this is broadcast around the world and covering the world of business and finance and the impact on all of us part in washington d.c. thank you so much for joining we are glad your on board coming up today we take a look at the good the bad and the ugly of those with christiane counterpart plus the massive consumer electronics show begins in las vegas today how and cook most of the big picture is there and will give us a report and later we'll look at how some nations around the world fund education and the student loan debt in the united states remington a grade of public citizen joins them all of that directly ahead but first but to some headlines let's go. and unforseen error slowing the united states economy

leads or global report today as analyst at two major players in global finance say the partial government shutdown is taking a measurable bite out of growth and may leave the federal reserve flying blind on interest rates bank of america merrill lynch says the partial shutdown of seven of thirteen federal agencies which has left eight hundred thousand federal workers unsure of when their next paycheck will rise shaved a tenth of a percent off of merrill's estimate of u.s. growth for the fourth quarter of last year reducing that estimate estimated g.d.p. to two point eight percent meanwhile economist at deutsche bank raised a key practical problem pointing out that the u.s. federal reserve which has touted data depended as a principal of decision making could be deprived of key data points from government sources including durable goods orders and new home sales if the shutdown drags on while a tenth of a percent off of the expected g.d.p.

. may not seem like a lot these teen numbers are critical giving the increasingly precarious position in which many see the u.s. economy and as a refresher the quarterly g.d.p. last year was two point two percent in q one and that jumped or jerked rather up to four point two percent in q two that in the third quarter it actually slowed to three point five percent look at that we'll soon see what that actual q four g.d.p. number is that's if the government economist at the commerce department's bureau of economic analysis go back to work when the shutdown is over the release date is set supposed to be on january thirtieth. and turning to specific agencies and functions the u.s. securities exchange commission the f.c.c. and my old agency the committee futures trading commission to see f.t.c. are among the agencies taken offline by the partial shutdown both financial regulators vital functions which include investigating possible violations of securities and commodities laws and review of applications for stock offering

exchange applications and product approval are among the key activities currently being suspended by the shutdown at the s c c only one hundred ten and for us mint staff out of the f.c.c. is total workforce of forty four hundred employees are on hand to handle a limited number of emergencies during the shutdown and c f t c the vast majority of operations that ceased and only sixty one employees that's about nine percent of all the employees there are on the job the defacto lock out by president trump is also hard on the processing of applications from farmers affected by the truck tariffs against china by a department of agriculture and petitions to the commerce department from u.s. companies for exemptions from tariffs on metals imports meanwhile reports of low morale among key facilities key folks federal employees at the transportation security staff at u.s. airports are piling up causing so muted but growing concerns about say. government

pay is due on friday but there appears to be no real hope for an agreement in time for the hundreds of thousands of workers to actually get paid. and flying over to china trade diplomats from the asian powerhouse are now allowing five additional genetically modified crops or g m o's to be sold in china as a concession in current trade talks china's agriculture and rural areas ministry announced the five g.m.o. varieties of soybeans and canola including some designed to be used in tandem with monsanto is now notorious herbicide wifeless thing that can now be legally imported into china the approvals were announced shortly after negotiations from the u.s. and china completed their first full day of official trade talks and are the first of this kind since the two gents to g m o's were approved for importation by the ministry back in june of two thousand and seventeen. and speaking of monsanto g m o's have also made new inroads into asian markets via india earlier today the

supreme court of india issued a ruling that allows the agribusiness and chemical giant to and forth patents on to pest resistant strains of g.m.o. cotton brand name ball guard in india monsanto's g.m.o. cotton was first planted in india in two thousand and three and its two varieties account now for get this ninety percent of all indian cotton production so the supreme court decision overruling the previous ruling by a lower court that india's patent act does not allow for patents on plants and seeds interestingly critics of the new ruling include a group associated with prime minister narendra modi's ruling political party the b j p and shares a bond santo india ltd rosen trading at the bombay stock exchange of mumbai on the news. and today i couldn't be more excited to take

a look at the good the bad and the ugly of cryptocurrency is to do so we are pleased to be joined but for the first time in twenty one thousand by kristi i have counterpart x. welcome chrissy great to have you happy happy new year happy negative so you're too young i mean you're all the in wisdom but you're too young to know these movies the spaghetti westerns this was the first real film in which clint eastwood actually excelled he became a star and in it he sort of there's a. really uncomfortable alliance and competition between these other two gunslingers and that reminded me of for this sort of title this segment about the uncomfortable lions in the crypto space where these new crypto folks and some real you know upstart coming into this established crypto space and really having a gun slinging shoot out so in that regard that back up let's talk about the good the bad and the ugly our own spaghetti western encrypt so what were the goods i

mean we certainly know that kryptos are being more accepted. in the conventional investor class but talk about that a little bit what else is good with kryptos yeah absolutely we have the arrival of institutional participants and with that we see a decline in terms of overall market volatility so with the at with the increasing amount of institutional and traditional investors into the market we expect the digital currency market to start behaving increasingly like the traditional equities market in two thousand and nineteen so that is a very big plus because we see a maturation of the entire industry as a whole in fact the wall street journal x. actually came out of the article as saying that the correlation between bitcoin trade and gold had reached an all time high of point eight four and similarly the correlation between that and the vix was point seven seven which is extremely high for quantities to. absolutely you know that reminds me so i say that it's a good thing i think that as i would regulated markets are involved here both

chicago board options exchange and the c. of the group trading a bit coin futures some people might not say so you mention the link between gold and bitcoin but you know back in the day and some even now say that having gold futures or silver any precious metals futures actually somehow distorts the spot price and there are some naysayers who say that these futures markets for bitcoin and potentially other crip those in the future we could talk about that a little bit but they may actually just distort the spot price for kryptos but by and large there are rules of the road here and and that's what i think was needed and that gets to the next area that i want to focus on the bad what are the bad as out there i noticed a story today by the way out of whole and they're going to tax ninety percent tax which is the stock the tax that they place on stock revenues in poland they're going to place that same tax this year on krypto revenues so that's not good news

that's bad but what else is bad in the crypto space there's a ton of uncertainty in terms of regulation because in the u.s. especially regulators are willing to actually put out solid rules and guidelines surrounding the space so there's this concern between over regulation and stagnating the growth of the cryptocurrency industry and also like what about the consumers we actually have to protect them from fraud and from the unscrupulous people in the industry so there's a very very fine line that the regulators need to walk in right now the regulators are uncertain and this creates uncertainty in the industry as a whole because developers don't know how far to take their projects they don't know where the line is so it's very difficult for people to actually propel their projects public yeah i mean as much as traders are risk adverse regulators are risk adverse to and sometimes that's a good thing they want to get things wrong and so better to have nothing out there then. and i have it wrong but they need to be careful and i think the more these things are regulated without being overzealous the better you know my position i've talked about it all the all the busters know my position on this but let's ask you

about the uglies and i know some of these and we haven't talked about it but we've talked about on the show before but not today but one of the sort of frauds and stuff in the space there are more hacks and we could count last year and run even last even this year on january fifth we had a theory in classic the eighteenth largest cryptocurrency in the market experience a fifty one percent attack where an attacker actually could gain control of sixty percent of the entire network and about five hundred thousand dollars from the exchanges but i'd say the ugliest side of everything was probably last november when we experience the hard work the hash war that ensued was just ridiculous and very poorly handled it put a ton of miners livelihood at risk the entire thing was very poorly handled on twitter out in the open airing very bad and made the entire industry look extremely incompetent and naive you know speaking about hacks by the way but i think i read today that there was a hack just in the last twenty four hours and it was it was a small amount it was four hundred thousand is

a lot of that your money. oh that's it it came out january fifth but they come they actually try to cover it up and it only recently came out ok yeah i mean i'm not a huge amount but if that's your four hundred thousand you know it's sure a lot that chrystia counterpart x. thank you so much for buter always great to see. and before we go to break officials in the office of u.k. prime minister theresa may are confirming that the previously cancelled parliamentary vote on the may plan for bret's it has been rescheduled for january fifteenth that's next tuesday as the prospects for passing moves may's deal remain dismal and are standing a road the only certainty appears to be more brinksmanship before this fine mess is resolved. and now it's time for a quick break but ahead here because when we return the massive consumer electronics show has begun in las vegas and holland cook host of the big picture right here in our dear merica is there will give us

a live report and we look at how some nations around the world fund education and that the student loan debt in the united states remington a grade of public citizen will join us as we go to break here are the numbers at the closing bell so we will be back in a flash. join me every thursday on the alex salmond show and i'll be speaking to guests of the world of politics sports business i'm show business i'll see you then.

manufacture consent to public will. when the ruling classes protect themselves. with the fine merry go round be the one percent. we can all middle of the room say. the most important moments are when the principals of the foreign minister or the president actually ask your opinion when that happens you are on your own and you. no i'm just interested to you actually. have to see what you think.

nobody could see coming that false confessions would be that prevalent in this waist up wrongful conviction if you had any interrogations out there what you'll see is threat promise threat promise threat lie a lie a lie the process of interrogation is designed to put people in just that frame of mind make the most comfortable makes them want to get out and don't take no for an answer don't accept their denials she said therefore would cooperate so i state that i would be holiday next day there's a culture and accountability and police officers know that they can engage in misconduct that has nothing to do with all the crime. welcome back we spoke earlier about the u.s.

economy slowing and a slowdown in china has generated headlines of course well now europe's biggest economy germany also seems to be cooling the latest official figures showed german industrial output falling off by one point nine percent in december confounding survey expectations of a small increase meanwhile industrial orders fell by one percent in november well above expectations closer to eight point four percent drop off trade frictions to the both the east in the west of germany involving the u.s. and china and great britain seem to be a significant factor driving orders down as a fall of more than three percent in industrial orders from outside germany offset a two point four percent rise in domestic orders. and that slowing of the chinese economy and the related trade fight between the

u.s. and china may also be registering in corporate earnings news a south korean electronics giant samsung cites market turbulence as a factor in falling profits samsung has disclose or operating profit figures for a q four and show a year over year drop off of get this twenty nine percent wow samsung preliminary figures for the quarter show an operating profit equivalent to nine point six billion dollars that's about ten point eight trillion one you may recall last week apple blamed falling profits in large part upon the chinese economy samsung sales for q four fell by eleven percent compared to the same quarter of twenty seventeen sam some stock is traded in south korea on the korean exchange the k r x and traded down one and a half percent on the news. this morning in las vegas they cut the ribbon at the massive mind boggling consumer

electronics show and r.t. america's big picture host and resident tech buff holland cook is there holland just how massive is this thing. apart at most conventions they measure the exhibit hall in school where feet here think acres no one building and contained c.d.'s and in this building alone the exhibit hall is about thirty five football fields and the very first video cassette recorder was pretty hot stuff here at the one nine hundred seventy consumer electronics show four years later there were issues in the us for the laser disc video player which quickly bombed and that's what makes being here so cool and every year thousands of companies exhibiting here . there are trying to obsolete what was so cutting edge the year before in one nine hundred ninety eight we were hypnotized by the new h.d. t.v.'s that cost thousands fast forward to this past christmas when i spotted

a forty inch ultra h.d. a picture four times sharper for under two hundred dollars at walmart this week in vegas we're writing and driverless cars and we're talking drones and we're seeing how technology is improving our health and changing the way we live. but it seems like the electronic show out there has a reputation of being this shooting gadget show with what the things that you're talking about were sort of some of them were bigger picture but a little micro recorders and all that but that really just scratches the surface right all and. yell for the first several decades this show was about selling things in boxes of audio and video equipment camcorders v.c.r.'s etc but appliances evolved the home became more connected but the wireless contact tiffany that we now live with that is now so second nature has changed the game as

the broadband pipe got faster that thing in your pocket that we used to call a phone has transformed life example hooper and lift made possible by four g. wireless speed and with eighty and t. and verizon racing to build out five g. networks much of what we see here this week is a peek at the next level of automation and convenience that will quickly become second nature and prominent here this year companies you don't naturally think of as techie procter and gamble and l'oreal are here tech is now that pervasive in our lives so for that reason what used called to be. the consumer electronics association had to change its name a couple of years ago to the consumer technology association and they read to us the media not to call this the consumer electronic show they want us to call it

c.e.o.'s lots a lot yeah i know i'm used to the old acronym but i mean when you're talking about folks like l'oreal out there i mean it sounds like almost anything goes holland. almost and we're going to make some news here because one of the hottest tech products in the last several years is not here consumer technology association c.e.o. gary shapiro told me that he cigarettes are not on display because the faith in manufacturers were not invited otherwise there are some forty five hundred companies from one hundred fifty five different countries here exhibiting their stuff and some one hundred eighty thousand of us here to gawk at and so my favorite gear is comfortable shoes and hand sanitizer. all with thirty

five football fields as you're talking about i guess they don't need the jewel guys and all of a ping folks so better off anyway artie america's holland cook host of the big picture thank you hala and we look forward to more reports from you sir. more tomorrow. about twenty five nations offer free college education the list is an oppressive and includes argentina in austria brazil france germany and greece even malaysia morocco panama poland and scotland offer free college in russia it's free for those with good grades however in some countries like here in the u.s. the mayor mentioned a free higher education those are fighting words and can set off a major debate but the call for free college education has merits not only to increase u.s. competitiveness but for the enormous debt upon students in the u.s.

the student debt has reached over one point five trillion dollars compare that to our friends in the united kingdom which have only one hundred billion dollars in student loan debt here discussing remington a great council for civil justice and consumer rights with public citizen remington happy new year great to have you with us again good to be here so we're talking about this but this is such a big hairy issue i mean it seems not to be getting the needed attention why do you think that is well what we're crisis where ballots from crisis to crisis we're trying to fight assault on our civil liberties and access to justice so this doesn't get the attention it deserves but people want to talk about this was a poll that came out just this week from harvard eighty seven percent of democrats sixty one percent of republicans say congress needs to take action you know it's a big deal right now remington how are students getting their their money per school is that through loans student loans or their

scholarships where how in the u.s. are they paying tuition majority of student loans and that's why one point five we have five trillion dollars worth of student loans forty four million of us have student loans and eight million have defaulted on them because what happens is when you get out of school sometimes you have to make hard choices you either pay your student loan debt or you get a car but if you don't get a car you can't drive to work. so this is having a huge impact on our entire industry because if you this is think of if you can't pay if you pay a student loans or you get a car you may say i need to pay my student loan so then you don't get a car you don't get a house and that affects our entire industry absolutely there was this. court case that we talked about not too long ago career education corp they had to write off like five hundred million dollars worth of loans tell us about that case and then talk about predatory lending to a little bit well that was really interesting because that was a lot of states are now are stepping up where the ministration is not acting so

forty eight states came together and said we're going to do something about this california still negotiating with them new york already settled and they are writing off about five hundred million dollars worth of debt which is great for unfair and deceptive business practices and so you'll see more of this i think in the coming months and years especially as we have more progressive attorneys general around the country you're seeing attorneys general in new york and illinois california taking. on taking corporations on where the administration isn't taking them on what sorts of things was critical issue corporation doing and what sort of predatory practices should people that are trying to get loans or trying to get an education what should they be on alert for and be careful so they should definitely one ask for the data look at the data for graduation rates and completion rates

and the salaries when you when you leave because c.e.c. for example didn't give full data to you should is that are you giving the price for that per cran it or the whole price that's another thing that c.c. did so they weren't saying this is what it'll cost fully to go here so really make sure they look at that too are they pressuring you to make a decision like right here right. now and that happened a lot during the financial crisis people did have a job or they were laid off and they need a new skill and so they were they were leaning on them saying well if you want to get a new job you want to get a new skill you've got to come here and finally look at the contract read the contract and make sure does have a forced arbitration contract a clause in it because if it does that will push you into a pretty secretive proceeding where you're not able to go to court to air your grievance you have to go into secretive room and oftentimes you'll lose their. leslie just got a little bit of time as great consumer advice but do you think we're going to

increase this discussion about free college education perhaps leading up to the twenty twenty elections i think we will we saw it slowly ramp up in the twenty sixteen election i think you'll see more of it just because the people who are in power now are starting to get of an age where they actually have student loan debt and i think that is why we are hearing about this because people actually who are in a position of power or running for a position of power have this debt and it matters to them as well. you know we saw that with senator sanders talked about that a lot and i know john kerry you probably going to be running former secretary of state and senator talked about it a lot so i'm hopeful we can have this discussion going through that list at the beginning of the segment here with all those countries lakers twenty four that are for it and we don't the best economy in the world boy it's just a shame we're glad you are in the trenches fighting for it remington a great public services thank you remington great to see you thank you. and that's it for this time thank you guys for being on board you can catch boom bust as

always on directv channel three twenty one dish network gentle to eighty or streaming twenty four seven on pluto t.v. you know that it's a brain t.v. channel one thirty two or as always you could hit us up at youtube dot com slash bombed us r.t. so long for now we'll see you next time. but politicians do something. to put themselves on the line and they get accepted or rejected. so when you want to be president i'm sure. most somewhat want to. have to go right to the press to see what the full three of them or can't be good. i'm interested always in the waters in the house. or sit. desperate for a single purpose. they have

a superman. they start training very young. eight months of intensive school. rats. and they save lives. when they came back from iraq oh marijuana her was cocaine methamphetamine so anything that's altering trying to get us out. that bad mindset using a chemical that would be self medicated. i want to be dream kenyan dream keno new nope just killing myself. out the whole wakes drink to get drunk alcoholics drink to feel normal. that's why it's this way drug addicts do what they

do shop while still for the next. star cool under which these guys are going through to it it just means to. reduce need to be hoped and good pushed on by the v.a.'s are as drugs go and stuff they need to be helped. and they've really should be looked at like now. numbers they should be looked at like people if they go to a veteran center for health should be considered as someone who really needs attention. was . was

. this is a humanitarian crisis a crisis of the heart and a crisis of the soul trump demands funds for his border wall in his first televised address from the oval office earlier today the democrats though say he's holding the nation to run supply continuing the government shutdown bring up to speed all of us. head to british m.p.'s and journalists face a direct backlash over. as frustrated members of the public. because he's obviously. not sure. why. you are offended by something this is a study. and a member of the anti migrants alternative to germany.