the u.s. . turkey urges the u.s. to end its support for kurdish fighters or risk a direct confrontation with turkish forces in syria. the prime ministers of the u.k. and israel on this first day at the world economic forum in davos. feels the scale of an alleged russian army which supposedly influenced the referendum. committee slams the i.o.c. for excluding. the country's top medal hopes from the upcoming winter games in south korea. for the latest on these stories you can head to argue dot com stay with us for the kaiser report looking at the impact of u.s. corporate tax cuts.

i am asked tiger this is the kaiser report we're in the sun the north american bitcoin conference in miami the excitement is palpable electricity in the air startups are starting up. yes max it's a pretty wild ride here very fine it's getting bigger and bigger every time we go to a big bang conference as more and more people. i do want to know one thing that we've kind of overlooked in the past week of coverage is the fact that the dow jones. went up one thousand points the fastest in history it twenty five thousand points and then it hit twenty six thousand points the fastest move the fastest one thousand white moves in the history of u.s. stock markets as i think that's the best thousand points since tropicana president

so i think we see some of that inflation perhaps you might call it hyperinflation that janet yellen and other central bankers were hoping for but you know you've got the wealth effect because you've got stock market by market property market trip the market all hitting guys do all time highs trading trillions of dollars while i walked into the entrance of the hotel here in miami and there's just replete with lamb bones everywhere lamppost rolls royces plus rotting you know the trickle down of different don't come to be the stock market the property market is having a boom time. this is the sort of town where you can drive a lamborghini into the hotel lobby it's pretty interesting so one of the biggest stock on the stock market of course is apple i think it was the first trillion dollar company right getting pretty close and very close and so they they've had a good time obviously in the past year as a stop. it's influence but one thing i want to look at is what has tax reform tax

reform has done to their bottom line and what sort of benefit it's going to bring perhaps the u.s. economy this isn't this headline apple says it will pay thirty eight billion dollars in foreign cash taxes and create twenty thousand u.s. jobs apple said last week that it would make a one time payment of thirty eight billion dollars to repatriate some of its vast overseas cash holdings the company which has faced international criticism for its tax evasion policies also said it would spend thirty billion dollars in the u.s. over the next five years creating twenty thousand new jobs so this is rolling off of the tax reform we've we've seen a lot of these sort of announcements out that apple is also giving a two thousand five hundred dollars bonus to most of their employees in the united states we saw wal-mart announcing thousand dollars bonuses southwest airlines

american airlines so many corporations have been amounts and big bonuses because of the tax cuts they've had a huge tax cut down to twenty one percent. of the likes of apple will go into it only ever paid one percent but we'll get into that event right yes so this is all about bringing those jobs back to america bringing the cash back to america chump just finished his first year in office and this is some of the campaign promises that he made and he's making good on those promises just really hard to criticize because he's doing stuff he said he would do this is obviously going to be a huge boon for jobs in the u.s. going to start manufacturing in the us and credible about being if you start seeing i phones and i have some other equipment actually being manufactured not giant in the nation but in the united states i don't know if you're going to do that or not but there are clearly bring a lot of jobs and are going to build a whole new apple campus and then i guess are shopping for a city now where to put that new apple campus of this will be a choice. no the company should have a have

a big specific announcement of what these twenty thousand dollars will be and could all be at apple stores for all we are now selling more products. in terms of their tax so apparently they're paying a fifteen percent tax on repeat trade in profits it looks like they're going to repatriate if you look at thirty eight billion that's pretty much fifteen percent of the two hundred forty six billion they have held overseas so it looks like they're bringing it all back by that those numbers the article goes on to say that in june trump told the wall street journal that apple's chief executive officer tim cook had promised to build three big big big plants in the u.s. as part of a discussion about tax reform the company is the latest to announce a one off payment as a result of recent changes to u.s. tax law which allows companies to pay a levy a fifteen point five percent and overseas cash holdings that are repatriated to the u.s. you know i remember the reagan years the trickle down economics that was introduced

and there wasn't really a lot of trickle down but here this is actually trickling down in real time jump announce a tax cut and boom twenty thousand jobs from the biggest company in the world relocated to the u.s. are treated in the u.s. that's genuine job boom tied to a tax policy and again this guy was a novice coming into office year ago i said you know why in the ball student does all the professional politicians suck you know suit this guy can do so far looks good well you know one thing i want to say is that since the financial crisis and then president obama came in a lot of people in the occupy wall street stores were like you know big bankers got bailed out and then they were collecting all these big bonuses they are the ones that actually are getting hit hard because of these new tax reform because they have massive losses in the two thousand and eight two thousand and nine financial crisis and they've been writing those. so some of these guys i think like citi

group just a bounce that twenty two billion dollars that they're going to have to hit on their profits this year because of this new tax reform is that they were counting out riding off all their big losses during their scams in the last. crisis so now they're going to be hit hard so he's actually hitting them hard unlike what we've seen in previous administrations yes it makes perfect sense you know the tax loss carryforwards are going to be you know ended so they've got a real genuine bottom line event happening to them and they're being penalized for making bad bets and lead to depression two thousand and eight barack obama applied zero zero accountability after the two thousand and eight crisis about five just to shower democrat money and said no pledge try to do better next time guys again trump says the policy is actually inflicting a little pain to our belong to the banks so back to apple you know the panama paper is had showed that apple had set up

a complex web of offshore companies to basically pay less than one percent tax rate . regarding the article mentions that in twenty thirty in a senate committee accused apple of using a highly questionable web of offshore vehicles to avoid paying taxes on the u.s. senator john mccain said his constituents were quote mad as hell to learn that the world's biggest company was paying tax rates that were sometimes lower than one percent i've never seen any thing like this that's across the board all big industrial companies all big doubt companies just people their tax rates member general electric reported on this couple years ago in a seventy thousand page tax return and at the end of the process they enter it with a tax credit they got money back from the government so any kind of tax reform like this that levels the playing field is going to be a boon to industry. it's. long overdue i would imagine they'll be another tax

reform bill next year just simplified bring in a flat tax me four years old all over and done with top will bring in a fifteen percent tax rate across the board which would be the best possible solution to the tax you know question in the us yeah so i mean i think obviously taxes have gone down in corporations we already have a low tax on capital gains so capital is very low tax across the world labor is still taxed very highly i saw somebody talking about this on twitter this morning about these tax rates and it is interesting to note that right now labor is so cheap tax interest rates capital is so low so there there should be some sort of mechanism whereby you know we should make leverage cheaper we don't need to make capital any cheaper there's already so much of it that's why stock markets keep on going up a thousand points and twelve days so we don't need any cheaper like

a lower burden on copple at this point we need a bit of a lower burden on labor because labor you know that the top tax rate is still in that well into the thirty percent for seven years we've been preaching to labor that think solutions offered by government are insufficient you must accumulate crypto currency we started preaching this when pinpoint was three all market was less than fifty million it's now five hundred million six hundred billion got to eight hundred billion the way to fight against government if you want to build capital is via crypto we've been saying this for six years six now years and we've been absolutely right and i meeting people here at the miami north american miami big point conference you can walk up to me and say thank you for a times reported twenty thirteen twenty seven twenty twelve you've made the industry you've made me millions of dollars i'm fighting against the banks i'm fighting against governmental look. i do want to caution you know. it is quite.

the prices are much higher on all these cryptocurrency and they were back in twenty thirteen bitcoin was down in the hundreds it was how the oil could fund as a government is slow on their feet to move in for wages and the way to fight back is via crypto of course you have to ensure with your hand up which you have your own sovereignty don't rely on the government to provide sovereignty for you they provide stuff for corporations not labor that's the message for seven years if you've been standing and waiting for better prices waiting for better prices you're going to have to wait for the rest of your life you'll never be a sovereign individual. you know you yesterday in the last episode you interviewed harry you. storm tokyo so there are other ways to enter the crypto markets by the way you don't have to do your savings take your cast and convert it to crypto and then. you know suffer the anxiety of the ups and downs of the crypto market

because it could be very volatile for a while so with like the like system token there are loads of platforms now where you can start to earn some crypto that's where primarily all my early crypto was urns so it does i think make it a little bit less emotional i know for a fact that i feel more emotionally distraught over it when i convert. to crypto and then prices go down the stuff i earn from my time exceeds my time my labor for that for the crypto less store and so get is when it also there are still mining opportunities so many all kinds you can still mine all kinds of home mining and you can do that all so many videos and so many resources if you're not participating in crypto at this point because you want to be poor. are you well ok i mean there are different ways of thinking of it not just poor but like not wealth or sort of sovereignty poor. and freedom corps like you know we have to get

a little bit outside of the whole you know crypto bro sort of notion of like we all have lamborghinis of that and there's a serious matter near zero percent and it's great for corporations and it's great for those politicians that are benefiting from that it's also great for those wanting to get into the crypto space because the cost of capital has never been cheaper and the cost of being in this space is never going to get any cheaper but anyway that's it for this first half from the north american making a conference here in miami city of the second half a lot more coming your way. to . join me everything on the elec so i'm unsure when i'll be speaking to guest of the world of politics sports business i'm show business i'll see you then.

you know one of the things we saw in this entire campaign leading up to trump selection was very little discussion of the facts nobody said look you know you may be the smartest person in the world in your area of treating people in the real estate market but when it comes to actually understand economics you have no background i think any you know good economists could possibly have won that election. depressed paid and attention to that. welcome back to the kaiser report i'm max kaiser here at the north america because a conference in miami time now to turn to marco centaury marco welcome thank you very much well i don't we're not just for a number of years now you're

a veteran in this thing you're a lawyer yet would you believe in your lawyers that there's there's a couple of us ok so now you've specialized in bitcoins and tokens and tripped out for years you were the very first one the very first people that you're a veteran in this space and now we're entering a new period called initial coin offerings and it's always been a challenge in this space there's always been a regulatory question mark from the very very beginning and fall michael tell us a little bit about what the challenges are now for i.c.l. if as you see it. you know now the regulator is as he said right this is what everybody's talking about when token sales before it's open so it was just because it was money services if things got really exotic it was like coin or ether and people were talking about a totally different area of the law and the money laundering k.y. see now people are talking about securities laws commodity derivatives lost the things that you know people who have been in financial services for years sort of

second hand to the. second nature but her isn't technologists this is brand new so the issues are am i selling a security if i make some if i slip up and make some kind of a statement or i'm not able to you know plan the entire house of the scope and say oh the minute you can securities fraud brand new questions that technologists really have to answer right now i started my career on wall street and it's a highly regulated environment and i know that at the beginning of the crypto space a big space the big question was is it a commodity is it a currency and no one ever figured that out definitively i think they regulators are kind of coming down and calling it more. more of a commodity that you see f.t.c. is looking at it more in those terms but now at the size you know space they clearly comes under the belly wake of the s.t.c. and so are these i c.e.o.'s of ramping up their legal talent and are they prepared for this or is it a mismatch and secondarily the the f.c.c.

seems like they're a bit accommodating somewhat that they're letting some of the growth happen organically is that what's your perception there as you see it has been in this space longer than most people realize i remember back in two thousand and thirteen sitting down with us you see before there were token sales before the rice ios just just talking through sony now with us you see talking through the basic issues of this is the watching this is how you can see what do you direct so is this is the difference between a private key and a network address they've been in this space for a long time quietly learning which is what regulators ought to do they haven't they haven't demolished the industry the chairman has actually come out and said look some of these things are just not securities they're things we're not going to regulate made it very clear that if therion for example with the r.c. twenty tokens as a real use case that of the network on which a lot of these token cells you know let's talk how we test how we test what is it

lies in part barco it's the test for what tokens are securities that also happens to be the test for what parts of orange groves are securities so it's really odd fit people say oh it's really a square peg in a round hole or maybe it's a testament to sound principles based regulation but the reality is this is a test from a sudden it's going to test in the seventy's when someone tried to sell plots of land in orange grove or really not the plants themselves just the profit from the box as you see some that's a security how he said no no no or intro's as he she won that argument and they came up with a test of the supreme court headsets for how it was investment of money in a common enterprise but the expectation. profit primarily from the efforts of others to take the test and you would talk and they're all different right and there seem to be more variations and then allows in the how we test in other words there's so many hybrids if you will in the space and on the legal front is that part of what you're doing is trying to sort through

a lot of the minutia in the various to come up like you know how does this fall and then absolutely it's a facts and circumstances based test which is sort of a legal way of saying it's a smell test although when i see it but at least you know it gives flexibility to regulators you need flexibility in the world of changing facts. and accommodates all the weird stuff you see happening like well i won't name any particular sales but there's just this great variety where in the midst of dislike came green and blue blossoming of all these different token models models for raising money bubbles for moving money around bottles for representing assets that are not money as tokens so that they can be traded as freely as you can trade a big one right and where do you see in all this because you know that's to granddaddy of it all and it's got the biggest market cap still and on the regulatory front there different countries are taking different approaches some countries are trying to position themselves as the quote unquote so it's

a little bit going they want to be because they want to try to bring that business in-house some countries are afraid of it some countries like venezuela are trying to adopt a block change technology bring in their own crypto coin that the petro to circumvent sanctions on the sovereign front mark on the big picture on the sovereign front what do you see trends there so look the people have talked a long time about how big corn is own regulated the coin is not under regulated the protocol is under regulated just like email is not regulated but uses of bitcoin uses theory and uses of crypto in general are regulated based on how they're used so at least here in the united states and what i expect to see over the next year or two three four years is the exporting of those. regulations around the world like the u.s. is frankly very good at doing developing sound principles based regulations and let's face it sometimes not sound but by and large no reasonable regulations and joining the joining g twenty groups joining the fat of the financial action task force making sure that those laws become harmonized so that if you're doing

business in the u.s. can pretty much do business in the e.u. or at sydney be the u.k. or some asian countries and pretty much the same way i say you fly in the high falutin circles of this industry you know you're a very well respected legal talent people come to you marco when you see guys like jamie diamond j.p. morgan who scoffing if they point now he's done a bunch i was wrong i regret having said all the statements where the banks today in the space today considered a challenge are they trying to adapt and so they can feed still where are they now the banks couldn't care less i'm telling you the banks could not care less and i confessed in two thousand and twelve and twenty thirty in there were there were some undercurrents some sort of social community undercurrents about how the banks were going to react they were going to try to quash bitcoin they were going to try to get rid of it and make sure that it could threaten them it turns out that banks really were deliberately by because they don't feel threatened and i think realistically they aren't actually threatened so when jamie diamond so look i think

the queen is a fraud. and then changed his mind later i applaud that i think you know somebody should change their mind based on new information they should change their opinions based on human relations but when he did say that coin is a fraud i was quoted in the same f.t. article saying look bet is. conjecture the big point is used for money laundering it's been disproven it is it's it's just not a meme that has really aged well yes can be used for money laundering yes big point is used for money but every single government that has studied it has found the use of crypto for illegal activities to be real. right that that they have a grasp on plus that they study you know use money laundering what is used and they have various you have turned cease and they have various other commodities and took his ways in how we already have prepaid cards credit cards whole laundry list of

things h.m.t. in in the u.k. the u.k. treasury just released another study that confirmed it study last year that crypto still ranks the lowest it is an emerging threat as as regulators like to say yes it's something to be on people's radar but look i mean this is this demonstrably this is this is not a criminal. it's only it's a nonstarter and that front terms of percent now when i was speaking earlier about bitcoin is a commodity is a currency i saw your i browse for oh as if to think i read your mind and you're like wow this guy's off base here somehow let me ask you that debate about how does it fall in the category of if it is like someone called a duck billed platypus you know right it's the memo but rather fouled our nor. you know what how do you see that so here's your chance articulate how you see it in the pantheon of assets and digital assets i am so. i'm so glad

that i don't have to. because because bitcoin is not a commodity crypto is not a commodity it's not a currency it's not property it's a protocol it is a language the computers used to talk to each other what they do with that language the output cation of the protocol that is regulated based on application think goodness for that because had it gone another way we would have had technology specific regulations like all cars must have at least four cylinders in order to be safe and sound on the road well we would have any tesla's of that if if if that was a lie what so thankfully we don't have much technology specific regulation in the us for. application based regulations when crypto is used to represent an investment contract it's a security when it's used to represent a limited partnership interest it's a security when it's used to represent you know index of an index of other currencies for example like a stable coin it's probably come out of

a derivative depends on how you use it that's how it's regulated me us today what about this argument some put forward that crypto should be protected under free speech because it's software software is speech and therefore it cannot be outlawed because you cannot outlaw free speech your thoughts i i love the argument i will shout it from the rooftops and tell him flew in the face to mix metaphors the metaphor i want to put real estate in kuwait around to the corner to me that you know who are in charge of billions of it but look realistically if it is speech it's probably commercial speech and commercial speech is has a much lower bar for regulations to pass so even if it is free speech course we have limits on that and i put on your magic prognostication that crystal ball next year at this time next two or three years one of the big trends that maybe are not on people's radar that you see developing i think everyone's talking about the f.c.c. and they are a powerful agency and they carry a lot of weight and they're very important but they may be beat to this they may be

beat to market so to speak by the private litigations there's a lot of private lawsuits out there where the first question a court is going to have to determine are these things secure they've got to figure out which a lot of what securities laws are common last. and just common law fraud out so there is a distinction as i see might not be the first person to come out and give this clarity it might happen in the in the world of the private law says there's a couple of class action suits out there there are well known examples and so you're saying there that's where the law will be made i'm saying you know that lee may have a decision by a court before we have this sort of crystal clear guy. by a c.c. or a safe harbor by a c.c. the courts might speak first do you see an example coming up well that might spill over into a gray area because you have clients and we don't you can't you know speak in a neutral way i guess is a good phrase for that where they are shredding the line in

a way that is got it more so than because it's always been this way market from the day one it's always been always stepping over the line it's always been that way is that kind of consistent or less six or seven years or are we entered a different period where maybe it's slightly different some way what are your thoughts i don't think there are any new areas what it when it comes to push me and i think entrepreneurs will continue to push the envelope and sometimes that will be a very very closely tailored fernandez so that's what we're seeing today marcos and juric i mentioned them in your firm yeah cooley well that look cool business card it's all black white and red this classic anyway thank you comic-con report thanks for all right well that's going to do it for this edition of the kaiser report was me max kaiser and stacey i would want to thank our guests marco centaury of coolie if you want to catch us on twitter it's kaiser report it's like somebody else.

we're told a secret society existed within the f.b.i. with the sole intent to undermine canada and then later president donald trump also we're told the f.b.i. last text messages from members of the secret society with russia gave rapidly losing steam we now have f.b.i. kate. the welcome to also quite donald trump has just marked his first year in office by

overseeing debt and now the u.s. government shutdown and while the partisan wrangling over the budget has temporarily been resolved underlying it is not just a million but a trillion dollar question of whether the united states will ever be able to bring its finances in order to discuss that i'm now joined by laurence kotlikoff a professor of economics at boston university and a write in candidate in the two thousand and sixteen presidential elections but as a consequence good to talk to thank you very much great to be here with you now you were scathingly critical of mr trump both before and after his election so i think it's safe to assume that you never expected him to be an outstandingly good president but a year and can you safely say that he turned out to be an outstandingly bad one. i would say so i think the terms of how he's presenting the u.s. to the rest of the world it's been a miserable miserable display of. authoritarianism aris ism.

and a lack of real focus and understanding of what the country needs now. you can see this in the health care. area we had really a débâcle with respect to the republicans proposing things that the country really doesn't want the country really once. universal health care not fifty million people uninsured and the republicans seem to not want that but the people do so that's just one example of many things that have gone wrong this year having read many of your articles i assume that you have generally very negative opinion of the american electoral system how it works. if you compare for example mr trump to let's say the obama administration which contributed a great deal to the american government dad on substance do you think he so far has been really so much worse than the red.