melissa: james freeman is brilliant by the way.u don't know who that was. >> over last five years, federal reserve forecasts of growth and inflation have been off by average of 100 basis points. sometime during the year, gdp growth of 3%, inflation 2% as part of end of year forecast. growth averaged 2%, inflation averaged 1%. this year is no different. melissa: this makes them typical economists. in economics you can only say what happened before, never what is going to happen. >> predicting is hard to do, especially about the future as the saying goes. fed has made a hash of it. their policies they think would stimulate economist. clearly they haven't. they make all the wild eyed guesses what will happen next year. they're practicing or trying to practice what used to queue republicans up, trickle-down economics. under barack obama the policy is make the rich richer and rest of the people will be helped. it has not worked. melissa: john, isn't it really bad news they have no amount anything left? they're sitting at zero. can't eve

"wall street journal"'s james freeman and mon at that mehta.he said was not that funny. >> i thought it was funny. connell: coke take as study, right, and funds people doing the study i guess. adds money to the study, to, say, the opposite of what i think we've heard from some nutritional experts over the years. at least in my view. what do you make of all this? >> regardless whether or not, i think a little bit of both. what you eat and ability to exercise, of course? >> yes. >> when you break it down, i did research, there are 39 grams of sugar in can of coke. that is equivalent of nine 1/2 teaspoons of sugar. daily allotted allowance for women is six and for men it is nine. regardless whatever it is over daily amount. connell: i just think, what about as a business decision, james, on your view on it as a business decision. if you're coke, nobody is looking to say this is healthy product. we know people are drinking fewer sodas than they did in the past. is this even, regardless, even if this was straight up study, how much do things like th

. >> joining the panel this week wall street journal assistant editorial page editor james freeman. editorial board member joe rago, and washington columnist kim straussel. kim, in the ongoing e-mail saga, what is the most important detail we learned this week? >> i think the most important thing -- well, a couple of things. one, we have found out that the server that was turned over to the fbi was, in fact, according to mrs. clinton's lawyers, wiped clean. we still don't know what that means yet in terms of their ability to retrieve data, but that was one thing. we've also seen the clinton camp become very defensive about this, which suggests that they and the democratic party realize that wills a bit of a problem for them. >> right. >> because of revelations about classified material, which has also been in the news yet more again this week. >> kim, also we've learned that there really was a lot of classified information that's crossed her e-mail back and forth. maybe more than 300. that's just based on the documents that have been looked at so far. this is an escalating problem o

we're joined by james freeman and kim strausso. summarize this story. what happened there? >> well what happened back then when clinton was secretary of state, ubs had a problem with the irs, efs under a lot of pressure to hand over the names of americans who held accounts in switzerland. secretary of state clinton intervened. it was a highly unusual thing to do. she fixed the irs problem for ubs. and then in the subsequent years, suddenly donations to the clinton family foundation from ubs skyrocketed. it also 8:00 decided to loan a whole bunch of money to the family foundation and arranged for bill clinton to get $1.5 million in speaking fees. >> the foundation and the state department both say no prid pro quo here what's the problem? >> well this looks like everything else that's gone on with clinton. she uses her official role and it seems as though it somehow ends up benefitting her political and family fortunes. and you've got evidence after evidence of this. and it's happened in many many different cases. this is the latest story. >> even if there's none found direct

james freeman, who wrote about president obama's 1% economy in today's "wall street journal." you know, you hate to be right, james, in something like this because, i believe, you know that everybody that goes out there campaigns for higher minimum wage, their is in the right place. they're trying to say we need to get people more money and can't support the money but they don't understand math of it. the franchisees we're not talking about wendy's ceo, small business owners, own a wendy's. they're out there. they don't have more profit to give away. they're saying we can't raise price of burger where we are because our customers can't afford it. so we'll cut hours. >> as you point out, a lot of these franchisees -- melissa: they're not rich. >> they're not rich. they might own one location. they're hoping to own a couple more to work their way up. these are low margin businesses, you force them to pay more for labor than that labor can provide sal you. they look for other solutions. the way wendy's is going, way mcdonald's is going. digital ordering, touch-screens instead of e

columnist and deputy editor dan henninger, washington columnist, and assistant editorial page editor james freemaniar is a very tough word association for any candidate to get over. >> yeah. as is the untrustworthy. it is a problem, and i think that joe biden really, stewart, is a direct consequence of hillary's problems and her declining in the polls. joe biden is simply plan b. it could be have been elizabeth warren. they're not very comfortable with bernie sanders. the democratic bench is very weak. other than biden, you might come up with john kerry. beyond that, there is no one. at the moment the biden boon is very hot. >> they're stuck at the moment with hillary. >> they are. >> she's raised over $130 million. she's got organizations out in states. >> did president obama tilt ever so slightly towards joe biden because he knows something about the fbi investigation that we don't know but is very important? >> you know, it wasn't even just a tilt. it was remarkable this week. the white house press conference, white house spokesman. he wasn't just polite about biden. he was abusive about biden

. >> now james freeman this week we heard of another country in abe sha that is not doing well, japan reported that their last quarter, they have negative growth. they were down they say $2 quarters negative growth is recession so half way to recession in japan. japan is the one that started this zero interest rate fad about 25 years ago, an they've had pretty much zero growth for fast 25 years. why are we following a no growth model? >> yeah, with it is really a message from all around the world that you can't print money to achieve process process pay prosperity and seen that in a devaluing the currency. it doesn't do anything and not good for growth. if you're hoping for some optimism maybe people in the united states -- starting to think we need -- need to think more about growth and less about -- monetary adventure, money printing maybe that's starting to happen. >> seven years of near zero interest rates haven't worked yet. >> as i've said 25 years in japan and no growth. too simple to say that zero interest rates equal zero growth. but it does zero rates reveal a fed that is fa