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the other this is the as a report. let's go into let's get right to this max i want to talk about billionaires we're going to talk about warren buffett he's america's favorite billionaire he's the little sweet ukulele playing billionaire but before i get to him i want to talk about another billionaire in history the guy was worth four hundred fifteen billion according to a visual capitalist they did a chart of the richest people in history and this guy's name was moose. he was you know an african king of the whole guyana section mali area present day and at that time that part of the world controlled the entirety of most of the world's gold trade so this guy had a lot of gold so i want to look at actually had good intentions can go horribly

wrong and how money. can possibly cause devastation because he went on pilgrimage to mecca and so travelling from africa through cairo down through medina and to mecca and this is what happened along the way which i found very fascinating saw wikipedia made his pilgrimage between thirteen twenty four and thirteen twenty five his procession reportedly included sixty thousand men including twelve thousand slaves who each carried four pounds of gold bars and heralds dressed in silk robe or gold staffs organize horses and handled bags he also had these animals that included camels which carried twenty three to one hundred thirty six kilos or fifty to three hundred pounds of gold dust he gave the gold to the poor he met along his routes mussa not only gave to the cities he passed on the way to mecca including cairo medina but also traded gold for souvenirs and this journey by the way is like widely documented all sorts of

contemporary accounts of it along the way as he was travelling so it's well documented it's known to be not just the wikipedia entry mooses generous actions however inadvertently. devastated the economies of the regions through which he passed in the city's a cairo medina and mecca the sudden influx of gold devalued the metal for the next decade prices on goods and where is greatly inflated to rectify the gold market on his way back from mecca borrowed all the gold he could carry from moneylenders and cairo high interest this is the only time recorded in history that one man directly controlled the price of gold in the mediterranean so very fascinating as people are celebrating all these huge infrastructure deals whether it's the new silk road or the infrastructure plan that trump is allegedly proposing right. you know spreading around of all this money cause a lot of inflation they cause a lot of problems and they had a way back at unwind all that somehow by normalizing the economy is on his way back

and it's a great story i had no idea that the richest man ever in history was this african no he was not the richest guy in the world he was actually worth just four hundred fifteen billion there were several people richer than him including the richest man in the world ever was julius caesar son augustus who's worth two point two trillion dollars but here we see the impact of. like warren buffett famously walks into a room if you walked into this room here there's a four or five of us here we would be worth on average what probably about five billion dollars each write something along those lines yes so it's an interesting fascinating story shows you that the even back then there was a lot of interesting economic vagaries that must be contemplated when you have such incredible wealth i mean talking about whether it's warren buffett or jeff bezos or the rockefeller's or any of these huge fortunes out of come and gone they do have

these ripple effects on the economy and you know they do. many times engender a reaction and then that becomes political policy in that shapes the economy and shapes politics and shapes our society it's shaping our society right now. donald trump of course and there is an infrastructure plan this headline reads higher inflation trump tax and spend boom sends investors looking for fed clues the upturn in inflation is already nudging u.s. interest rates higher even before the federal reserve's next meeting five weeks from now the central bank is expected to increase the cost of borrowing in march to keep the economy from overheating but now investors wonder if the federal reserve rates four times and twenty eighteen instead of three as previously planned why well what's complicating the fed's job is a massive shift in washington support for the economy first came the tax cuts and now democrats republicans in congress have busted prior budget caps with a deal to spend an extra three hundred billion and the next two years they're expecting this inflation to ripple through the economy i know the fed has been

trying for eight years to cause some inflation and now it's going to come rapidly remember ben bernanke he had said that they can control inflation if it will never get out of control because they'll just flip a switch and will you know raise interest rates and calm down inflation that's exactly right he said that there is no risk that there would be a spike of inflation because they have the controls and everything is under their control they can flick a switch and they can start to make the maneuvers does a scary to control inflation history tells us that not the case once the inflation genies out of the bottle it tends to feed on itself and become a big inflationary problem and i believe that at the moment we've had a period of fake. the flavor. engineer by all the central banks in the day don't have the control that they think that they have and once you start to see this being picked up in markets like the gold market and others you know you've got to start to see it feed on itself in a big way and you know this guy. who travels across africa and the middle

east and saudi arabia and caused this hyper inflation where he went how did he retract it it took ten years to retract it but he basically had to buy all the gold back at very high interest rate so in a way as we went through deflation in two thousand and seven eight and nine the fed basically did the opposite they were while they were paying high interest rate for all the bad debts they were paying all these bankers to take all their toxic debts and put it on their own balance sheet so something similar would have to happen well the numbers are huge i mean the central banks took on trillions and trillions of dollars of horrible debt and so i want to start on wind and once the dam is broken and all that money starts to come into the system you know i always look at the money velocity number which has recently got to the lowest it's ever been but then six months ago started tick up once the money velocity starts to pick up and watch that money start to come back in the economy have inflation and combine that

with wage inflation and you have the makings of a shift from economic power from wall street to main street here's another story about america's favorite well certainly the media's favorite billionaire the democrats' favorite billionaire and that's warren buffett and it's interesting you know we've been covering this divide in the u.s. and remember koch brothers are great billionaires or their super bad billionaire villains george soros is either a villain villain or he's a great humanitarian billionaire warren buffett pretty much everybody agrees he's a great guy except for when he comes up with a so-called tax but is he a good guy well according to the nation secret behind warren buffett's billions america. favorite investor loves monopoly not free markets they use his own words that he himself tells people i only invest in basically monopolies if they have monopoly pricing power that's what i bet on and that's what i invest in and this is what i go for and because he's one of the most successful billionaires of all time

investors of all time everybody mimics him thus causing a positive feedback loop where everybody also seeks out monopolies to invest in and empowerment so look at amazon share price why is amazon soar and why is warren buffett actually finally going along a lot of these tech companies where he famously didn't during the dot com boom as because now a lot of them have monopoly pricing power they talk about the fact that for example he always dissed airlines he would never invest in airlines he said well he started going long and twenty sixteen you know it's ten percent of some of these airlines and the reason why was that well the obama administration allowed the merger these mega-mergers so you now just for airlines and they have huge profits it's often reported how suddenly the airlines have massive profits that's because there are now they're no longer eight but there are four right it's anti-competitive so the way to grow the economy is through competition if there's somebody sitting on top

of the economy like buffett with access to unlimited cash to buy these monopoly positions in monopoly companies that's anti-competitive and it should be busted up as such to create more jobs and more wage growth but it's not happening so they're pushing the economy to the edge of a different type of precipice as we're saying with the introduction potentially of a big hyper inflationary burst that's going to kill the bond market and then cause everything to be reset anyway and then buffett will be long gone having made his hundred billion dollars but at the expense of a viable u.s. economy yet so everybody says that he's a great capitalist he's you know one of the richest guys in america sometimes is the richest sometimes bill gates's i'm. so here's an exact quote from him the arch capitalist they say the single most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power if you've got the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor you've got a very good business but there's nothing wrong seeking out businesses that are in

good positions and able to raise prices but there is something wrong when you have a single entity a private equity firm like berkshire hathaway working with the government to guarantee that he's investing in sure things and monopoly positions that are aided and abetted by a corrupt government that's not free market capitalism that's something else that's feudalism again they look at some of the data about how this ethos you know when he was the first to invest in monopoly pricing power and everybody has followed him since then two thirds of all u.s. industries were more concentrated in two thousand and twelve than they were in one thousand nine hundred seven the economist found since the reagan era the federal government has abandoned antitrust and foresman with markets for products like eyeglasses toothpaste beef and beer whittled down to a few suppliers the consolidation is vastly inflated corporate profits damaged

workers and consumers stunted economic growth and supercharged economic inequality supercharge economic inequality the democrats favorite billionaire basically helped facilitate this by leading by example and we have donald trump we have incompetent buffoons that run for president nonstop because we have an economy that has left most people like with nothing to lose right supercharged economic inequality that's what his style is done on a mega billion dollar scale and the results are plain to see. so apparently a billionaire walks through the room in the economies around them get deficit. and whether it's baca hundreds of years ago with matt samantha or what warren buffett walks through your town get ready for the flay sherry collapse. all right well fantastic i got to take a break will be back right after these important messages. still

on a hot day and a dinner table bottle mosaddeq china six oir. an estimated eighteen people sometimes are a trashy jeans are now living in greece. you know still more. to do your home in there you go food shopping and. many sell their bodies just to make ends meet. you know that on the second i get no assistance in that it's almost as if the left things can. turn to dealing drugs to make a living. and last blood runs a little. game of been.

looted. apply to many clubs over the years so i know the game and so i got. the ball isn't only about what happens on the pitch for the final school it's about the passion from the families it's the age of the super money kill the narrowness and spend each year to twenty million players. it's an experience like nothing else on here because i want to share what i think what i know about the beautiful game like great so we'll pull chance for. at least. welcome back to the kaiser report imus kaiser time matter it's our conversation

with a b. writer extra there journalist all right nice guy welcome back thanks for all right so we finish up our last conversation talking about some cultural themes the the zite geist as it were you know you work over there rolling stone rolling stone has always been a barometer of the culture of the pop culture the rock alter the u.s. culture and that's had like hunter s. thompson wrote for ling stone you write for rolling stone right p.j. o'rourke you're well positioned i think to to have a good insight into this these social changes and and moves in the way we were talking about this there's two movements out there one is the what i would perceive as the reaction to the shooting in florida of a more of oh a serious post in general post-millennial lot of generations of the have a name yet. really come up with the term we will write you should come up with the term zero zero and we're all waiting for this interview. we're at the millennial

writing this post millennial so there without a term wrote you better than i could you know what will yeah we're going to go with something maybe right now we'll think of something but so this generation i saw them on t.v. and they are serious that mean that their their attitude is the n.r.a. is trying to kill us you know there were existentially threatened here. and so that's that movement and then there's the me too movement and ok that's also the thing move and let's talk about this possible audio movement this is now heart it seems like a bookend to the sixty's anti-war movement in a lot of ways. can you dig into that a little bit more you know put your guys explore ation had on and what do you see. well it's definitely brought back to kind of an ironic left right. but the difference is the sixty's were it was peace and love and. there was this you know explosion of kind of music and there was

a vibe to it that was later brought back the own ironic old left ok this unpack that for a second so the last lesson we had to a left in america was like there is lack panther's that was left out was left right and that was black eyes with guns you know and there was a real strong reaction to this the yes yeah exactly ok and now and then we went into a phase of really right. wing kind of middle of the road conservatism and the left even though people say hollywood is the left and yet yeah nobody is going to usa today ninety four percent of women in hollywood get sexually abused there is so there are predators in the liberal left of hollywood it's a predatory state yeah right and i would dispute the fact that hollywood use is really all that lefty i mean if you look back at the movies from that era from the reagan era especially i mean they were incredibly conservative right i mean there

were there was all kinds of messages you talk. prototypical movies on the left in america there wasn't when i was growing up anyway so the an ironic left refers back to a muscular you know left wing that was it really post jim crow i mean this was the movement to restore justice to all citizens of the united states and so now we're so now you're saying possible swing back to an ironic left and so the stark could be dead the ironic it was called the jerry seinfeld school of humor is kind of maybe dead right and we're going back and it will go into a new. era and does it dovetail into this. need to move or is not a completely separate movement because you have feminism in the seventies i really this is questions for white ranging sugar free range question yeah but yeah the feminism of the seventies that kind of died it's a lie in a lot of ways in my view right now that could be coming back and having a more serious approach to more famine as women so there's

a feminism and the more of us that are they is all coming together now what do you think i mean i think it's a great question the the bringing of seinfeld is actually really right on because what was seinfeld seinfeld was a show about nothing right that and that was the disposal of the virtue of it was that we turned it on and we and we we didn't think about politics and that was cool we the show didn't have any themes that were dangerous really just it was all just zany goofy stuff today if you if you say to somebody i'm going to i'm going to not think about politics i'm going to affirmatively engage in an activity that takes me away from thinking about what the world is really all about those they'll say that's that's privilege right like you only somebody who is not affected by the politics has the luxury of engaging in a show about nothing right and so everything has to be about something and this is this is this is. kind of a radical change in the way we think about everything in journalism humor culture

it all has to be sort of directed towards a political and and it's become hard i mean i notice that for me because you know what i what i do is so different from that i mean i think part of part of the way i work is based on trying to you know look at things from a humorous and a little bit reason. reserve point of view. but. that's that's not really acceptable right now humor without. you know sort of humor for its own sake is now it's sort of discouraged in the pop in the popular writers or you slip in there it's a charged word privilege right so this is a hot worry right. white privilege is is the topic and so what you're suggesting here is that everything now the idea of being the jerry seinfeld ask type of camera non-game gauge it all is only available to the privileged to basically are

benefiting they are the razzi a class they're the inherent tours of this new generation that's doing all the work they have all the jobs there are tearing what they perceive to be a crazy president a crazy atomic weapon armed world and they've inherited a horrible situation and they don't want to not to not anymore they want to be engaged they want to make because their life is a existential threat so where do they have room to engage weren't were they going to take this or their movement where are they going to go with it well they're going lots of places we're going to i'm in the me too movement is obviously taken off and has gone lots of places and it was as achieved a lot already i think a lot of this energy right now is being directed. towards domestic politics towards sort of ousting trope. but there was but there is a split there i mean if you if you look at the american youth culture and follow the kind of the debates that go on online you know between you know there's

a slight jacobin right which is which is exactly beyond ironic left or right there are leftist politics and there are serious earnest people but there's sort of a split between people who actually want to install. a socialistic new regime you know modeled after corben or bernie sanders or something like that and sort of democratic party which has appropriated a lot of the language of the jury corben for a second because his popularity is soaring and he is a frickin you know let her finish an exam on the thirty years ago like michael foot in labor politician in the u.k. a complete repeat. if they factor in reaganomics and he and he could very well be the next prime minister of britain and he's got tremendous support so that would be a signifier that we are going to turning to a huge left wing possibly no movement politically in seeing in the u.k. and bernie sanders it was kind of the equivalence here in the us but i'm not sure

he has enough gas in the tank to run for president again but are there do you see stirrings like a korban asked type absolutely what do you see yeah i know it's out there that sentiment is out there and a new bernie sanders for a long time ago and spent a lot of time writing about it before this election cycle but i never saw what happened in two thousand and sixteen coming with the outpouring of support for him and that had a lot to do both with this sort of new newly coalescing leftist politics but also with pent up frustrations towards the status quo towards the democrats and towards this idea that but what you're talking about the. the existing political parties have left us with these huge horrible scary problems and we just can't elect them anymore we have to go in a sharper more serious direction and we saw that on both sides of the aisle but

that's and it's definitely still out there where you're writing because you're writing as you mentioned before he said it hinted at that it has an illness satire to it or humor how do you now are going to you know this is your market this is the folks that are be reading your stuff what's the process do you. listen to what's happening out there and it goes into the writing organically or do you have a certain style that you feel is your quote unquote brand that needs to be maintained i really that's kind of an odd question but it's tough you know what you're saying no i mean it's been difficult be i'll be honest i mean. there is a part. when i do i've always believed humor for its own sake is sort of an inherently iconoclast like when people laugh and they laugh at anything if you watch money python it's not political it doesn't tell you to be left or right beside us degeneration is like humorless to a degree yeah my generation believe that laughing at all politicians was healthy

right look if you looked at all of them and realize they're all on some level posers and silly and we should be suspicious of everything that they say. that that was a healthy response no it is not quite like that now humor humor of that sort is a little bit sort of discounted it has to be targeted has to be out of the direction i mean all the humor and southern alive in the last year has been about trump you know it's putin coming down the chimney or whatever it is and. i don't know i want to feel it is humorists have a responsibility to be equal opportunity in the sense that saturday night live they never bring up hillary's foibles and the fact that she's very easily to satirize because. it's someone who lost a game show host essentially i mean i can't satirize that you know you're not a satirist yet they feel like somehow that show like they have a responsibility above and beyond humor right and is that. i mean that seems like

they are. violating their or their role there so do the code you have to offer the public a way to vent and have a release from the from the stuff that's going on because they are becoming as political as rachel maddow and it's the same thing in journalism right so journalists of my generation we grew up with the idea that our only responsibility was to get things right right we tell the story we see it we call it where we see it in every direction we put it out there and we let society figure it out they make the responsible decisions from there these days the idea is we have to. the outcome we have to be political we have to make a political decision prior to putting the information out there and what's what you're seeing now is instead of journalists reporting in all directions that are just becoming messaging platforms that just essentially in sync with one of the

other political parties and it's kind of the fox is ation of news and it's going on across the media landscape and i think that's it's very dangerous unhealthy because as soon as you know a political media i mean that's a classic feature of a third world country when media outlets don't report all directions you know i listen them all and i can assimilate it all and i come up with my own conclusion but that what's happened is you had a nation of symbols are becoming schizophrenia they wrote telling multi personality they had their day they change their chemical composition looking at their for news outlets to correspond with what's going on they can't synthesize all this stuff even brain is not capable of doing all it's to make those sophisticated choices and live life at the same time so you end up with a completely fractured view of things and none of it represents reality and through that we end up with like charlie munger coming out and saying laws fargo should be forgiven for stealing money out of everyone's accounts right now so i could often kowtow really exactly you know i mean you're absolutely right when when when nobody is reporting on the foibles of their own party the nobody is trustworthy and

that's the problem when you have this information landscape where people are reporting the negative things about their quote unquote their side you know you basically have a desert you know you have this gigantic oasis of of on trust with the media and people are consuming tons and tons and tons of it but they're not making sense of the word think that it's fake it's jumping is it's their obese lots of lies right. exactly right matt thanks so much for me i sound of course dr you are right let's go to this edition of the kaiser report with a nice guys or stacy ever like as a matter of me if you want to reach us on twitter it's kaiser report and.

from north korea to syria's president donald trump's foreign policy is literally all over the map north korea says it is open to direct talks with washington only to be met with preconditions in syria peace is within view but this is not what the trumpet ministration wants. fifty years ago breaking it with into account again as a sleeping pill dusty's would i need to get back to the woodshed beside the signed up thanks what terrible but not on this is sure induction for both of us will be here not that we will. move them left across the victims are still things legal battles demanding at least some compensation. to waste the school the physical damage itself as well as a constant reminder that the people who actually perpetrated this crime has never

been brought to justice and it has been a couple. that i have to plan for syria. they're going to have. a different standard here. like ours i heard. that there are. desperate. for. here or don't want to. hear more. if a need for. a more. sensitive. and . then your home part of our home grown don't want. to be safe. this is a middle aged man bargaining for sacks of.