to the justice department in a hearing on wednesday chief executive brady dougan will hit back saying only a small group of private bankers were involved with helping americans conceal their wealth however here's the quandary we know that there are politicians who have offshore bank accounts mitt romney comes to mind for example i think he's got a couple and why do people have offshore bank accounts well there are a variety of reasons but a lot of the time it's to avoid paying taxes however the current colossal colossal tax code here in the u.s. permits these abusive accounting gimmicks and there are billions more lost in accounting gimmicks right here in the us gimmicks like for example the ability for people to earn wages that much lower tax rates thanks to long term capital gains i'm talking carried interest here horse what else have you talking carried interest now are officials turning a blind eye to a problem here at home or are they employed distraction tactics with this whole credit suisse business we'll let you decide.

tokyo based mt gox was once the largest because an exchange in the world now it appears to be bust the question today however is whether the whole propos currency movement has been dealt a fatal blow max kaiser the dynamic of the report here on our t.v. is a crypto currency even jealous and he thinks the mt gox episode is good for crypto currency is because it strengthens the community by a living in exchange with poor systems in controls max has his own crypto currency coin so i began by asking him to give us the full deep read on max going take a look. is next generation cryptocurrency cryptology is stronger it's faster. there's

a lot of money moving into alternative currencies like max coyle this is one of the fallout from the bitcoin situation with mt gox people realize that they need to diversify into other coins other crypto coins and max coin is immediately one of the most popular alter currencies as they're called are crypto currencies in the market and we've got some surprises coming from max cohen some enhanced minutes through the cryptology that will place it probably the absolute cutting edge of crypto currencies if i want to invest in max point what do i need to do for the layman if it's just someone watching today what would they do to go get some point . well there are a number of exchanges that offer max coin including m. c. x. now which is the first major crypto exchange to offer it there's a lot of crypto trading going on right now people are trading in and out of bitcoin they will acquire a bitcoin position then the go to an exchange in the choir a max going position so once you enter the crypto world you're free to trade in two

out of different currencies but you have to make that first move out of fear and into crypto so most people go through big coins and once you have a bit coin that's kind of your gateway into these other alternative currencies like max coins so the market capitalization day one got up to five or six million dollars there's a several million that have been created or mind already people are mining these things in the twenty four hours a day they're making money mining mack's going and they're going to exchanges they're exchanging them for other alternative currencies for bitcoin and this entire crypto market is really becoming quite significant and i'm not surprised that you're seeing a lot of the established banking industry quite nervous about what this portends for them right it could mean a lot of negative things on their side but you know with mt gox having imploded is because i'm going to zero that's the real question will big coin go to zero. no i

don't think that's the case that to say to imply that mt gox blowing up it will impact the intrinsic value of fifth coin is incorrect because bitcoin itself the cryptology and the protocol is as a value well beyond how it's traded on a one exchange in this case mt gox i think it's showing a remarkable resiliency in the face of the mount gox collapse if i remember if you look at like world com and ron lehman brothers bear stearns those are paper ponzi great empires that collapse to zero or near zero because they were there's no intrinsic value whatsoever with crypto with bitcoin you have one of the major exchanges mt gox going through enormous difficulties but there's still tremendous value people are buying it knowing that the long term value is very good you've got second market in new york a very sober launching more advanced trading platform to mt gox was really

a toy. exchange where they were trading virtual trading cards from a few years ago they were never really in a position to be a serious trading platform so this is not a surprise really and the value of the big going to stuff is holding up very well and i expected to make new all time highs in the next six to nine months max what you say to those who say that you know for any crypto currency has no intrinsic value. well that's correct because the cryptology is extraordinarily valuable internet age where you can harness the network of tens of thousands of computers to go through the algorithms in the protocols to decipher the machinations required to mine a bit coin and this at the end of the day has value above and beyond what is in the

fear world remember a fee after n.c. technically has no intrinsic value if you talk to paul krugman at the new york times he'll tell you that well yes the u.s. dollar has no value except it is backed by men with guns. you know this is not really a currency so much as a license to invade countries star wars create kleptocrats become a monopolist it's not really a currency the u.s. dollar is not a currency the us dollars a license to commit war crimes pretty much backed up by psychotic warmongering pentagon that's not really a currency gold is a currency silver is a currency bitcoin is a currency the dollar is not a currency the british pound is also another license to invade in the extra exploit and extort it's not really a currency percent has no intrinsic value. max we can always count on you for those sound bites like warmonger in pentagon so i thank you now i want to ask you how do you get people other than true believers to transacting crypto currency when it

fluctuates as much as big as i mean what are you doing to tackle this on the front of maps point well you're saying adoption of the currencies in countries that are undergoing tremendous stress so in cyprus they're now opened a coin bank and a crypto bank which is now just like any other high street bank that's doing business purely in point you've got venezuela active in bitcoin you've got eastern europe russia active in bitcoin the ukraine apparently is active in bitcoin so countries on the periphery that have been disenfranchised by the money center banks who are backed up with men with guns remember that's what the fiance is about they now realize that as a store of value as a way to transport their money they're adopting crypto currencies so when this will end up in the center of the global economy in the g twenty countries that will come later but it's already happening in africa and europe and south america they're

already adopting bitcoin is becoming a way of life because they realize it's a great store of value great way to sun money and it's a great way for economic freedom economic sovereignty and the established bankers are really running scared i think this is what's behind a lot of the recent. kind of increase in banker suicides we've seen about twenty bankers have committed suicide in the last few weeks i think that they realized the jig is up bitcoin is here cryptocurrency they're here they can't compete with crypto currency the they fear having to actually work for a living and not just get printed money from the government and pad themselves huge bonuses so they're taking the cowardly way out they're killing themselves and this is what you'd expect in a club talk or see that's fed by the money printing and quantitative easing so quantitative crypto currencies are really pushing aside the malevolent in fl. and psychotic bankers who do nothing but pat themselves huge bonuses start wars and create huge wealth and income inequality now actually rational that countries on

the periphery they've really adopted big point and embrace state or their own crypto currencies but do you think most governments will see crypto currency is as a threat and try to ban them you kind of said yes but i would love you to expand upon that. flow that a lot of as you point out governments and people are adopting bitcoins for example in iceland they developed or a coin which is a crypto currency for the people of iceland you have them as a coin in the united states for the nation of the indigenous population indians are a look oh it's a nation are creating their own coin in scotland they're trading scots going again to establish their own sovereignty and service of will there be a pushback from the established governments in the established banking industry of course there will be but they have really no ability to stop this wave of innovation just like they can't stop p.d.p. file swapping they can't stop bit torrent they can't stop the internet is that they

are there when they're going to be fighting a losing battle so this is unfortunately for them. not going to be pretty i think again that's why a lot of these bankers are killing themselves because they realise that they're never going to win this battle against cryptocurrency they're taking the cowardly way out i say don't kill yourself compete on an open you know be a capitalist compete with script don't just throw yourself off a building you know try to be more like a capitalist. that was max kaiser host of the kaiser report here on our t.v. now you want to miss the second part of my feeling and tomorrow find out why he says the head of one big bank should be behind bars but time now for a quick break but stick around because that guy right there he's going to be with us after return obviously to dean baker there it is about the u.s. economy and asking him to explain some of the trends in the u.s. wage and consumption patterns that we've been seeing and in today's big deal i'm joined by edward harrison to talk about the housing market will people around

january a surge in home sales to look at some underlying trends but as we head to a quick break here is a look at some of your closing numbers of the bell stick around.

for the help to buy scheme for real estate which is a copycat of fannie mae and freddie mac. debacle which caused the subprime crisis of two thousand and seven the british energy corporations are going to take fracking even though in america has been proven to be. completely on the economical and environmental disasters but they're going to do it here anyway because why nobody in the media here except for maybe george will be up over there to guard him will say anything about the fact that this is an ecological disaster and more importantly an economic boon dog all that will increase britain's debt to even higher than it is right now the highest it's been a decade. democratic revolution

or government cool as russia and the west trade blows ukraine lies. what does the future hold for the deeply divided country. right on the scene. first for you and i think that you're. on our reporters' twitter. instagram. to be in the know.

while the housing bubble was inflating macroeconomists dean baker was mourning people of the problems as far as back as far back as two thousand and two was a while before it actually popped and he was also a frequent and boucle critic of the policies which caused the bubble to inflate in the very first place now after the bubble popped and the recession he anticipated crushed the employment outlook for the u.s. has. turned his focus to jobs we want to talk to him today to get his read on the jobs picture the u.s. economy and the housing market dean thank you so much for being here one of the few people can say i actually called the crisis before it happened because a lot of people say they do if they really have to have it in paper figure out how serious. it is in the interim but well done and i want to start by asking you now the economy the economy was growing above three percent all through the second half of last year now people see one percent growth for the first quarter what is going

on here can you give me some explanation of these two things going on i think the main force is first off the growth and second half of last year was inflated by inventory cumulation very very rapid pace of inventory cumulation i don't think anyone could think there would be continued so if you pull out the inventories the growth was somewhere little over two percent so that's kind of the underlying growth rate that's what you would expect it to fall back to once you have the adjustments so there's two stories here as we get into the first quarter one of the slower pace of inventory cumulation that means a drag on growth that's a negative second thing whether i was really whether i keep to i don't know i was too poor for the longest time to start preparing let's listen well not only we always get bad weather in december and january so that's not news but this was definitely worse and i'm saying that because i got stuck in minneapolis because the snow still you know because i personally felt it but no it definitely was i would say through january it was noticeably worse but through february it definitely was so so i would say that was had an effect slowing growth you know half

a percent maybe as much as three quarters of a percentage point so i think weather really did have an impact given the weather it had something to do with extreme weather in places that aren't familiar with it it wasn't like a lot of snow in new york where they can handle and there can accommodate it was atlanta and other that's right you had a lot of bears in the south that don't typically get such severe winters right and so the fact that i mean that's why i was pulling it originally so that you know that new york got snow or boy you know that shocker that happens in january so that's not news so it is. when you get in atlanta it shuts down much of the south ok now dean i want you to take a look at these two charts that we have right here there from the st louis was fed data say now the first one if we get those back out there right now it shows the real wages plummeting during a crisis and then rising again recently however they plummeted once again and now this second shark we're going to pull up it shows real consumption expenditures also plummeting during the crisis and then picking up briskly and then flat lining you can see there from twenty eleven onwards what do you make of the differences

between these two charts. the wage story this is very striking i mean we've seen very weak wage growth really for the last three decades the one period where we actually saw good wage growth it was the end of the ninety's right you know where we had low unemployment and that's you know i think really fundamental so we've seen very weak real wage growth you know depending on exact time period stagnant or even falling slightly in terms of consumption people are able to maintain their consumption to some extent or even increase it into a large extent because of this increase in asset prices so this is the housing bubble so part of the story of the housing bubble was that it's people's house prices went up they were borrowed against their homes and they sustained or even increased their consumption now that house prices fall and consumption of course is falling back with it right now do you think this. this this chart that we just had up it kind of demonstrates the problems with aggregate demand oh no oh you know this is this is the basic story that you know we're stuck in a situation where we have been inadequate aggregate demand this is something

economists basically dismissed as an issue for decades they just didn't think it could possibly be a problem and now we're having you know economists very pramod comes like larry summers talking about secular stagnation that's basically the story and until you know the story i was saying is ok with three ways out of this one you can have another bubble in the right mind would want secondly we could have large amounts of government spending government deficits which we have to some extent but not big enough the third way is to get the trade deficit down which strikes me is the the best. most rational path to go unfortunately there doesn't seem that much interest in that either in policy circles but that's the my view how we get you know aggregate demand back up and hopefully would see wage growth again dean talk to me about this how what about trade how would that work we will start with trade when we have a deficit around five hundred billion that means that money being generated here it's spent overseas trying to mexico wherever it might be not creating demand here so it creates a big hole in the minute how do you feel that the best way to correct the trade deficit is get the dollar down because the dollar is what determines relative

prices if the dollar falls by twenty percent other things equal all these foreign goods cost us twenty percent more that means we'll buy domestic goods rather than foreign goods people will hate hearing out there well we've done this before and there is no other way you would just that so the people are paying more course we're all going to you know we'd rather get cheaper imports but on the other hand i mean a lot of jobs for people and they won't eat that they want to well put actually there will be a lot of opponents to that that thought but it you stated it quite well now why do you think people's consumption patterns are so static in the face of all the variation in wage in income growth that we're seeing right now why why the static well there's a couple things i mean one is people are largely set in their ways but also a lot of consumption is pretty much fixed month to month you know you're not going to move out of your home you know that's a big portion of consumption your health care i mean is a lot of things you know if you have a car you're making a car i mean there's a lot of things if you think about where you dollars are going an awful lot of what you spend month by month that's pretty much fixed you know you know people always

have an option to go out to dinner or something like that so there are things like that but to a very large extent consumption is fix and that's what we really do see big ups and downs in consumption you know over over short periods of time right it's not like vacations are going to. going to crush that pattern and the big the big ticket items now i want to talk about this you wrote a piece with jared bernstein on there is called replacing excuse me let me get the title right getting back to full employment a better bargain for working people now in this i want to i want to ask you. how do we get to anything close to full employment you talked about this a lot in the piece and i read it it was fascinating but i want you to explain kind of to our viewers how do we get back to that well the key thing is we have to get demand up and you know we just went through the three ways again my best stories get the trade deficit down the get the dollar down no there is another route that we talk about well but in the book and maybe this is the most promising way politically is to actually reduce the supply so one way to do that is through work

sharing which is actually you know our model here is germany germany people often look at the unemployment it's five point two percent they go while booming economy you know their economies grow no more than our economy the reason why they've maintained a low unemployment rate in fact lower than before the crisis is that they get employers to keep workers on the job when they see a fall off in demand and they cut back hours so rather than laying off ten percent of workers they cut back hours by ten percent and that's a very good way to go it works and this kind of i we're running out time but i want to quickly mention this you are you know supporters of modern monetary very they've long called for replacing unemployment benefits with job guarantee and that reduces the social issues associated with forced i don't mess what do you think of this kind of idea i know that you're you're into it well i'm willing to experiment with that i want to say replace it because you have to see what looks like if you're talking about having millions of people been employed by the government you want to make sure you could do that when there was a blow up in your face jeanne i'm so sorry i wish we had more time i have

a lot more questions and you explain this very well but that is all the time we have for now please come back very soon that was macroeconomists dean baker co-founder of the center for economic and policy research time now for today's big deal. and big home sales are up and edward harrison knows about it and he's going to to talk. about it now we're going to be discussing january surge and home prices you know what has happened kind of on one hand mortgages applications they did mortgage applications that's what you do you fill out to buy a home they've been at their lowest levels in nearly two decades and this means not as many buyers are in the market heading into the spring season which is usually the busy time of year when it comes to buying homes so i got her start up asking

new home sales are up but the more job creation seem to be weak what's been driving this recent recovery in home prices if this is the case in terms of buying a home in two thousand and thirteen things were looking up home prices were going up but actually the rate of growth has been declining in home prices recently and the interesting bit is we're talking here about new home prices new homes are only seven percent of the market existing home prices or exit existing home sales i should say are at eighteen month lows so you have mortgage applications you have existing home prices down that's ninety three percent of the market you know the fact that we have new home sales that's not really that big a deal right it's not it's not as important as they're reporting it to be a lot of exile if i want to take a look at this graph really let's throw it up on the screen if we can now the bottom half of the graph shows how big of a drop in housing prices each city experienced at the top half of the graph shows how much each market has recovered have las vegas miami and phoenix the biggest

drop and i mean they tend to win this stuff and the best recovery and so i thought the bubble burst in these housing markets you know how how can this happen again you know it's happened before how could it happen again and can you explain what's happening in these markets because they are volatile markets they're crazy markets and there's a lot of jokes made about them but how do you how do you predict what's going to happen with the bottom of these markets no one was there to pick up the bottom and people came in. and investors real cash investors came into the market i think we actually even have some graphs on that they're not you know it's either phoenix or las vegas we can put that out there that out we can show that some of us you know what we see here i think this is this is the one for phoenix or it's the overall market you can see that those are all ok of cash investors was increasing as we had

the increase how we have drugs as well as very ones that are you see that. here's the interesting thing. is you can see it's all up except the part at the bottom is showing that even though vegas is still going up and we see big it's a sort of a harbinger of what happened elsewhere because they lead in terms of the way down and then leading the way up the cash buyers are now increasing and. so people are starting to get out the cast by smart money you know our money is getting out of the market and yet we still see that things are going up so the question is is this a harbinger of you know the market softening somewhat not necessarily the market going down but the home price appreciation softening so when you look back at what dean baker was say about aggregate demand or whatever being there to the degree that it's been it's been boosted by the housing market. potentially a headwind in terms of getting that getting that g.d.p. growth so the question is why are they point out the smart money and why you know

that it's you explain it kind of but if you'd think that they'd write it longer you know well the smart money the reason that they're smart is because they see every one of his sisters going to the market when you're plumber tells you that i am right out into the they've decided these markets have risen enough they've gotten their money you know they've bought at a low price now they've sort of the high price and rather than get greedy and take everything that's on the table take the chips off the table move on to other places where they think that there's a better return so real quick thirty seconds what do you think is happening with the housing market. twenty fourteen what do we have to. have a softening of the pace. so i think that the mortgage application slowdowns would continue and then therefore the year over year changes that we see in things like the case shiller and it's going to come out and so eventually we're going to be at a flood thank you as always have wished you could talk more about this but that's all for now however you can see all segments featured in today's show on you tube at you tube dot com slash boom bust r t we also hearing from you so please check

out our facebook page at facebook dot com slash boom bust r.t. you can see and tweet out us as well to aaron to aid at edward and h. from all of us here at boom bust thank you for watching see an x. time shall. be used you don't know if you don't panic or. response to bruise. everyone in my life that i cared about they're gone and then. i came to skint well. i was national champion in track and field and also was able to go and qualify for the olympic games. but had to experiment with that the drugs i had

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