corporation's percentage keeps increasing b i s. explains why zombie firms are on the rise and survive longer this is according to the bank for international settlements the central bank of central banks and by zombie firms they mean that firms that are unable to cover debt servicing costs from current profits over an extended period and they now say that globally the number of zombie firms is over twelve percent in the u.s. it's approaching fifteen percent of all firms cannot meet current debt cost from current profit to discomfort from zombie banks to have a zombie bank plague as spilled over to zombie corporations what is a zombie bank is on a bank is a bank that's technically insolvent it's kept alive by bailouts continuing rolling balance from the central banks because of their friends in the other the banks the commercial banks the lloyds that h.s.b.c. b.n.p.

the citi bank they're technically insolvent but they're kept alive even though zombies today perpetual rolling of bailout they call quantitative easing or some other name that they come up with every few months this is spilled over now to the general economy and the corporations listed on the s. and p. five hundred these are in fact companies that cannot maintain their buy ability through profits as that word is understood that you're selling stuff for more than a cost they are reliant entirely on blood transfusions this is a vampire economy this is a frankenstein economy this is a zombie economy and of course the pop culture reflects us as bob proctor as the sayings of the one nine hundred eighty s. the pop culture. guys is reflected in the market zombies are not in hollywood because we live in a world of zombies and because the zombie banks became zombies after eating the you know the basically the flesh the actual living beings that were. or the workers the productivity the wealth of all our pension funds and

you know it's the zombie pension funds and there are looming frightening monster debt obligations that they owe their you know members of the pension fund that was feeding the zombies as well because as b.a.'s points out their analysis suggests that the increase is linked to reduced financial pressure which in turn seems to reflect in part the effects of lower interest rates so interest rates are so so low pension funds gamble on the fact that they have an eight percent annual return most of their investment has to go into safe investments like bonds and the bonds are ever lower because it's evermore. basically returns that these pension funds there's a rumor celebrex lowering the bar and the winner is the saddest and most lost that's the economy we're living in you know zombie zombies i remember the crabbers song zombie. so dramatic the

irish rock was so great for a while there and then they became a zombie economy in the because the banks were allowed to trade total mayhem oh well well as you see from the chart zombies are crowding the s. and p. five hundred so there's the yellow line as it's rising along with the s. and p. fifteen hundred i'm sorry about that but you know speaking of zombies like you know . everybody here is so partisan and everybody thinks like those people in the midwest they're deplorable is they're losers as hillary clinton might call them and we on the west coast and the east coast are winners and where vibrant hillary voters and we you know you know we're better but when you look at the entire fabric of all these headlines nobody is. and island they're all part of the same system so when we have the zombie banks we have zombie corporations and we have zombie

workers we have this first headline about the zombie corporations and banks being kept alive by low interest rates workers overdose on the job and employers struggle to respond so i'm going to read you a little bit of a longer text here because you have to listen to this to believe it it's really fascinating and it's a sad story jimi sullivan prepared for his job as a bricklayer the same way every morning for years injecting a shot of heroin before leaving his car the first time he overdosed on the job in two thousand and thirteen at a vigil near construction site a coworker who is cousins definitely injected a dose of nor can an opioid antidote into solid his leg he woke up and went straight back to work the second time in two thousand and fourteen his cousin revived him again and after resting for an hour in his car sullivan was back on the job his boss told him not to let that happen again but within

a month sullivan had again overdosed on the jobsite this time another worker called nine one one after a few hours in the hospital he went back to work so i mean here you have a guy shooting up heroin going to the construction job overdoses inject with narcan pops up goes back to the job like it's rinse and repeat the same part he's part of the economy which is receiving injections of cash to hide the pain of an economy that doesn't prove the wealth anymore and merely extract wealth . so make sense a busy guy a bricklayer a construction building the foundations that everything you see around you would also be the same all right so you begin that by saying that no man is an island so the implication there being that this deployment of this brick layer jimmy heroin addict is mirrored on every part of society and in ever

greater organizational hm mm. paradigms of society so this one individual is. sparing seeing a hellish life due to design this occasion and opiated cation of the american economy but so too are the people of his family and his community in the wider community and probably in his state and now of the united states of america oyur is employers are living in this just in time opiate addict is a minimum wage hell scape brought on by easy money like easy blood into the veins of the. ever increasing as vampire population of the zombie population and the cure is staring us right the face of course the obvious cure is you need to make financial fraud more expenses by raising interest rates

aggressively to weed out the crooks would be the obvious solution paul volcker knows that but he's not running the fed and more we now have enablers we have dr frankenstein running the set we are running the central banks we have jamie dimon in charge lloyd blankfein these are the these are the vampires of last resort they're the deepest foul lists dank just. so. we don't see any of these conversations anymore in america we used to have on television back in the sixty's and seventy's we said deeper conversations what our society should be what sort of economy should we have part of this situation here is. construction workers have the highest the highest death rate of opioid overdose on the job the second most concentrated the only other industry that has more opioid addicts is the entertainment industry according to this chart but they are

to this data but construction workers what happens is they lose their job if they're not on the job you know it's a vicious you know you have. to show up at the job and a lot of them it's obviously very labor intensive you're using hammers and nails dangerous it's dangerous so they have a lot of medical issues of pain so they've got to get on the job they take the opioid to get on to the job because it's the only way to get through the pain and you know maybe the conversation should be had of you know ok there's on the one hand you need to feed. stock markets and you need the revenue pushing the opioids but on the other hand like we also need to discuss like is or better way to how this should workers have some workers comp should they have the day off should they have a week off or two weeks off ansted to make recover from the pain should they not be threatened with losing their job because they have this pain and like maybe there are other conversations that could be had but we don't have those conversations because it's all shrieking and it's all crazy story the economy like we're drivers

there resident last five years and i cut in half that's actually have a headline drivers who are left are earning less than half of what they did four years ago study finds a study by j.p. morgan by the way the biggest zombie of all the banks the biggest derivatives book of all the banks the one the benefits the most from zero percent interest rates and the fed chairman and women going out saying we should buy equities in the next financial crash right well there's an amendment to the constitution. outlawing slavery and that's clearly an example of slavery in america right here well i don't i don't think they're forced to do that but it is definitely a declining income and it's only going to add to the sense of. you know the the harder you work the more you stay in place we've covered the red queen syndrome and fracking like you get people. just make that bomb payment otherwise that you're flow of cash is going to be cut off if you don't make that bond payment and forget

the fact that fracking doesn't make money forget the fact that you're driving faster and faster and harder and harder more more fares and earning less allows us saying all these people have in common is a generally carry a lot of debt lot of student debt a lot of medical debt. the debt for their car auto loans auto loan debt ok so we know from history that forced labor a lot of times as comes with debt peonage well i might say and allergy i have for the show better and i think it's working the zombie story you could introduce the slave story to another episode but i think this fits in it's suitable i think that the zombie works in fact that we have a zero percent interest rate economy because we have zombie banks that is filtered down to zombie corporations because pension funds need to meet their debt their pension obligations payouts to their members so they have to loan more and more money to more and more zombie corporations in order to keep their flow to their

members those same workers need to work harder and harder to pay off the debts for all of their student loans or. mortgages which house prices continue to rise so that works better for me when i mean we have invented something new a zombie slaves. they are the best of both worlds are the worst of both worlds defending and i look at it as content goes could be good so a new report from j.p. morgan chase based on payments directed to two point three million family show the average monthly platform earnings drops considerably by fifty three percent between two thousand and thirteen and twenty seventeen these drivers made seven hundred eighty three dollars per month and twenty seven thousand versus one thousand four hundred sixty nine. in two thousand and thirteen so like i said working hard it says they had more quantitative tightening at the reverse of quantitative easing and while it's happening minutes what's going on here well is it really max are telling you a billion times you can never never taper

a ponzi scheme and this is the motherlode ponzi schemes so what's going on maybe the federal reserve the reckless policy in a band where they would use rates from fifteen percent down to zero. they claimed they're going to be raising rates but it's still statistically insignificant the amount of the raise so all are doing is replacing there are two forms of policy easy there's monetary policy and fiscal policy so they're getting rid of the monetary policy but they're adding fiscal policy so fiscal policy government spending is replacing monetary policy they're also reinvesting the the the bonds the bond proceeds so it's late to meet q.e. so really it appears the optics are that they may be tightening but they're not really tightening they are the language is that we're tightening and yet that debt number keeps going higher and higher sighs you point out it's all optics now the bank of international settlements which is the central bank of central bank report

that fifteen percent of all u.s. corporations are zombie firms on abol to cover their debt servicing costs from the current profits your thoughts on what's happening here well i think that we're living in a land of unicorns zombies managed by humans or snowflakes we don't understand are you a sheep so the problem with wall street right now is you've got too many people involved in the same crowded trades the e.t.f. trade is a horrible trade you know it's like a roach more to get in but there's no way that when syrian valuations people don't understand valuations i mean you've got some ridiculously priced stocks later i think we've got a couple charts here are going to church of him isn't that you can take a look at amazon as a true in dollar company that. i don't make any sort of problem which is necessary if you're going to maintain that kind of valuation so anybody who's buying amazon the most crowded trade in the world last year you know i think that's going to end very very badly i mean yes you know

a look at the hours on start but let's talk about another company we've mentioned before tesla so the thing about tesla met in a air on wall street i used to work on wall street for many airs they say very lax about the rules particularly regarding the f.c.c. the securities and exchange commission so when iran mosque the c.e.o. of tesla says something like i'm thinking about taking myself private and funding has a place when i think in the old days used to get what's called a wells notice right i mean the f.c.c. comes after this to be illegal to do that stuff right that's what you're talking about securities fraud and is evil and most guilty of securities fraud yes she is lead forsett i'm not sure now you know it's it's a classic what are the set up signs for a classic. you've got look you go corporates look at europe you've got corporates and investors selling and millenniums buying stock the problem is you can't really tell what the finances of tesla are and they've never made

a profit they've got around eleven billion dollars in debt they've got to increase their debt even more the company is hemorrhaging money it's burning its cash is hotter and spacex jet fuel so it can possible really choke you know months came out and so the funding is secure we had no funding you're just trying to burn the shorts basically that's market manipulation in my book i don't know why people are buying the stock it's probably one of the best shorts on the planet and over three hundred bucks a share i mean that i'm in a ponzi scheme message that you put out the stock when are you certain they're going to be buying it four hundred twenty dollars a share and i think it topped out at around three ninety five and then really had to admit that. it's a lie you know sure the shearers collapse but you know i think that is that there is a small time when compared to what's out there are now and if there are bigger problems if you look at who. is somewhere neighborhood of seven trillion dollars in the

united states and i did four terrified of trillion of those bonds have to be refinanced within the next five years right so it's a good point in that whatever you think iran must is doing if it's illegal or not it's in the context of a entire global market that is korea plan upon seeing gaves then much bigger frogs than follow all the central banks and trillions of dollars so he's a small fish it's just a forty fifty billion dollar bezel where as very central banks are involved in much bigger scams now at the same time the bloomberg consumer confidence comfort in the acts now at its highest level says january of two thousand and one so consumers same happy man their wealth effect has kicked in the now stocks are higher property markets are people feel wealthy they're confident they're buying stuff what was going on there well look this is this is around we know it was seen by reckless

central bank policies around the world united the. japan you know why not o.b.e.'s germany used more buying whole bonds now you've got a european central bank run by mario drug use every school in sacks line what we're on in the european more. that are highly rated supposedly and the government on your spending inordinate amount of money trying to problem use more supporting more it's in keeping interest rates artificially low the problem is italy has four trillion dollars in some debt. the banks are shutting up so the banks are morally insolvent and need to be recapitalized it was a huge problem and it could be the real the fall of the car that makes the e.u. crash so the debt in the european union is supersized and i don't see a group solution to that so if you're going to be a bit of a program right well they've got this idea of the zombie banks that were kept

afloat by the central banks because they didn't want to have to have any problems with their friends in the banks but this is bleed it into corporate zombies they have corporate zombies they can't meet their interest payments they are relying on on bailouts as well and so it describing there is this kind of contagion if you will of insolvency that's spreading with a with a kind of a hidden under a rising stock price of the stock prices are going higher through stock repurchase programs and through the use of as funny money as being printed so on the surface it looks like things are good donald trump will point the stock market and say see look things are going great but underneath the surface there's a plague of insolvent say and that insolvency bubble when pricked should be pretty catastrophic and you're saying then italy that i mean that is who is it is a seventeen trillion dollar piece the global economy so. how are the banks and the

aig doing like dyke's your bank and these other banks i can't imagine that. saying they're doing very well let's look imagine the amazon before being a trillion dollar company apple is now a telling dollar company as well that u.s. dollars dot zimbabwe dollars and that remember back in the dotcom boom we had cisco was going to be the first trillion dollar company before it flamed out of famously ninety percent crash where is this going it is amazon and these companies going to try and are they're going to be a flame out when you touched upon something that's interesting no i think will definitely be a flameout i think amazon netflix or two of the biggest flames don't make money that will clean out and test must go to jail but what's happening is is a lot of these companies are issuing tons of debt either corporate debt or the raising finding and in other methods and what they're using it for is financialization they're not using it to create products so what they're doing with the stock buybacks is they're cannibalizing future earnings and paying off the

c.e.o. suite then never ends well in history never had and were seen as most pronounced right now where we see inflation is it's been exploited by the west so although we're seeing this cuny tightening in the us where it's really impact and is where all the speculative cash ran and u.s. markets interests are hurting emerging markets like turkey urgent teener brazil mexico and venezuela now remember turkey's debt is dollar denominated a lot of it so their currency has dropped about thirty percent this year and their economy has gone down the tank same with argentina brazil and mexico so their dollar denominated debt is forty percent more they have forty percent more debt now yet their g.d.p. of production can't support even the debt service that they have and as interest rates go up we're going to see a change or default which is beneath the donatists the fall so i don't know if that so emerging emerging markets will need this i don't know if the e.u.

will need. or phrases in china because china is a big problem with all that debt china has that is a big break on china but let's look at the central banks again and continue on the same so to keep this on the banks going they buy the debt of the zombie banks you talk about drag talk about the e.u. you talk about the central banks inflate their balance sheet by trillions of dollars or trillions of euro's and there's another trend though which is permission and ugly and disgusting and that is central banks buying stocks so the swiss national bank is the biggest owner or one of the biggest owners of apple stock the japanese central banks been buying stock on the japanese market to keep it floating and now the head of the federal reserve bank here in the u.s. is talking about when the next crisis hits they're going to start buying stock in the open market met your thoughts well you know this is this is a big from central bank should be doing ninety percent of we're doing right but we are going to economic charlatans and we'll year that are going to run it back into

a ditch and then when they create a problem you go to the scene guys you know it's like einstein senate. insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting to get a you know different result obviously the result is going to be the same but we need to do is think of a box and get people to try to change the program you know we have too much debt too much credit leverage because the crisis right now we've got more debt more credit more leverage than we had back in two thousand and eight why would anybody think it's going to end or it's going to end catastrophic student loans are at an all time high the fault rate is at an all time lows are closing in on two trillion dollars right so we've got that we've got a record credit card debt that's the only thing that sustaining this robbery right and you know the sure buyback programs are ridiculous max you mentioned it yourself so you know if you have two hundred shares and you're a dollar a share you're right that's one hundred dollars and heard that if you buy back

shares and you make it seem hundred dollars you just don't get your what do you really don't know you are and trying to double that's only financialization and that's a lot of the magic smoke and mirrors that we see going on and you know i'll tell you rest of it back to test you know we want to grasp as because really got a few seconds on fact i'm going to say thanks for being on the kaiser partisan against an ok max thanks look i agree with going to there for this edition of the kaiser part with me max kaiser stays here and i thank our guest misfires. planted ponce if you want to catch us on twitter of course as kaiser report until next time by zero. zero zero. zero zero with all make this many a punter consented to the public wealth.