this was that waffle house at like three in the morning and some guy forty one year old guy came in and he bought a bunch of people's meals and was handing out twenty dollar bills and one woman got upset because he hadn't bought her meal and so her boyfriend shot the guy dead and classic no good deed goes unpunished it's basically the bucket of crabs syndrome when any crab tries to get out of the bucket the other crabs pull it back in people want to be sharing in their misery and destroy their misery they get violent in this case i'm going to compare this to the tax cuts because when i saw that article about the florida man i thought wow this really explains government right because a soon as somebody that's why america does not have universal health care for example is because everybody gets jealous like that poor person has free health care i get none so we're going to destroy the whole system rather than just expand the system they want to take it all down while tax cuts came about and especially

the tax cuts were brought about because you know you and i know from living in the rest of the world that the rest of the world has corporate tax rates around eighteen to twenty four five percent so america had thirty five percent and they brought that down to twenty one percent but in order to get that to pass i need to pass some tax cuts for ordinary individuals so most people receive tax cuts but according to the headlines trump gave most americans a tax cut and they did not notice republicans passed a sweeping tax cut for two thirds of american and twenty seven thousand saying it would pay for itself in the american public with thank them now as americans finished filing to the i.r.s. for the first time under the new system the law swelled the deficit and survey so just one fifth of taxpayers believe their taxes have gone down of course that's made it difficult for donald trump on the campaign trail but most people part of the reason why they don't realize this is because their refunds are less because they paid less taxes in the first place people. wait

a high incomes with doing well and the truth is that anyone who's ever made any serious money at any time ever knows that it's your after tax income that matters and the tax code has to be studied pretty closely because it changes constantly and therefore every single year practically you need to adjust your kind of tax planning if you will to make sure that your after tax income is that a maximum level otherwise you know you will get unfairly or you will get excessively taxed and the other phrase aside from no good deed goes unpunished would be careful what you wish for right which is another phrase like you might come true so everyone said i want lower taxes and you got a home but now you get lower refunds and so he didn't it didn't really meant anything donald trump had insisted that the iris withhold less from the ordinary average income tax so during the year the ordinary average american income in the

middle fifth bracket they paid twenty dollars less was taken from their paycheck each week that amounts to one thousand and ninety dollars one thousand dollars less per year they paid in taxes that means they got one thousand dollars less on their refund at the end of the year so they equated that not with pay less taxes but that they got less back from the government when it in fact they lent less because when you withhold tomorrow it's a lot of people like prefer to withhold and lend to the government for a zero percent i mean they could lend to the government for two and a half percent if they wanted to become like a rich person you know you can lend to them and buy a treasury instead but instead they just lend to them for free basically by allowing them to withhold what you don't want to refund is exactly one of the government not for nothing and no i mean that's wrong i mean people think that i'll get a refund that's great no it means you have a horrible tax attorney none. one number number two is you

know it goes on from there people just have no idea you know how to plan for taxes a lot of people are very angry and they in particular they mentioned that in many democratic strongholds this is new jersey new york in the district of columbia the average refund amount decreased according to h.r. block fueling discontent with the law even though residents in those states got a tax cut on average and i saw some i think it was the new york times blamed the democrats they said that they were basically pushing fake news and a lot of democrats well on the campaign trail. kind of insinuate allow the audience to believe that they actually received a higher tax burden than in fact what is in fact true is a lower tax burden but certainly the top one percent of the corporations we saw huge tax gains for them jamie diamond recently in their annual report mentioned

that they had over three billion dollars thanks to the tax cut again no good deed goes unpunished so is the corporate lobbyist that were lobbying for this for years it was bipartisan buy part both democrats and republicans wanted to give this corporate tax cut and they got it and the argument to the ordinary person out there was that if we allow them to have more money they're going to hire more people they're going to invest in the company and things are going to be great buybacks have been single largest source of u.s. equity demand each year since two thousand and ten averaging four hundred twenty one billion dollars annually according to goldman sachs suggesting banning buybacks would have disastrous consequences for wall street average annual equity demand from households funds and foreign investors was less than ten billion dollars each so households are only investing ten billion in new funds into the stock market every year no second donner party you know it's cannibalism it's you know i'm still

alive because i haven't eaten yet that's not capitalism must not grow fast of markets that's stuck in the dollar party writ large it's buying your own it's smoking your own belly button lint getting high on your own supply you know that's not it's a cat chasing its tail you know they're talking about cliches it reminds me of the cat owned by that famous poet who was at the algonquin round table dorothy parker i believe for a cat was named cliche apropos of nothing so here we had tax cuts. that were meant to stimulate the economy what they've done to stimulate the stock market and donald trump is not happy with that because he thinks it should go up five to ten thousand points more had we also had interest rate cuts but here like it's never enough that companies are not going to invest in the u.s. economy because they know that there's nothing left of the u.s. economy but we're future is an ai futures and this was so that means that there

will never be another worker in america to earn an income to buy any good so the consumer economy is that and no good deed goes unpunished and you can see that with one of the other things obviously not all the money printing all the quantitative easing all of the free money for the bankers and the top of the corporation none of it has gone back into the economy the other idea has always been like let's build infrastructure and again we have like such a corrupt bureaucratic economy that even that can never happen so you saw with for example in california they planned on building high speed rail because america needs high speed rail but that's part of the reason why we can't compete with china we can't be compete with europe for creating real wealth right but every single time knode good deed goes unpunished the taxpayer wants high speed rail because they want to live like europeans and asians they want to have a better economy but in fact what happens is they're scam artists and corrupt

officials every single step of the way so a thirty billion dollar forty billion dollar high speed rail system turns into one hundred billion which serves a two two hundred billion and takes decades to build and or to feed all the tollbooths scam artists in the way for good literary references i'm going to go with cinema references for two hundred. legroom doof remember the famous french movie or the new wave apoc of the back in the sixty's i think was louis below yes on telly audience right happens they eat themselves to death yes and it's really kind of violence actually hard to watch because grosz they're burping and farting in puking and just keep on eating and right that's blackstone berkshire hathaway jamie diamond they're gorging themselves to death on this bill say free cash and they themselves will perish and take their entire country down with sound because they can't stop there's no editor in their mind they're like goldfish in

a bag of food they're just eat themselves to death that's another analogy but the analogy i introduced at the top of the show was that no or the metaphor no good deed goes unpunished so in terms of this economy if it's of it's not a metaphor that's an idiom it is so in a corrupt system it's impossible to do any good deeds because everybody's gimmee gimmee gimmee it's like if if if it's so on equal and it's so corrupt everybody scamming everybody even the tax code as you mentioned it's like seventy thousand pages long right because there's so many loopholes and no good deed goes unpunished less what catholics say money look what uses you know the good deeds ended up crucifying himself so this was a basis for this whole catholic church of giving away money all the time and nobody having any so never last trump gave most americans a tax cut and they did not notice so i think that's an interesting story i'm looking forward into as we head into two thousand and twenty and these elections

the fact that most americans don't believe they received a tax cut as a remarkable event when in fact they did receive a huge tax hit so i don't understand how that happens although then a corrupt system filled with a lot of you know fake news because you know people have got to realise. it's only. about their savings account it's not about spending is thought about consumption it's about saving and about having economic and and individual sovereignty that's what gold and bitcoin offer they're. impossible to print away by the value by a government and if you're looking for tax gimmicks to get rich you are going to lose what i'm saying at the end of the day is that these people like how how can you ever arrive at a place where which already of the population wants to lend to the government for

free where wall street makes fifty five billion dollars per year getting free money zero percent from the fed and lending it to the treasury overnight they make fifty five billion dollars to lending to the treasury with free money from the fed here what you already have taxpayers want to give to the treasury free free and we demand nothing they should be demanding two and a half percent every single night from lending to the money to the treasury not for free now that's another religious problem that would be the issue of the puritans and anyway we got to take a break we'll be back after this don't go away. facebook and google started with a great idea and great ideals unfortunately there was also a very dark side. they are constructing a profile of you and that profile is real it's detailed and it never goes away

turns out that google is manipulating your opinions from the very first character that you type into the search bar it will only be one dog food over another one comparative shopping service over another and one. candidate over another they can suppress certain types of results based on what they think you should be seen if he'd have this kind of power then democracy is it can illusion the free and fair election doesn't exist the more rope we give the sooner we're all. so what we've got to do is identify the threats that we have it's crazy. let it be an arms race. spearing dramatic developments only really i'm going to resist i

don't see how that strategy will be successful very critical time to sit down and talk. to people as i live the good feel confident. fun. we have many things in this world this is an e-mail for everyone why some people take our things all the power just for themselves instead of the mother.

welcome back to take as the report i'm ask as our time that's a rare return to our conversation with rick ackerman of rick's pics over there rick ackerman back com rick welcome back always a pleasure max so rick ackerman you know when i first started following you oh man many years ago. as a compliment to my fundamental analysis of things of course you provide a lot of technical analysis they have i believe it's a proprietary technical analysis tool called the hidden pivot and i mention this because cents we spoke last the whole crypto currency market has really exploded in popularity and so has so has technical analysis exploded in popularity that people

like tone days and peter brandt and even some of the old timers from all straight have gotten into following the crypto markets and i would encourage anyone in the crypto markets to take a look at your work because you have a fantastic track record with your own technical analysis and the hidden pivot technique that you develop and i want to talk about individual stocks now and as you might say let's talk about these dead stocks walking you've been writing about them a website let's start with goober it's not yet gone public but it's filed an i.p.o. what do you see there rick well let me mention max that i have slowly come to trust my church over my gut instincts some frequently long wrong at major turning points and the technical analysis just kind of keeps me honest so in that sense i've been kind of a perma bear but with respect to the actual for kids for a lot of these stocks they've been very bullish. goober's is crazy.

the dreamer's we're thinking about one hundred twenty billion dollars valuation for a company and remember it's just really an application that sits on a phone. so. the idea of the company being one hundred twenty put million dollar valuation came down somewhat because the lift i.p.o. didn't do so well they kind of started it to bump seventy dollars a share and it quickly came down into the sixty's so. the problem with the company they haven't made money yet and of course the lot of companies that go public haven't made a dime and there's always that prospect and even though. guber could conceivably make money the competitive circumstances are really there strongly against them and i've witnessed something in florida that will definitely be a stumbling block for them namely that you i or anybody we know could buy software

that would allow us to kind of create a mini cooper and from what i've experienced some of these drivers can offer amenity services little frills that cannot their margins are already low enough for instance you get picked up at some place and you get one or two free stops along the way so. i think that the one hundred billion dollars for ruber is really crazy and i think it would still be a little bit pumped even a ten billion dollars valuation considering what it is and what's possible that it's just an extremely competitive business and and the creative destruction destruction. an economic idea that you destroy and build something more efficient it is there but i don't think the final face of creative destruction in the rear in the right handling business has been much thought about right well let's focus on

something they said there and that people have made a note of it that the company does not make a profit and may never ever make a profit and that the interesting point here is that the company really never does have to make a profit and. what i mean by this is that if you're a cost the capital is there oh and if you have a large enough company and you have a good or less sympathy all of the socks got a direct path to the federal reserve you can borrow money basically had zero so you can therefore have revenues based on percentage of fees that you're taking on iraq and your stock could be trading as a multiple of ravenous but in fact you would never ever report a profit as long as money is free. money according to the deflationists like yourself and. you know larry kudlow the trump economic advisor they think that zero is

a good price for money so the fact is the company never has to ever make a profit for it to be worth whatever that pick a number out of that wreck there's no fundamental analysis there's nothing that there's no earnings there's no profit there's nothing to there's no there's no metric to give it a valuation the valuation is whatever goldman says it is well that's true you know earnings are real curse for a company like i.p.o. like goober simply because you've now got a figure that will give you a price earnings multiple so the last thing in the world they want is earnings at least for a while. you know some other stocks are pretty well pumped and i notice that the stories to keep them pumped to continue to evolve to them biggies apple and facebook have changed the business models apple has been experiencing weakening sales with the i phone which is a huge piece of its revenues so they came out with an announcement maybe six weeks ago about how they're going to get in the streaming business and of course the

stock took a big leap as though there is big money to be made in the streaming business but the fact is it's hugely competitive and the margins just for making movies that people will subscribe to see are not nearly what apple's been making for a. with with iphone facebook is another they have a hugely profitable advertising model but they're very vulnerable to getting marked down for a couple reasons number one over that the whole world is kind of going after them regulators are looking at facebook and all of the ways in which facebook traduce is privacy fight facebook has become a pariah among those who value privacy but also you find that a lot of the the core facebook already has plenty ols are sort of deserving the platform and leaving just us senior senior citizens as subscribers

so you could say that facebook is kind of becoming uncool and it eats if you look back to some companies like america online you realize just how quickly they can become totally uncool so facebook is very cleverly said well we're going to shift to a different model based on fees and services small group conversations encrypted messaging and things like that but the revenues from that would be nowhere near what they're reaping from laser target advertising but again like apple that the news that they're change that facebook is treating its business model is changing it was greeted with a big leap in the stock well let's talk about apple for a second cell as you rightly point out the margins on the i phone are hid that it's like sixty percent it's one of the most profitable products ever and it has ubiquity and it's been a money cash machine for apple now because of competition is margins are the phone

are compressing and they're moving over to streaming and the margins on streaming are not anywhere near that they're quite small actually but here's a company that they can just buy back its own stocked. as hundreds of billions of dollars off parked offshore that's never been taxed and they can just borrow again a zero percent of buy back their own shares warren buffett the big shareholder in other words they don't need to make money they can buy back their own stock and manipulator earnings for as long as they need to to keep the price going up right and number one and number two facebook similarly there in a situation again where they can simply get into the game of buying back their own stock to manipulate earnings if they want to that's and has their cost of money is zero so again stock said no top rick because there's no cost for money and there's no regulations anymore there's no top to stocks wrecked and it's only in the opposite section of the wall street journal that you could find arguments that it's

somehow beneficial to us all that these companies are taking huge money and they're centrally cash sure and buying back their own shares so a lot of the money held stock simply overseas by companies like apple tens of billions of dollars was repatriated to under the tax quote unquote reform and acted under trump so the companies take this money and they put it into their stock just sort of bit propping up the stock price they don't think of it as propping it up they say well it's a great buy but a cunt company is a very poor judge of the worth of its shares so you've had this it's been. in the trillions of dollars worth of support for the stock market and as i mentioned it's only in a wall street journal that they could say that's a good thing but in fact it has no implications for economic growth other than the fact that all the shareholders who are getting richer and richer as the stock is

bought up by the company itself maybe they'll invest it in automobiles and houses and things like that but i don't think the economic stimulus from that is really it's not really achieving economic growth in the way that capital investment and money put into research and development which and you've wound up really was such a huge skew of capital court toward these digital companies that. get to thinking well who needs manufacturing but we do there is the hyperinflation it's except it just goes in a stock repurchases and everyone else is left out in the demilitarized zone of the generalized economy fighting each other i'll tell you a company that is actually down twenty percent doesn't look like there is tesla. market cap is about forty five billion at the moment this is a very interesting fast any situation because iran mosque totally thumbing its nose

at the as they say he's going his own way and this is a fascinating situation what do you see with tesla both maybe technically if you look at it and fundamentally rick tesla's thrilling really you know we go through new cycles where it looks like the company's going down the toity and the regulators are going to sanction on musk out of the business and and things look grim for a little while but in all that the the grimness the stock has over the last year and a half or so has sort of oscillated. well aloft in other words you look at it around on a chart and it looks like it could consolidation and the word. punch the regulators have thrown a tesla has not really made it full be neat that consolidation zone on a chart but you know there's a a couple of i hate tesla websites out there and they track things pretty closely they've got drones up in the air looking at parking lots where there seem to be too

many unsold tesla's and tesla will say well these are this is a staging area these cars are all sold but there has been there been questions raised about how many vehicle registration numbers tesla has has used versus the number of course that it's selling the company has been wildly erratic as far as how it sells its cars you know not long ago musk was saying we're doing away with showrooms and that was kind of a surprise to the people who were working the showrooms and now they're again just a month later six weeks later they're saying well we may not go with this online sales model so things are so unsettled within tesla that it's amazing to me that the stock has not really been been buried and i think that's probably testimony to the just the amazing showmanship of musk himself he stood over it

charismatic guy and one of the great entrepreneur certainly agree with that hope it was a come on now the show some time rick thanks for being on the kaiser report thank you for inviting me on max always a pleasure that's going to do with us episode of the kaiser report with me max kaiser as they surveyed like to thank our guests rick ackerman of rick's picks and you can find it rick ackerman dot com if you want to touch with us at kaiser report on twitter until next time. join me every thursday on the alex salmond show and i'll be speaking to guest of the world of politics sports business i'm showbusiness i'll see that. the united states relations with russia or iran have never been particularly

cordial but under the presidency of donald trump both took a downward spiral there have been sanctions attempts at isolation and a badge of evil from both moscow and to iran how are the to the leveraging american fender to. make this manufacture consent to step into public wealth. when the ruling classes protect themselves. with the financial merry go round be the one percent. we can all middle of the room sing. the real news.

for the good old navy does sort of book. the sets for the fall to the the. simpers you did i'll sell something just to move you know but to keep. the measure defenseless and what's at play if they don't thrill. you among the group was. to build them over and we did what you except your then he says and pulls with folks like me the folks with the security just hold it where you go. oh. i'm. going. to pull psycho. closer we're going to produce a. monkey

in the. pacific as this was the last stop at the push and i was also as. the leaders of russia and north korea concluded their first ever summit after more than two hours of face to face talks with lot of kim jong un expressed a willingness to work towards the denuclearization of the korean peninsula. just to determine something chairman king also be directly to tell us about his position and about the questions he has a connection with the situation on the korean peninsula. human rights groups condemned as grotesque saudi arabia's beheading of thirty seven people said to be mostly from the shia minority one person's body was even strung up in public on the largest mass execution in years. and they you wonder.