tv Cross Talk RT January 6, 2014 8:30pm-9:01pm EST
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so the least we can do is have some fun along the way hopefully at the expense of these threats being corporate tyrants tonight let's talk about that by following me on twitter as the resident. that does it for me for tonight on meghan lopez have a wonderful night. he survived war atrocities. to make a psychologist so she. has changed his life and the world around him. by giving up. hope. and loves to so many children.
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know and a welcome to the twenty fourteen and now girls isn't a boom bust here are some of the stories we're tracking for you today. first up we're kicking off a year and a historic way for women i'm talking about janet yellen sped had confirmation taking place today we'll tell you all about it coming right up also the wall street washington world valving door is spinning like a roulette wheel and it looks like the carlyle group is cleaning up thanks there new acquisition i'll tell you. it's going to wear later on in the show and you never judge a book by its cover or maybe a company's stock by the pretty face of its c.e.o. well apparently having a good look at the helm is also good for business but dumpers is and i just got this in today's big deal coming up and it all starts right now. now on monday janet yellen makes history by becoming the first woman to chair the u.s. federal reserve now a senate vote set for five thirty pm in washington d.c.
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will usher in the sixty seven year old who has served as vice chair of the fed since twenty ten now seceding ben bernanke you whose term ends on january thirty first yellen has been an unwavering advocate of the fed's aggressive steps to boost the u.s. economy by way of quantitative easing now gallons of main task as chairwoman will be to navigate the central bank away from its current bond buying program now despite yellen why it spread support among economists true means a contentious figure for some in washington there are those who fear her support of burnout easy money policy will have a negative long term consequence on the economy. now elsewhere high frequency traders now have a trade group all their own a collection of high frequency trading firms have hired a pair of heavy hitting political strategists to help revamp their image now refuting what they say is the industry's unfair reputation of high speed trading as a disruptive force to the markets now in their corner strategist kevin madden and
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kirk smith are heading a group called modern markets and initiative headquartered in washington d.c. and backed by four high speed firms the group is arguing that high frequency trading traders rather have made the financial markets cheaper and faster for investors however critics point to the increases in high frequency trading during times of heightened volatility. and finally the revolving door that is washington to wall street takes another spin yet again this time capital favorite the carlyle group is the one we're talking about now the investment firm has hired julius genachowski former head of the federal communications commission to help run its leveraged buyout division genic house he was chairman of the f.c.c. until may but now will serve carlyle as managing director and partner focusing on investments in technology media and telecommunications joining koski is an advocate of and free and open internet and wall add to the f c c he supported rules against
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discrimination by internet service providers over what content they carry well there you have it will be tracking these stories and keeping you posted on all the latest. now back during the housing bubble very very few people predicted the financial crisis however mr warner lawyer did and he was capable of making this prediction by using the economic theory known as an empty or modern monetary theory now mosul or is the author of the seven deadly innocent frauds of economic policy great title and i spoke with him earlier about where the u.s. economy is headed today check it out. now warning many analysts are expecting two thousand and fourteen to be a stellar growth here i want to know what are your thoughts for
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a twenty fourteen well first of all i hope that right but right so i sorry that we could see much like what we've had over the last possibly below two percent growth. now i want to ask you about your thoughts for us housing in two thousand and fourteen what do you think that will look like. i'm not as hopeful as everybody else and let me give you my fundamental position that is that the budget deficit too small to support the credit structure and look at mortgage applications for example they took up persepolis drop and now they're down on the bottom they were actually down ten percent year over year this is for mortgage applications for the purchase of the homes and you look at existing home sales have fallen off topic home sales have fallen off sharply and i look at the personal income numbers have fallen off and it doesn't look good to me. now is that true though that more mortgages are being given out today though than they were say six months ago even.
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yesterday if you look at the total pool of mortgages it's only i believe morally positive it's that it is going down for a while and so to get total credit outstanding it's. not good i want to move on because you're obviously going to talk a lot about modern monetary theory and specifically how the government private sector and trade sectors how they all work together i want to ask you do you believe that u.s. consumers are living off of debt accumulation and they're just essentially tapped out. that i think the consumers doing reasonably well at the debt ratios are way down and. there's potential to take on more debt now the problem is the rate of growth of income has been decreasing ok and so it's like if you go into a bank for a loan and he says well the good news is interest rates are down and your your balance sheet is cleaned up the bad news is your income isn't keeping up in the income i think is critical to debt growth now how does the larger reduction in
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deficit help sustain growth. where i'll see opposite direction does not help to sustain growth the fact is it's the removal of the safety net if you will a couple of years ago when we had our double dip scares i was the one saying it possible with a nine or ten percent deficit because we had the. much underlying support from uncle sam it's kind of like an allowance today with the instantaneous deficit probably well under three percent we don't have that kind of support and we're more like it's like flying without a net right now. how long do you think government can run deficits without any unintended without negative unintended consequences i mean it seems like it can't go on forever but you say that's not the case ok well the u.s. dollar is that tax credit is the thing that can be used to pay taxes and so when the government spends a dollar either one of two things can happen with that tax rate it can either be used to pay taxes in which case it's a loss to the economy or it will remain outstanding in the economy in one of three
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forms cash securities or excuse me chad reserves are in securities accounts treasury securities those are just the outstanding tax credits that have been issued in there are used to pay taxes and so there's there's no problem with particular you know particular problem with that percentage so you believe there are simply no limits to government spending no problem with that no numerical limits at some point already if you are depending on how you spend or you could drive up prices and then you'd have prices going up which could be considered a serious problem but there's no financial problem there's no credit problem there's no solve in c. rist of the government has no ability to pay none of that these are just government tax credits that are outstanding. now do you believe that quantitative easing is and has been effective. well as bill dudley just said if it's effective it's because it's a bit signaling it signals what the fed may or may not do in the future but percent
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if you just look at quantitative easing there is no channel from quantitative easing to the real economy except for one and that is it removes income from the economy so last year the fed turned over our baby hundred billion of the income that it would not have earned if it hadn't had four trillion of securities and that in. it would have been stead been earned by the economy so quantitative easing has caused hundred billion of income to not reach the economy and instead get sent back to the treasury so if anything it's acting as a modest but not sizable tax on the economy and slowing it down. and i want to ask you about this are tax cuts do you view them as inferior to spending increases in terms of adding to consumer demand. no if they have different multipliers but that's immaterial what you do the size you want to add it to me and you are so if a specific tax cut at half that multiplier of a spending increase you just have to do twice as much which isn't
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a bad thing. so i move on to the next thing now that curious kind of come and gone without inflation rising just as japan experienced a decade ago people are starting to think that increasing the supply of base money isn't inflationary and isn't a bad thing what is your view on that ok my view is there. the view a base marty is too narrow base money are fed liabilities and that our abilities are created and they're fed or abilities created by deficit spending and base our ability should include the dollars in securities accounts of the fed as well as the dollars in reserve accounts and the dollars in securities accounts we call those treasury securities and so if you look at the entire monetary base so to speak where you include all fed liabilities quantitative easing does not change this the monetary base by this definition and so you would have no reason to expect quantitative easing to change anything in a real economy except to remove interest income through the interest income channels now can you talk to me about inflation i want to ask pacifically is the
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fed going to eventually get behind the curve on inflation. well two things are there so inflation in your is pretty loosely defined but in a way it's generally defined. i believe is it's my assertion that given the current. arrangements the fed is backwards in the use of its tools i think lower interest rates are deflationary in a contractionary dyess in this economy for the same reason that q.e. is the government and in this in the economy for every dollar borrowed there's a dollar saved so it all nets to zero so when you move interest rates you just shifting income between savers and borrowers and and the only difference is that be the difference in the propensities to consume interesting come out of interest income between the two but in addition the government is a net payer of interest to the economy with their seventeen trillion approximately treasury securities outstanding these are dollars in securities accounts of the fed
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tax credits outstanding that the government pays interest on now the fed has a chunk of them but the rest are outstanding and when interest rates go down when the fed cuts rates that cutting funds they're cutting interest payments from the government to the economy and that acts as a contractionary bias in a deflationary bias and not an inflationary bias and in addition you have all the cost channels when interest rates go up the cost of doing business goes up the cost of holding inventory goes up all kinds of costs that get passed through to the economy as higher prices by those businesses that operate a cost plus and perhaps thirty percent of the economy is operating at a cost and not a marginal cost price so if you look at the individual channels it looks to me like when the fed is lowering rates they're stepping on the brake and not the gas when it doesn't work they just step on the brake harder and the car slows down more than it would have otherwise and so as long as this is happening i think we are in roach
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motel here we're just permanently stuck with these lower interest rates. that was warren and most lawyer former money manager and co-founder of modern monetary theory now coming up right her reggie middleton joins me from our new york studios to tell us what's new in the world of technology and big and also rachel courteous and i sit down to talk about sexy c.e.o.'s and not just in a superficial way now a new study says that the better looking the c.e.o. the better looking the company that's in today's big deal stay tuned it's all coming right up.
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with mike stronger for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune in to kaiser report on our. now as the price of the cryptocurrency vaults higher and higher a lot of people are beginning to take notice and is big quite a bubble about to crash or is it even a currency at all here to break down the bits and give us his forecast of where the world of technology is heading is reggie middleton independent investor and financial blogger welcome reggie it's very good to have you here today and thank you very much now this is one of the now i want to start off about talking about bitcoin it's been all the rage as of late and it has fans and it has critics who happen to be a fan so my question is why so bullish on but quite ready. to
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call it a phantom of. that is most interested in the technology because the technology enables things to be done that haven't been able to be done before. i came into the internet in the early ninety's. it was curiosity a lot of people thought it was a nerd fad and right now most people couldn't survive continue their daily activities without the internet. is really misunderstood because should be bifurcated thought of as two parts because of the lower case p. which is a digital currency based on cryptographic methods. cryptography and with a capital b. which is a protocol and a network based upon a protocol which their currency is able to travel so you have to pause to pick on almost all the tension media attention and investors speculate attention is focused on the lower case b.
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the digital currency which is very interesting specially considering you know it has the meteoric rise you know sixty thousand percent returns etc but what is a real interest is a protocol that because in travels along the network that allows you to do things as program the money and make smart money as compared to most fear currency which are considered let's pick the most famous one the u.s. dollar the dollar is dumb currency you take a dollar bill i give it to you and i give it to you that's pretty much end of story i pay you for a service or product if i don't like this service or product and i'm not the dollars back i can ask you for it you don't like we fight in court arbitration etc with bitcoin you could program the currency so i can actually give it to you but you can't spend it until you can see. the contract the agreement is is agree. so if you break through and agree that the reason i give you that
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money is valid then that money can be spent so we can actually program to do that which are a simple much and many more complicated things and the distinction that you make between you know coin with a capital b. and big crime with a lower case the is an important thing as well but i want to go back to the lower case b. as you would say we haven't seen an annual nine hundred percent increase in anything since two of mania and you know it begs the question do you honestly not think that big corn is just a little bubble it seems that's too much in one year. as a stand alone currency it's a possibility is a bubble that he looks publishes ok but you also have to look at what you comparing it to you comparing to tulips so the utility value of a tulip is maybe in a flower at the end of the day the utility value of because compared with the capital beat recording is much more remember because let's. and a good analogy would be a car to determine if
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a crossover price you look at it and look at its historical prices and what the cause is selling for so you have a mercedes that selling for say ninety thousand dollars and then i have this car let's say it's a wrestler not a tester put a wrestler computerize kora nobody's heard of it. last year was for twenty thousand dollars this year for one point two million dollars is that car overpriced is it a party is it a bubble well looking at just a car different looks like it's a problem. but this car comes complete with its own roads and this crossroads can travel anywhere in the world where there's an internet connection and i just saw over the country from state to state with throughout the u.s. but over the oceans and over the sea into europe into asia and africa and not only can you do that it doesn't have to pay any tolls at all it does it causes all bridges in tolls toll and it travels faster than any other car. and you don't have to pay and i guess if i was so sure free now but i'm looking at it from that
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perspective i'm sorry to interrupt you but i want to get to technology questions too and i have one more about that quote that i really want to address now some believe that big point is intended to damage central banking systems and that it pushes a blatant libertarian political agenda by hindering states' ability to collect taxes do you believe this to be true. well i have no idea what it was intended to be because i haven't interviewed the. the originator it's a big cause but if you take my and soon analogy. it was intended to damage or to take down the media companies and if the media companies have been damaged that's because they did not embrace the technology early on and learn to adapt it to their business model of that their business model to it so if the central banking system will be damage it's because the central banking system did not move along with the technology but instead to fight it i don't believe because. it may fall but i don't believe the technology of digital currencies. i think it's here to stay very so in
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order for the banking system both commercial private and the central banking system to succeed and benefit you have to change the way you do business in the business model if you don't then it's a good chance that. if you will take down the central banking system will be much more the system for then a conspiracy of the people who created because i did take out the central bank so maybe the central banking system can learn a little something from the music industry and get on board for the heart of business now i want to move on to target technological innovation now let's talk about tech companies in general what are your latest thoughts on apple is it a buy. i personally wouldn't buy apple if i were to do the buy sell and hold off i would consider the buy the reason is but. buying sony after the walkman has taken over have taken over the industry. apple has probably
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more competition in its field as it has been a leader than any company ever and it's been a simple technology distribution channels or indeed. you know it's a tough ride for most of the direction in apple i think would be neutral down or you know it will rise with the market and they did benefit from an increase in market share by sending the chinese telecom deals but you know they were last to the party and after that there's only but so many chinese you can sign deals with i think they've done it so there will be some new product announcements i'm sure they're going to cave and come up with a large form phablet they may do a watch but you know of all the world computing typesetting watches a wristband or basically broke up the wrong tree i don't see a huge form with the current technology capabilities and even if it does come up with a fair bit that is to stem their market share loss relative market share loss i can't see them gaining any there so you know there's no additive positive it's just
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supposed best damage control let's talk about google now now do you think google's business model is better than apple's. i or you know better or worse is so real to the subjective as for right now google's business model is that performing apple's google's business model and also google such a diverse company. google's much much more diverse annapolis but if you take a look at what google competes with apple mostly and that's with mobile technology mobile communications the mobile computing google's business model through android was designed to attack apple's business model android as open source software open source are princes and ecosystem was designed to attack the fat margin business model which is apple apple was able to have his cake and eat it too for quite some time and as doing prior to management to applied. writing. basically
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a boom in portable computing and micro computing and mostly i think the incompetence of the competitors and their competitors now have learned their lesson and with the advent of android it will focus on developing specialized applications something they couldn't do before where they tried to develop the hardware in the software and the app was performing so gradually looking at the google yes i'm so sorry to interrupt you but we're sadly we're out of time we've got to come back and tell us more because i have many more questions and they're fantastic insight is definitely needed but thank you for your time that was financial blogger reggie middleton now it's time for today's big deal. rachel kurz is joins me now to chalk about whether a c.e.o. looks equates to a company's good financial health honest question i think now according to an
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intelligent hugh dot com survey a company may be better off hiring a person who has brains and beauty to get the company on the right track now allowing for that company's performance to soar and maybe even help its stock prices brands and you're important now economists at the university of wisconsin studied the links between attractive c.e.o.'s and an overall stronger company performance saying quote c.e.o. attractiveness may also affect shareholder value through the visibility channel in which media attention may affect firms in investor base and stock prices we find that more attractive c.e.o.'s are associated with better stock returns on c.e.o. related television news days give me your take on this study is you know telegenic says and confidence more important than your business model well this is what's so fascinating is the way that they defined attractiveness so it is sheer appearance but it also had to do with things like like a bill. he perceived competence and things like that to be so it does have to do
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with how symmetrical your face is it also has to do with how people respond to in those gut reactions do make a big difference you can see a lot of times they'll do studies where they'll see that the politician that a person immediately likes after say five seconds is often the politician most likely to win that election so it's not entirely surprising that when something is televised that people are responding to the way a person looks great it makes a lot of sense you know again but as your question about confidence i think is an interesting one because. the thing about appearance is that people are constantly getting this positive reinforcement right so they're there feeling very confident they're feeling really good about themselves and there is they've seen that and this study showed that people get paid more money if they're more attractive tough life it is now having a good a good looking c.e.o. it's definitely helpful in terms of you know media attention that you might get but do you think that having a sharp handsome smile is really truly better and more important to shareholders than the actual company's performance that seems crazy to me i don't think that
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consciously it is consciously you know people are looking at the nitty gritty of all of the numbers and data that they should be and that's what the study said is that you know most of the time it doesn't really make a difference it's just when we're talking about as we said earlier it was televised events those are the usual events where people are talking about it and also another benefit is the media attention for morrison meier for instance is so cute and young and all of these things so the media looks at her more it gives her more of an advantage in terms of getting free attention and shareholders certainly love all of that attention to the company right and since she took over yahoo the company i believe that it's seen by one hundred fifty percent yes significant i mean is that attributable to the. going to monitor they are no i don't think that it is i mean you know a cute face but she's done a lot of work at that company besides that whether it's hiring acquisitions changes in the way that she deals with employees though. as i think of a much bigger effect than the way that she looks now rachel morrison made some
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major changes obviously on her arrival but you know those changes aren't all about like you said her looks there they have to do with other things and there's management to think that it's a team thing and just putting a pretty face is the most important thing i don't get a most important thing i don't think it hurts and that's i don't know what the take away is it never hurts to have a vertical face at the front all right we're running out of time that's all we have for now but you can see all segments featured on today show at you tube at youtube dot com slash boom bust our teeth we love hearing from you check out our facebook page see you tomorrow bye bye. i have. a site that i think corporations mind. because. i'm trying to call them all about money and have the daschle pick for politicians write the laws. right.
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here in just two. days. that. he's the only u.s. politician who served as a navy frogman and a professional wrestler he calls himself a bird is patriotic to say the truth is the former minnesota governor jesse. about president obama about our failing government and about the truth behind who killed john f. kennedy it's all next on politicking. politicking with larry king our guest the former at the time the governor mrs minnesota an old friend jesse ventura he was host and executive producer of conspiracy theory.
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