there i marinate it this is boom bust and these are the stories we're tracking for you today. first up we have anthony randolph though of the reason foundation live in studio today and we're not backing down with our line of questioning you know won't want to miss a moment of it is going to be awesome lots of that is taking an extra hard look at non-banking institutions they believe to be irreplaceable and systemic for the world's economic help this puts warren buffett now in the fed's crosshairs we'll tell you all about it and in today's big deal ed harris and i discussed the goings on at davos this week and we asked the pope and asking does the financial glamour fast even really not all doesn't all that talk about it all coming up and it all

starts right now. first up you're wrong president hassan rouhani takes center stage at davos is the world economic forum on thursday he's attempting to stir up investment for his country's economy as iran attempts to come back from the diplomatic oblivion if you will now rouhani views davos as an important opportunity for iran he says quote both for economic reasons as well as explaining our political news now the focus of the summit shifts to the middle east on thursday with israeli prime minister benjamin netanyahu scheduled to address delegates just hours after rouhani is

address now a meeting between the pair has been played down by officials but stranger things have happened in the cushy borders of da this. world leaders mingle freely with celebrities and c.e.o.'s and inform atmosphere than that of the usual suspects. now elsewhere the city of baltimore maryland has been inadvertently charging drivers more than two point eight million dollars in fines on account of faulty cameras new not good now according to data from a secret audit obtained by the baltimore sun the city issued roughly seven hundred thousand speed camera tickets at forty dollars apiece in two thousand and twelve now if ten percent were wrong seventy thousand people were wrongly charged with total of two point eight million dollars the audit identified thirteen cameras with double digit error rates and consulting firm u r us corp evaluated the camera system run by xerox state and local solutions in two thousand and twelve and found an error rate of forty times higher than what city officials had claimed now

a spokesman for xerox said the company would have no comment on the audit. and finally warren buffett's berkshire hathaway is so large that the federal reserve is now studying the organization to determine if it's to stomach that up to require fed supervision the u.s. financial stability oversight council led by treasury secretary jacob lew is a valuating which non-banking financial institutions could threaten economic stability if they were to fail and with berkshire's reinsurance operation being the fourth largest in the world it definitely qualifies for the extra amount of scrutiny now the fed can impose stricter capital leverage and liquidity requirements and demand stress testing for prices scenarios if the company proves important enough since the council first met back in october of two thousand and ten they've designated three systemically important non-banking financial firms the first one is new york based in new jersey based prudential financial and new york

based met life all are in the final stages of review. well there you have it as always. we'll be tracking these stories and keeping you posted on all the latest. as the world's business and political leaders meet in davos one of the main themes is income inequality now the pope has in florida leaders to take this issue very very seriously now back here in the u.s. unemployment has been on the decline but many are afraid the american dream is now out of reach for most americans anthony randolph the director of economic research for the reason foundation is here to talk about whether income inequality is a problem and what policymakers can do about it anthony thank you so much for being here finally in the flesh we've done this in new york d.c.

a couple times but i want to start off by asking you know under the obama administration we've seen huge huge gains for corporate profits and stock prices tremendous now the fed has been printing money to help the economy which we know and printing that's argue argue about it and there's that i mean there you go leave it at that yet many company execs there are still bashing the president as a socialist sure question is the president a president is socialist no more than probably anybody else in congress and there's a lot of stuff in the u.s. that's pretty socialist having any kind of welfare system any kind of full security is technically socialist but in the way that word is thrown around trying to demonize the president absolutely now many who would describe themselves as libertarian they seem to buy into the concept you know that the president is all about redistribution of wealth socialism is people think of it and yet the gap between the rich and the poor it's grown here i have the numbers here ninety five percent of income games from two thousand and two thousand and twelve went to the

top one percent there you go now does this suggest rejig redistribution upwards not. downwards crony capitalism or the lot of the crony capitalism comes from quantitative easing which has as bernanke has him self admitted pumped up the stock market driven up equities the top ten percent of america is really what owns wealth in the stock market so it's just going to drive up a lot of wealth for the top one percent in general so under the obama administration has been the entire quantitative easing program started in two thousand and nine so it makes perfect sense that that's where a lot of wealth is going to go up because it's kind of redistributing the price is that what you say you know redistributing wealth by increasing asset prices i mean their incomes if you're talking about income inequality where money is going from the poor to the rich as opposed to just the rich gaining faster than the poor those are two different kinds of income inequality we've got a lot more people on welfare under the obama administration and a lot more wealthy people out of the bubble as a result of quantitative easing whether or not that money is being redistributed

from the poor pushing them on welfare or not is that i doubt that's really what's happening it's a lot more of the fed's printing money we've got an asset bubble right now the stock market is going to blow up at some point probably not in the next couple months well the plans of how the tapering works but in terms of wealth for the upper class it's grown not necessarily distributed from the poor now what do you make of talks about raising the minimum wage i think it makes perfect sense in the united states we talk about. fairness in egalitarianism is a lot and we if you look at the entire history of america it's all about having an equal chance and there's this sense in america that we should we should have more wealth and people don't have it so it makes perfect sense of people are fighting for minimum wage it also makes perfect sense of people fight against it because we also have this pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality in the united states that's run conflict that there's a lot of people think about fairness putting myself in more karmic terms which is

it doesn't matter at the end of the day if everybody's equal as long as you have an equal starting foot in actually i don't think that there should be any minimum wage at that point but in a time. i'm when you do see a lot of people getting richer because of growth to say the stock market it makes a lot of sense that everybody's looking around saying well if the government's helping out the wealthy why can't they help us and bump up the minimum wage now what does that increase unemployment. it depends it would almost certainly increase under employment so if you raise the minimum wage people who have jobs they're probably going to keep their jobs is going to be good for them and that doesn't necessarily mean there are certain instances like in new jersey where they've raised minimum wage and people who got fired but that doesn't mean that more people get hired and what happens is you have more part time work so the biggest thing that's happened since the bubble of two thousand and eight is more part time jobs than full time jobs so it's you wouldn't necessarily see it all depends on how much the minimum wage goes up but under the current policy proposals that are out there raising minimum wage i doubt that you would see dramatic unemployment increase you

would see underemployment increase ok now i want to get back to this part time unemployment but first i want to ask you do you think raising the minimum wage would actually have a measurable impact on income inequality measurable. well it might have some sort of marginal effect for people who have jobs but not really and the number of people that have minimum wage jobs in america roughly three percent most of those are not heads of households so when you see these protests fast food workers and they're talking about we need these jobs to survive there are a handful of workers who are heads of households who have minimum wage jobs oftentimes what they need are more hours not necessarily higher wages although they would love higher wages and you could bump up wages to fifteen dollars an hour you wouldn't see a lot more of those jobs added to the economy you wouldn't see wealth dramatically increased amongst the poor because you've got a small number of people who have the jobs in the first place and a lot of them are teenagers and a lot of them are people who are not the sole earner for their for their household if you want more equality you could just end quantitative easing tomorrow you would

have a lot of the wealth that has been accumulating the stock market get blown away by a bubble crash and you would have less income in. quality i'm not sure if that's really the goal of trying to and income inequality now isn't on the minimum wage at the poverty level now for a forty hour work week is that correct it depends on exactly where you are in the country i mean in new york city it's going to be obviously different than in iowa or texas right now on the subject of lack of ways of increasing the use of part time employment and that's a is that a big part of the lack of wage growth in the u.s. today i mean it's you don't have people that are building the salaried jobs for a long term period of time as much as you did before the bubble if you're hiring a lot of part time labor and that means that employers are not sure really what things are going to look like in the future so they don't want to invest in the full time labor as much as part time labor it also means that they're worried about mobility of the labor force one reason why i like fast food restaurants have

a lot of different people doing ten to fifteen hour shifts because people tend to leave those jobs a lot and if you depend on most of your workforce having thirty five hour work weeks and then a lot of them leave and you don't have people trained. there and the other top down so you have what you do is you hire a lot of people because you're unsure about the future you give them all ten to fifteen hours so they all know enough that they're replacing ball and that they're not costing a lot ok now do you believe that increasing the power of major corporations is a major factor as to why we're seeing this. total total disconnect between the rich and the poor and a benefit to the rich i think that the dodd frank act was a complete failure in trying to address what you call corporate power because you're just mentioned the idea that berkshire hathaway might be listed as systemically important situation that means that berkshire hathaway would be considered too big to fail and we now have firms that are explicitly listed as too big to fail. i would rather see things like the f.b.i.

see it go away and have firms actually have to pay but if you're a positive assurance bank that you have to actually have to pay the road. real costs of insuring deposits to the point where it's actually an affordable and you have these large banks start to disintegrate and have to break them off into smaller bits so you have smaller companies as opposed to telling a bunch of really big firms by the way we're going to label you as too big to fail which means you can to stay as large as you can you can take the money that we're printing you don't have to invest it back in the economy you can continue to just throw it into stocks that are generating a lot for everybody else and we continue to have this sort of muddle through stagnating economy now this might seem like a simplistic question but don't we have laws against monopolies the sherman act you know but what monopolies really are the i mean monopoly is about a single institution that's dominating and even if there is a monopoly those laws typically are only going to get put in place if they start to hurt people with prices start to tire people prices and oil markets right now we

see prices go up when there's oil shocks because you've got actual competition within the oil market but there's a lot of really big oil companies that dominate that market and you don't have a monopoly you actually do have competition but amongst a bunch of really big firms with less innovation than if you had a lot smaller firms who always get around it and you stick with us we have to take a quick break but stick around because more with and new round turn then add harrison talk about the goings on in switzerland this week over the dagoes economic summit as we head to a quick break though here's a look at some of today's closing numbers at the bell stick around.

we welcome aaron eight and abby martin two of a terrific hosts on the our team network. it's going to give you a different perspective give me one stock never i'll give you the information you make the decision don't worry about i'll bring you the. revolution of the mind it's a revolution of ideas and consciousness. with the system and strangling your problems it's would be described as angry i think in a strong. ai or single. we're

back in studio now with ave around the reason foundation director of economic research there with more on income inequality and the american dream now anthony i want to start off with in your speech when leaving the white house in one thousand nine hundred sixty one. president eisenhower and i former military general he gave a warning about the military industrial complex being too big have we heeded his warning absolutely not can you expand upon what we have

a larger military relative to the size of world now as we did then the idea that conservatives will be able to talk about wanting to be have responsible spending and yet also freak out any time we want to cut the budget of a military that is the size of the rest of the world on its own is somewhat ridiculous and when you have things like the sequester where people are the government shutting down even more people in washington d.c. where we're at right now freak out because people are losing their jobs and these people in particular contractors aren't getting paid while the government shut down and contractors lose their job and that hurts local economies because washington d.c. area it's become completely saturated with the military industrial complex those are the contractors that are losing their jobs some of them are my friends that are listening the show right now they are furious. but the idea that we in any way of heeded that warning is ridiculous now what about the idea of health care we're taking a turn here the health care industrial complex isn't that what obamacare is about

obamacare obamacare the affordable care act is about building up the health care complex it's not a health care law it's a health insurance law it's a it's a law written largely by the insurance companies to guarantee themselves customers it didn't really do anything to adjust health care costs in the united states that's one of the things that we're. thomas coming into the law is that it would start to turn the costs of health care down but it hasn't it's helped some people who didn't otherwise have a good insurance we know all the troubles with people trying to get on board but the fact of matter is some people have been able to get on but it hasn't curbed health care costs and in continuing to propagate the current. industry as it is insurance industry as it is i think is problematic because that's one of the reasons why costs are what they are requiring us to have insurance in the first place do you think this is obama's intention you know to increase the health care you know there's no payoff there nothing. i think i had my druthers i would shut

down the affordable care act tomorrow i think that it's a terrible law and i'm completely against it but i don't think that obama's proposals for it were the ferias i think this is a different philosophical view of how the world ought to be normative flea then i have and about half of america has it's not about undermining markets it's not about trying to destroy america but it's his philosophy is undermining markets and it is causing problems for america just not intentionally now like you said health care it's a defining economic issue here in the u.s. if we didn't continue with obamacare what alternative would there be there are market proposals out there but they're really hard to transfer to i mean there's ways in which you could actually tweak the current market structure as it has been set up with care act and one of my colleagues you could all mean has written a couple columns about this about the way that you could take the marketplaces and more or less privatized what was just created by the government there really are

a number of ways in which you could just get rid of the whole edifice but it would require thinking differently about health care costs it would it would go back to a model where you don't need insurance for basic health care things where you only need insurance for critical care so cancer konica transfer from what we have to now to that has problems it would it would create costs and everybody. i would have to be on board with the hiccups going that way. as an end state we can definitely get there how we get there i think there's a lot of people who are my on my side that honestly completely honest about the problems just psychologically getting america to that place now i know that you think policies regarding well they should be targeted at increasing economic opportunity so that's an increase in economic opportunity but what specifically can the government do to increase those opportunities to get so if we want to get stop talking about the federal government as nothing's going to happen there we can talk about the state and local governments and their small things like what things are

called occupational licensing which are really sexy to talk about but if you want to be a barber if you want to be. a theory or designer there's about a thousand different occupations that you have to get licensed for that create costs and limit the actual economic opportunity like on the state and local level there are things that local governments don't even have to wait for the government on if we are going to talk about national government i think that immigration reform isn't just a big deal for the parties and politics it's also a big deal for the economy the governor of michigan today asked the federal government to set aside fifty thousand visas for workers who want to come work in detroit as a way of getting economic growth going in detroit and what he's acknowledging there is that having people come to the united states with entrepreneurial ideas or just to lower the actual cost of labor to help businesses would be good for economic growth and it would create more economic opportunity for more people thinking

entrepreneurial ways actually moving forward with some kind of substantive immigration reform a path to citizenship so that workers that are here in the united states now can come out of the darkness and can actually start to be robust contributors to the economy as it is those are ways that we can move forward on economic opportunity as opposed to trying to just and minimum wage and think about trying to tighten the gap between the rich and the. or just needs to be a more macro level and wasn't that what the us was built on initially you know none of us go along here. for all of everybody and everybody wants to shut the door when they're the last ones. common refrain but it's really true and it's really frustrating and i find myself constantly in debates of people particularly on the right who are about trying to protect the jobs of americans as they've just defined americans today but the reality is that our country was built on people coming over who sometimes didn't even speak english and it took a long time to integrate into society but as a result had to fight really hard to survive and had these entrepreneurial

instincts that sort of fed the lifeblood of the country right now i just want to ask this wealthy people they could have run all of their income through businesses that set up today and this is if one reduces business taxes you know then you get to the question is the same way that private equity firms that use the carry tax to kind of the cost of their businesses doesn't and to business tax kind of opened up a huge opportunity for an arbitrage situation for the wealthy it certainly could and then business taxes is something that's a bipartisan idea amongst liberal and conservative economists will tell you that it is double taxation in the first place but it does create an opportunity for people to game the system which is why you probably and if you're going to business executions and all income taxes and go to some kind of consumption tax you should take the current tax code as it is right now which is maintained by all the lobbyist groups who have their offices around the capitol building if you come in on the train like i did today and you take a cab past the capitol every single building that surrounds the u.s. capitol building is some kind of lobbying firm or lawyer firm for

a lobbyist and they want the tax code the way it is now so that they can poke holes in it and they can if you get rid of all of that and you go straight to a consumption tax there's no way they can do it you can do it anywhere out of time but thank you so much that was anthony randolph a director of economic research at the reason foundation a time now for today's big deal. edward harrison joins me now to talk to all of those so what better week to talk about it now the world economic forum is taking place in davos switzerland this week and it has nouriel roubini twitter feed filling up with his many selfies this is true story if you check it out you'll see what i'm talking about but what exactly goes on at this annual gathering of world business leaders and the political muscle of a role with well it was originally conceived as

a conference in broadmead business management concerns to quote all stakeholders including workers customers and society at large however today davos has devolved into a see and be seen gathering of hollywood stars political hot shots and the corporate elite all congregated together for a few stylish days in the swiss alps and now pope francis has admonished these c.e.o.'s and assorted financial groupies attending this year's posh summit saying quote modern business activity for all its virtues often has led to widespread social exclusion indeed the majority of men and women of our time still continue to experience daily insecurity ed what does this say about the some of the pope francis is pretty much calling it out as a farce and that guy does not like the rich i think we can deduce that from everything else so there's all about equal opportunity and ultimately it's a mirror of our society it's really telling us what where our priorities are i mean the fact that you're saying that it's turning into

a complete spectacle it's almost like the oscars the way that you know that it seems. that these are the values that we have and. those are the kinds of things that are discussing it's a great thing that the pope has sort of interjected himself and said wait a minute you know we actually you know you gave that quote about the ninety five percent of the gains going to the top one percent i think that's exactly what we have to be concerned about the. and he's very concerned about it for sure. speaking of hollywood for the next year now the theme of this year's world economic forum is quote reshaping the world what is that even mean there is a what is. a theme i don't know make something that grandiose and you know what sort of action of things can you actually take away from i mean it's not like the g seven or something like that where you actually get political leaders coming together and potentially making policy decisions it's really just a you know let's let's talk about things in general and let's come up with some

grand sort of vision but at least the center itself and i say you know yeah. but there's no i. mean you know. but here's one of the interesting things i have a long quote that i don't think i'll have time to read but basically it's about apprenticeships there was a meeting yesterday you know kind of a gathering that talks about the idea of apprenticeships and how they should come back into vogue you know already here really quickly as business leaders and governments struggle with ways to address high unemployment rates among young people after the financial crisis and facing the aging population of skilled workers business leaders said that they were hoping to change that through technical training and programs including apprenticeships and internships that are intended to give young people the skills they need to succeed in today's workforce and avoid a lost generation of workers this is from the new york times ed this seems like a great thing to talk about no definitely not at a forum with all these economic leaders and the germans actually are talking about exporting that model you know because that's a model that you have in germany they're talk about exporting it to the united

states and they're already setting that up with actual apprenticeships that they're doing in america and so i think it's a great thing so as fun as it is to make fun of davos for what it's called into there are some good things that are coming out. and we really just wish were there so or does it. and as always thank you very are inside iraq that's all for now but you can see. all segments featured in today's show on you tube at youtube dot com slash boom bust r t s a love hearing from you so please check out our facebook page at facebook dot com slash boom bust our t. he also tweeted us at our nade at edward and h. from all of us here from but thanks for watching see you next time bye bye.

pleasure jimmy sat here's a guy who committed pedophilia with over four hundred children and he's taken to the court take on the old bailey and his defense is if you prosecute me i'm going to go to switzerland that's what i just be a say if you prosecute me and our scads and scores of hundreds of incidents of fraud we threaten to leave the country and the government says. fruit. i know c.n.n. the m s n b c news have taken some not slightly but the fact is i admired their commitment to cover all sides of the story just in case one of them happens to be

accurate. that was funny but it's closer to the truth and might think. it's because one whole attention and the mainstream media works side by side the joke is actually on we're. going to get. at our teenagers. we have a different approach. because the news of the world just is not this funny i'm not laying there but i'm not. you guys sort of the jokes well handled in the sense that the.

breaking news on our t.v. n.s.a. whistleblower edward snowden takes part in a live q. and a lot of people ask their burning questions to snowden including a question about his reaction to president obama's n.s.a. speech we'll take a look at his response just ahead and the capital of ukraine has seen countless clashes between protesters and riot police now a ten cease fire has been declared by opposition leaders negotiate with the government the latest from ukraine coming up and the syrian peace talks have just wrapped a day to win switzerland but with the two sides warring over assad's power in the country will the syrian government and rebels even be able to come to an agreement or bring you more from switzerland later in the show.