for them and other words those who help others are doomed to suffer as a result of their being helpful now i really thought of this as a great way to explain you know politics in general because based on this headline here that happened a few weeks ago in florida of course florida good samaritan shot dead after picking up tabs at waffle house this was at 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 last. well the deficit survey showed

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 all equate high incomes with doing well and the truth 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 mount 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 too much 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 number 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 it was the corporate lobbyist that were lobbying for this for years it was bipartisan by 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 at 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 that'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 outgoing come round table dorothy parker i believe her cat was named cliche apropos of nothing so here we had tax cuts. that were meant to stimulate the economy what they've done is 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 those 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 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 was sort of 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. 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 gross they're burping and farting in puking just keep on eating it right that's blackstone berkshire hathaway jamie

diamond they're gorging themselves to death on this bill say in a 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 a 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 well that's what catholics say money look what uses you know of the good deeds end

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 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 it's not 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 which 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. montes

holiday tip international memorial awards twenty nine c. the now open for entries all media professionals are eligible whether you are a freelance journalist who work for alternative media or part of a global news conference to talk disciplines sunday published works and video all written for much go to award dot altie dot com and then to now. 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 always favor one dog food over another one comparative shopping service over another and one candidate over another they can suppress certain types of results deiced on what they think you should be see if they have this kind of power then democracy is an illusion the free and fair election besan exist for the more growth we give them the sooner we all hang. join me every thursday on the alex salmond shill and i'll be speaking to guest of the world of politics small business i'm show business i'll see you then. welcome back to the cause 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 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 sense 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 crypt of 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 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. though the idea of the company being one hundred twenty put billion 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 though a lot of companies that go public haven't made a dime and there's always that prospect and even though. goober could conceivably make money the competitive circumstances are really they're 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 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. or does have to make a profit and what i mean by this is that if you're a cost the capital is zero and if you have a large enough company and you have

a good or less about goldman sachs who has 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 iran than your stock could be trading as a multiple of revenue is 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 now. not nearly what apple's been making for a life 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 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 for hate 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 eat 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 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 stock has hundreds of billions of dollars off parked off shore. that's never been taxed and they can just borrow again at their zero percent of buy back their own shares warren buffett's a 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 there oh so again stocks that no top rank because there's no cost for money and there's no regulations anymore there's no top to stocks wrecked yet and it's only in the op ed 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 sensually cash sure and buying back their own shares a lot of the money held stock simply overseas by companies like apple tens of billions of dollars was repatriated 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 hyper inflation 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 last totally thumbing its nose at the as they say he's going his own way and this is a fascinating situation when you see the test of 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. punched 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 still ovarian charismatic guy and one of the great entrepreneur studly grant that opening was a come on now the show some time rick thanks for being on the kaiser a part thank you for inviting me on max always a pleasure and that's going to do with a subset 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 wrecked ackermann dot com if you want to get touch with us with kaiser report on twitter until next time.

for get on if you don't want the old ball in the office go to sit for the ball to do through. supper's you did well sell some properties to me if you go back to cuba fidel false. information about something like that plane you don't really. know you among the group watch us from the mom. who built them all the movies you did well yeah except you're then he says the calls with folks like me the folks at the security just hold it while you go pick up.

oh i. don't. feel pity to put all psycho. closure we're going to produce a. monkey it is the old salute to the pacific as this is the last stop that the push and i wish fulfilled has. just. passed. out. to me.

please leave me. alone. i do think the numbers mean something they've mastered us with over one trillion dollars of debt more than ten white collar crime families. eighty five percent of global wealth he longs to be. eight point six percent world market rose thirty percent some with four hundred to five hundred three per second per second and that we rose to twenty thousand dollars. china's building two point one billion dollar. mark but don't let the numbers over. the only number you need to remember one one business show you know board the mid one and only boom but.

i'm not. leaders of russia and north korea to conclude the first of a summit after more than two hours of face to face talks both with him and putin and kim jong un expressed their willingness to work towards the denuclearization of the korean peninsula. and to the future something chairman king also reach a rec league to tell us about his position and about the questions he says in connection with the situation on the korean peninsula. president anonyma defends some of his most unpopular policies during a news conference that was aimed at de fusing the widespread public anger sustaining france's nationwide protests. plus a un report.