn't matter what the debate that we're having over facebook kind of doing what the government wants they're going to do it anyway it's happening to back doors exist and when it comes to facebook i mean to be honest with you they're complicit in any way they're allowing to you know who are complicit or the users people post all kinds of incriminating stuff and it's hard it's hard to sympathize them you know with them on that level that we're not complicit man we're we're not we're not users we're commodities ok we're commodities should you have the option to go back in time and change pictures and delete stuff from the internet i mean we could have theoretically a government deal with the people where the government just says ok we're going to allow you to delete your online embarrassing history and in exchange we're going to give you something else what is a carrot i don't know yeah you know and i think that that really i mean again it's up to it's our profiles but anything that you post on the internet mean that's

there that's there forever and especially with these latest revelations that we have learned from the n.s.a. seclusion with the dea and and. and being able to go back and look at things i mean there's really no telling to how there's no knowing at all so if you want to win today show be sure to like us on facebook at facebook dot com slash prime interest you can follow me manually or twitter at me but i will underscore right below and you can follow me english p.r.i. so thank you so much for joining me thanks bob. and it was a not a cool day on prime interest the reporters in traders who have been leaking key economic data finally gave themselves enough rope story line with which to hang

themselves good luck mr mueller and the ports are getting busy as exports are rising a promising sign for economic growth according to the latest trade data but is like you leave titanic headed towards the interest raise ice berg albert atheism raising deckchairs the ship might be destined to sink finally amazon floated a move to print new call it a shot off the bow to the mainstream media tune and tomorrow for more of what's in your prime interest i'm perry and boring have a great night. wealthy

british style. markets. find out what's really happening to the global economy for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines to cause a report. i would rather ask questions of people in positions of power instead of speaking on their behalf and that's why you can find my show larry king now right here on r.t.

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right to see. first street. and i think you're. on our reporters. in. the. secret laboratory. was able to build a most sophisticated robot which all unfortunately doesn't give a darn about anything tunes mission to teach me the creation and why it should care

about humans in the world this is why you should care only dot com. a developing story it's not going to say barack obama counsels the shed jewel of one to one with enough to russia granted asylum to n.s.a. leaker edward snowden moscow says washington's still unwilling to build relations on an equal basis. united nations tells r.t. it's investigating reports that kurdish civilians have been massacred by rebels in syria this is al qaeda linked groups that push to create a breakaway islamic state. all sidelining to the japanese government is now forced to step in to help the operator of the crippled fukushima power plant contain a recently revealed massive leak of radioactive water.