no there are i'm marinated this is boom bust and these are the stories that we are tracking for you today. coming up my interview with ben style he takes us on a walk down monetary memory lane yes monetary memory lane and david backwards joins me to talk about marketing monetarism kind of interesting stuff you won't want to miss that plus amazon dot com is coming up with ways to serve your every need and you will not believe what their latest scheme entails i'll tell you all about it now let's get to this.

e-mails obtained via the freedom of information act reveal how far one of wall street's most powerful trade groups is willing to go to fight against cities trying to use eminent domain to diminish the foreclosure crisis despite wall street's recent kings communities around the country are still suffering from the full closure process and over ten million homeowners are stuck with mortgages worth more than their homes are worth that they currently live in and even though loan modifications would save fannie and freddie as considerable amount of money federal housing regulators still refuse to pursue mortgage write downs for struggling borrowers private equity company mortgage resolutions partners has proposed that cities use eminent domain power traditionally reserved for seizing properties for public use to seize more vigilance kind of an opposite in the reverse there now the amount owed on the loan would then be reduced so that the bar was no longer

underwater avoiding foreclosures however system up. or the securities industry and financial markets association is having none of it they are now spearheading wall street spite against using eminent domain to mitigate the foreclosure crisis. elsewhere in the latest on the global four x. sixteen investigation say that five times fast fix four x. sixteen investigation h.s.b.c. has now suspended two currency traders now this is the first time the bank has taken action against employees since regulators began their probe into the market last year a key focus of the global probe which began in april two thousand and thirteen in the u.k. has to do with an electronic chat room known as the cartel now according to investigators the chart room was filled with some of the most influential traders in london and included senior traders from j.p. morgan u.b.s. and barclays the investigation is also prompting some scrutiny into the way prices

are set in the currency markets known as the daily fix efforts are now underway to create alternative benchmarks. and finally amazon dot com they know what you want and they're going to give it to you even before you hurt that's right amazon plans to start shipping items you haven't even ordered yet betting that you will amazon recently received a patent for what it calls anticipatory shipping and that's a system that predicts your future purchases based on things you previously bought the technique could prods delivery time and discourage consumers from visiting physical stores now the patent document amazon says delays between says that it will put delays between ordering and receiving purchases and made quote dissuade customers from buying items from online merchants now amazon says it may box and ship products it expects consumers in specific areas will want then those packages will wait at the shipping hubs or on trucks until the orders actually arrive at

amazon now in deciding what to ship amazon said it may consider product searches previous orders wish list shopping cart contents returns and even how long an internet users cursor hovered over an item interesting stuff well there you have it as always we'll be tracking these stories and keeping you posted on all the latest . in the wake of the financial crisis that began in two thousand and seven many have pointed the finger at the monetary system as the ultimate genesis of financial problems which ended in crisis as we know now earlier i spoke with ben steele author of the battle of bretton woods about the last one hundred years of monetary history i started off by asking him to explain the classic world war one gold

standard here's what he had to say the pre nine hundred fourteen gold standard was actually created without any international conferences or agreements so there were no fixed rules but there was an important implicit rule that pretty much everybody recognized that is when gold flowed into your country you loosened monetary conditions that is you lowered interest rates and when gold flowed out you tighten monetary conditions you raised interest rates and broadly speaking this cap global imbalances from getting out of hand it also kept prices reasonably contained inflation in most gold countries gold standard countries during this period was roughly at zero throughout the whole period so pretty simplistic but why did the gold standard break down. well typically countries spend convert ability of their country their currencies when they go to war and that's exactly what happened in one nine hundred fourteen when world war one broke out the the system

did reemerge in a different form in the one nine hundred twenty s. as countries went back on the gold standard but there were two problems with it first they stopped obeying the the role that you tighten monetary policy when gold flows in loose and when monetary. gold flowed. out the united states and france in particular were just hoarding gold they sterilize gold inflows that is they did not lower interest rates automatically when gold flowed in also the british made a key mistaken one nine hundred twenty five the pound sterling was sort of the linchpin of the system when britain reentered the gold standard they kept the same power of the exchange rate parity that they had left the gold standard in one thousand nine hundred fourteen and so the pound sterling was significantly overvalued because of the inflation britain and experience during world war one this caused britain to experience considerable deflation and recession which

produced enormous political strife and britain was eventually forced out of the gold exchange standard in one nine hundred thirty one and dozens of countries and mediately followed now can you tell me a little bit about france's gold fourteen. well basically the if the french. simply stopped following the rules of the gold standard they did voigt some mistakes that britain had made for example they ballyhooed their currency about eighty percent from the pre pre-war parity. which helped enormously to account for the inflation that they'd experience but they were putting enormous pressure on the bank of england for example which was running short of gold stock to start settling their trade balances in gold but there was a lot of political conflict reemerged in the one nine hundred twenty s.

over the reestablishment of the cold steel do you think that contributed to that great depression. absolutely the currency and trade wars of the early one nine hundred thirty s. helped to strip spread the man a. great depression globally and really created the environment of misery and anger that pave the path to aggression for hitler and mussolini the us treasury was very concerned about this and indeed the bretton woods conference in one nine hundred forty four was held very much to ensure that in the post-war period this type of currency and trade war would not again reemerge because again the u.s. treasury was convinced that it was these economic problems that ultimately pave the path to war and now i want to talk a little bit about more bretton woods stuff in a little while but first i want to ask you would you consider the gold standard

inflexibility also a contributing factor to the depression. well. it's not clear that the gold standard could not have been reestablished successfully for example if britain had really entered the gold standard in one nine hundred twenty five this significantly devalued rate a big change it might have been possible to keep the system. functioning at an acceptable level with out causing the recession in gold standard countries for quite a bit longer now under the bretton woods system the us dollar was the anchor currency that you know gold was other pet other currencies were then pegged to in u.s. dollars because the u.s. currency was called would you consider this a kind of watered down gold standard or something entirely different. it was

actually something quite similar to the one nine hundred twenty s. that is you didn't have the rule of the classical gold standard that monetary conditions were tightened or loosened as gold flowed in and out you merely had this pledge from the united states to maintain a fixed exchange rate although there was no mechanism to ensure that the united states would have sufficient gold stocks in order to meet this requirement and indeed president richard nixon was forced to close to the gold window in one thousand nine hundred seventy one and permanently suspend dollar convert ability into gold precisely in order to prevent complete depletion of the u.s. monetary gold stock now the bretton woods system had it definitely had her ability last seen from the end of the second world war until nine hundred seventy one why do you think the system lasted so long. well i actually wouldn't credit credit bretton woods i would credit first and foremost the marshall plan i should

emphasize that the new i.m.f. that was established at bretton woods was mocked bald by the truman administration for most of the one nine hundred forty s. in the early one nine hundred fifty s. there were also some innovations on the european side like the european payments union that helped to reste or some sense but semblance of monetary stability i would emphasize that it was not until one thousand nine hundred sixty one fifteen years after the i.m.f. was inaugurated that the first nine european countries met they were acquirement of the i.m.f. articles of agreement that their currencies be convertible into u.s. dollars at a fixed exchange rate so indeed the bretton woods monetary system could not really be said to have started until in one thousand nine hundred sixty one by which point it was already coming under tremendous pressure as the united states was losing

gold stocks. now moving to today we are currently in a new system and this is some system has actually endured for a longer than bretton woods system what are its strengths and weaknesses visa v the monetary system that came prior. well you could call it really a system there or no implicit rules that anybody obeys you have some countries in particular the key currencies like u.s. dollar. the euro for example these countries allowing their currencies to freely float their countries operate a sort of dirty float where they monitor the exchange rate and intervene it can at . key points in time other countries fix their exchange rate some countries have gone as far as to abolish their currency use entirely for example in this

hemisphere ecuador and el salvador abolished their currencies twelve years ago and now use the u.s. dollar as their domestic currency ben thank you so much for your time and your insight we have to have you back on very soon. thanks very much erin thanks that was ben steel author of the battle of bretton woods. time now for a quick break but when we return my interview with david a backward professor of economics at western kentucky university he sat down with me to talk about market monetarism plus in today's big deal battery is it not to include it ed harris and i talk about the days of the disposable battery being number and yeah no more but is it for the best well that you decide it's all coming up so stick around.

we welcome era nate and abby martin truly terrific oh shawn we our team at work. is going to give you the numbers but you're the one stock never i'll give you the information you make the decision don't leave about i'll bring you the work is a revolution of the mind it's a revolution of ideas and consciousness is pushed through the system extremely probably would be described as angry i think in a strong. one single. what

an economic slump hit the global economy after the biggest financial crisis since the great depression support increased for a group of economists called market monetarists now market monetarism is a school that cannot mix which espouses that central banks target a level of nominal income or output instead of inflation and and employment or unemployment if you will now earlier i sat down with david back worth a center assistant professor of economics at western kentucky university and i leading he is a leading advocate of market monetarism and i asked him to explain what market

monetarism is here's what he had to say. well market markers would be defined by first buying for most that money matters we believe monetary conditions are pivotal to the business cycle any sudden change in the supply of demand and money's going to generate swings in economic activity we think that happened in two thousand and two thousand and nine but that said we do not think that the central bank the federal reserve should be targeting money or aiming to grow my supply money is created by banks and financial firms so the fed really can't control but what we do think is the secret environment that's conducive to banks producing the optimal amount of money and households and firms you know spending an awful rate as well and we believe that is best accomplished by having the father was a servant stabilized the growth of total dollar spending as the total dollar spending is kind of a product of you know money there is and often it gets spent and if you if you

focus on that as opposed to focusing on inflation or some other measure it believe it be much better world we live in now the name that is thrown around what with total dollar spending is nominal g.d.p. targeting but all it is is the central bank targeting the growth of total dollar spending we believe that's the best way to conduct policy if they did it would be much better now why it should we expect nominal output or nominal income targeting to be more successful then targeting unemployment or inflation. well target inflation is a service well for a number of years and decades but it has its limits so if you target target inflation and it's great when inflation is for fucking changes in demand or spending in that case it's to the right job but you could have a situation where there's a supply shock for example there's some disruption to oil that's going to affect inflation but we would want to respond in the same manner if you would say demand

shock if for example oil was to dry up from some war and the middle east and prices started to soar with it pushed the economy toward a recession in the last and you want to do is to raise interest rates tight monetary policy inflation targeting has this real difficulty of trying to distinguish between changes in inflation arise from demand shocks in those countries supply shocks nominal g.d.p. targeting you don't worry about that all you worry about is stabilizing total total dollar spending unemployment the problems are going to employment is that we really don't know what is the optimal rate of unemployment it's a real variable and ultimately central banks do better when they target what we call a nominal measure a measure that has some kind of dollar priced into it so it could be nominal wages not malenko normal g.d.p. that fail to be much more successful because you can you can shave that over the long run it the fed cannot really shape a real concrete variable measure of economic activity like point and so it's better

in the long run focus on something like nominal g.d.p. this actually leads very well to my next question which is won't targeting nominal g.d.p. instead of targeting real g.d.p. just lead to inflation. no it shouldn't if the federal reserve say target five percent nominal g.d.p. growth rate and that's kind of what it was during the great migration years from two thousand and seven what we saw it simply happen is that real g.d.p. grew about three percent inflation about two percent you see the same kind of product it was full of it again if you focus on stabilizing total dollar spending you're not going to see any huge run up in inflation or or fall on it's we target normal g.d.p. you're still a korean long run inflation expectations so you wouldn't see a big destruction of the bond market you still have the the long run price stability that inflation tare brings but in the short run it gives you

a whole lot more flexibility to respond to economic shocks provide more stability and december two thousand and eleven the economists there was an article published in there on how the economic crisis triggered a rise in various schools of economic thought in the article said quote the market monetarism is the first economic school of thought to be born in the blogosphere with post counter posts and comments there and comment threads replacing the intramural exchange of more established areas so again i ask do you think this is an accurate description of how market monetarism came to be and rose to prominence as it as it is today. i think it's fairly accurate i mean the market monitress that i know the. right to do so we share the reason we kind of emerged was because of the great recession and the failure of the federal reserve to respond adequately to it in our view so what we did is we started on blogs first and then from there a success and that led to op eds and article writing opportunities but really the

conversation was driven by the blogosphere and really has changed you know the debate where the bait first takes place and there's always a place for more serious discussions and research but it's a starting point blogs to really been useful in it not just in this area and in other areas to me tar and other developments in blogs for you get real time feedback from thoughtful people who know these issues deeply and mark and want to present is just one example of that you know the blogosphere opened up a playing field of people like me to participate so that it definitely is a unique experience that has been a consequence of the great recession and technology so see it with blogging ok now the i have recently noted that in twenty thirteen the u.s. government's fiscal balance shift was more austere than that of the euro zone's or japan's yet the us has done ok in terms of both real g.d.p. and nominal g.d.p.

growth what does this say about the effectiveness of monetary policy. well i think it says a lot about monetary policy you know sometimes brass will you believe in fiscal policy will i believe that to the extent that the policy is affective and i believe in certain cases that can be effective but when it is if i. will be offset by what the federal reserve is doing if it's doing a good job sort of going to your question here the reason that the sequester and the fiscal austerity if you thousand and thirteen did not take as big a buy as many predicted and many were pretty predicting recession or worse and the reason you did not do that is because the fed stepped in with q e three and it began to change how much it was purchasing conditional on the data conditional state of the economy so i do think you can work out what happened in the u.s. compared to what happened in europe isn't as evidence that you know the right type of monetary policy can offset what happens with fiscal policy and the reverse is

true if congress were to send that some big familias spending plan and it started to generate higher inflation was the federal reserve that was concerned about high inflation if it stepped in to you know to cut that off it with offset that fiscal policy so i think what we're seeing is what scott sort of called the one tree policy upset to the extent the central bank is doing its job it should offset any real effect that comes from fiscal policy and that is noise houtman but in principle it should and i think two thousand and thirteen is an example of that. that was david backward economics professor at western kentucky university time now for today's big deal. mr edward harrison joins me now to talk about power more specifically power that

comes in the form of small electro chemical tubes filled with magnesium dioxide and zinc better known as batteries you probably know his daughter is now in the economist recently published an article pretty much saying the like of all stock that you may be holding and her gys are duracell the lot are owned by procter and gamble because the days of the battery powered household torch they are probably numbered now what used to be a lucrative market is now being squeezed by l.e.d.s. or a late emitting diodes television remote controls ones powered by batteries can be controlled via apps on your cell phone and the latest gadgets come with batteries built right into them and i turn to you how does a company that once produced a product so prevalent find a way to innovate its way out of this situation that's a good question because you know it's been it's the it's the ever changing question of technology i actually like the fact the use of the word sports the british system i was. in the air but you know if you think about canals and how we went from canals to railroads and then we went from the horse and buggy to cars and you

think about the internet and all these other innovations almost every single time the companies that were dominant in the previous technology and it up getting wiped out in the new technology. and then when you had the new technology was a huge wave of all these different companies just think about the internet in in the late ninety's yeah half of these companies don't even exist but you know there were a few big winners of the initial companies that were were part of the first wave amazon being a problem exam. what's crazy is that you know we grew up with batteries and i think of every toy ever received a christmas of a batteries not included it's just such a prevalent thing for so many years but like you said or somebody those were pretty popular until cars came around but china is the largest battery market in the world today however locally made alkaline batteries there they're cheaper and more ubiquitous than batteries that are made you know form form produced so how do more

costly foreign brands kind of find a waiter survive in an industry where they're only growing market space is no longer interested in their products what do you do well you have to innovate around that you have to find ancillary markets that you can hook your product on to and hope that that's a good way to move forward in slowly wean yourself off of the dependence of your old model really about i.b.m. as an example you know i.b.m. is nothing like the company. was dominant in personal computers or even mainframe computers a whole generation ago and so that's the kind of thing that you need to build to do right and now they're just a consulting firm is a totally different now with other forms of natural power that are becoming increasingly more popular like wind and solar and all these other things is it possible that batteries like i said before the batteries that we grew up with another day they're just going to be a relic something we're going to see the music museum and you know basically we can

harness these these newer forms of. but it was just one month ago i bought a new solar powered. keyboard and apparently this thing you know it only does it doesn't even need real light it just needs you know even fake light from your desk light in a powered infinitely i mean i come down and i turn the thing on and it's always working because it just gets light from you know from the lights the overhead light yeah they were it warrants it's i think i want to. love it it's about it's amazing that's all with all the time we have for now but you can see all segments featured in today's show on you tube or you tube dot com slash boom bust r.t. we also love hearing from you so please check out our facebook page drop us a line facebook dot com slash boom bust our t. you can also tweet us at aaron aid at edward and age from all of us here thanks for watching c.n.n. about. our

new. tanya. well tell me how you and my little grandson. i know. i don't like. being cut off. except. that the spiritual side is destructive. i try to convince her and try to preach that it was a sex but it's dangerous and she had to leave it was a story she had lost her mind. you know you see we'll come back i know it was and i will wait it would even if it means i must wait until

my dying day. science technology innovation all the list of bellemont from around russia we've got the future covered. i would rather ask questions to 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. question for.

coming up on our t.v. president obama tells us he wants to change the n.s.a. surveillance program but are the proposed reforms anough to silence critics to the latest just ahead and iran suspends part of its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief could this temporary deal pave the way for a future troops more on these developments coming up. on the porn industry is leaving the city of angels for the city of san what's behind the move out of los angeles we'll speak with an adult entertainment later in the show. it's monday january twentieth five pm in washington d.c. .