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 or. comment like. face time you know.

a pleasure to have you with us here on t.v. today i'm sure. 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 euro zone factory growth slowed in august could tensions in ukraine be causing the trouble in euro land we're looking into it then founder and president of alice investments david merkel is alive and in studio today he's sitting down with me to discuss accounting evaluations and in today's big deal edward harris and i are discussing and underqualified eric cantor taking an arguably overpaid position on wall street it all starts right now.

welcome to a brand new season of boom bust now our lead story today europe european purchasing managers index or p.m.i. came in monday and it wasn't pretty manufacturing growth in the euro zone slowed to a thirteen month low in august the markets eurozone manufacturing purchasing managers index dipped to fifty point seven in august down from fifty one point eight in july now it's important to note that a figure above fifty indicates expansion so obviously it's not a lot of expanding going on in your own land and while the p.m.i. is resting above fifty it's just barely above it now amid rising tensions between the e.u. and russia over ukraine new order's window old and factories suffered the factory

p.m.i. for germany russia's biggest trading partner in the you fell to an eleven month low of fifty one point four while meanwhile p.m.i. in the blocks second economy largest. me france fell to forty six point nine the pressure quine in manufacturing activity in italy adds to concerns about the inability of the euro zone's third largest economy to return to sustainable growth six years after the onset of the financial crisis now activity in spain's manufacturing sector slowed for a second straight month in august a sign that the economic recovery there may be losing some momentum as well the figures come ahead of the european central bank's meeting on thursday and there's speculation that u.c.b. boss mario draghi could offer some indications later this week that he's considering some form of quantitative easing for the eurozone similar to those taken by the u.k. and us during the financial crisis the eurozone wasn't alone in experiencing weakness in manufacturing u.k.

manufacturing activity slowed sharply as well while activity declined in denmark also partially reflecting weak demand for danish exports in the euro zone activity also slowed in poland the czech republic and hungary which likely reflects the worsening conflict in ukraine will be keeping a very close eye on europe and keeping you up to date on all the latest. now live and in studio with us today is david merkel founder and president of olive investments and former chief economist and director of research at fin of corp securities first and foremost welcome to the show david i think you know happy to have you here now i want to start our conversation by asking you about the term value investor that's a very popular term and i've heard it applied to to different people like a warren buffett or you know a jeremy grantham but what does that term mean to you it means that we're trying to

buy securities for a discount that disco could be twenty five percent off forty percent or fifty percent of the group or the discount through a margin of safety for us and we look to try to do it under many different conditions so. if there is war if there's panic we're not going to lose so much we like to have the net close below us and by buying at a discount we tend to assure that that's at least our objective doesn't always work you know does it work more often than not yes well you know as i understand it you could just love a company in its business model that so-called moats and all that are built around itself that could be your favorite but if the valuation doesn't present a lot of upside what should you do as a value investor you should avoid that company i mean there are some very popular companies with with great business models but can they grow into the valuation in question i'll just toss on example tesla tesla is one of those companies where.

you would have to grow at a rate of something like forty percent per year for the next five six seven years in order to grow into that valuation i look for companies when i'm buying them that maybe have to grow at about a five or six percent rate to justify their valuations and even then in an economy that is as weak as it is that's still challenging right five percent is it does count it certainly does count now and by that you bring up tesla because i want to ask you basically on about high growth companies like tesla you also have amazon facebook there's many many others but you know from this is hard to figure out a value so how do you do it from a valuation perspective you know with some things that are really out there like a tesla or say in amazon you might try to imagine what might this company be like fifteen years from now what percentage of the total retailing market might amazon have and would they be it as a normalized margin at that point in time now take that and then discount it back

to twenty percent interest for for fifteen years and you'd need something that would say yeah now i'm buying this thing for maybe forty percent of what i think it might be worth even. accruing a twenty percent interest for a long period of time now there's a huge amount of risk there who's who's going to compete with them and what new technologies might come into existence i mean g.m. is coming up is throwing a huge amount of money to try to compete with tesla granted i think the tesla is much more clever and will be able to beat g.m. but there's the possibility who can tell you one must have got a lot on his plate you never know things can happen stranger than fiction or you know the higher the valuation the greater the profit potential the more people are going to try to compete with you and that means uncertainty there you go now if you could advise individual investors about the tools and habits you know to use that that improve it evaluating the company and that's what would you say are the most important to us well you have to be skeptical for one because managements will feed

you information and you have to say what if what the management's telling me is not going to be correct and what's my downside how how bad could this forecast turn out that's why i like to own companies that have lower low expectations built into them many of the companies that i own for my clients if growth does not happen the valuations of the companies are not going to change that much and they'll still be earning decent money for example i have owned some shares from my clients in a company called industrious book-o. it's based in celeb mexico it happens to be one of the largest producers of meat in north america very few people know about it it trades on a mexican exchange of trades in new york but it you know it's it's basically tripled for me over the ten years that i've owned it and they are now called challenging tyson here in the u.s. in addition to other things that they've done so looking off the beaten path not looking at everything that's being tossed at you by the media i mean when i used to write for real money dot com i would write things to to to tell people be wary of

what you get here in media even for me i mean i used to write for jim cramer so. you have to have you have to be careful and be as low as possible. these hard work is possible you have to do your own research and homework and understand that things can go wrong this is wall street the markets always have a new way to make a fool out of you and so caution is always warranted not bold moves it's a business it's a business you know and businesses go well or they go bad sometimes the sexy money is but the execs the company is going to hate it we think smart now i understand that people like george soros they have to file this thirteen f. thirteen f. and i want to talk about this that's a major document basically that highlights the changes in their portfolio existentially now how can someone like me use this kind of information because basically what his thirteen have said it was very bearish signals the media is saying so how can i use information looking at his bearish thirteen out there and invest myself once

a quarter around the middle of the quarter all the thirteen eps come out i download about eighty of them and i i have my own database that that translates the cusip which are controlled by the american bankers association into the ticker symbols that you and i commonly use and then i take a look and see ok what are the new companies that these expert investors have been buying that nobody has seen so far and so all set them aside and a look at them then i'll take a look at the ones that have been added to dramatically by these same investors and i'll say ok these are these are fodder for research so with with soros i mean you only see half of his powerful and that's true of all thirteen of so you don't see the short parts you're only required to reveal the long positions the long bonds stocks and options whether put or call options now what people were bearish about if they saw all the put positions all the brolga of lee bearish things that he had entered into but you don't see the other sides of the trade source is a clever guy and you don't necessarily know the full so but is there some validity

for looking at just the long sort of thirteen s. yes and it tends to lead to our performance my friend my bonnie faber has written a great deal about this it does aid and i find good ideas just reading for. in the experts and even a fellow whose book i've reviewed and i'm going to be putting out the next several days. you guys fire of maureen fund of educational value investors coming out next week. he. he does thirteen of us. another acolyte does does thirteen of us they look at each other's ideas and they copy i mean it in that one sense of shameless. but but nonetheless it has to be put out and why not learn from those who have done so well now i ask you you know david one thing that you hear a lot about is this over trading and the lower returns with over trading so is it isn't it that not swinging at pitches is just as powerful as basically is swinging when a pitcher is throwing low balls or curve balls right i do something to tie my hands

i only trade basically in any major way once a quarter and i do it right after i finish my thirteen f. analysis that doesn't mean the thirty nothing else is everything but at that point in time i'll stack up all my companies in my portfolio now and then all the competitors that i'm looking at and all rank them against each other then i'll sit down doing fundamental analysis of the companies that look attractive and then take a look down my my list of companies that aren't ranking so highly that i still own and also treat a few out of those that look not so attractive a bonus that i own the ones that look at tractors but that forces me to be very mechanical businesslike and keeps me from oh hey i'm this company's following my perfectly what i'm going to do i'm going to say no i don't sell. i'll wait analyze and i'll try to say well what's my expectation for this company from here on out always look forward if you look at the past you're going to say you're going to make bad decisions are a good miss businessmen are saying how can i maximize from here david thank you so

much for your time and what i wish we had more time i think we have to have you back very angry or not and that was david merkel founder and president of our investment. time. very very quick break but stick around because when we return reggie middleton will be on the show reggie sat down with me to discuss the latest and greatest news surrounding apple apple they've got a new film coming out next week and then in today's big deal edward harrison and i are discussing eric cantor's new gig on wall street and remember you can see also featured in today's show on you tube but you. don't bust our teeth and on hulu at hulu dot com slash boom dash now before we go here are a look at some of your closing numbers of the bell come on back with us.

the government says it wants to. be secretary of defense and defense department are committed to the president's goal of closing guantanamo bay. why are there so many legal roadblocks for the remaining. duration doesn't apply to these proceedings the government has demonstrated that they have no respect for the attorney client privilege no you can't look inside that board no you can't see the place which is interesting to the client so if the public would actually have the courage of the world there are a lot of issues that are. higher about will join us as we seek answers to those issues and much more this is abby martin breaking the set. and i. like. crap.

like. this break my advice. like. as in the morning. i'm just glad. i'm not mad at any one word. and. 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 our t.v. question lol. welcome back now we are ringing new part two of my interview with reggie middleton see there it is the i'm an inventor of ultra coin i previously sat down with reggie discuss crypto currencies and recent tech news but in this part of our interview i asked him what his thoughts were on apple considering they've reached a new all time high here's what he had to say irrational exuberance the fact that i think a lot of people are not taking a very close look at apple's. pipeline of potential and actual products versus

their competitors apple has stood management but it appears that one of the managers that was responsible for apple's significant rise is no longer there and that steve jobs and again i don't want to put too much weight on that because if steve jobs did his job correctly he put competent management emphasize himself but when i look at the apple pie apply i see the approaches beats at what i think is ridiculous premium you know more power to dr dre and everybody was a very good payout but i don't think it was a good deal for the shareholders of a have large screen phones which means that they're now catching up to the android manufacturers from three years ago and they have potentially i watched it sort of a compare this to their competition where you have google with so driving cars so driverless cars google glass which you know you always touch with your interface applications you have. the android the android.

for their google spot where you have replaceable components i think as project era where a user could pick up a phone for fifty dollars and replace the memory or the camera or the speaker at will these are technologies that are allowing the competition to give in the student first. very clear path into future profits a few future revenue and if i compare google's pipeline apple's pipeline you know google's a significantly larger and apple's also a strong the behavior of a mature company no longer a growth company massive share buybacks relatively sparse investment or indeed compared to actually revenues etc even compared to samsung and stems and spans the flexible for flexible screen affordable phones etc. apple is a very good company it's a very good very strong marketing and product but the actual pipeline seems scarce and. stead of going through an all time high i would be most likely if i was to

speculate on it and i know the near term bear but i bear in medium to long term. i'm glad that you bring up google because i want to know how do you see google both in the mobile space but also in terms of overall business strategy it sounds you can give us an overview of it if you can go more into the nitty gritty. rob google is from a broader perspective still an advertising company but they've done an excellent job in the seas playing the seas to expand and diversify the revenue stream the projects that i mentioned such as grass driverless cars project ara. or in they bring google to expansive their advertising or simply post of their advertising it all depends are they carried a business model that represents a mask in real quickly do you think that they're spread a little bit too thin you know if advertising is one thing what do you think just in terms of the overall company. i don't think this puts them because i take a look at the results a lot of people thought they were spread thin when they brought you to what is the most valuable video probably in the world right now most likely you too they

thought it was pretty thin with the android what is the most valuable mobile operating system in the world driverless cars it's just think about the possibility of a start of owning cars now you simply buy a great driver and get a new car you can get it for free if you play you advertise it. so now you get in a car you go from here to fifteen blocks away for free without pain gas told said roy do is look at if you have a tie this you know the ability to change the business model of the extant industry leader and put them out of business is what google does excel day think about the last time that she rented a movie let somebody great a classified ad. you know variety of industries google has basically couldn't have simply by changing the business model and changing the revenue proposition exchange and i like. right now we've been hearing about a price war in the cloud storage space so do you think cloud storage costs could go near zero. but they can go for the window for the consumer consumer.

no no i know you can do as well yes. well i don't think it's cost could go in the zero but the storage business could be interesting right now for the consumer it is free almost all the major vendors of space for free dropbox google drive microsoft's. excuses are microsoft microscope version seven robots. all for free speech and the free speech that they're all for just a few years ago was an expensive premium on your client device whether it's. a hard drive etc you know some offer of five ten fifteen twenty gigabytes for free that was expensive but ten years ago very expensive what the are doing is most likely very or again recreating the business proposition so this they will give you this drive space for free if you and then you fill in the brain google does it so that

it's as mates but they also cause things such as google docs applications the office application environment etc microsoft has a position where they're trying to defend their extend office which many which i don't think is going to be possible going forward because. it's simply too expensive for the new world and then you have new technologies there's a technology base of brawn. the big call in space and technology that allows you to use just distributed space and so distribute space of your harddrive so basically it's like dropbox makes were bit torrent where you can. take you can buy hard drive space from five hundred other holders of the hard drives personal people for a fraction what drop charges and you can do the same if you have extra space you can sell it on this period appear distributed basis and actually making calls with business models such as these these drives these drive the cause close to zero or

negative for the big providers but i don't think the big providers care if they're again trying to change the business proposition and that's giving a speech for free as a loss leader or cross the line for something else you know going to make money if you give yourself in for free energy and asking what are the benefits of the cloud over premises storage for home and business users of technology. the benefits or you don't have to manage your own system need don't have to deal with security you don't have to deal with upgrades etc but that's the detriment as well you don't own the system you don't control security you don't control grades you don't you have a privacy issue you put something very sensitive whether it's personal or business and the provided good subpoena and you potentially have a problem from that mistake in microsoft actually lost a brief decision when the u.s. government declared that microsoft had to cough up data that was one u.k.

servers because microsoft is a us a company that means that companies in the u.k. or u.s. companies who have better in the u.k. have no i don't know of privacy is the word for a bad state security against subpoenas in the u.s. even know that their property or their data is not located in the u.s. and not located under the jurisdiction u.s. courts are these so they thought now i'm not a lawyer but these concerns can potentially be mitigated if you have control of your own service. that was reggie middleton c.e.o. of veritas and inventor of alter prime time now for today's big deal. big deal time with edward harrison season new deal and today we are discussing eric cantor's new job that's right mr cantor's new gig on wall street at motorists and company it was announced tuesday morning that the former house majority leader will

be joining the investment bank as vice chairman and managing director now even though he was a high ranking member of congress we know they cantor has absolutely zero wall street experience so edward why wouldn't louis make this offer to him yeah why would. he give his offer from were i think it's clear that neither the. guy nor have yeah financial experience because he was a regulator was that it was a set and so forth but cancer has nothing except his connections in washington so it's clear anyone who's looking at the situation understands that not only is it clear that because of his connections but he's being paid a lot of money three point two million dollars a year old in order to facilitate something as a result of those connections i mean it's incredible but you know we'll his law degree he does have a law degree obviously has tremendous experience in congress will that prepare him

for the job or do you think that his preparation is his rolodex his contacts on wall street there's no preparation necessary outside of well you know some companies where there's a lot of litigation but i don't think that in the position that he's in which is basically a mergers and acquisitions for a legal experience unless he has specific legal experience is going to be. contributory to his doing a better job i think it's more about captured anything else i mean. we have something here maybe we can put up a quote on the screen from from simon johnson and he wrote this just recently. two hundred years ago washington he was captured by the british who then proceeded to set fire to official buildings including the white house treasury department and congress today it is a domestic interest group very large bank that has captured washington because are likely to be far higher than they were in eighteen fourteen and i think that's agreed very well that's incredible and what's going on is that it's not just the

big banks per se but now we're seeing the whole financial services industry is captured because at the end of the day that's how it works in washington if you want to make things happen you need to make your voice heard in order to make your voice heard you need to have somebody who has connections in washington eric cantor has those connections you have it now here's the question do you most people to have never heard of this part but do you think that most is sending the wrong message putting cantor in a position you know as a v.p. and a manager knows he's vice chairman and managing director of their company so is that the wrong message or think most americans just think this is par for the course now that they think it's par for the course of what you were saying because basically we've seen this over and over again with obama administration officials in particular so it's not just you know the republicans are doing this or the democrats are doing this it's a bipartisan thing where we see a revolving door it's not just from government to wall street but wall street to

government in the back again so it's just back and forth and it creates not just potential impropriety but it's the mindset of the people who are involved that they are all thinking the same way because they're beholden to the same industry and the same sort of belief system it's one little club and i think that it's in the a very bad signal but people are not going to be listening to that signal because it's happened so often it's the wall street to washing. internet against that we track so closely if you're here on said it happens and i will continue to and we only have about thirty seconds left i want to ask you really quickly how cantor's new gig on wall street kind of affect the twenty fourteen elections i think that it will have zero basically because people really don't care about this unless we have some sort of financial crisis then that will tear them out there and as always thank you for your insight and that's all for now but we love hearing from you so please check out our facebook page facebook dot com slash boom bust our teeth you

can also tweet us at any rate at edward n.h. from all of us here at boom bust thank you for watching us the next time but i. will. technology innovation all the developments from around russia we. cover. so try to. pull. your life before it's a sure thing everybody. know

what. my life like but. let's say. this case is. sometimes for nothing. and it's. not just you but still you can still be just if you see the stage take the t.v. . but feature film on the seller. list . we welcome their innate and abby martin to be terrific oh son b r t network. it's going to give you a different perspective give me one stock tip i'll never i'll give you the information you make the decision don't worry about how breaking the said work is the revolution of the mind it's

a revolution of ideas and consciousness in frustrated with the system extremely your problems with would be described as angry i think i'm a strong enough under single. coming up on our team new information after i first claimed to have killed another american journalist a new video appears to show the batting of stephen thought lot just weeks after the death of james foley and protests in eastern east jerusalem. continue sparked by the july murder of a palestinian teen in the aftermath many in the same family have been beaten and arrested is this family being targeted a discussion with them coming up. and tensions between nato and russia as the latest fighting in the east of ukraine continues thousands of civilians remain under bombardment without.