oh hi there this is the kaiser report hey you know our unit driving it over right now. well you know who has been in the news many many many times of the past few years because of disinter mediating the whole taxi space taxi medallions are crashing and price all over the world from new york city to chicago i don't think they have medallions in london or places like that but it's certainly messing up that situation over there they've had loss after loss after loss after a loss they seem to be a loss making operation part of that is in order to basically become a monopoly in the city so they've been losing billions of dollars it's not a publicly listed company but there are a lot of big investors like goldman sachs throwing billions of dollars at them to create a global monopoly but here is the latest in their debacle of losing money

and you know fair enough it's only goldman sachs's money so i guess though goldman sachs will have to defraud some granny somewhere to pay for these losses but gets run over by its own subprime auto leases last year last three billion dollars they also lost their c.e.o. in the past few months and two years ago however when these folks launched the subprime auto leasing program to put their badly paid drivers into new vehicles they couldn't otherwise afford they apparently did not do the math remember they started a program called exchange leasing because they were having a problem they were growing fast but they didn't have enough drivers with good cars to drive everybody who wanted a nuber well on july twenty fifteen when the exchange leasing program was announced the company gosh we're excited about how these new solutions drivers unique needs and offer more and better choices and greater flexibility than ever before their

actual pitch from this exchange leasing program with a new ber at that time then goes on to say. unlike most multiyear leases that have high fees for early termination drivers who participate in exchange for at least thirty days just thirty days will be able to return the car with only two weeks notice and limited additional costs the program allows for unlimited mileage and the option to lease a used car with three teen maintenance also included so the only penalty for returning your car for two injured it after thirty days was to enter the fifty dollar deposit and we're going to get to the shocking numbers about how wrong they were but on the surface max that looked like any sort of leasing program that any auto manufacturer in the world would everett and turner into knowingly what

a cliffhanger could hardly wait to get these numbers they're so shocking all of the key phrase in their sub prime and we're talking about growth at any expense growth at any expense which is the business model of cancer and we saw it during the real estate subprime crisis banks they ran out of people to lend money to but they were making a lot of money making these loans and the loans are backed up by the federal government and the taxpayer so much of what we saw in the savings and loan crisis and all the laws that were in place to safeguard people from a savings and loan crisis were changed to make what was illegal in the one nine hundred eighty s. legal so the subprime crisis was a repeat of the crisis except all the illegal activity was made legal so they had to repeat and they ran out of customers so they started making loans to people so-called ninja loans no income no job people without and if you could fog

a mirror they'd give you half a million dollars to go speculate the property market it blew up as a course it had to. and then the government printed fifteen sixteen seventeen trillion dollars taken principally from people's pension accounts to make it all economically work and gave it to the bankers to reward them for having changed the laws to make what was the legal legal and they became fabulously wealthy in the price of fine art went up another hundred percent and a boss. painting hundred eighty million or whatever that's all the result of poor people defaulting on mortgages during the subprime crisis now of course look at that they say no bankers ever got in trouble there is never any penalties for committing massive fraud in the banking sector was commit massive fraud the loan lease business well importantly nobody but nobody but their investors are paying big time for this the drivers wouldn't otherwise

qualify for a loan in the private sector outside of working for. they wouldn't have qualified here they're able to jingle mail just give the car back for two hundred fifty bucks in the meantime what they were getting is cars that have been driving for four of like six months and they had twenty thousand miles on it so here's the wall street journal on this article where they defrauded themselves essentially wall street not wall street journal but are. messed it up for themselves and their investors well the exchange leasing division had been estimating modest losses of around five hundred dollar per auto on average these people said managers recently informed executives that the losses were actually about nine thousand dollars per car about half the sticker price of a typical least vehicle so they were losing not five hundred dollars as their

entire business plan in their projections and their earnings when they're presenting to goldman sachs and other silicon valley sort of investors to give us another few billion dollars so we can lose more money in order to gain market share well here here they were estimating we're going to lose five hundred dollars on this program you know but we're bringing in way more than that on getting these drivers and you know saturating the market with drivers well they were actually losing nine thousand dollars on average they own forty thousand of these vehicles now each one having a nine thousand dollar on average loss so they've either got to sell all of these vehicles and an already collapsing used vehicle market and prices because so many leases from three years ago are coming off off lease right now. in the regular market but you're competing with rundown cars that have way more mileage and then

somebody who's leasing a car from one of the big auto manufacturers well there's a big number attached to the west that the total cumulated the aggregate number for me i think you is three hundred sixty million dollars in losses if they sell these of course they could do something else which is just trying to package up this book of leases that they hold exchange leasing because they're shutting this down if they've shut down this unit they could either sell these forty thousand vehicles and you know realize this thirty three hundred sixty million dollars loss not like they need anymore tax write off or a buck or they could sell the leasing program to somebody else and maybe change the terms and conditions of all these outstanding leases that all these drivers still haven't turned in their the totality of the forty thousand vehicles i understand when you say that there are no investors outside of the private investors who are

being impacted by this problem over there at goober but i would disagree and that goober is on a private market basis they did a round of financing putting them at a value of seventy billion dollars and there's a lot of problems over and if goober in fact collapses let's say the way enron collapse enron was an eighty billion dollars public company that did collapse it set off a crisis in the counting industry for sure and it had ripple effects throughout the economy and throughout the the markets now if tanks that's a seventy billion dollar potential loss as you point out it's mostly private investors which would include let's say goldman sachs and others but if these folks like the goldman sachs suffer any losses at all remember they then can or the government for a bailout so they could go to the government and say blew up we need a bailout and the government because it is staffed by goldman sachs. employees mostly trump they would rubber stamp that fail up and then to pay for the bailout

they'd have to go into people's pension accounts and they'd have to grab that money or wells fargo and go into your personal account and grab that money to give to goldman sachs bankers and make them whole because they're god and i'm her just you know and out in the meantime the public infrastructure and you know the public transportation system which is taxis are part of it in new york city and chicago and washington d.c. and los angeles and never really have a taxi system but that's all been wiped out like a lot of those medallion owners certainly in new york city remember they were selling some people bought them for a million dollars and now trading at like one hundred thousand dollars which is probably even overvalued in the with the existence of but if we were also implodes just as the entire tax system and all the cities implodes it could be quite chaotic well you're indicating there possible contrarian play that a taxi medallion in new york city might actually have bottomed out and the value

might be starting to go up i mean if it for a contrarian investor like a warren buffett who says i like to buy straw hats in the winter time and go against the crowd you might look at this is say hey look at taxi medallion in new york is trading artificially cheap i think a load up on taxi medallions but we're not saying to do that but we're not because of course some is going to say no time bought a hundred fifty thousand dollars to actually rebellion and now it's only worth twenty one hundred taxis a new product in my bedroom flat in queens i don't know what to do and finally speaking of contrarian investors i don't know if this guy is one but he says people need to get outside their bias and this is ray dally you know everybody needs to put five to ten percent of their money in gold multi-billionaire investor he runs what's his name bridgewater associates out of connecticut one hundred sixty billion dollar hedge fund and he's saying that the political risks are rising rapidly and people don't seem to be accounting for this and they're so. and i think he calls

them that they're biased towards the u.s. dollar and they are there keep on buying u.s. treasuries and they're against gold and gold barbarous relic but he says most immediately during the calm of the august vacation season we are seeing too confrontational nationalistic and militaristically leaders playing chicken with each other while the world is watching to see which won't be caught bluffing or if there will be a hellacious war and to the odds of congress failing to raise the debt ceiling leading to a technical default a temporary government shutdown and increased loss of faith in the effectiveness of our political system rising it's hard to bet on such things one way or another so the best that one can do is be neutral to such possibilities and buy gold he says you know five to ten percent this is a standard wealth management tool for those with wealth to manage many americans how of course don't have any wealth but here he saying five to ten percent we haven't heard people say this most people are even on the financial news on the c m

b c's and the hedge funds of the world are all piling into big going what are your thoughts on this great value as a putt for everything you just said is true and it's been reflected in the price of bitcoin whereas great value of band anyway we've got to take a break we'll be back right after this don't fret and go away. isis militants have just shown to control the sun to the tune of three d. ministers could. be so being spotted on the other side of the river. here in the room to observe militants who have joined some of. those groups there's a determination to do. going to some extent in the philippines.

after two months of sunshine keeps finding shouldn't weapons and explosives. not being rationed scenarios where civilians used to live on a daily occurrence. we're not going to want the job done but. i know it. is a busy day. to see him. walking dead. and. it isn't enough. says he doesn't. notice i noticed but.

even. now no one's. around him and that's. it. welcome back to the kaiser report imax keyser time now to return to our conversation with international film star all around nice guy soon to be a starring in a new our t.v. show the gap the great american pilgrimage i give you stephen baldwin stan welcome

back to serve our i well this is been a fascinating discussion i want to pick up on a point we made in the previous segment about the left wing in america the media in america a lot of these questions are open questions and they are debated in the mainstream media and the page of the new york times and the l.a. times and so i think if you know what do you think about my i think my thought on this is that part of the reason for this show great american pilgrimage is to go out and talk to people i mean you know you and i can talk about this all day long but let's go talk to people see what they're thinking what's going on they're the ones who are making the votes they're the ones that are making the political right reality happen right you know. and i got to tell you. as you and i do because most of the folks watching the show don't really understand completely how well you and i know each other how long you and i know each other the fact that we're friends i think is richer respects regarding funny you know i would must

match geysers as much as i do if max keiser wasn't as funny as he is so that's why we're on board together you're going to be producing and you'll be producing as well we're going to come up with a lot of fun ideas but the idea is basically every time i meet people they go what are you doing what's coming next i go we're going to the city called the gap the great american pilgrimage in an r.v. with the dogs and talk to people about america and everyone reacts to cindy literally so. really sounds. so max i'm excited to go out and experience the great american pilgrimage again i think are you were were so fired up to turn to turn this program into you know for our t.v. . parts unknown you know anthony bourdain or like a duck dynasty and you know i believe the best way to do that is to give people an experience that makes you laugh and they enjoy and they feel good about while at the same time really talking about the issues really talking about sanctuary cities

we're going to be talking about. immigrant policy except for a. across the board from from trump to guns to bibles to the qur'an and whatever it is we want to know. as the. creators of of the gap we want to know from people. what happened how did we get here not what happened in a bad way or good way just how has this progress here in this country that you know a reader seen now in twenty seventeen degree just movement and surge of pru test in the united states since my teens sixty seven sixty six sixty seven sixty eight. so that fascinates me and what fascinates you you're a serious guy and you're driven to our community. but you want to do it in

a way that's unique and fun and i think oh this coming together on this journey is going to absolutely result in that outcome yeah well agreed on those points and this does have a fail of a one nine hundred sixty eight political awakening to it in america and the point is that to go out there and find out what's going on and as you point out we have known each other a long time maybe experienced decades of american history and in a country that's not that old america is only two hundred forty years old they've been alive for a significant portion of the history of this country so here we are traveling through america and what concerns me a little bit is that there seems to be this rising tension between two to two divides politically and america without political division and resulting in

conflict before i think sixty eight with a very polarizing period you know the kent state incident the murder can't stay for example the whole debacle of the vietnam war this was to mulch us turbulent times going back of course you could go back to the civil war clearly is you know another example we have the illinois the state of illinois stephen is being talked about now is the first american failed state the economy of illinois about to go. illinois is about to go under the entire state. and this is bringing about a huge dislocation in america so what about this this tension that's happening in the happy old versus the mccoys almost you know families are being split apart as they were in the civil war as they were during the vietnam war there is a real powerful sense of of of tension bleeding into. some violence so what's your take on that are we is

a trend becoming more pronounced are we in your opinion i mean will find out a lot of more about this on the road but do you see from your observations that the trend getting more divisive stephen. this is what basics are exciting to me. is that we really can't be sure you know can we. you know for me max what i've witnessed. over fifteen. baby bowen is fifty one and what's what's amazing to me and my observation is this slow erosion of tolerance is what i call it. and really the interpretation of tolerance because in my perception the liberal movement in america is is looking to take the constitution and ethics and moral ethics and you know tolerance and on

a lot of what is that in the iliad will wright that i have to be one of the members of we the people. is that now the most dangerous aspect of all of this is now free speech tolerance always a not only can you not disagree with the progressive movement but you can't say that you do and in fact what they're hoping for relative to all of this jeems that they are pursuing is that not only that you. approve of it but that you agree with them as well that you must agree with these perceptions. that are in these changes to the landscape and the tradition and the foundation of what has built this country and that's the people so i'm excited that great

american pilgrimage is going to go back to that grassroots thing to say hey look you know in in sixty eight this happened in seventy five that happened in eighty one that happened you know as if we progress through this transition. it's going to be interesting to hear the voices of people who agree with or disagree with it and everything in between and that they get to honestly and simply communicate that from their hearts. so yeah it's to me max it's a super wild crazy freaky time in american history right now and i'm going to go right into the vortex and i want to do a search warrant right into that with those people agree or disagree who are you where you're from god bless you what do you got to say about what's happening right here in the great american beauty which is going to be excited and i'm thinking about the one nine hundred seventy s. what's of course in american history was

a time when workers had the greatest purchasing power of of any time in the last under airth wall street was on the way down workers' wages actually because inflation was on the out they were getting great purchasing power with them the wages that they were making and that during that time we had filmmakers like alan pakula who may have things like all the president's men the parallax view and films that challenge the official american narrative you know the only guy we have out here today who is challenging the official american narrative is oliver stone who would put out things like the alternative history of america series or he'll go and interview glad america potent in moscow and you know as a journalist but my question is. where did all that great filmmaking go were those directors go and are we on the verge of possibly going back to an era where we are what we will see hollywood directors challenge the

official narrative and come out with socially relevant and challenging material stable. it's great christian brother because you know in hollywood you have people like me and dean cain and some others. who are willing to to to really stand up and give their opinion then james woods is like throwing down on his twitter he sees a man using. this so obviously for the most part of a majority of hollywood folks that do not agree with any kind of fiscal conservative or skillful perspectives in that regard which is which is fine you my thing is this i'll never forget i went to the premiere of syriana that george clooney put together and afterwards i walked on i went you know the movie was kind of wild and low and you know it was more entertainment in my opinion than trying to seriously sarcastically communicate

a message which is that liberal message don't answer it clooney same to me like you know i said hey you know it looks great i mean this really agree with all of it but i said look pretty cool get seated and i guess he was yeah man this should be firmer this one causing the trouble isn't it and it kind of did and i went well i guess for you road yeah but you know when it comes to like the coal miner and people like that who can afford to go see this movie mr clooney you know those little people who do their best to pay their taxes to. you know. i theory you i guess the point i'm trying to make is is is really quite simple. i'm we're grateful and motivated and inspired to live in a land. that no matter where all the dynamics are regardless if seventy percent of the messaging in the media is this the people

are what matters americans are what matter most in america. so i'm looking forward i think right now like you said. mr stone and some folks are are obviously in an incredible minority in the content provision world called hollywood but that's strange and that's changing the rattling of this change and all of this protest and resistance and all of this disagreement and discourse is what america's all about it's a good thing that we have the the rights and the freedoms to to have this conversation to have this it's the platform of politics that we do the is truly democratic and free lessons stand before we got to go one last question if

you looking forward to what compare this nischelle an hour to the gap the great american pilgrimage where you can think of going to compare more to the thout of music are apocalypse now. be like. if we did our own version of apocalypse now to be like if alec baldwin were playing a colonel walter kurtz. kind of scene that kind of brando alec kind of coming together and then alec i don't know perhaps like brand new must have done on accused maybe hope break out a ukulele and just start singing. a metion folk songs like i couldn't make you willard and then i guess that makes me that that a topper character that photojournalist it tells people you can't land on a fraction ok i was going to do it for this episode the kaiser parts they have all the facts let's bring up. and that's going to do it for this edition of the kaiser report with me max geyser as they are but our guest david baldwin john to catch us

on twitter it's kaiser report intellect and by you know. the city of minima so modest was hit the hardest by the twenty eleven tsunami but it was damaged mostly by the radiation after the nuclear disaster the little not even enough to let you know the you think it will mom also have the love that i. am a little slow to return it to the will decontamination is not complete much many locals could not leave their houses and farms most of us you know he might. be a nice nice kid. six to one they stay strong like

their ancestors centuries ago did. not mean also a couple. a lot but i wonder. how long she initiated. to be gentle naive will there wouldn't souls find a way to rebuild their lives in the world and lambskin. but you will get you on the order you know melissa another good morning and one

million people died i. killed people they'd be even begun. to. know no one still come to wait everybody's running and upset.

police in finland say that they now believe that friday's stabbing attack which left two down was an act of terror the main suspect is an eighteen year old moroccan inside. coming up. an increasing casualty.