i would rather ask questions to people in positions of power instead of speaking on their behalf and that's why you can find my show larry king now right here on r.t. question more.

the government says it wants to close the secretary defense and defense department are committed to the president's goal of closing guantanamo bay. why are there so many legal row blocks for the remaining. states constitution doesn't apply to these proceedings the government has demonstrated that they have no respect for the attorney client really no you can't look inside that board you know you can't see the police which is adjacent to the client so if the public what actually happened that heads would roll there are a lot of issues that are being handled by the ira by will join us as we seek answers to those issues and much more this is abby martin breaking the set on the back. hello there i'm marinated this is boom bust and these are some of the stories that we're tracking for you today. first up the f.c.c.

is looking into mutual funds that look like hedge funds and call themselves all funds so what so what are these funds going to look into it ourselves coming up right out and then the latest addition to the boom bust team at the onset for she is on the show today she's bringing us home report from the black cat cyber security conference and in today's big deal redacted tonight host we can't seem to run with me to talk about the privatization of prisons and all starts right now. you've heard of alternative music alternative culture heck you're even watching alternative meat. but now we have alternative mutual funds yep welcome to you all

to new few now while many investors are embracing these illiquid alternative funds the securities and exchange commission isn't so keen about the whole phenomenon the f.c.c. has launched a broad examination of alternative mutual funds in an effort to scrutinize one of the hottest and most controversial investment products offered to small investors today all funds or liquid alternative funds have marketed themselves as a way to hedge against market risk by employing hedge fund like strategies such as betting on some stocks and against others trading futures and using derivatives to increase leverage they're also a cheaper way for individual investors to gain access to strategies once only available to sophisticated investors now critics say that all funds are just watered down hedge funds and individual investors might not completely understand what they're getting themselves into quickly finding themselves in over their heads so far this year investors have poured roughly sixteen point eight billion dollars

into these types of funds and with their surge in popularity the f.c.c. is focusing their inquiry on the liquidity of the funds their use of leverage and the degree of oversight provided by the fund boards so to give you a better example of how these funds have grown so quickly when a q.r. capital now that's a pioneer in the space launched its first mutual fund in two thousand and nine it managed twenty billion dollars by the end of june of this year it was managing roughly one hundred thirteen billion dollars that's significant jump other firms like goldman sachs blackstone and bank of new york are boosting their offerings in the space as well by launching their own all funds but not all funds are on board and many financial advisors say that they won't offer alternative funds because of the complicated strategies involved in managing them and their lack of long term track record of success we just don't know their brand new now my take if it looks to. and it smells fishy it's probably fishy so buyer beware.

now our next guest is definitely definitely not afraid to speak his mind i recently had the chance to speak with peter schiff they've been best favorite and c.e.o. of euro pacific capital now peter believes that the current housing market is a bubble and says if something doesn't give the country could be flooded with homes that no one wants to buy take a look at what he had to say. well i think this eco bubble that the fed has reflate it in the housing market is already beginning to lose air and the main difference between this housing bubble and the last one is the last one was more of a main street bubble and this is more of

a wall street bubble because the principal speculators are hedge funds and private equity funds and very high net worth individuals who are paying all cash for properties and buying them on the interest of creation of selling them at a profit or renting them out to all the americans who can no longer afford to buy but i also think this is a bubble i think a lot of the real state that was snapped up in foreclosure auctions i think people overpaid and i think the investors are now is just now beginning to realize that they overpay so i think the speculative buyers are leaving the market and there's nobody to fill the void because the real buyers are absent in fact if you look at the recent almost the sticks the percentage of homes bought by first time buyers is at a record low and in fact home ownership among individuals is a generational lows so prices have to come down dramatically from here before real buyers can actually afford to buy all the properties that have been bought by speculators. and it's some point the speculators who own these properties if they

can't collect enough rent to cover the cost of ownership they're going to be selling these properties and look out below because when they put these properties up for sale again there's no buyers anywhere near the current prices. so you're saying that speculators overpaid when these homes were in foreclosure and i is that correct yeah well initially in the process they probably got good prices but then the prices began to run up as the supply of foreclosures was dwindling and more and more speculators wanted in on the action they started bidding against each other and prices were too high and some people might have looked at prices and compared them to where they were at the peak of the bubble and said well i'm getting a twenty or thirty percent discount so it's still ok you know what you're talking about a discount to an inflated price you could still be paying an inflated price is that actually if you look at what the potential is to rent these properties out because you know the rents are not going to be there i think a lot of people misjudge the market regarding how much they could actually read

these houses for because it's very difficult to rent a single family home a lot of renters don't want them because there's a lot of other costs associated with it and i think it's going to cost these hedge funds a lot more money than they think to manage all of these single family homes it's going to be very difficult i think they've been off a lot more than they can chew and you know a lot of these investors they paid cash for the properties but that doesn't mean they're not in debt they might have borrowed the money through another source they don't need a mortgage but they still have borrowed money that they've brought to the auction house so they still have a lot of debt and if interest rates begin to rise and they have to service this debt but they're not getting enough revenue from the rental income they may be forced to want to put these properties up for sale but again if all the speculators want out who's going to buy nobody. here treasuries have been doing pretty well with the ten year hovering around two point five zero level so do you see this low yield lasting and if not what impact do you think an uptick in yields would have on

the real economy well first of all a big uptick in yields would be devastating for the phony economy because it would predict the bubble in stocks and real stated forced a lot of banks to fail and you would have a worse financial crisis than into the. thousand and eight but it would liberate the real economy when the real economy is being stifled by the low interest rates and what the fed is doing so but if the surface it would be very positive it might be painful at first but ultimately it would be a joy a pain that would be beneficial because it would lead to some long term gain but i think the main reason that we haven't seen a bigger increase in interest rates since the fed began tapering is because foreigners have come to the fed's rescue if you look at the increase in buying of treasuries from china from emerging markets in general from europe you look at belgium for example you've seen this big increase that has offset the reduction

from the fed which again they announced today they tapered back another ten billion and if it wasn't for all these foreign central banks we would have had a more dramatic impact on rates as a result the question is how much longer will the can we count on this support from our friends especially when we're pissing off so many of them with our foreign policy now many believe us shares are priced to perfection right now with the s. and p. five hundred having had twenty seven records that highs this year and some american investors are diversifying into cheaper international shares do you recommend that move and why or why not try been recommending that for years and i've been following that advice personally yeah i think that people should be invested in the stock markets to question is which markets which countries which sectors should they be focusing on because they're all not the same so i do believe that there are

certain markets that represent a lot of value where the stock prices are not inflated like they are here where you get a lot more value for your money you pay a lower p. e. get a better dividend yield and you have a better. prospects i think here in the united states you're right we're we're there's a bubble going on and in fact beneath the surface if you look beneath the average is a lot of stocks so far in two thousand and fourteen are in bear markets there are plenty of stocks that are down more than twenty percent on the year there are a lot of stocks that are down ten percent to twenty percent and there are some stocks that are making new highs but it's not that many when you look at the overall market and a lot of it is based on share buybacks that are financed by cheap money and it's the low interest rates that make possible the valuations and some of the inflated earnings numbers so that if interest rates were to go off that would completely knock the rug out from under these stocks because not only would it reduce their

earnings dramatically because they would have to pay more interest cost on all the debt that they've accumulated to buy back all the shares but it would also impact their revenue because their customers who also are levered up they would have to spend more income on interest payments so they would have less to spend. on their products but now higher interest rates means that you have to discount those future earnings by a bigger number so the multiples have to contract so there's a lot of room beneath the market in unless of course the fed comes to the market's rescue with an unprecedented amount of money printing which i actually believe is what's going to happen. that was peter schiff c.e.o. of euro the capital. time now for a quick break but stick around because when we return our t. producer beyond the fish is telling us about staying one step ahead of hackers and how it's a hard thing to do for even the most seasoned cyber security experts and in today's

big deal redacted tonight has the kneecap to sitting down with me to talk about the privatization of the prison and a little wired stuff in there as well plus remember you can see all segments featured in today's show on you tube that. youtube dot com slash boom bust r t's and on hulu at hulu dot dot com slash boom dash dot com but. now before we go here a look at the mere closing numbers of the bell come on back with us. the stories we cover here not going here in iraq other big story lines and talk there's a reason they don't want to. reset. now let's break the set.

i marinate joining me on. that in our cold and financial commentary interviews and much much. only on the bus and only.

welcome back now to computers smart phones tablets we use them for everything these days but just how secure are your electronics last week the boom bust team attended the blackout conference in las vegas and it's a meeting of the best collective security minds on the planet and what we learn there is that hackers and thieves seem to always be one step ahead of security which certainly isn't good for any of us need tells us more. experts who are around the world recently gathered at the black cat conference in las vegas to discuss events mental technology and information security in the post snowden era and

meetings like this. explore some of the most pressing issues of our time like whether or not privacy is at all attainable in the digital age the black phone the first allegedly fully encrypted smart phone was hacked after one expert at the conference found two new flaws in the device and this comes after a recent study released by hewlett packard that claims seventy percent of smart devices ranging from t.v.'s to home thermostats to automatic door locks have security vulnerability is all of this begs the question if the so-called internet of things where essentially any object can have an embedded computing system is really for our benefit kimberly price the director of syntax red team strategic operations suggested the internet of things might be spying on all of us. my refrigerator has imbedded software in it and they know things about my eating patterns is that really matter i don't know. if we're talking about embedded health care systems where you know a couple years ago there was some research done where insulin pump could be

remotely hijacked to deliver fatal dose of insulin that's a problem that's a security issue with life and death consequences a person's privacy breach and we have to be looking at these very realistically in terms of real world impact and not if we overreact to the small things and i'm not saying we shouldn't react but if we overreact to them then we're going to be immune to the things that really do matter. it goes beyond your home car phone and computer though owner abilities were also found in airport scanning equipment allowing hackers to potentially manipulate their vital functions security researcher billy rios claimed to have found the flaws in two t.s.a. approved pieces of equipment it's hard to imagine chaos in the airports of hackers could take advantage of these flaws especially for a security system that's undergone so many changes since nine eleven. i don't know if you want to know but i want to get quickly through that you can be prepared. it

does however it's something we need to do rather than through in the hard way that we should have. while the list of potential vulnerable both big and small continues to grow researchers at black hat say prevention is key and should be the plan to focus on going forward in washington because the sheeny are. now aside from security and privacy concerns we also made an effort at black had to get some perspective on the financial markets and tech industry as well now you heard a little from kate pierce a moment ago in bianca's report and she's a security consultant. i sat down in vegas with her to learn a little more first asked her how well encrypted the new york stock exchange now as jack another massive market exchanges are today here's what she had to say. some of the stuff the encrypt is very very good some of the. optimized for other things.

like easy reconciliation. and it's security is a business as a business cost and it's a business benefit of the comp you think of it becomes everything that stops you doing what you need to do. so there is that balance but it's such a community at the technical level with it to an extent the predictions you want to go. on the in crowd with your prove to be on various networks so if you if you if you financial who can get on this with network that's a problem but once you're in enough. you've got a lot more freedom i want to switch gears a little here and talk about women in the stem industries which is science technology engineering and mathematics now a recent study says that women account for only twenty four percent of those in the workforce so you know how do we encourage women into this field and stop discouraging them and i was very lucky in that i missed that discouragement because i transitioned gender a couple of years ago and until that point you know i was one of the dude walking

around i was blending in to this sea of men and in my industry is even worse than steam in general in general is around thirty percent i see numbers at a fifteen percent for my industry and when you take out the people who are in management or in the softer jobs it drops even more but it's terrifying. so there's a couple things that don't discourage them when the girls it doesn't necessarily need explicit encouragement just don't. don't sit up us folks expect don't tell them that they're not cool for doing that now the other part though is when they get in often the korea trajectory isn't there not so much a glass ceiling as they need to get on the elevator. i've seen this with some my friends who are. in biology and academia with or the postgraduate students coming through are like sixty seven percent female but the faculty is almost exclusively

male and we have largely hired me and the. board. maybe i'm just being paranoid but something funny there but also all too often i get people saying oh but it's all about me or it's all about me or well remember talk of the i've seen tends to devolve into an oligarchy you just mentioned that you noticed a change when transitioning into a woman so what are some of the more prominent changes that you noticed from the workforce in community i've been very lucky in that i've missed most of the worst ones. most of the differences have been having to justify myself more having to. deal with not being presumed as an expert by walkin i have to prove myself in a way that i didn't have to previously and that is. frustrating but also a lot of fun when people don't expect that i slam them down and make them feel insufficient it's great you also mention that some people in the industry just presume that you're an h.r.

or marketing no depending on how i dress you go out there walk up to any random got man and say so. but then again also if you have social skills i presume your sales or marketing if you know hiding back during. you must be going to suffer because if you were technical person you wouldn't waste time with it but people also use the lack of social skills as an excuse to be rude or to get away with things they would get away with elsewhere and that is very discouraging that women . i haven't been socialized to put up with that i have been socialized to accept it and so i don't i people find that jarring but i'm happy with my life i'm not here to be pushed around by people who are being idiots dr kate clancy an assistant professor at the university of illinois recently published a study and if the statistics basically say that the number of women in the workforce or are being sexually assaulted more that statistic is going up and this is just yet another obstacle for women to have to face in a male dominated workforce and a male dominated byron meant like a stem job so does this problem deserve

a thoughtful response in kind of similar to the way that organizations are trying to encourage young girls to apply themselves in science technology engineering and mathematics so partially it's there but a lot of it is also the nature of the industry of academia it's all about your networks the people you've worked with you need them particularly early career to boom your own credibility and if you but they do something to you you want to have position of power sure you could you could you could push something. but when you suddenly lose your collaborators. they can ruin your career even if it even if it wasn't explicitly because of that people just think you're making a fuss and that's not ok but it's we do see that in other places too but instead particularly why you don't publish on your own you do work on your own it's always a group of people whether it's the people you work with directly or the people across the country or across the globe and you need to keep them on side. and maybe

as men started getting sexual assault the more they did would actually start to see some change but until then we have to work out how do we deal with that in the same way that a lot of women publish with a first initial rather than a first name because then they don't hit the gender bias in the same way. that. shouldn't happen but you see the same thing with resumes and studies where people see no reason why with mr or a first initial instead of a name and suddenly they get more. you can't prove anything but the correlation is suspicious. that was security consultant kate pierce time now for today's big deal . big deal time and i'm joined today by the wonderful mr and i'm the big deal you are the big deal you are a big deal now today we're talking about private prisons and here's the deal three

major companies scope be a capital d.s.m. and a communal insurance have made headlines for denouncing their moment i million dollar investment in the private prison industry now the move comes after an effort made by color of change a nonprofit organization pressured companies to day to day best from private prisons in light of exploiting men and women of color so we should corporations that you know operate in the public sphere like public prison systems be allowed to trade on public markets or is there a conflict of interest there i mean you know i think it's going it's gross i think good because it because they're deciding on people's lives these prisons put people live a lot of people away for god knows how many years of their lives and they pressure politicians to lock them up longer to keep them in jail longer i mean the number of we've three thousand nonviolent prisoners serving life in prison in this country we have five percent of the world's population and twenty five percent of the world's prisoners i mean if we keep locking people up at this rate who's going to be left

where the snuggies and play the video games no one who's going to wear the snow again this kind of wear and i guess i don't know maybe the companies that are getting paid for each prisoner they have it that's i mean it's terrible but it scope i want to talk about them because they're an alternative asset management firm and they're based in new york city or billion under management and they have. other assets under management there they're in real estate they do other things but one of the most profitable sectors is this private prison industry so why do you think it's such a successful business model does it have to do with the fact that you know it's kind of like a recession proof industry when you think yeah there's stocks are doing great the corrections corp's are doing great but it depends on how you measure success right right now we're only measuring success with profit would if we measured success with the number of prisoners rehabilitated or the number of prisoners that didn't get you know we didn't have the vibe because there's more violence apparently in these privatized prisons and less rehabilitation in these privatized prisons so it depends on how you measure success maybe we should measure it on how the groups are

by the present so there you go you want to call that we're talking about this because in singapore they still are punishment where they're going to have cane and it's kind of funny i mean from a western perspective you're reading this in the paper you know so and so about six lashings but the recidivism rate. is extremely low so for us to say it's barbaric to do this but at the same time we actually we. are not so we're going to make this clear nothing but here would you say are stinkers cost wise it's very cost effective and you have the option to go to prison you don't have to but i hear what you're saying in the sense that like we find that so barbaric locking someone up or there are. certainly you know all drug crimes is saying yeah. yeah it's depending on where you stand it can go either way no private prison companies there are more operationally efficient than public prisons and furthermore why is that and should they be more operationally efficient is it because they have the luxury of not caring they don't have a public they're not possible they're not they're not public servants so they're

not responsible for the public's opinion do you think that's why you know officials say well dexter is efficient. it's quite interesting i mean you know prison prison labor and journalism fish and i think that i think. you measure to give their. during you know they're not trying to rehabilitate somebody they don't they just want to retain them like the number of prisoners a lot of states several states i think it's maybe nine have signed contracts to these private prisons saying they will have like ninety percent fill these prisons all at all times also if they show hotels don't have. time tracks i say we're going to lock people up for you that's incredible now finally i've two seconds left well thirty but i want to talk about wal-mart can you tell me what's going on there there was a leaked memo from goldman sachs you know about this so quickly give us a heads up and commander show this week to you know how rumored acted this way wal-mart goldman sachs so that wal-mart is on the decline and should continue to be on the decline apparently they're losing out to two smaller more convenient stores

and the list of dollar stores is one of them and do you know how crap it is your stuff has to be to loosen up the dollar store like most other stores they have like repurposed ramen noodles and like stolen shampoo bottles you know that's what they haven't really pregnant. as an electrical cords and so you it's a full on them really i don't know how when you're on it is really fun you have to come back more often that is leaking out posted every almost every doctor's night every friday eight pm check it out it is truly awesome here on r t that's all for now but please check us out on facebook facebook dot com slash mr t. and these tweet us at aaron aid at camp from all of us here thank you for watching we'll see you next time.

the government says it wants to close the secretary of defense and defense department are committed to the president's goal of closing guantanamo bay. why are there so many legal road blocks for the remaining. six constitution doesn't apply to these proceedings the government has demonstrated that. they have no respect for the attorney client relationship you know you can't look inside that board you know you can't see the place which is adjacent to the client so if public or what actually happened that had to go wrong there are a lot of issues that are being handled at a higher level join us as we seek answers to those issues and much more this is abby martin breaking the set on the back.

on larry king now why are americans becoming less religious we're discussing the state of faith in america in this day and age it seems like there's kind of this new breed of religious apologist that they seem to be wanting a lot of evidence with their faith they seem to use a lot of scientific arguments these days just asking maybe we don't need a god you get called a strident atheist and somehow that's viewed in our society as a bad thing for asking questions but asking questions is what it's all about and you prove god i gained my my faith my belief from what the bible says about god and it's a you know ultimately christianity is about a personal relationship with jesus christ that's what it's really about but individuals who actually practice their spiritual teaching bump into peace love and forgiveness that you remain at the service have.