surge is attracting investor interest toward the crypto currency and away from the metal the biggest online vaulting service said this is in the united kingdom and they say that crypto currencies have kind of dented the appeal of gold right well the money to go up online with apps the app a condom even or stand technology and they understand bitcoin and they're flocking into bitcoin and right now because market cap is about one to two percent that of gold ever gold is worth seven trillion dollars let's call it a bit coin is in above one hundred billion of trying to get to two hundred billion but that's quite a gap in order to close that gap in order to see it going truly equal gold and market cap we're going to have to see bitcoin trade above one hundred thousand dollars a coin just to get just to get started i think to to achieve complete parity it actually would trade higher higher than that but you know we've got a ways to go yet but we've made an excellent start affairs for

a few years of because. i mean just think about the price rise kind of gives me the vapors like colin powell remember that is like oh there's no weapons of mass destruction do not look at the vapors son of a look well in fact on the screen you should see a chart here if all goes according to plan in the edit suite and that is the bitcoin outperforms gold you'll see gold is up eleven percent so far this year whereas of course between has risen seven fold and according to google trends max global searches for buy bitcoin have overtaken by gold after previously exceeding searches for how to purchase silver last month the amount of gold changing hands on bully and vaults online trading platform dropped by almost a third from the twelve month average but it's not just milan he also is also bankers and i think bankers and hedge funders and wall street sort of guys other than jamie diamond of course allegedly. he says he's not buying big coin but

a lot of people on wall street are buying big time in bitcoin but it's an immutable asset that you can store in your wallet or in a memory wallet that could be worth a billion dollars you could have a billion dollars and it's secure and secured by the network and that point is being now taken on board by those looking for safe havens there are the family offices so-called you know these are the accounts managed for a wealthy families all over the world they're now looking at bitcoin as a way to store a value they've traditionally put money into gold and other assets for long periods of holding part of a multigenerational family wealth once they start buying bitcoin that's going to be another you know trillion dollar market looking at this thing you've got to hedge funds looking at it you've got wall street looking at it you've got now indexes being launched you've got seven thousand saudi princes who have seen prince ali and

bin tell all have his wealth seized and they want to make sure that they have their billions out so you know if bitcoins market cap is one hundred billion it's going to have to go to hundreds of billions us to compensate just to deal with the saudi princes but we have not that much time left so i want to move on to a few other charts and i the next episode i promise everybody will get into what the c.m.e. in the futures contract and goals and what that on between and what that might mean but in terms of charts and haul in these parabolic lose it's not just that we see parabolic moves mean for course seen parabolic moves and the stock markets not only the dow the s. and p. but also the footsie the japanese stock markets are hitting you know the highest since one thousand nine hundred two so it's finally inching back up they're actually going parabolic back up there but stock markets hit fresh eyes global equities now worth ninety two point four trillion dollars equals to one huh.

injured in twenty percent of global g.d.p. that is way above the buffett one hundred percent crash threshold this is from november fourth and of course they continue to go higher after that but you see the parabolic move happening there of course it can continue to go parabolic longer than any person shorting at as many have been wiped out many headphones have been wiped out trying to guess that this will crash well well you know some history on this so you have the financial crisis of two thousand and eight two thousand and nine market was trading i believe it was around fifteen thousand or so trade back down to nine thousand and once it got back up to fifteen thousand many pond and many folks out there were saying ok it's a double top that's it earnings are unsupportable the price is at these levels etc but then it just shahrzad to twenty thousand twenty two thousand twenty three thousand and that is in part to what i've been saying on this show now for several years to those who tell me that it's overpriced and will not go down. will not

continue to go up and that is that the entire s. and p. five hundred being taken private these companies are being taken private to mergers and acquisitions they're being taken off the board there won't be stocks to invest in as we know that understand that in another five or ten years they're all going to be private well you didn't actually know this i know for a fact but that is my next chart really and you won't believe it but it's from schwab dot com and it was an analysis that they had the day before hollowing so october thirtieth and it's the spirit of the season scary charts for investors and vanishing stocks as a section and this is under scary charts here's the chart and that is showing you the vanishing stocks falling numbers of listed u.s. companies the number of companies listed in the u.s. stock markets has been cut in half over the past twenty years going from eight thousand to about four thousand as you can see from the chart the disappearing public stock market. a frightful prospect for active managers left with fewer

stocks to pick from and investors concentrating more and more of their savings into fewer and fewer stocks so there you have it again that's the scary charts fewer and fewer stocks in which to basically try to poor all the assets of this huge baby boomer population retiring into the markets that is half the amount of u.s. stocks foreign stocks have increased by just as much but there you have it not right all this is executive talking about that the actual number of stocks available to buy has been cut in half and so in that that'll become half again if interest rates remain as zero percent looked at amazon's purchase of whole foods they did so with money that cost them the zero percent financing they quire amazon the earnings one were a creative they were a threat to the bottom line they start making more money day one they cost them on the financials zero and the market cap went up higher than the value of whole foods

that is to say thirteen billion dollars on that purchase so here you have amazon that's already an entrenched monopolist that's octopuses us giant squid and penetrating every facet of the economy and it's being financed by money that they can borrow in purpose perpetually and zero percent and buy anything without any trust regulations bumping into them whatsoever so then you apply that to maybe five or six giant companies and five years from now you going to have just five or six giant companies their share prices will be exorbitant like they're a google or amazon this or a berkshire hathaway's the stock prices over two hundred thousand dollars a share so berkshire hathaway in five years of say the stock five hundred thousand dollars a share so in order to participate in the stock market and not be a wage slave your whole life you've got to pony up five hundred thousand dollars for one share of berkshire hathaway you know what was that berkshire hathaway shares when you were working out what i thought it my ira in one thousand nine hundred two. it was two thousand dollars

a share so that shows you how much that's gone up but again you mentioned that so i just showed you that chart of number of listed companies has fallen by half well even those that remain and you said that you know that those have declined but they will continue decline and here's another chart showing the evidence of that and this is the biggest buyers of u.s. stocks are who to guess who is the dotted line the companies themselves those are called share buybacks you of course knew this you knew the answer because you've been talking about this that the companies have been borrowing money and buying themselves back thus boosting the stock price that's boosting their own christmas bonus for coming to the christmas bonus season all those other like nine lines there rest of world households have been declining in terms of ownership of shares and institutions have hold even less so those are like the banks and rightly so you know if you're an executive at a company and you award yourself an option to buy stock let's say the stocks are

one hundred and you give yourself an option of buy that stock and if the cost for that offers a dollar and then you borrow money from the fed for zero and then you buy back your own stock reduce the supply of stock the stock goes from one hundred two hundred fifty so now your option that you worry yourself for a dollar is worth fifty one dollars. in the space of one year so now you cashed out and now you've just made a quick billion two billion five billion dollars by something that just a few years ago was just centered completely illegal it not allowed to do that even a few years ago but then if you have your fresh billion dollars you can buy a u.s. senator or congressman for a hundred thousand bucks to change the law to make this game go on even further yes so when you worked on wall street in the eighty's it was illegal to buy back room chairs like this in the way that they're doing i believe so yes so everybody is often on c.m.t. see saying you're missing out you're missing out you're missing i got to get in you got to get in but the only one's buying as you say everybody else is not

participating in this rally this parabolic rally by donald trump as they're calling it the trump rally but it's all been in share buybacks. you know perhaps they feel like maybe his cut cut cut tax bill is going to somehow help them or maybe that his fed because he's going to basically point five f.m. c member so they're going to depart to determine what the value of money is the u.s. dollar so maybe they feel like they're going to keep it cheap me he's going to appoint some people because he's he's already on the record saying he likes cheap money he likes borrow cheap he likes you know here's a guy who's gone bankrupt many many times cheapening going bankrupt even cheaper or keep in mind that if you have a lot of money and you're buying stocks for two or three percent of the value of that portfolio you can insure against any losses so you can buy options and futures contracts on a million dollar portfolio and i spent two percent of that value the portfolio if the if the market dropped fifty sixty seventy percent you'd only lose two percent

so that's what you can do if you have the wherewithal to do so if you're not in that category any put let's say ten thousand dollars of the stocks and there's a correction and you lose fifty or sixty percent you lose fifty or sixty percent that's the reality of it and then the time it takes to make it back to where you started from could be five ten fifteen years so there's a ton. asymmetry if you don't have the where with all the hedge yourself as i just described then you're playing a loser's game and that's why less and less people actually own stocks that are getting priced out cut out the. price and meanwhile those who are going to four of the portfolio insurance insurance you could call it are are running away with it well anyway that's it for this episode i wanted to just bring your attention to those charts as we enter the scary season and the christmas season when they all want to look for their big bonuses. you know people are buying big queen they're not participating in the financial markets it seems they're

participating instead in the bitcoin market and they're moving away from silver and gold and typically you know us have a big year end rally you know typically anyway we got to go to the second half don't go away stay right there. we'll willingly accepted the risk of being shot wounded taken prisoner but noone has signed the poisoned by our own people of so you so that was leaked or biological and chemical products the 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 burn 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 the onus is from the exposure from the burn pits would really literally some to be a growth and they don't want to pay is the way to decades a lot of those soldiers will die in time and they will have to pay. paul burrell to get the middle finger to be used in. delay denial peter. i think good. old citizens are coming have the stand pulpit better understand that a shock is they are not in favor of it made to it's coming good to direct you to the boredom for the shot but on the other side i think it think came back to the

old impression ofcom from patients that's a mistake on the western side through especially by the americans and the also on the other side. welcome back to the kaiser report i'm max keyser time now to turn to dave column is a professor at cornell university who writes a yearly year in review for peak prosperity and zero hence dave welcome and am thanks for inviting me this is this is one i get to take up my bucket list now that's fantastic how did we end up on your bucket list dave i mean i've been following you guys for years. trying to figure out if you're is kind of this crazy off screen as you are on but i don't have any data yet so if you're on a college campus and universities are ground zero for the new hysteria against free

speech what do you think this is about including the attempts by the democrats and m s n b c to shut down alternative media voices on the left and arteta what do you think about this i think it's sherry and i think it's probably part of a. bigger anger thing across the globe a little bit i think the students are. in a good day notoriously kind of crazy but but now now because of this this this this blanket of hysteria it's got a point where i largely blame the adults for not finding a way to contain it better and cornell university of course is famous for a lot of student suicides more or less the last couple years well i got even clarify that point in terms of cornell famous for dramatic suicides there are suicide rate is actually below the national average. one things we did do enough as

we put these mash nets underneath the gorges and so you can't actually jump the gorge and i actually think it worked i think i think. i think a number of the suicides of college campuses are kids who do something spontaneously so huge jumps the bridge is conceivably when they walk on the bridge the first time they don't they don't realize they're going to jump that's my suspension and the nets prevent that from happening so it's like an apple factory fox come in china they get the the anti-suicide nets as a professor at cornell what are you a professor and what is your what do you do that what do you teach. well again a chemist specializing in the organic chemistry of lithium and. and i teach organic chemistry both graduate and undergraduate i just finished being chair so i have been in the lecture room for quite some time. but i will reenter the last lecture and soon and my research does organic chemistry so so now you're. a side

job if you all are well noted for delving into economics and people i need to have going to have got a video up now talking about price gouging which is kind of interesting so do you see a connection between our down a chemistry in economics or economics it's just a hobby or it's what how can you what was the context there dave well you know there is there is an odd connection i find that i find that thinking about economics which includes neuro psychology and various subdisciplines history . it i think it does influence the way i think about science and certainly. science influences the way i think about economics because because i spend a better part of my day bunking things on ideas that were very complicated turn out to be correct and so when i look at the economists and they say something and i

have this natural capacity say well i think you're wrong and lot of people have trouble looking at an expert saying you know i don't believe you because they say well they're an expert i don't defer to expertise conquerable right of course chemistry is what's called a hard science relies on of empirical evidence except for a whereas in economics it's a soft science as far sociological psychological do you agree with that. i do and i think they were goes off the rails when it tries to pretend to be hard science i think it's some senses a subdiscipline of history in that. and that to me economics is you you asked the question you know we've been here before. what happened next and said ok now you look you say well we've now got massive amounts of debt what happened next and then there's using answer out there in the distant past that people dismissed

but usually the answers a good start and so i think it's a lot about history knowing knowing the past knowing now and it played out going forward ok so let's talk about what if any else that i think a sense of if you're back around in iraq's parties and you've got a video out of price gouging and i think the premise of the video is you are in a making the bullish case for price gouging in areas that say that are hit by a storm and they the rates on the over taxi might go up a quite a bit and that looks like their price gouging and say your position basically is that this is your bullish on this idea is that is that correct in my characterizing that correctly i'm going to tell us a little bit more about what you're thinking that what goes into that thought well it is sort of a free market idea if you look at it you could disasters of the past. people

rushed to the scene with supplies and goods and help and now we've got fame and i'm sure the three of us can all agree that it's seen as a disaster and then they're dysfunctional and it's trumped good design feature we'd be better off. and so anything that inhibits the flow goods and services into the disaster zone is problematic and price gouging laws which say you can't charge more keeps people from you know bring. a truckload of chainsaws and five cancer gas and saying look we can help you and they have a risk and they have expenses and yet the price logic goes laski people from from do and if you do it you get arrested you're not coming back and so so i am a fan of not having price gouging laws i don't think local stores i don't think the big chains will price gouge the p.r.c. to bad i think what the price gouging laws do is keep outsiders from coming into

the area with goods and services right so talking about i guess we could call it the price discovery mechanism and if you have a market it got buyers and sellers demand and supply and there is a an invisible hand and a price is set by that price discovery mechanism and so in the case of a disaster zone the price for water might go up but if we're to believe in the free market in our free marketeers we need to accept this price gouging as a corollary of the free market and not pillory it is that is that basically true. yeah and you know if people in hurricane areas found that the price of plywood rose before the hurricane they might start preparing instead of waiting till the week before the hurricane to go by their plywood go by the water go by their chainsaws and a hurricane or two in which in which prices reflected availability and prices reflected the ballot. they were theirs and you know and talk to gave you examples of the

woman who got the last generator do the generosity of someone who is going to get it and it was because her father was going to die and the point that i make is that any idiot who could die owing to lack of electricity should already own a generator that i was just stupid ensoul i think that i think price gouging laws. not existing would help people think well maybe out of buy my book bottled water in advance maybe out of storage in the basement i keep a couple hundred pounds of relatively cheap food in the basement because you don't know what's going to happen you're going to have an e.m.p. you're going to have ice storm you're going to have a cyber attack and and i personally would rather know that i'm not going to star over the next month because i saved myself one hundred dollars on the the face of it what you're saying there is a logical free market needs to function in a free market society so my question is how do you account for or how do you

balance or what do we do about the fact that in america if got a mixed economy if got in some cases the free market where prices are discovered by supply the man and then at that macro level you've got an institution like the federal reserve that issues the free market economics and instead impose a top down call of bureau like dictatorship in may in setting the price of money with their interest rate policies and causing enormous financial dislocation and hardship through. that form of financial repression as it's called are tearing me out how do we how do we get over the fact that in this economy in this country we've got to three separate belief systems working in parallel and we can't decide which one to go at are we going to get out of passive socialism or capitalism we can't seem to figure that out dave yeah yeah i fear that we are figured out we're

going down the socialism that. the federal reserve as you have stated there is a problem. to me the most important market in all of capitalism is the money market where people who want to either borrow or land money meet they had to lower the price and so if i'm willing to defer savings the first spending for a while not i have savings i'll loan it to you so that you can build a factory or something and so the price of capital is really the most foundational part of capitalism yet the fat decides that well we do not like what the free market is doing to the price of cattle right now so we're going to change that and so the fad is pretending to be you know the politburo in moscow and saying that the price is wrong we're smart free markets stupid and we're going to set a new price and what you get when you set prices arbitrarily you get. you get

shortages you get access to get malinvestment as you pointed out you get down you get a huge huge boost in the inequality so people who are in a position to benefit from from these arbitrary pricing do so and and then there's people who are just getting clobbered the person who's paying more for a loaf of bread versus paying war for their ranch rents have been soaring and rights. say we've got about a minute left so you know in order to make all this work out. why can't we work a system where if i'm in a flood. or disaster style and the price of water goes up three or four percent or a thousand percent then that difference in price will be subsidized by those who are gaming the fed and extracting hundreds of billions of dollars from the economy immorally illegally in a socialist capacity completely against the tenets of free market in america he said i'm saying like i gave her i guess or your ear argument for price gouging but

those who pay those prices need to get a subsidized by the fed who's a socialist mal actor and all this to make up for the difference so your thoughts yeah right thank you guy i don't agree but i think you don't either that the senate shouldn't be competent why should write this job so joe if if the prices went up to thousands or sad when i guarantee you what happens next and there's a hurricane people be loading trucks bottled water i'm going to run down there make some money and they would be a natural price arbitrage and right if we got a cut they're out of time but hopefully you can stick around for another segment if that's ok you got it. right well that's going to do it for this edition of the kaiser report may max kaiser stacy everett like to thank our guest dave kami is a professor at cornell university they don't reach us on twitter it's kaiser report and so next time by l. .

they call me a useful idiot i mean you called me a useful idiot a useful idiot useful idiots go expressing my opinions on the first two sins of us doing it behind his record is the same strategy we attack persons instead of talking about what's next. you'll ban me from getting this close to the white house i'm with a group code pink why not ban the color pink one hour stretch beyond the right i should be sent to the town because i want to try to break me on the wheel but what i don't have time is this sort of nonsense you don't scare me and i'll continue to voice my opinion i'll continue to speak out in good company i'm in good company you

going with me you want to do this because we are free thinkers. i fear that we may see the iranians taking the first steps towards restarting the nuclear program which will only further ratchet up tensions and further increase the risk of war that's the big danger here this is not just about chilling video this is automatically putting the united states on it or simply to reach at. least even should this have. to pursue class as i live it here here yourself and. find it. lead you know. you need. a deed. done. and i guess beyond. we have many things in the smiles and this isn't

enough for everyone and why some peoples wants to take our things all the power just for themselves and that is the mother. that we need. to stop spending. money little.

headlines on r.t. international power play in the middle east intensifies saudi arabia. yemen while also being accused of stirring up war against. the american congress for the creation of a u.s. space call putting instead the u.s. air force in charge of militarizing space. cia john kiriakou was removed from an e.u. parliament panel at the last minute simply for co-hosting a radio show on a russian media outlet sputnik. they feel like they can't even risk even. association with the russians russian.