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tv   Boom Bust  RT  June 19, 2014 12:29pm-1:01pm EDT

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middle east is playing out in the markets pretty interesting stuff and in today's big deal i'm joined by the brilliant and the beautiful abby martin now miss martin is sitting down with me to discuss modern women in the workplace like ourselves can we have it all or like to think that it's all coming off so let's get to. the phone is day to day i'm bust with to leave stories we're giving it to the first is the federal open market committee vision for the future of the u.s. economy the second is amazon's swank. new mobile phone now we'll start off with the fed stuff it's pretty important the f o m c has decided to continue to taper its quantitative easing program cutting another ten billion dollars from its monthly
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bond purchases to thirty five billion dollars officials believe the us economy will expand at a rate of two point two percent in two thousand and fourteen the fed projected the benchmark federal funds rate would be two point two one point two one point two percent on average by the end of two thousand and fifteen and two point five percent by the end of twenty sixteen unemployment has continued to fall and inflation is picking up but it's still unclear when the fed will decide to raise rates. now time to talk about the tech stuff amazon in fact the tech company is getting into the mobile phone market and what a market it is it sure is now wednesday amazon introduced a new smartphone called the fire phone adding yet another tentacle to the sprawling online merchandise business it's available on starting at one hundred ninety nine dollars with a two year contract and six hundred forty nine bucks without a contract but expensive stuff now the phone. one has competitive hardware that
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amazon c.e.o. jeff basis compared to the i phone five s. and the samsung galaxy but it also has additional features as well one is a head tracking tool that allows users to interact with a phone with out directly touching the screen with your finger that's kind of bonkers now users can use the fire phone to easily connect to the whole gigantic amazon ecosystem so of course you can access amazon prime's music and video but also figured out a way to make it easier to buy online stuff as well now one feature called the firefly recognizes various products through pictures and audio offering the user ways to purchase them pretty crafty on amazon's part so while it is all pretty interesting stuff the smartphone market is fraught and i mean fraught with peril currently apple and samsung dominate the market making other options even ones from big companies like google microsoft and facebook left fighting an uphill battle just to survive so question is will the fire phone live up to its hype or will it
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just burn out going to have to wait and see. for our first interview today i spoke with economist jim rickards about financial warfare and the impact of iraq's instability on the oil markets now his latest book the death of money looks at the various threats to the international monetary system so we asked him what financial warfare is and what impact it could have on the international monetary system here's what he had said. and that you were fair is part of what strategists call an asymmetric or a new structure were fair so it's everything other than conventional kinetic weapons you know no bombs planes submarines there are a lot of things in asymmetric warfare including cyber warfare weapons of mass destruction but financial warfare is basically using capital markets. derivatives
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commodities foreign exchange all the things that viewers are familiar with as weapons to try to diminish the power of your opponents that has your own power this is going on right now between russia and the united states run ukraine again no one thinks that we're going to invade ukraine there's no support for that but putting on sanctions freezing assets and there's been a financial were fair there's been sort of this been financial warfare between the u.s. and iran for years now it's in a kind of truce right now last december the president announced a kind of detente with the rand in their nuclear negotiations and some other points of contact actually that they were trying to expand to right now around the crisis in iraq try to list iranian aid maybe iran and us work together to suppress what's going on there but so that financial warfare financial war is sort of in a truce right now with the financial war with russia is alive and well that's probably going to get worse because i don't think putin's finished with ukraine so
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basically using things you are familiar with capital markets to hurt your enemies you know sectarian strife in iraq has been the growth of opec crude oil production at risk over the next five years so how do you think this conflict will impact the oil markets. well the low price is going to go up this conflict is no where near resolution it's a very complicated chessboard as you know and it's not just. that's the issue of the sunni. muslim extremists who are seen to be sweeping the board in northern iraq and of course the rand has now come in from the south to protect its interests they don't really want to but they have to the turks are very concerned because kurdistan seems to be declaring an independent kurdish republic turkey didn't mind helping kurdistan achieve autonomy within iraq but they certainly don't want an independent kurdistan that seems to be happening jordan is in the crosshairs as may go there next but behind the scenes what's going on kind of
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a higher level is that russia and saudi arabia are financing and promoting the advance and it's not just these terrorists there are a lot of former baptist members there are a lot of sunni members of saddam hussein's former army the so-called awakening councils the tribal chiefs these are sunni's who are not muslim extremists but they do want to topple the shiite government so this is an alliance of convenience a lot of it's being financed by saudi arabia at the moment also designed to break up the emerging day time between the u.s. and iran and this is going on for a while you mention this and american people just roll their eyes oh wait a second we thought iran was the enemy they call us the great satan what's going on here well the answer is that you know since last year and for a couple years the private talks behind before that obama has been you know playing footsie with the iranians and we've really annoyed at them as a regional power and green light of their nuclear ambitions so it's a stab in the back to saudi arabia so you've got the saudis and the russians using i.s.i. as sort of his pawns along with former elements of saddam's army squaring off against
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sunni's backed by iran and the u.s. is trying to get on the iranian side so it's a very complicated chess where the bottom line for markets is it's complicated it's not going to be over soon it's going to get worse it's going to. regionalized that means oil prices are gone a lot of our a lot higher and you know what is escalating violence how does that play out in the future markets obviously there's going to be a lot of volatility but what would be your bet right now. well again you know this will show up in futures markets higher oil and i expect higher gold one of the things that concerns me a little bit aaron is we seem to be living in a world a two second attention spans you know look at market professionals in the u.s. and you know three months ago was worried about ukraine and you know kind of goal went up a little bit on the fear trade and there was some volatility and then you know there was a little bit of pushback of the sanctions they were too extreme but putin is not just a good chess player is a good you know sort of comfort to judo expert he was smart enough to back off a little bit he said i pushed so i got some pushback on the pushback and he backed
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off and everyone in new york said oh great ukraine is over on to the next trade well ukraine wasn't over it's not over who does now moving in these rowing tanks in eastern ukraine they shot down this same putin sat there with a grenade launcher but obviously he has the ability to to influence what's going on there and i heard reports i haven't seen them confirmed by they did have some good sourcing our reports that sadly some russian journalists were killed in ukraine today and if that's true that gives putin is often said you know i don't want to invade your country but i will go protect russians well that's a. reason for war putin needs one but so he might come back in ukraine also he's. saying that the white house really can't walk and chew gum at the same time if we're distracted with iraq what better time for him to go into ukraine and he's the one stirring the pot in iraq alone the saudis as they say we've got to work this problem that many dimensions but the bottom line for markets is that you know there's this outrage between complacency on the one hand and
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a very tumultuous world that's probably going to get worse and more dangerous on the other that's going to break my my guess is that will break in favor of higher prices higher inflation higher oil and higher gold. of the one nine hundred seventy s. you know it was the said easy money in seventy one seventy two to promote nixon's reelection and we didn't get a lot of inflation at the time but then there was a geopolitical spark in one nine hundred seventy three with the kapoor war then inflation just ran away we have fifty percent five zero inflation between one nine hundred seventy seven one thousand eighty one so what's going on in the middle east now and ukraine could be the kind of geopolitical spark on top of all this dry candling or would that the fed is printing that people have been surprised we are going to print four trillion dollars which the fed has done and not get inflation or the answer is that printing the money is only half the equation you need a spark or catalyst for a change of behavior to increase the velocity of money you can wait
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a long time for the spark but this may be it. now as the situation begins to unravel it points to the question of why we got involved in the first place now the markets are already feeling the pain at several international refineries in northern iraq has evacuated personnel and ron paul an outspoken critic of intervention abroad has said quote because of the government's foolish policy of foreign interventionism the us is faced with two equally stupid choices either pour in resources to prop up an iraqi government that is a close ally with iran or thule or throw our support in with al qaeda and iraq as we did as we have done in syria i say we must follow a third choice ally with the american people and spend one more dollar or one more life attempting to remake the middle east. now ron paul isn't alone in his criticism either back in two thousand and three millions and millions of people took to the streets around the world in protest of the iraq war but as always we'll
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be keeping a close eye on how this story shakes out and keeping you updated on the market's reactions. time now for a quick break but stick around because when we return richard heinberg is on the show the senior fellow at the post carbon institute sat down with mooc to discuss the practicality of replacing carbon energy with alternative forms of energy plus artes very own abby martin is on the show today the fabulous miss martin is joining me in today's big deal to discuss women in the workplace but before we go here are a look at summer closing numbers of the bell stick around.
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the media leave though so we leave that maybe. the same motions to the play you call the there's the. shoes that no one is as good with the gas that you deserve answers from the it's all politics. are a. little.
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you know she's good leverage sure kirby was able to build the world's most sophisticated robot which on fortunately doesn't give a darn about anything tunes mission to teach creation why it should care about humans in. this is why you should care only on the. welcome back to the show now in the middle east is looking increasingly unstable and that probably means that the price of oil is going to go up to actually way up but given how important carbon based energy is to our economy how realistic are alternative forms of energy to replacing carbon energy to discuss more about this issue and what the future holds i spoke with richard heinberg a senior fellow at the post carbon institute and an expert on energy issues now i
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first asked him what if we have reached peak oil supplies and what alternative forms of energy are really out there truly here's what he had to say. well there are lots of them. even though there's a long list everything from nuclear to solar and wind and hydro power and geothermal tidal power wave power i could go on. we've looked at all of those and our analysis suggests that none is likely to replace fossil fuels and that's specifically oil at least in the transport such sector anytime soon well has a lot of things going for it from just from a pure energy economic perspective it's it's portable it's concentrated. as we yes we could run cars on electricity and and more and more electric cars are coming out all the time but you can't run
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a airliners on batteries because the batteries would be too heavy and big so one never probably never going to have electric airliners and since the same problem with eighteen wheel trucks that deliver all the you know food to the supermarkets and products all across the country so our our transport system really is hooked on oil and the the alternatives just aren't are not there now do you think the costs of her navel energy sources will drop quickly enough basically to help us transition away from carbon sources of energy which i thought what are your thoughts on that. you know will be the those costs are dropping and of course the opposite is happening with fossil fuels and particularly oil and and more with natural gas and coal will be seeing higher prices there also so that the price differential will will increase and so renewable energy sources will become less expensive so you could say well what you know problem solve the. the market will
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take care of it but it's not so easy because it takes time to make an energy transition and the energy sources were. talking about solar and wind have characteristics very different from those of fossil fuels that are not dispatchable you can't. you can't command the sun to shine or the wind to blow when demand for electricity is high. so you have to somehow match supply and demand through energy storage or who are upgrades to the grid all of that's very expensive takes time and there's so the you know when you do all the calculations that you know it really doesn't look all that good for us solar and wind as complete substitutes for fossil fuels in some ways you could think of them as fossil fuel extenders because well solar well sunlight and wind are free and abundant and in and renewable the the technologies that we use for capturing them the wind turbines and the solar
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panels are not renewable they're made out of nonrenewable mineral metal materials and and mining those materials transporting them and transforming them takes fossil fuels so it's a system that is in a sense piggybacking on our current energy system that's dominated by coal oil and natural gas that's interesting in and out tend to think that i mean you know the layperson this doesn't really think that way but it's important now i want to run with that understand i wrote a book called the end of growth adapting to our new economic reality so can you tell our viewers what the premise of this book is. well the promise it is that. we've reached the limits to growth and of course limits to growth was the title of a book published back in one nine hundred seventy two it was a study undertaken by some scientists at mit wendy half of the club of rome looking at the likely scenarios for population.
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production and environmental pollution and as as time went on and a standard run scenario showed a peak in decline in world industrial output sometime in the early twenty first century. studies that have looked at that report since then and have shown that it's standard runs and here it was actually pretty close to being on on track for predicting the various factors of production as they would go up since then well here we are in the early twenty first century and we're seeing declining returns on investments in oil production we're seeing declining returns on. efforts to produce new technologies yet we have lots of new technology in in communications and entertainment but the the basic technologies that we run our world on transportation manufacturing agriculture are actually hasn't done that
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much change and. it's because population is still growing but these other factors are reaching point of declining marginal returns it looks as though world economic growth is in the process of. shutting shutting down and i think the. crash of two thousand and eight was a big symptom of that but all we did really was to paper that over with massive government interventions in the forms of bailouts and stimulus packages and then the central bank stepped in with trillions of dollars in. quantitative easing all that's been able to do really is to. create a kind of zombie growth that the world is feeding on right now hand and it can't go on forever i mean these these are extraordinary tactics that are that are still being used by the world's governments and central banks to main. in the the
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appearance of growth we should be looking for a plan b. you know what do we do as growth comes to a halt because it's inevitable it's inevitable you can't continue growing an economy based on consumption forever on a finite planet and where we're reaching the limits i mean it scares the heck out of me it's very concerning but i want to bring you brought up the great recession and you know the global economy a comeback for our session so doesn't that say that the economy is resilient and that growth isn't over i miss on some level. right well. yeah the economy is coming back on the basis again of these extraordinary measures the u.s. . federal reserve has been injecting in many months up to eighty five billion dollars into the national economy just basically creating that money out of nothing in order to keep interest rates low so that people continue to
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borrow money and go out and buy stuff. and it's only worked marginally i mean this is the this is the weakest recovery from a major recession in u.s. history. if you look at unemployment figures it's true that unemployment has gone down new jobs have been created but that's largely because we've redefined unemployment you know people who are have given up looking for work are simply not counted. and other other accounting tricks are being used also to to hide the situation from a so that we don't really see that we're at a historic turning point and the tragedy is there are things we could be doing to adjust and adapt to the end of growth if only we were honest with our so and recognize that this is what's happenin. that was richard heinberg a senior fellow at the post carbon institute time now for today's big deal.
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big deal time with one of my very favorite ladies on this whole planet mr martin the host of breaking the set. the fabulous abby is here to discuss gender inequality in the workplace and the infuriating and i mean infuriating pay gap that also exists now according to the latest figures from the u.s. labor department white women earn about eighty one cents for every dollar that men on black women earn sixty seven percent of what white men earn and latino women are only sixty percent women also spent twelve years out of the workforce on average to care for their families now even as women work diligently and just as hard as men they can't seem to break this glass ceiling even though it should be shattered and has been cracked if you will but why do you think men continue to get promoted
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faster and get paid more than women i mean this is a really important thing to address erin because when i talk about the pay gap people respond they're like that's a myth the whole not even two cents on the dollar the thing is is that it's not necessarily to pick up in the same jobs it's just what you said it's it's going further it's it's getting promoted it's raising the ranks and whatever profession and on another hand i think it's first of all the lack of competence and i think we still live in a very massaging the sexualized world on the other hand i think it's also a lot of reverting back to these roles that women think that they need to decide because if you look at the jobs that have these pay gaps are that are lower paid it's like you know nurses teachers and then men are you know the anesthesiologists the doctors the executives so i don't know there's a lot of social things that i think go into those factors really glad that you bring that up because you know a lot of people argue or point to the fact. children kind of changes everything and that this maternal instinct really creates this tug of war for women who want to
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balance work personal life stuff but do you think there's any truth to that maternal instinct hurts your professional career knows you know you have children i'll tell you what it really is here do you think the us is only the only developed nation in the world that doesn't allow paid maternity leave and women have to leave their jobs if they want to have a so so here we live in a society where you know you're chastised if you don't want to have children what do you this this is really made that doesn't understand. or if you want to have a kid you are literally do need to abandon your career and you will lose that chance to get higher and to rise the ranks because you do want to have a family so that's a really big double edged sword that i think that we experience here that not a lot of other european countries do i mean it's true and it's scary for all young women and even women that are approaching this point in their life and they want to figure out what to do and it's a rock and a hard place there's really no way to get around it the having it all it's very hard to think about but you know studies have also shown that women aren't
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typically as aggressive as men when it comes to negotiating their salary. you think this is true and b. why why why women absolutely think it's true and i think you and i know in this profession i think every woman that i know that's in a profession has been completely sexually harassed and this massage mystic environment of employer employee relationship by their bosses to the boss and only tell it to your yeah and then you tell someone that like hey this is going on they laugh it off and they're like oh well you know that's just you tube comments or whatever i mean all of these things add up and i think it really makes women feel inferior and not have the gumption or ability to really speak out about these things so they kind of just shrink down as shrinking violet and then of course if you are assertive and you're seen as this being the b. word with a capital b. look at this well who does she think she is i never went oh never now i also mention this because when it comes to saving. retirement men and women differ as well and according to a twenty thirteenth study by prevention on the gender gap with retirement savings
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the top financial priority for men is to quote maintain their lifestyle in retirement while for women the number one goal is to quote not become a financial burden to loved ones so what this shows that there is obviously a stark difference in the financial retirement priorities of men and women so abby do you think that there is this innate selflessness that women have that makes them you know less selfish when planning for their later years in life i think i think yes and i think one only has to look back at the last fifty years women live was not that long ago right we just got the right to vote not even a hundred years ago so i think back to fifty years ago women were seen as literally their only role was the spouse you know take take care of their husbands now i think we've emerged into this whole market where we're still trying to pick our feet up and i think the only way to change it really erin is to assert ourselves and change these paradigms break these paradigms because men are never going to give us give it to us unless we step up and change that glass house once and for all that is coming now never been rebuilt i love you thank you so much for your take on that and fun that's all for now but you can see all segments featured in
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today's show on youtube youtube dot com slash boom bust r.t. we also love hearing from you so if we check out our facebook page at facebook dot com slash boom bust archie and please tweet us at aaron aid at edward n.h. at abby martin live from all of us here at groove us thank you brought him up the next time john. tried to. pull it out of. new. york to. get everybody. tommy. the last noel. my over the last five.
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months six. months cases of limits. sometimes for nothing. this season and. it's not just keep up the story it's still being jobst if you see a stage eight look to be. but speech was. huge and it's what's your next vulgarized darwin science punishment for an uncommitted crying i was done for believing in eighty feebleminded still today those are the few i don't know why. but i still don't know why genetic improvement through forced sterilization the basis for nazi ideology don't stop at just
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sterilizing and now go to the point of death. for years rarely discussed. till now really rather not talk about that right. some people say that when it happens somewhere in time not a very nice one the curtain falls down. fifth some point and i could no longer stand it i decided to kill myself. waldron i was scared of what i'd done i punched but i didn't understand where i didn't want a man rises head and the woman should. run from him. everyone who sees this video to also speak to the children's father. so my has then became
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a controllable people that he can do anything. why you're crying don't cry i know i'm tired of crying too don't cry. well glued to the. show thirty five can just spend over fifteen billion euros on faulty head says beach one hundred three million degrees we can talk amount of fuel cells from the same piece quoted france we travel in search of the sun. knowledge you are we've got the future covered. right. first trip. and i think the trip. on our reporters were very.
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key of resumes it's a and ground offensive in eastern ukraine a day after the president promises troops would soon lay down the. no law i didn't want to all medical supplies them to besiege a city of slovyansk the city says on the verge of a humanitarian catastrophe thanks to the nonstop government offensive. cry for help iraq off the u.s. to use its aid power against isis militants who are locked in three is battles for the country's volatile oil reserves. a golden globe fell from ukraine in exchange for refuge the promise made to a red face by the russian the president during a phone call.
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