global supply because of that oil inventories in places like saudi arabia and the us are also falling u.s. reserves are at its lowest point all year and saudi stockpiles in june stood at two hundred fifty seven million barrels its lowest level since january of two thousand and twelve. in south america an oil producer is struggling to meet delivery contracts and because of it it's losing prominence with one of its most important trading partners cuban trade with its ally venezuela has fallen seventy percent since two thousand and fourteen because of venezuela's economic hardships according to the cuban national statistics office report released this week trade with venezuela fell to two point two billion dollars in two thousand and sixteen down from four point two billion the year before and seven point three billion in twenty fourteen the alliance dates back to the days of fidel castro and hugo chavez when cuba imported all of its oil from venezuela in exchange for medical and other professional services and supplies but lately venezuela has been unable to export

as much oil to cuba last year sending just one point six billion dollars to the caribbean island compared with five point one billion a year before the economic crisis began human exports to venezuela have also fallen over venezuela struggles to buy goods as well imported less than half as much as they did the year before. all right cuba's economy has expanded one point one per cent through june of this year but the government warned it's still struggling so austerity measures will be staying in place and may even be broadened joining me to talk about cuba's financial future is john kavanagh president of the u.s. cuba trade and economic council john we wanted to bring this up at r.t. because cuba is essentially fallen off the media landscape since trump's promise to enact stricter regulations on the country so i wanted to ask you what is the current situation in cuba. cuba is undergoing again a severe economic crisis primarily brought on by the implosion in venezuela and for

the last seventeen years cuba has looked to venezuela to provide much of its energy as well as financing and now that is at risk substantially it's decreased fifty to seventy percent in the last three years and so cuba is finding that its the increase in its tourism revenues decrease in commodity prices decrease in production of commodities is all providing a of a very bad situation well if cuba and venezuela are so closely tied we've been hearing so much about venezuela why do you think more people have not connected these dots to talk about cuba as own economic crisis. i don't know why people are connecting the dots but the dots are large and as venezuela goes so does cuba cuba will try to withstand as many commercial economic and political changes as it can and its goal is to find another benefactor and traditionally cuba for the

last sixty seven years began with the u.s.s.r. and then in two thousand found venezuela and it generally will allow expansion in its economy allow in this case as we've seen in the last five years the development to redevelopment of the private sector but then as soon as they can. and as soon as they find a benefactor they retrench and in this particular case china the russian federation iran brazil they're not going to make up the slack and so cuba is going to have to make some changes and then you add into that the acknowledgment that they need to make commercial economic changes the trump administration trying to put pressure on the cuban economy and then these outside factors that cuba has no control over and it basically has the cuban government recoiling and you now have less than two hundred days before raul castro retires and is replaced by his vice president so

there's all this stuff going on and for the cuban government it means uncertainty in the cuban government hates uncertainty you mentioned changes with the trumpet ministration what do you think is trump's game plan with cuba. well the president doesn't have a particular game plan and the program that's being developed that he announced in june and that's going to be rolled out in september primarily has been driven by the members of congress of cuban descent this six of them in the house and in the senate and the goal is to make an attractive travel to cuba and make unattractive u.s. companies engaging with cuba and what their plan need to do which is a brilliant strategy is to say we are going to dissuade you from engaging with companies in cuba that are controlled by the cuban military and that puts u.s. companies in a bind because no c.e.o. wants to be on r t defending why they want to have business with

a military run company as opposed to a civilian run company so the trump administration is planning to roll this out the good news for u.s. companies is that the regulations and the policy initiatives are going to be far less severe than many had expected but they come at a critical time for cuba because u.s. visitors to cuba have the highest net profit margin of any visitor to cuba and those half a million visitors to cuba mostly of cuban descent primarily from south florida or northern new jersey they spend a lot of money in cuba and so the trumpet ministrations basically trying to grab as much cash as possible keep it out of the cuban government's hands put it into the cuban private sector hands but ironically some of these changes may do the opposite of bad let's talk about what's happening on the islands though because cuba has its own struggles promoting private enterprise from within you know people can work independent of the state as long as they aren't too successful and that results in

a lot of professionals choosing to leave the island do you see cuba changing its tune on private enterprise in the future especially with a change in leadership. i'm not certain the change your leaders. shipp the odds are that next february when raul castro retires he's going to retain his position as first secretary of the communist party of cuba and under the cuban constitution that basically controls the country so even though they'll be a new president you're still going to have an almost ninety year old man basically in charge of the commercial economic and political decisions in terms of though what these new young primarily private sector folks are doing it's difficult because the cuban government can't define success it has a problem with saying to someone how successful can you be before you become so successful that we want you to give back and even everything out so what you have

are some very talented people who are electing to drive taxicabs because they can make more that way than they can as being a physician and for the cuban government they've always looked at the private sector as evidenced by two hundred categories that are permitted whereas in never in most countries you'd have thousands and thousands you'd have to try to create some that weren't permitted but in cuba as case those two hundred are always considered an experiment they're not considered policy and they're not considered to the economy or to the political fabric of the country and until the cuban government grasps and defines how it perceives success you're going to continue to have this private sector bump up against entrenched bureaucracy bump up against cuban government companies because they have their fiefdoms and win and stay with it it's going to continue to be a developing story and police and will definitely be following those developments

john cavil at president of the u.s. cuba trade and economic council thank you so much for sharing your insight with us today. you're welcome. stop me if you've heard this before bit coy and broke another record thursday of the digital currency top forty five hundred dollars in trading which means it's doubled in price in the past month alone that's huge and since the concept of crypto currency is still so new many people see growth like this and want to compare it to a theocracy wondering when the bubble might burst cyber security expert john mcafee says this type of thinking is a mistake he joins me now john why do you think the word bubble cannot be applied to bitcoin. well first and foremost bitcoin is not a currency it costs over a thousand dollars to create

a bitcoin today and electricity and computing costs second the value of bitcoin is linked to the number of users and the number of transactions it is not a speculative investment even though it is being used as such by many people as the bitcoin network grows the value of corn grows as people move into bit corn for payments and receipts they stop using u.s. dollars euros chinese yuan which in the long term devalued as these current so what you're saying is more of a currency devaluation than a bubble in bitcoin as more people use it it has more intrinsic value and again the cost of producing a bit coin increases with the value of the bitcoin so this is not something that we're pouring out of thin air this is something that's created with massive amounts

of electricity and computing power while someone who disagrees with you on the term a bubble when it comes to big coin is mark cuban back in june he tweeted i think it's a bubble i just don't know when or how much it corrects. when everyone is bragging about how easy they are making money. now when he tweeted that bitcoin dipped in price how can one person's random twitter thread have that effect on the price and what does this say about bitcoin stability. or says nothing about bitcoin is to go to three after a drop five hundred dollars it's now one hundred forty four so these temporary fluctuations are meaningless are created by speculators people who do not understand the fundamental technology of the blog those who do know that in the long term these fluctuations will make no difference the more people who use bitcoin the more valuable it will become this is the only metric we can use now big

change go hand in hand but blocked chains ability to track financial transactions in a way that is incorruptible it gives it infinite amount of uses outside of the original purpose of using it for a bit coin do you see block chains overtaking certain aspects of the financial system as we know it now. it will take over all aspects people think the bitcoin or the blog chain is own and by someone by a company or by a consortium no this is strictly a mathematical formula that nobody owns there we are all participating in and we use the block chain for everything from. fixing supply chain problems in corporations to verifying the authenticity of the sender and receiver in a financial transaction it is the most powerful technology that the world has seen

i believe since the invention of agriculture now john we've showed our viewers rise just in the past month and we can show it to them again if it's up there but on july seventeenth one month ago you tweeted that bitcoins low of eight hundred yesterday simply could not be maintained in the long term bitcoin moves above five hundred thousand within three years of bets you ask so i ask you john do you stand by your statement. well keep in mind there's bitcoin grows and grows in value all other currencies national currencies are going to decline so the advantage to using did coin the advantages are huge if i do a wire transfer it'll it'll take me twenty four hours if i do a bitcoin transfer it takes me thirty seconds it is instantaneous i know people who do not use any other currency in the other than bitcoin they buy their houses their cars everything using bitcoin by connecting to all the users who sell all the

things that they need as more and more people use this what will happen to national currencies they will obviously have the value they have to so that five hundred thousand includes a massive devaluation in the u.s. dollar which absolutely has to come if corn continues to grow at its current rate well it's certainly a community effort and the big community and for other cryptocurrency is it's only growing john mcafee founder of mcafee incorporated thank you so much for your thoughts today time now for a quick break stick around when we return a stolen are worth more than one hundred million dollars turns up in an unexpected place where no one was looking and i.r.s. has the world wrapped around its finger with a little known long. as we go to break here the numbers at the closing bell.

welcome. back. it's. about your sudden passing i've only just learned you were a south and taken your last wrong turn. up to you as we all knew it would i tell you i'm sorry but only i could so i write these last words in hopes to put to rest these things that i never got off my chest. i remember when we first met my

life turned on each breath. but then my feelings started to change you talked about war like it was again still some are fond of you those that didn't like to question our ark and i secretly promised to never be like it said one does not leave a funeral the same as one enters the mind gets consumed with death this one height difference i speak to now because there are no other takers. to claim that mainstream media has met its make. such. isis militants i'm just shown to patrol base on the

left and right even this is compound. enemy troop movements have been spotted on to other side of the river. here in the alley soon troops of militants have joined forces with. those groups elusive to clear their determination so for him to go into some extent in the for the pennsylvania. even after two months of. the army keeps finding hidden weapons and explosives. nothing up operations in areas where civilians used to live on a daily occurrence. you know i don't know meaning walk the dog run right now what are you annoyed to get in my day. to day. basis seen. walking dead. believe over and it will make my yeah this is a special city and there's a. few

americans have heard of something called the foreign account tax compliance act or fatca but outside the us it's something every financial institution knows all too well the foreign account tax compliance act is america's global tax law it was quietly enacted during former president barack obama's administration in two thousand and ten and was fully in effect in two thousand and fourteen it's been touted as a way to track down american tax cheats who hide their money from the i.r.s. in foreign accounts how does it work it requires foreign banks to reveal americans with accounts totaling more than fifty thousand dollars and how does the u.s. in force it financial institutions that refused to comply face harsh penalties and are frozen out of u.s. markets so everyone is on board including russia china and tax havens around the

world never before has an american tax law attempted such a far reach the i.r.s. requires all americans to report and pay tax on income earned anywhere in the world fact facts not just resident u.s. citizens with foreign holdings but u.s. citizens living abroad which has caused a number of them to remount citizenship. its reach also extends to dual citizens and immigrants with any type of resident status as well as spouses of u.s. persons who have signatory authority. joining me now a man who wants to see fat cat gone jim jatra is a former u.s. diplomat and co leader of the campaign to. jim you call it the worst law that most americans have never heard of what's your issue with cracking down on offshore tax evasion because we always hear about corporations and millionaires that are of aiding taxes right i assure eyeball for cracking down on offshore taxation and all

taxation just like i'm all for cracking down on terrorism because i'm against terrorism doesn't mean that all by your and everybody else's cell phone and e-mail records should be indiscriminately gathered by the government and i don't see why cracking down on tax evasion means not going after people you have a reason to think are tax evaders but gathering the data of absolutely everybody in order to say well we'll find those bad guys in there somewhere and impose all sorts of her induce costs on consumers around the world in the effort to do so and it doesn't work on top of all there is targeting the corporations and millionaires that we hear about that are hiding money also noticed are specifically exempted corporations as far as millionaires go if you are an actual millionaire or somebody really wants to evade taxes you could easily they in fact put your money into fine art into bullion into gems also let real estate things it doesn't cover what it really causes a problem for people of modest means many of them living abroad nine million americans living abroad but even people in united states who have for whatever reason may have an account overseas basically to treat them as presumptive

criminals and you'll find especially with americans abroad being denied a credit card or debit card you can't open a checking account they cancel your mortgage that's why a lot of these people renouncing their citizenship so they're treated different and we know how it's in force and we know why the whole world around board it's serious restrictions against foreign institutions that don't comply there's a thirty percent withholding penalty plus getting cut off the u.s. market no. he wants that but i want to ask is it worth it i mean does the u.s. recover a lot of tax money this way though actually when it was passed back in two thousand and ten was scored a recovering eight hundred million dollars a year who has a lot of money no it's not it's about it it's about twenty minutes of the operation of the federal government per year and as professor william burns of the university of texas a and m. university school of law as pointed out it may be recovered a quarter of that you compare that to the cost that for example individuals you know filling out forms paying penalties and they're probably paying that much themselves in addition to what's being recovered by the treasury issuing those

estimates are correct and and but that then has to also be weighed against the institutions themselves paying hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide to comply with this is dog and those are cost being passed on to consumers shareholders people who are paying those costs being passed along by those institutions so let me get this straight it's the treasury at best is getting eight hundred million or a quarter of that to women generally hundred million and you're saying the institutions and their customers and everyone else attached to them are paying billions of dollars to comply that's right and that even a small bank will be paying over a million dollars into the millions of dollars to comply a large bank like one big thing like bank of nova scotia canada it's paid three hundred million dollars and it's compliance with that because there was a bank in spain the professor burned on paying eight hundred million dollars in a stack of compliance and this is money going into the u.s. treasury and hope is coming into the pockets of the great big accounting firms law

firms beat up people like this this is the biggest corporate welfare boondoggle the world has ever seen to be the human aspect of the story of that i mean obviously with taxes and the laws it's hard but what is the human aspect here who is affected well and you know it's i think one way or another it effects a lot of people as i mentioned the people especially people living abroad americans living abroad and as you pointed out in the opening it's not just americans it's found. says of us americans it's a resident alien or maybe somebody's mother was born in america they're people they call accidental americans some cases that you know they work because under u.s. law because their mother had been born in the united states or something like that and suddenly find themselves saying well you haven't been paying for filing taxes for the last forty years and even though you don't know any taxes we're going to smack you with penalties for non filing that's the kind of thing that goes on but the other thing is look i'm a former diplomat the idea that we threaten saying against every country in the world for not following the law over which we don't have any jurisdiction over them and punish them just because we can this is you know this is

a fundamental deformation of the principle of sovereignty in international affairs i know that the penalties are harsh but does it surprise you that all of these countries all of these financial institutions do comply with us no that doesn't surprise me at all because let's face it bankers and other lists of the same merchants morals are nest not necessarily the strongest in the world you know what's patriotism worth to the bottom line what's their client's privacy worth to them really with a look at it and say i'd rather crack down and do it do whatever they want is a shakedown but we'll do it and especially we're going to pass the cost along anyway and besides who's advising him on this stuff the very same compliance firms that are pulling in all the money so they're being told by their advisers oh real fact is he has to say there's really no other choice and they're rubbing their hands with glee at the thought of all the money they're going to make so is that the here to stay there's been quiet rumblings of a repeal but that's been happening since it was quietly enacted so we're talking

about seven years ago and it was enacted under the obama administration seven years later i haven't seen any news of a strong repeal isn't going anywhere i think it is rand paul in the side of freedom caucus chairman mark meadows in the house of repair it produced repeal bills it's in the republican platform that it should be repealed you know as you know the tax bill if we can get anything done in this town is hopefully going to go through this year we do have groups like americans of tact. for the national taxpayers union that are supportive of this this effort so i think there's a real shot at it plus there are some things the treasury department itself can do not to go into all the details but there are things the obama administration did they were just strictly illegal to try to implement sadhu because it would collapse under its own weight if they did it treasury fixes those things this thing's a dead duck knowing what you know about the trumpet ministration do you think that this is something that helps get on board with i don't know because unfortunately because it's wreaking havoc and costing so much money abroad inside the united states because the impact is largely not felt here and it's really kind of an also

ran issue fact look i think if you asked eighty percent eighty percent of congressmen and senators what you think about fact that it's a fact of what's there exactly and even though foreigners they assume this is also a big huge priority of the united states to impose this law and get all this information what in fact it's you know how the thing got it back in the first place it was simply a paid for another bill oh this will raise eight hundred billion dollars let's put that in nobody examined there were no hearings on it there was no cost benefit analysis it's absurd to former u.s. diplomat co-leader of the campaign to reveal repeal fact at repeal fatca dot com thank you so much for lightening us today is very interesting. all right tech giant apple is looking to throw its hat into the already crowded digital streaming ring sources claim apple is looking to acquire ten original t.v. series and that various company executives are already scouting prospects through different agencies the move comes just after apple hired two longtime sony pictures television presidents they've been behind some of the biggest shows on television

such as the blacklist breaking bad well the do over will be responsible for overseeing the build up of world class content for apple now this isn't apple's first foray into streaming original content the company released both planet of the apes and carpel karaoke a spin off of c.b.s. late late show with james corden on its apple music subscription service but neither of those was met with credible. and while the company plans on spending more than one billion dollars it wouldn't be enough to catch up with streaming giants like netflix and amazon this year alone netflix spent over seven billion dollars on original content amazon's budget has reportedly been about four point five billion dollars for the entire year and for more news on video streaming and the fight for video views catch a special encore episode of unplugged airing tomorrow at the same time. but one point we've all dreamed about finding lost treasure some people search sunken ships others go to ancient ruins like indiana jones but one lucky person found to be

normally valuable lost treasure behind a door this discovery happened in a town i used to live in thirty two years ago someone stole willing to famous painting woman ochre from the university of arizona museum of art authorities searched high and low for the piece of art that is said to now be worth as much as one hundred sixty million dollars but they never had any luck fast forward to twenty seventeen where furniture and antiques dealer and silver city new mexico bought in a state just up the road in a town called cliff where i went to high school behind that door was the painting he didn't keep it he didn't get any money it is now in its rightful place thanks for watching today we'll see you next time. the city. was the hardest by the twenty eleven tsunami but it was damaged mostly by the radiation after the nuclear disaster. not nearly enough to

last you did not. think it will also tell them. that i am a little dejected a little contamination is not complete much many locals could not leave their homes or the farm shop but she was nice. nice . checks don't want to they stay strong like their ancestors centuries ago did. not mean i'm also a couple. of what i want. or issued from the little blue beetle when i will their will and souls find a way to rebuild their lives in the world and lambskin. were. we all willingly accepted the

risk of being shot wounded taken prisoner but noone signed up to be friggin poisoned by our own people of seeing stuff that was nuclear biological and chemical products said do not truck tires all types of styrofoam polystyrene batteries trucks there was a complete denial i think at all levels of government that there was any connection between berm pits and what these brave soldiers were suffering from to compensate every soldier marine airman and sailor that was on the ground that are complaining about illnesses from exposure from the burn pits would really literally send a be a pro and they don't want to pay it so the waiting decades a lot of those soldiers will die in time and they won't have to pay and. call for help and get the middle finger the movies the model is. delayed and i hope you die

. here's what people have been saying about rejected in the us a full on awesome well the only show i go out of my way to lunch you know what it is that really packs a punch at least yampa is the john oliver of our. apparently

better than. to see people you've never heard of. the world bank very. seriously send us an e-mail. a knife wielding man stabs most people in the finnish city of before being shot and detained by police. i was sitting next to it when it stopped and i didn't. know fifty fifty people i mean there were people people lying. on the floor meanwhile the terrorists who killed fourteen people in spain were planning an even bigger attack according to police the country's in mourning after vehicles from driven into crowds in barcelona and the resort town of cambria. terrorism is the.