headline the chicago mercantile exchange group c.m.e. group the largest and most liquid exchange in the world is considering expanding further with the purchase of u.k. based any ex group which offers bonds and foreign exchange trading and the x. touts the largest trading platform for u.s. treasury bond trading and c.m.e. is the largest interest rate futures market trading like any x. c.m.e. has a sizable and growing foreign exchange futures business at this point the negotiations are ongoing and under the rules of the london stock exchange where and the x. group is traded their stock is traded c.m.e. group has until april twelfth to make an offer to. unilever the anglo dutch consumer goods company is moving its headquarters out of the u.k. to the netherlands unilever says there will be a net loss of fifty jobs down from one hundred between the two current headquarter locations in the u.k. and in the netherlands well unilever c.e.o.

was quick to say that the move was not related to britain's vote to leave the european union that denial may be of little political help to u.k. prime minister to resign may unilever stuck also will move from trading on the footsie one hundred in london to the euro stock index in amsterdam the multinational corporation markets aided markets a diverse set of food products soft drinks and personal care products under brand names including hellman's ben and jerry's lipton's and trust them away. do you. hear opinion is preparing a so-called digital tax on tech companies that could raise over five billion euros annually according to the financial times the f.t. also reports that the tax will be set at three percent while precise details could change the draft proposal calls for taxes to apply to companies with more than seven hundred fifty million euros in revenue and totally e.u. based revenue of fifty million euros while the proposal would require approval from

all twenty eight e.u. member nations to become law is already reportedly supported by france and the u.k. . a once senior trader at de frank first based deutsche bank has pled guilty to fraud and rigging the benchmark interest rate euro bore in two thousand and eleven hundreds of trillions of dollars of debt around the globe are based upon the euro bore the trader christian but har who hails from france will be sentenced in the next two months and deutsche bank for their part in the role paid two point five billion dollars in fines in twenty fifteen over the scandal which has seen some of the biggest banks in inner dealer brokers in the world pay about nine billion dollars in fines and penalties to. the people of the us territory a proto rico continue to suffer and struggle to rebuild but their debt is generating actual profits for some investors the wall street journal reports that an index of puerto rican municipal bonds has yielded

a fourteen percent return this year the highest for any of the more than three hundred indexes tracked by s. and p. dow jones indices puerto rico has seventy billion dollars of debt to manage but their situation has improved recently at least a little puerto rico disclosed a six point eight billion dollars in previously unknown bank deposits in december and in january economic estimates of damage from hurricanes erma and maria were actually down revised and the us congress to approve a twelve point eight. billion dollars in assistance in february. despite the predictions from economics the economists rather that retail sales would go up in february the commerce department reported retail sales drop point one percent in february representing the first time since april of two thousand and twelve that retail sales have declined for three straight months consumer spending

which accounts for more than two thirds of u.s. economic activity slowed for the first two months of the year after accelerating at a three point eight percent annualized rate in the fourth quarter of two thousand and seventeen her discuss in detail about retail is melissa arma the founder of stocks wish to thank you so much for joining you know we know that after the holidays generally consumer spending goes down we get that but given that paychecks are growing for workers there is lots of jobs we have still a four point one percent unemployment rate three hundred thirteen thousand new jobs were created last month why didn't retail move more or is that just normal. well you could call it a holiday hangover i think people tend to tighten up on their budgets a little bit normally in any kind of environment in january and february because people are getting the credit card bills from what they spend over the holidays they get the bills and the bills are due so people tend not to spend money also

people are usually waiting for their refund checks people start to file their taxes in these first couple months before april fifteenth and so once they get those refund checks then you might see numbers pick up again in the spring and into the summer so i don't think it's disastrous i don't think it's disastrous at all consumer confidence is high like you pointed out and the market looks good the market looks strong people are work i don't see any negative reason to get upset about it it's just a typical time of the year it's cyclical when we look at melissa the largest retailers in the world and i may not have this right but is it wal-mart the actual sort of brick and mortar place and is it amazon the online biggest retailer. i don't know exactly if wal-mart is the biggest brick and mortar but i know about wal-mart stock didn't do so well in their last earnings report for this first quarter although they really are one of the strongest retailers out there right now to compete against amazon but even wal-mart isn't doing as well against amazon i

don't know if they're the biggest one or not because don't forget you have target to target as a brick and mortar stores too and target stock is you know competing against wal-mart all the time for also in-store people how do they get the people through the gate when you get people to come out and go and shop and store you tend to have them spend more but i was on a stunt such a great job getting people and getting their things right away free shipping this and that next day shipping and wal-mart and target haven't been able to compete with those and i don't know if they're going to be able to compete with those and that is the problem amazon is definitely the king the queen of everything online and i don't know how anyone can compete with them in the future they're really good just growing by leaps and bounds i got a call with my driving home last night and i got a call from a guy at our party said there's amazon for you and i'm thinking why do you need to tell me well it was food that is was being delivered delivering food now so it's really doing just a bang up job well you mention target there melissa and i think target is either

the number three or four toy retailer also which brings us to two before i'm told that brings us to toys r us closing down and. i was a little bit dismayed by the c.e.o. who blamed it all on amazon and blamed it on the digital age because it's my recollection that toys r us has had a heck of a problem for a number of years a lot a lot of debt what do you make of it. they're a classic example of mismanagement of one of the reasons that they're that they're going under it's mismanagement because you're right there are a number of years of knowledge that they've had significant that they've had a lot of debt since two thousand and five they went private at that point i think it was six billion and even last year when they filed for bankruptcy september two thousand and seventeen and they were trying to save it they were trying to save it there really didn't even do enough to save it between september and now when

they've just shut down or decided to shut down they still had five billion that last year and when you got that much debt it was costing them four hundred million a year just to service that they weren't getting ahead and that was again more than ten years since since two thousand and five since they initially went private so it's really mismanagement they they weren't doing enough sales they weren't getting people in the store they weren't competing online against amazon amazon's been around for a long time that's true but when you look overall they had enough time to try to pay down more of that debt and they are close in stores before they had to go under completely and they just didn't do it i think it was really poor mismanagement and it is sad because if you if you're if you're remember toys r us used to be big toys r us and babies r us and when you were a kid and you go and shop in the stores and they had everything everything you'd ever want every barbie dress every barbie doll that was the one place you could go they had everything it's true you can go shopping at target and stuff but they don't always have every toy that you want and so that was a nice thing about toys r us they had a lot of them in tori and now they're going to be gone they had every barbie dress

like every one of melissa and let me ask you though about lego mattel fisher price how are those companies doing. well all in all hospitals looks the best of any about mattel doesn't look so good it's in a down trend that stock has been falling falling for a while so i don't know what's going to happen with the hasbro that was trying to hold that looks the best of any of the toy companies so i have to say i think two thousand and eighteen is a good year for companies even like mad that's in a down trend to try to turn around because of the corporate tax cut say it means they've got a chance to out to put some more money and meat into their companies to grow and expand and try to turn themselves around hasbro could make a new high this year i don't know there are hovering hovering hovering but with a strong market has four could make new highs again sometime the next twelve to twenty four months matt has got a lot of work to do yet that is a down trend but this is this is a big year this is the year to do it and do you do you know do good economy or

what's your outlook sort of briefly for this european retail. for rangel i would say the retail has had kind of a strong start to the year overall with the market but typically retail doesn't end up performing until the end of the year because we talked about this last year black friday with holiday sales but i would say retail some retailers have had a good start to this year overall i think retails can have a better year in two thousand and eighteen with consumer confidence high and people back to work and they have more money in their pockets with the tax cuts but they still have to have good management they still have to get the people in the door and they still have to compete with amazon which again i don't think anybody really knows how to do that well melissa amo founder of the stark choice thanks for your time as always have a great weekend it's always delightful to have you on the program banks have a good weekend. time now for a quick break but stick around because when we get back we take a look at redo both energy the economic surrounding it and the health risks of

fracking with tyson slocum the director of public citizens energy program plus before we go some in the crippled world are taking it to from the code of the wild well i'll explain as we head to break here the numbers at the closing bell green arrows across the board for the. baby panda. don't miss this one much eighteen so vote with your remote to zante for special coverage of the russian presidential election exit polls opinions real time results monitoring and much more. just by the adult survival guide.

customers go behind you would you. then help well reduce some of our. that's undercutting but what's good for market is back yet for the global economy. american five full human rights abuses notion. of yemen you see. it genocide or they're going gone then just look who is some porting who american and british and a number of other european countries they are a very generous in the end their support to the actress so what kind of human rights is sad in which to live a million children a woman does not count. by . the church

secret indeed catholic priests accused of sexually abusing children can get away with it quite literally i like to call this the geographic solution so what the bishop needs to do then he finds out that the priest is is a perpetrator is simply moves him to a different spot were the previous standards not the highest ranks of the catholic church help conceal the accused priests from the police and justice system to that end of that's known as the eye and then i think you'll hear that it used this out and. it's felt. welcome back before i want to break we're speaking

a little bit about amazon with most are more well japan's fair trade commission is rated amazon's talk. quarters in pursuit of an anti-trust investigation of the online retailer the commission says the raid was prompted by complaints from suppliers that amazon pressured them to shoulder the burden of discounts and is on is also reportedly suspected of demanding a collaboration fee centrally a tax on the value of each item to cover discounts the fair trade commission previously cited amazon for demanding that suppliers price their products on amazon at the same level or lower compared to all other sellers japan is the world's third largest e-commerce market and amazon's second largest market outside of the united states. and bad boy bank wells fargo remains in the hot seat as it's reported today that a federal investigation extends beyond the unlawful tactics in the retail banking practice and now includes the wealth management business the u.s.

department of justice and these curious an exchange commission are conducting the investigation and agents from the federal bureau of investigation have been interviewing some wells fargo wealth management employees in recent weeks. virgin atlantic has posted its first ever loss of forty eight point five million pounds the airline's bottom line took a hit after a harsh hurricane season and problems with the rolls royce engines that led to increased cost cancelled flights and grounded planes virgin c.e.o. craig kreeger told the telegraph of london that virgin's fleet suffered a ten percent average grounding rate in twenty seventeen meanwhile virgins famous figurehead billionaire richard branson is reportedly planning to sell thirty one percent of the airline stock to air france k l m if approved the sale would leave branson with only twenty percent u.s. air air carrier delta holds forty nine percent of virgin airlines. and other

aviation news air buses reportedly planning to cut production of two troubled plane models by after the manufacturer says that they will cut deliveries through twenty twenty of their double deck widebody a three eighty passenger plane down from six for a down to six from twelve this year deliveries of the a four hundred m. military transport plane also fall from eight to fifteen those reductions factor into the likely loss of thirty seven hundred jobs although the corporation says affected workers would be reassigned to other work labor representatives say the cutbacks will affect plants in britain germany france and spain the a three eighty has previously been considered for cancellation while the a four hundred program has struggled to produce working models on time.

when your talk about renewable fuels in the economics around them in the health risks of fracking is tyson slocum the director of public citizens energy program thank you for being with us again tyson great to be here bart no we talk a lot about renewables and renewables include. things like hydro and even plant based ethanol biodiesel but those aren't the big ones tell us about the big ones big renewables in the u.s. and around the world right the huge growth that we're seeing over the last several years bart is with wind and solar and especially what's known as utility scale so these are large scale wind farms large scale photovoltaic deployments so just since two thousand and eight in the united states we've seen more than a four thousand percent increase in solar deployments in the united states and nearly a three hundred percent increase in wind capacity deployments and they're getting cheaper and cheaper in fact there is a large electric utility united states called xcel energy which has operations from

minnesota to colorado and they recently put out a request for proposals to meet new demand and the cheapest solicitation came in from a wind producer pairing their windmills with energy storage at twenty one dollars a megawatt hour that's far cheaper than what natural gas coal or nucular could come up with solar plus storage came in a thirty six dollars a megawatt hour so those are the cheapest that we've seen pairing renewables with energy storage and that energy storage component is important because it offsets what we call the intermittency of renewables you know renewables don't produce the wind doesn't always blow exactly doesn't always show exactly and so energy storage really is the new holy grail and that's really the next big technology development that we're going to see that's really going to transform energy markets worldwide

you know. per viewers who don't know tyson did teaches at university of maryland he's great on all these things and read an interesting article the other day we reported on the program that there's a new development i think out of japan where they actually gain power not just from . solar but from rain drops when the rain drops actually hit something that mechanical or movement creates energy so all these things are really just fascinating and to hear that they're becoming what was your phrase utility or something what were you till of the scale realty scale is fantastic now tell us about. the show you say is the main but then when writing that one ok so tell us about the difference between the u.s. and the rest of the world i assume the e.u. is a lot more solar and wind than the u.s. right so the u.s. is still playing catch up to the european union the largest deployments we're seeing are actually in china where as a proportion of total energy production renewable energy is still

a small part but because everything in china is on such a large scale because of the size of the country the economy and energy demand we're seeing massive deployments there and so the real race here is who can have control over the technologies and the companies to deploy these technologies and right now the e.u. and china are ahead of the united states but but there is a lot of progress in the u.s. and the u.s. they're now doing it you were explaining to me a little bit earlier not just on land but they're actually going offshore talk a little bit about that where offshore are they going right so the east coast is seeing some sponsorships by states there's a existing offshore wind development in rhode island the state of maryland and the state of new york have put together new subsidies to help offset the higher capital costs involved with offshore wind there are some technical issues with

offshore wind that make it more expensive than on shore and so states are responding to that higher cost of offshore wind by providing some subsidies for it and so we're going to see big growth in offshore wind particularly on the eastern coast of the united. dates where there's a lot of capacity and obviously that's where population centers are and so you want to have energy production where the demand is and in the us that's on the coasts this may be a silly question but i'm a known to do that so. you know when we travel and we drive around i see a lot of these and flat areas the country in between where i travel a lot between chicago and moline illinois out on these farms this is a great thing for farmers i want to talk about that in a minute but i'm curious the silly part of my question is is there more wind on the water reminds me of the wind on the water to cross the finish line but is there more just because the temperature differentiation on water or is that just silly and you know you know there's definitely there's there's lots of wind potential in

a lot of different areas and plains in mountainous areas and offshore and so what the water does it make it more windy because it necessarily it's more that you have big population centers there and so how can we link energy production that is geographically close to where the population centers cities out in the water exactly and it's very densely populated on the east coast united states so moving it off shore is a lot easier as long as you take into account any concerns by other marine and commercial traffic there by getting back to where we see a lot of wind in rural areas not just in illinois where you cited but places like iowa texas texas has the most installed wooden capacity of any us state and it's all out in west texas where the ranchers are in illinois you price saw it in farmland and so there is a huge financial benefit for wind farms located on ranch and farm land because it generates additional royalty income and they don't have to worry about droughts or

blizzards or anything else let's move quickly to fracking there is a great article that i know we both looked at in rolling stone the talk about the health impacts of fracking now a lot i know why. out of this is not fully developed in the case law eccentric but explain what sort of the concerns are at least with regard to this this rolling stone article does a great job of kind of summarizing all of the big public health scientific studies these are peer reviewed academic studies into health effects dealing with fracking there's been a huge explosion of fracking in the united states and what the rolling stone article tries to do is say what have the health studies taught us about what the impacts are on communities and it's there are significant problems there are because fracking is extremely toxic right you're dealing with hundreds of different chemicals that are mixed in with water that are injected into these frakt wells and

so that chemical mixture poses all sorts of problems not just when it's being injected but when that wastewater is being blown back up and when it comes up particularly in the in the rural areas where it gets into some and the aqua for and into somebody as well and in rural areas you might not have city water so there's been a lot of settlements with individual landowners but not a lot of case law on this right right because most of the contamination cases get settled and often involve what's known as nondisclosure grandy is so this happens let's say a household says you know my soil or my well water we believe was contaminated by this fracking operation the company in question will often come to that family and say listen we don't know if it was us or not but here's what we're going to do we're going to pay you a bunch of cash or we're going to buy out your contaminated property we're not

going to say that it was our responsibility but you are going to sign a non-disclosure agreement that forbids you from talking about this and there was one famous nondisclosure agreement with this family farm in pennsylvania that banned the couple's teenage chill. during from even writing book reports about fracking so that's how deep these nondisclosure agreements are and they extend for an indefinite period of time and so it really inhibits some of the public health studies looking into fracking because when investigators go around in these rule areas and ask folks you know what do you know about contamination there are people that are legally prohibited from talking to researchers about it so one thing that we've asked the american petroleum institute which is the big lobbying trade association for the fracking industry is release these families from these nondisclosure agreements let's get these. examples of contamination into the public domain so we can have an informed debate about the safety of fracking bled us. hope

it happens tyson slocum director of public citizens energy program man you are just a fountain mation and a good fountain not. so thank you so much for being here always my pleasure. and before we go the crypto world of currencies and trading is often equated with the lawless american west where gunslingers and gangs clashed with cowboys and cowgirls and outlaws clashed with law men well now over yonder in hong kong a crypto exchange is saying that the bandits tried to but failed to bust into their computers and they've used the code of the west in offering an all time reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the perpetrators in this case hooligan hackers by nantz the exchanges offering the equivalent of two hundred fifty thousand dollars to be paid in crypto currency for information that leads to the arrest of the scoundrels and whomever was in cahoots with them the exchanges

also set aside ten million dollars per future reward bounties and is encouraging other exchanges to do likewise as we reported earlier already this year seven hundred million dollars from two exchanges has been hacked and consumers money is gone well that's off for now time to settle up and get the up and have a great weekend hope you have to wet your whistle be sure to catch boom bust on you tube you tube dot com slash boom bust archie adios partners. in the heart of the swiss alps this is a place probably most secretive some the pentagon moma styria son the cia and best gun did the forty six of the swiss customs are here permanently all the science is controlled by them and they impose the opening time so it will go up was it it was a do is form is up to us the procedures in place of the strictest and all you are

a must to pieces by artists like and modigliani can't and soon the scientists warehouse that's where the report comes in it covers up deals which are naturally. discreet commercially discreet step but also discreet because they concern fraud. and some of those paintings are linked to dark secrets nobody knows how many of these secrets a kept inside the geneva freeport system will never obtain an inventory of all the works in the freeport who knows how many there are three hundred three thousand three hundred thousand is it a matter of confidentiality only is it the world's black box of the our business. the most expensive fish in the world each one is selling for tens of thousands of euros it continues to grow its entire life if it was thirty years old you might have a two ton fish out there and yet they don't get that big today because we're way to

good catching. it's only awareness of a much larger mission was once there and that was much more widely distributed we have politicians that are in office for a few years they have to get reelected everything is very very short term our system is not suited and is not geared for long term survival and that's why we have the catastrophes there you have. an american five of human rights abuses notion the example of yemen used to do this is our genocide there were there going on then just look who is some porting who american and british and a number of other european countries they are a very generous then then there's support to the actress so what kind of human rights is in which to live a million children a woman does not count. russia's

defense ministry says it believes that extremist groups in syria are planning to stage false flag chemical attacks to give the u.s. a pretext for directly striking the assad government. but news comes as rebel control of syria's eastern doozer crumbles over forty eight thousand civilians fully the stricken region through humanitarian corridors and. also an airline small scale expels twenty three british diplomat smearing the step taken by the u.k. in response to the kremlin's alleged poisoning of a former spy and his daughter. there's a one more moment when i name my son donald trump behavior recalled my family my parents. because of pressure i left my village for.