increasing margin rates on solver now this opens up a bit of a can of worms here because the sienese increase in marginal rates split the financial journalistic community down the middle between those who believe that the regulators are manipulating prices and manipulating things like margin rates and those who believe that they're not bill gross coming down the side now of the manipulation camp now the intention was to drive down prices as bill gross says now that did these interventions in the oil and silver market do they do anything to dissuade you from investing in either of these assets let's say oil or a silver and what's your thoughts on what bill gross is saying definitely doesn't dissuade me if anything it encourages me i'm looking at buying oil right now because we've been given a. a little bit of a dip your buy there are little sales there are merge and c.e. stock. definitely i completely agree that the market is manipulated there's an absolute no question of that it's just a matter of what level is a manipulated but the u.s. government for decades has been manipulating m

now speaking of market intervention there was at the end of april when we had all those margin hikes on silver oh yeah who can forget well bill gross the manager of the lot world's largest bond fund tweeted last week that margin increases and so were basically an attempt to rig the market he said quote i eat a action yesterday continues policy maker efforts to cap bad inflation in parentheses silver margins except nonetheless higher inflation ahead oh bill gross is going off the reservation he's calling out the manipulators and the corrupt regulators they're in the pocket of the markets he feels i believe that his fund big. john fund the world one of biggest funds in the world he's got the leverage and he loves to write about the inner workings of these markets now over there in business insider dot com joe wiesenthal at the same time he wrote a piece lauding ben bernanke the for engineering a price drop in the price of oil course but wiesenthal's a paper blog any attacked pimco and bill gross as being given to conspiracy theories so there's a bit of an interesting dynamic being set

the other aspect is, you know, if a business is -- is at a low margin area, they are going to have to take steps to try to address these additional costs. they are going to have to look -- i know one business that says it is a well-known restaurant that says they will move all of their back office space out of san francisco. they are going to look formecha- mechanization as ways to cut down on the labor. it will street journal report was comparing the increased mechanization to the increased use of labor over the past two years. it was significantly higher, the cost of labor, then mechanization. you are going to see more independent contractors. there are employers that are abusing this, but most of the employers are trying to play by the rules and operating on a very thin margin. they are looking for ways to grow and expand their business. president o'brien: thank you. we have one more speaker before we go to the general public comment. mr. black? >> commissioners, rob black. thank you for the opportunity to speak today. you have heard from the proponents of this ordinance that busin

that is financial end-users exchange margin with her counterparties. the prudential regulator's proposed capital i margin requirements for swap dealers and for major swap participants do not require those entities to pose margins to their non-dealer counterparts. this will undermine market discipline. the absence of this two-way marching discipline and regime is the central lesson to aig's billiar. we are also concerned the cftc's proposed segregation rules made repair arrangements that permit netting across customers cleared and uncleared positions. we believe this will increase systemic and settlement risk and will restrict these use of capital. nfa remains concerned about the efficacy of physician limits. we are particularly concerned about the workability of their cftc proposed rules which depart from its long-standing policy of disaggregation of independently controlled accounts. inappropriately formulated limits would impair the ability of markets to serve their essential risk allocation function which would increase the cost of managing risk and

the margin is quite thin. we have only 8% that would be going to the general fund, and that represents $3.8 million of which we would not be bonding against, and that is the margin above which we are receiving money. the rest will go to debt service to pay for the improvements. i'm just wondering, as we go down this process if the property tax revenues do not come in as we expect, if the numbers do not come in with a $3.8 million margin to the general fund, what is going to happen with this project? are there items in the $1.5 billion investment, whether it is open space or other things, that would have to be delayed? what would be the plan? >> a couple points on that question. one, the on the property tax that would come into the general fund, as harvey rose reported, there are additional general fund revenues that the project will generate, and those would include property tax, sales tax, and a host of others, the payroll tax included. so the net -- or actually, the gross revenue we expect coming to the gene

i think they need to put a margin. i don't think the capital requirements of small participants is a significant. >> final question. my time is running out, but i direct this to either one of you, but deeply the position limits proposed by the ctc will raise costs for smaller investors with money and commodity mutual funds? >> in a financial crisis inquiry commission discusses this. we saw it in the summer of 2008, and it certainly made the financial system much more fragile. >> mr. roth? >> i would assume that the imposition new regulations generally increases cost somewhat. the question is always is there an offsetting benefit to the regulation and escape the judgment is whether the, whether there is excessive and whether it is hurting the overall economy. >> thank you, madam chairwoman. >> you're welcome. thank you very much to both of you. we will excuse you and ask our third panel to join us. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] 's's in a few moments a hearing on the possible radicalization of ameri

he's always been nice to me, help out marginalized

and that's when they had to fire up the emergency diesel generator so they lost some major safety margin there when they lost the grid they were on diesels for twelve hours and they're reportedly back to the grid at this point but you can see how dicey it is when they're losing connection to the grid like you say they have diesels then if those fail then there's batteries and another worry that we have is that with all the floodwater around if that diesel fuel supply they have a month fuel supply supposedly were to get fouled with water then those diesels wouldn't work there's all kinds of ways you could lose the diesels there's quite a history of diesels simply failing in the united states or in nuclear power plants at a nuclear power plant it's sad that this plant has been that particular plant has been shut down since april when they stepped down for a normal refueling outage but they saw these floods coming and you mention the tsunami in japan there was very little notice at all that the tsunami was coming it came an hour after the earthquake so they've had weeks or even months to kn

you suggest raising marginal tax rates to 70%. alan reynolds has written a piece in the "wall street journal" pointing out you can raise tax rates all you want, the federal government has never been able to collect more than about 9% of gdp. what do you say to people who say, if you raise the rates that high, it will discourage investment and lead to an orgy of tax lawyers and accountants finding ways to ferret the money around? >> to set the record straight for reynolds, it was raising it on incomes over $15 million. i didn't say i'm just a $250,000 or $500,000. more importantly, before 1980 -- in fact, during the great prosperity from the second world war, for 30 years really, until 1980 -- we had a marginal tax rate on the very wealthy that never dropped below 70%. it's true, if you include all the deductions and credits, the effective rate was something under 70%. nevertheless, it was over 70% officially, even under dwight david eisenhower, republican general president eisenhower in the 1950s. it was 91%, the marginal tax rate

does that give us a margin of error say 1% above or below whenever the baseline determination is once we enter into these kind of contracts. that is what i am trying to understand. >> in this summary front section to the charter amendment, it refers to a simpler view of it -- shall not impose new costs as a result of the participation of police officers in the drop. supervisor mirkarimi: it is a little vague to me only because i'm trying to catch up and understand our yardstick compared to other cities who are experiencing the same debate. it seems our controller would like to weigh in. >> we do not have a single definition of costs neutrality we apply to all circumstances in this city. generally speaking, absent other direction, our office would apply an absolute rule to take it at its face. i know there has been conversation in other jurisdictions about drop program analysis. is it within a reasonable margin of error that the cost or savings are within a band and in some places, folks have stood on that to authorize continuing the program, specifically in our program and i think the

so that we can bring down the marginal rates.now there's a lot of debate about how the corporate taxes are. it's almost irrelevant to me. it's a plus if we can lower them. we can do that by addressing the swiss cheese in our corporate tax code. the other thing is going to small manufactures. one of the beauties is there are a lot of small manufactures tucked away that are very productive. they're very competitive. they're in lancaster or pittsburgh or ohio, wisconsin. all the forced product companies are not big. these are small companies. there's been a lot of discussions about these companies not getting a loan. that's been an issue. i'm less concerned about that now. it's starting to improve. but one thing that worries me is the lack of equity capital. we don't have investor taking an equity stake in the companies. there's a lot of reasons for that. i think there's role for government to play here. helping finance indirectly through different means to pride equity capital. don't try to pick winners and losers, but let the prof

these rules include heightened capital margin or liquidity requirements. indeed, these requirements will incentivize even greater regulatory arbitrage and the expansion of shadow finance. activities also will tend to shift internationally to the regulator of least resistance. at this early date, the signs are mixed about how effective u.s. regulators will be. even if we limited our analysis to the behavior of the fed. consider, for example, the fed's two stress tests. the 2009 test that began at the depth of the crisis offers a textbook example of applied macroprudential principles that lent that exercise great credibility. these include the availability of a clear public backstop mechanism for supplying capital in the absence of a private source, the application of common standards across institutions for asset valuation at a point in time, the use of plausible asset loss assumptions and, finally, the designation of increased capital needs in dollar terms rather than as a capital ratio. thus, limiting the incentive to deleverage. the successful test marke

of revenue but how that money is raised for the modeling captors the effect of the marginal tax rate the disincentive to the workers did. >> right. good. okay, the next question has to do with provider behavior. again, everything that happens in the economy is because an individual or company believes in a certain way based on the conditions thrown by its government or by some of their factory. when you look at provider behavior if we were to cut the pay of everybody in ceo by two-thirds with the impact of your people wanting to receive or move to your position? >> i'm afraid it would come congressman. >> essentially what the chain saw that was applied to the provider reimbursement under the obamacare to will does impact provider behavior, and you're modeling doesn't assume any change in behavior, right? >> that's right. we don't capture, again, if you were trying to in part, our modeling does not capture any sophisticated way the possible ramifications of that >> looking not theoretically but likely realistic outcome with the reimbursement rates are to providers by two-thirds, we ar

the overall margin of era -- a margin of error is about 5 1/7%. i would like to begin by talking about some general preferences that we heard the customers expressed when it comes to issues around their electricity service. the question was really designed to drive at the core of value proposition which was essentially, we offered the respondents a choice. would you like to pay more for electricity if you knew you would get more of it from clean, renewable sources? or would you like keeping the same rates even if it means you won't receive more of your energy from the clean and renewable sources. the customer base and basically split right down the middle. 45% said they would like to pay more, of 43% said they would prefer to maintain their current rates. we also have a question that asked about a variety of other factors. we offered the respondents the list of factors that you see if we ask them to rate the importance of each of them individually. in this slide, the dark green bars, light green is very important. surface reliability, a 52% rating

you have profit margins which are near their cyclical peaks, and we do think profit margins are going to keep inching higher over the next quarter. >> reporter: second-quarter earnings are expected to grow 14.5%, with even bigger gains in the third and fourth quarters. but economist stephen wieiting warns all may not be rosy with those second quarter reports. >> we expect them to guide down very aggressive estimates for gains in the back half of the year. we do think their profits can grow in the back half of the year, but not as robustly as the estimates at this point. >> reporter: it's clear the u.s. economy has hit a soft patch. the question is whether the recovery will slow further when the fed stops its second bond- buying program at the end of this month. in spite of those concerns, some analysts think corporate profits can continue to surge. part of the reason is productivity has been improving, thanks to cost-cutting during the recession. in addition, almost half of the revenues for s&p 500 firms come from overseas. taken together, some analysts predict strong earnings will pr

so where is the space for this marginalized community? i did a story two years ago that focused on west oakland, dealing with asthma rates. nobody in west oakland had the money to pay for it, but everybody read it. i know because i walked around and handed out paper copies of it. how do we focus on those organizations, the people who cannot do it themselves? i am sorry to answer your question with a question, but it is something i am passionate about. >> hello, i am just graduating high school this year. i plan to pursue a career in journalism. like others, i get a constant reminder that it is a struggling field. personally, i am not too concerned with money. i am just passionate about journalism. like many others, i want to know what it is looking like for people like me, who are planning to pursue a career in journalism, what steps do i need to be taking? >> four years from now, i believe she will be out of journalism school, what will landscaped look like? >> it will look great because you are cheap labor. [laughter] and there is plent

i've been concerned about margin requirements on sovereign funds, margin requirements, when the non-us subsidiary of a u.s. bank is dealing with a non-us entity that it could be a margin requirement, my own view that's a very -- do you under this statute had the authority to take that into account? and can you and your fellow commissioners i just with regard to market, and those particular cases where they would be international setting, a competitors disadvantage, make it go away? >> we are working along with the prudential regulators, because the actual have authority under dodd-frank to set the margin for the banks. we just have the non-banks. but we are along with the sec initiating dialogue with international colleagues. >> you have existing statutory authority collectively to adjust if there might be a problem? >> i think we have existing authority. it has to be based upon rational reasons along with the administrative procedure act has us do it. >> i understand. assuming rationality, but you do have sufficient statutory authority do with the specific situations that we are talki

what kind of impact is that having on margins? >> well, obviously that does affect margins. it depends on the category. it's a little inconsistent. certain categories like discreet audio components are doing fairly well because of the explosion in flat screen tv sets so people really want a great audio component. but on the price of the screens themselves there is a tremendous amount of competition out there among the screen sellers. and that obviously presses on margins. this is a business where you ino vate and you die or you cut your cost and you die. so it is a pure competition in the marketplace. >> what about the retail environment, again as we ramp neup that holiday season. you mentioned volume. we mentioned price. what about at the retail level. what are those members telling you? >> well, certainlies there a a tremendous competition in retail. some of the styles like circuit city have gone away and best buy, target and wal-mart have pikted up some of the slack. the independent dealer is certainly under pressure there. but they're providing a more higher value add se

put that off to the side and look for tax reform, broaden the base, and reducing the marginal rates, always good to try to do. but in the meantime, it really seems that it is a spending problem like people say. >> mostly health care spending. >> thank-you. >> mr. mulvaney, let me ask, your opinion that spending cuts will recover this recovery. but as an economist, you are aware of a body of work for the fiscal consolidation, and others took on forms of fiscal consolidation as many of you mentioned. and in 26 instances, they grew their economy in the short-term as well. they spend less, they control the fiscal policy, they owed less as a nation, reduce their debt mainly through targeted spending cuts. they grew the economy in the short term. the lower their country's debt by around 12%, and their economy went to 3.5% average, and sweden did this time, new zealand had along the same way. to this theme that if we control spending, it will harm us economic recovery, dr. taylor, dr. hassett, do you believe that to be the case? you think congress is capable of such severe spending cuts tha

the other aspect is, you know, if a business is -- is at a low margin area, they are going to have to take steps to try to address these additional costs. they are going to have to look they are going to have to look -- i know one business that says

>>knowles: margins are tight. there are costs pressures. >>reporter: kpmg's golf advisory unite estimates that 45% of golf clubs in the uk and ireland failedto make a profit last year. a recent survey by the english golf union shows over half england's clubs no longer charge a joining fee...95% of clubs no longer have a waiting list... >>stanley: a lot of clubs are struggling on the membership side of things where once upon a time they had a long waiting list, of people waiting to come and join. those days for a lot of golf clubs are gone. >>knowles: people are evaluating at the moment. do i become a member or do i just play casual, what we call nomadic golfers...so i think there might be a natural trend there. >>o'connell: the loyalty at private members clubs...especially in the last 5 years has really dropped out. >>reporter: at golfbreaks.com the core business is selling golfing holidays...but 3 years ago it created a web-based system where golfers could book cheap, off-peak tee times at participating golf clubs. >>stanley: last year we

i think we are going to work together on the margin in approach. i think there's good consensus on a risk mitigation techniques. there is frankly a greater challenge on some of the transparency initiatives. we have swap execution facilities looking at the cody yes, but those might be a little different in what we are doing here on the execution facilities >> honorable shapiro? >> i agree there's always of course the risk of regulatory arbitrage but there's also significant consensus among the veggie 20 and financial stability board members who is put forth recommendations to implement the g20 commitment about what needs to be done. in particular the derivative stays and oral we have a lot of consensus issues there are a few restaurants were notes treating problems and regimes i would speak to in particular where we are not only doing the same place but that's why it's important to continue to push to the task forces and working groups of international regulators and to persuade others to come to the consistent requirements. >> mr. wash? >> i guess

he's worked through many, many underrepresented and excluded, marginalized constituencies, communities, hopeless populations, immigrants, limited english speakers and in ways enough are often not represented particularly in the work he does in administrative forms, which are sometimes really life and death type of situations, folks who are very vulnerable on the verge of being full any large nallized. so i think his work is very important, something that we can use at the police commission right now. again, that you have decisions to make, though the decision i hope you will make will be to move david waggoner on the police commission. he will do very well and we need him there. thanks. supervisor kim: thank you. next, i have eddie and kevin bart. and if you have not been called, please line up after those two. >> good afternoon. i'm vicing my support for david waggoner for police commission. i met david through the new leaders council, which he mention 20d11 new leaders council fellow. they collect some of the best and brightest of the bay area and bringing them together for training

i think they need to put up margins. i don't think the capital requirements of small participants is as significant. >> final question as my time is running out but i direct this to either one of you. do you believe the limits being proposed by the cftc will raise costs for smaller investors who have money and commodity mutual funds? >> i haven't thought of it in those terms. i do think that the position limits are critically important to stem excessive speculation which i think we have seen in a number of commodity markets. recently, we certainly saw it in a the financial crisis inquiry commission discusses this. we saw it in the summer of 2008 and it certainly made the financial syste