a pleasure to have you with us here today i'm sure. over there i marinated this is boom bust and these are some of the stories that we're tracking for you today. first up kick off to the twenty fourteen a world cup is just days away for brazil humans aren't necessarily welcoming the games with open arms now we're bringing you part two of my interview with forth the economist victor matheson he's telling us about the very wide range of issues facing the world cup both economic and otherwise and the european central bank is moving into chartered waters without a map to get a better understanding of what's going on in euro and dr ben steele is on the program senior fellow and director of international economics at the council of

foreign relations is filling us in on what exactly is happening over the c.v. and in today's big deal edward harris and i are discussing debt forgiveness and the rebalancing risk in our economy let's get to. our lead story today brazil now for the next couple weeks you can't and won't mention brazil without mentioning the world cup for better or worse and with the kick off only a couple days away protests are exploding throughout the country not really an optimal time for brazil that's for sure now brazil has a lot and i mean a lot at stake here the world cup is the most watched televised sporting event in

the world and brazil hasn't posted it in over sixty years so making a good impression is imperative for the country especially in light of the fact that brazil's wizardry of economic growth is. been waning as of late now in the past three years brazil's growth has slowed significantly since its boom years throughout the two thousand which was largely fueled by the country's vast natural resources and heavy investment in china in the past few months however their stock market has waned and inflation has soared but if the tournament goes well it could help prove to global investors that despite its problems brazil still is not a horrible place to put your money however for those protesting the cup is a symbol of how their country's economic boom hasn't improved their daily lives many believe that the roughly eleven billion dollars spent preparing for the world cup could have been better spent on social programs for the poor poverty is a massive issue in brazil and the world bank estimates that nearly sixteen percent

of the country lives in poverty according to a study by the pew research center seventy two percent of brazilians surveyed are dissatisfied with things in brazil today which is up from fifty five percent one year ago and about six out of ten brazilians say hosting the world cup is a bad thing for brazil because it's taking money away from public services like health care and education and to make matters worse soccer protests aren't an unusual occurrence in brazil during last year's confederations cup thousands of people took to the streets in rio to protest a rise in transportation fees and just today in sao paulo striking subway workers and the state government there have agreed to hold emergency talks and an effort to try to resolve the five days strike which is plunged the city's transit system into chaos and threatened to disrupt the first match of the world cup on thursday and if the country's capital of brasilia didn't have enough to worry about already hacker group anonymous announced that they'll be launching an attack on the fifa world cup and its sponsors bottom line while the odds are on brazil to win the world cup it

might come at the cost of their global reputation. the mega event for the beautiful game is only days away but as you just heard resigns aren't necessarily welcoming the games with open arms so in anticipation of the coming world cup we want to play you part two of our interview with sports economist victor matheson now we explore a range of issues from the world cup to the popularity of soccer here in the u.s. but i start off our conversation by asking matheson what the simpsons paradox is in the context of athletic graduation rates here's what he had to say. so here is a kind of a here's kind of a fun issue if you take a look at the graduation rates of college athletes what you will find typically

is the graduation rates of athletes particularly in in more acute programs like football and basketball are lower the graduation rates for the student body as a whole but what you'll also find is that. graduation rates for minorities particularly african-americans across the country whether they're after it whether they are athletes or not are actually quite low and minority athletes actually graduate at a higher rate than minority non athletes and white athletes also graduate at a higher rate and white non athletes what brings the overall graduation rate for for athletes down is the fact that in many programs the athletes are disproportionately african-american and so what you see here is once you control

for the fact that you have lots of african-americans in the or. in your athletic programs on. group traditionally has had real we've had real problems giving getting these folks to graduate on time once you condition on that it doesn't look like athletic programs are nearly as bad as. as they look and as a matter of fact for example on the women's side women athletes across every demographic group are far far more likely to graduate non-athletes were now we talked a little bit about big event economics when we discussed the olympics earlier but i want also ask you about the world cup big event coming up this summer now there are a lot of brazilians who are bitter about the world cup because they say that the money that's going to glitzy stadiums could be better spent on improving the lot of the poor and many of these people taking to the streets in protest sometimes violent protests so do you believe that they have a point. it is really quite telling that the first of the protests actually started

in brasilia the capital city and brasilia is the location of really the most egregious stadium project of the bunch we had a stadium in brasilia which was originally slated to cost about two hundred million dollars all of which was going to come out of the public funds and instead that project has ballooned to about seven hundred million dollars so all well over triple. this isn't a city that has no real top flight professional team that it's it's it's a team that is in that city on a regular basis draws about two or three thousand fans on average and here you're building a seven hundred million dollars stadium that looks like it's going to be a white elephant afterwards at the same time politicians in brasilia are cutting subsidies for things like mass transportation and you know seven hundred million dollars will certainly buy a lot of subsidized bus rides for citizens in places like south following rail. and

brazil is a beautiful city so it's amazing that they're putting the biggest baddest stadium right there but i want to ask you has it soccer and why hasn't soccer rather caught on in the in the u.s. the way it has elsewhere i mean soccer is the biggest sport in the world by far yet the u.s. the analyst doesn't have anywhere near the popularity of basketball baseball or even hockey for that matter well so one thing i would say is that soccer is far more popular than maybe the media give the count for major league soccer is is one of the most highly attended soccer leagues in the world view of the n.f.l. obviously draws more than ever last but last year for example the seattle sounders out drew the seattle mariners by a wide margin. when you look at t.v. ratings especially for big events like in like the world cup the last time we were in the world cup we had big games against england big games against ghana the t.v. ratings for both of those games exceeded the television ratings for any single game

of the world series that year so the top rated soccer broadcasts in any given year are they match up pretty well with the top rated broadcasts for the n.b.a. or major league baseball ok that's interesting and good to know it leaves well my next question english soccer star david back on his fielding a team from miami so do you think he's going to have success and if so why. well certainly one thing that beckham is a very good at is marketing here's a guy who was the for many years was the face of soccer worldwide in terms of sponsorships was the most sponsored had the highest sponsorship numbers of any athlete in the world he single handedly really put major league soccer on the world math world soccer math and this is very interesting considering big the back room was never anywhere close to the best actual soccer player on the field of anyone so

if anyone knows marketing it's david baca mind you just because you're good at marketing doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be good for you good product on the field you'll no sample it never managed teams that are that have become world champions so i think that part of the business is is completely different from the idea of actually putting people in the seats getting his miami team to create a good soccer products a whole different ball game do you think the fact that miami is such an international city will only work back on the favor. well that certainly helps what's really working against him in miami is that miami has shown. huge reluctance in be in embracing outdoor sports in particular major league soccer has already had a field franchise in miami of the miami general who are contracted about ten years ago. they also are the fort lauderdale strikers part of the old north american

soccer league folded in back in one thousand a before the major league baseball team the floor tomorrow florida marlins have traditionally been near the bottom every year in attendance so getting people out to out to games especially in the summer seems to be a real trick in florida and no one's quite figured that out not just soccer folks even baseball folks haven't quite figured that one out the marlins do have a very fancy stadium there in miami with a nifty retractable roof it's kind of cool but when i ask you restock hurricane katrina devastate i mean devastating orland so what role do you think professional sports can play in the redevelopment of cities like new orleans and others hit by catastrophe or even in cities ravaged by dust realisation like pittsburgh. well there's certainly something to be said that says that stadiums and professional teams are really a kind of a rallying point they certainly make people happy that unite people so i think that

sports definitely have an outside influence on culture that's way way beyond the dollars and cents and i think everyone nationwide when that first win that first game was played back in new orleans for the for the saints after hurricane katrina that was really a big deal. that being said that in terms of dollars and cents we put about five hundred million dollars of new money into the super bowl super dome after katrina the real question is whether that money could have been better spent for example redeveloping neighborhoods in the lower ninth ward rather than providing a nice new home for a billionaire owner and millionaire players that was sports economists victor matheson. time now for a very quick break but stick around because when we return a council of foreign relations senior fellow mr ben steel is telling us about the e.c.b. his recent drastic measures then in today's big deal edward harris and i are talking

about debt forgiveness and the rebalancing risks in our economy and don't forget that you can see all segments featured in today's show on you tube at youtube dot com slash boom bust our teeth and on who who doesn't love who now it's time to run but before we do here are a look at some air closing numbers at the bell come on back. to you like me who want your comedy news and some t. want your comedy news to be a bare fisted no holds barred fight to the dad. but the truth vampire whining into the next in the corporate elite the billionaire freaks well they're going. well that's what you get with my new show projected tonight.

the slumlords engine well it's a missile that is being sued to add to the list of numbers among the many candidates for the prophecy of current issues actually back to a new doesn't do too much for ad revenue my own tech agriculture giant teeth on a seventy six year old american farmer based in india fallout do you think this is going to create for the cia do you think this is what's triggering a great american city largest economy in the world it's also the largest debtor nation in the history of the world breaking the set is mostly of alternatives to the status quo but one might give real alternatives points to looking towards the american dream the next they were just trying to survive stime for americans and lawmakers are forced to wake up and start talking about the real causes problems for.

welcome back now the european central bank is moving into unchartered waters with its announcement of negative deposit rates and cheap long term loans to banks now these are historic moves and you see the president mario draghi has said that there are likely more to come so to get a better handle on what's happening in europe i spoke with dr ben steele a senior fellow and director of international economics at the council of foreign relations now dr steele is an expert in international finance monetary policy and economic history and his most recent book is titled the battle of the bretton woods now i started our conversation by asking him if he was surprised that the e.c.b. if you get unanimous support for these new programs take a look at what he had to say. but i think it's pretty significant druggy managed to get the germans on board because obviously that was the area that he was meeting

the most resistance it's significant however that the e.c.b. governing council still couldn't do agree definitively to go forward with some version of quantitative easing that is large scale asset purchases as we've seen from the fed the bank of england in the bank of japan. now i think the big concern is inflation or better put deflation so are you concerned about inflation expectations in the euro zone and if so why well i mean inflation is been declining relentlessly for most of the last two years it's down two point five percent now across the euro zone i think one of the primary reasons that. german resistance to more aggressive monetary loosening. is being beaten down is the fact that inflation in germany is now down to

a mere point six per. the e.c.b. might have to do you more in fact mario draghi himself said at the last e.c.b. presser so if the e.c.v. does do more what would you recommend it do and why his language is spotty language certainly suggested i think he wants to go forward with some version of quantitative easing large scale asset purchases it's clearly much more difficult to do in the european context than it is in the united states the fed of course has. been a big buyer of u.s. treasury securities and mortgage backed securities there is no version of the u.s. treasury market in europe so the e.c.b. the options are more limited in controversial they could intervene in the sovereign bond market and i think that may still be too difficult politically to get through the governing council in the next several months or as mario draghi hinted they

might move forward. with the establishment of a deeper asset backed security market in which the c.b. would intervene in order to push down private lending rates ben do you think that young vide men will go along with q b. that's yet to be seen it is significant that he allowed druggy to go forward with the statement that the c b was investigating the use of the asset backed securities market as a means of engaging in asset purchases so there's no doubt that drug users achieve some some progress within the governing council now elsewhere in europe we've got some serious internal conflicts i'm talking about the ukraine of course now ukraine's economy it's a mess but they were able to get an i.m.f. bailout in order to stabilize things so do you think the i.m.f.

program will be enough or will we see a default as we did in greece you know that really depends on political developments over the next year and in particular over the next several months i mean the i.m.f. program was premised on some pretty cheery scenarios that they were painting for growth next year they're talking about a five percent contraction in the ukrainian economy this year but two percent growth next year and four percent the year after that i mean we would really have to have a marked improvement of the political situation and the military situation on the ground within ukraine in order to see growth figures like. then it isn't the i.m.f. strategy deflationary i mean why go through the wringer trying to make interest payments when you can just write all this stuff down basically just go through a lesser wringer i mean they're going to default at some point anyway no i think

that's looking pretty likely you could also argue that even greece and the markets been fairly optimistic about greece even greece is going through some form of slow motion restructuring you know rescheduling of the debt we're going to see the lowering of interest rates etc etc in the case of ukraine you know the i.m.f. is in a difficult situation it is fundamentally a lending institution it's not the sort of institution that's going to take be able to take the lead politically in terms of forcing a restructuring of ukraine's debt. you know ben do you think the i.m.f. strategy is likely to eleni ukrainians or is the threat from russia great enough that they'll be willing to make the sacrifices well it's interesting to note that if you go back to april of last year the yana covert government in ukraine was in the final stages of negotiations with the i.m.f.

on a fifteen billion dollars financial assistance package but the whole thing fell apart . because of ukraine's resistance to significantly lower energy subsidies of course this time around the ukrainian government was not in a position to resist this but there's no doubt that this is very unpopular on the ground within ukraine in of course the new incoming government in kiev is on shaky foundations and it's going to be difficult to. keep popular support in the country if the country is seen as being forced into austerity by foreign powers. now ben i noticed that you had an i pad index which you posted early last month and it reminds me a little bit of the economists big map index so can you tell me a little bit about why you did the index and what you found if you might call my

index the little back in. the economist big mac. index was a way of looking at the degree to which prices are aligned internationally by picking a product that legitimately global and the same across borders the. mcdonald's big mac. the problem with the big mac is that it's not really tradable internationally it gets pretty mushy if you try to put it in your pocket and cross borders with it where is the i pad mini is quite durable when you need to travel with it so arguably it's a better mattrick of whether prices are well aligned into nash. only although obviously you wouldn't expect the i.m.f. or other official institutions to rely on it but i did find some pretty interesting things using this metric for example prices of the i pad mean very closely aligned between the united states and china which would suggest that the chinese renminbi is really not that significantly undervalued against the dollar at this point. that

was dr ben stiller senior fellow and director of international economics at the council of foreign relations time now for today's deal. big deal and today edward harrison and i are talking about debt forgiveness and the rebalancing risks in our economy pretty exciting stuff now in the house of debt which is fantastic by mere safety and i keep me on has been getting a lot of attention for the ways that it explains the causes of the financial crisis and for policy prescriptions afterwards now here's a clip from our interview with professor amir syfy one of the co-authors. so the central argument that we're making is if you have a very narrow focus and all you think about is well we have to protect banks we

have to protect banks you fail to recognize that actually forgiving some of the dead while it may impose a short term loss on mortgages is actually better in the long run for the overall economy and i think that's the painful lesson that we've learned and that is exactly why the great recession in the united states was such a pro long economic downturn it's because we didn't do nearly enough debt forgiveness right up front and not enough up front so at first and foremost can you give me a brief rundown of their argument and particularly amir's right there and you know in their book why did they emphasize debt forgiveness specifically well the basic with their argument is that when you have debt crises in the basically. there's been some element of debt forgiveness that's been associated with. specific examples in american history and other history and what they argue is the reason for the is because a debt contract is really

a contract between two that have to take either. the upside of the downside the upside be you know if i get this this house or whatever this possession is and i pay interest for that you get the interest and that's the contract when the contract goes bad when bad loans are made it's both the debtor and the creditor who have entered into the contract and made mistakes and therefore they both have to share some semblance of pain but what we've done in this particular downturn is we've basically build the bankers out and then we've let the debtors fend for themselves and that's created a negative downward spiral that deflation if you will because of the deal leveraging that we've seen now i personally i totally agree with you know. and the idea that you both do it the debtor and the part played no one wins here one to the person who is lending out money and get totally forgiven and the person who is who needs to get forgiveness should be telling for it and it's a good thing but i want to ask you you know this book has been compared

a lot to timothy geithner's stress test book but i can you break down the differences the small and bigger differences between the two because i understand the governor's book is more bank centric and rotation and i haven't read it but maybe you can talk to me about it i think that the good news general view and we saw this during the crisis and what he said since the crisis has validated his view as being this is that you know we were it was an epic downturn and as a result of that we needed to make sure that the banking system was actually made a hole in some capacity because if it weren't made whole then we would have had a great depression he was concerned about bank failures in the rise of the sort that we had during the great depression the reality of course is that he was basically bailing them out and he conflated the banking system as a whole with individual bags and there were no there were no actual penalties for the bankers themselves and when i say conflating the system with the banks which

are making the system a whole but not necessarily in the. whole meaning this big could go bankrupt. you could wipe out the shareholders and you could keep those assets in place right but he didn't want to do that because he was in bed with the bankers and is this centrally a supply and demand question i mean here's the example suppliers you know going to believe that suppliers of credit were the ones who needed saving a person the other is that supply demand. he thought it was a supply question that is you know credit supply propped up and that will make everything whole but the reality is both credit and supply if there's no demand for credit you're not going to get any economic benefit and thank you as always that's all the time we have for now and remember we love hearing from you so please check out our facebook page at facebook dot com slash starting and please tweet us at aaron aides at edward and h. from all of us here at boom bust thank you for watching we'll see you next time a bomb.

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coming up on our street arizona faces a huge influx of undocumented children which cross the border of the u.s. and mexico over a thousand are being transported to facilities in the state southern part more on how the u.s. is handling the situation just ahead. and two california counties are suing the world's largest producers of prescription painkillers it's in response to an addiction epidemic to these drugs but it's producing tragic consequences more in the case coming up. and over a thousand religious leaders call for a change to the u.s. prison system they want congress to pass an act which would dismantle aggressive sentencing laws more on that later in the show.