Charlie Rose

SharkswithfrikingLazers  03/15/2011 05:44 PM Report

Look at China go!!!

Very Cool--as seen on CNN.

THE LINK: http://www.bit.ly/cVMWJ4

Click the box of your countries on the right (you might start with China and United States).

Next click the play button--at the bottom of the screen in the middle.

Watch how the United States just suddenly takes off and then how China races to catch up after having quite some difficulty. The China story is amazing--especially in life expectancy and then in income per person.

You might do it again this time adding India--not as dramatic but still amazing.

THE LINK (again): http://www.bit.ly/cVMWJ4

NeilMacCallister  02/21/2011 04:12 AM Report

"Timothy Geithner, U.S. Treasury Secretary, from Davos, Switzerland."

That reminds me, ..how many U.S. Congressmen and Congresswomen have also traveled to Switzerland, and opened one of those "anonymous", "un-traceable", and "non-transparent" Swiss bank accounts?

Does Mr. Geithner have one? ..How about Nancy Pelosi and/or Harry Reid? ..How about Orrin Hatch, Arlen Specter, and anyone else who has been in Congress for 30 years?????

How about John McCain?

How about our "Good ol' boy" Joe Biden, ..do you think he owns a Swiss Bank account???

Pete Rose was "impeached" from the Baseball Hall of Fame for having questionable under-the-table financial dealings.

Shouldn't the United States insist that all our current public-monied tax-collecting federal-office holders not be allowed to maintain any secret anonymous off-shore Swiss bank accounts?

Why, or why not?

Do you think our President Barack Obama has one yet??????

TruthSayer  02/15/2011 10:53 PM Report

Donald Trump for

President

Of

The

United

States

And then there'd be no more of this trade deficit crapashoot anymore

EyesOnYou  02/03/2011 02:13 AM Report

laupen, everything you say is right. But once it all blew up, they faced the option of letting the world financial system, jobs, pensions etc., all evaporate or pay the ransom. They chose the latter. Now all they are trying to do is manage the pile of shit as best as they can.

The real problem we have us the corruption in our political system because of campaign finance.

EyesOnYou  02/03/2011 01:59 AM Report

Charlie what's up with the Red Socks???

Very impressed with Geithner. But I have bad news for him. As much as he and Obama are trying hard, sooner or later we Americans are going to see Cairo in the streets of US UNLESS they learn that ECONOMIC HEALTH must be viewed in terms of the well being of the majority of the country's citizens. Having Oligarchs doing well at the expense of 90% of the country spells

C * A * I * R * O

laupan  02/02/2011 05:30 AM Report

Geithner's role in the AIG bailout continues to destroy confidence in Government. These decisions were unfair to the US taxpayers, and have undermined public confidence in the government. Many of these companies who were ruthless in pursuit of profits and greed should have been allowed to fail.

The New York Fed under Geithner ordered AIG to keep details of their bailout secret, as well as many other decisions and policies he has been involved with in the past two years is an indication of why he is there and who he really protects. Geithner's activity while at the New York Fed needs to be scrutinized and reviewed as it is an indicator of the character of the person who is in a very important position which is shaping the future of America’s financial house.

Geithner was directly responsible for corporate bailout this past financial disaster. Billions of taxpayer dollars were funneled to many corporations which should have been allowed to fail due to mismanagement, personal greed, fraud and corrupt behavior of both the business leadership as well as our elected leadership.

The government knew about mortgage fraud a long time ago. There were many people and organizations pointing this out, FBI warned of an “epidemic” of mortgage fraud in 2005. The FBI and other government agencies did little or nothing, why?

Mr. Geithner, Treasury chief tax evader, is unable to solve any of our problems as he has way too much of his own baggage. He and the administration with their agenda sell us down the river of debt. The Chinese are aware of the inept and confused state of affairs and become more so when dealing with people of his character and others in Washington. The veil that has hidden our “OZ” is becoming more transparent. We the American people pay the price for the stupidity and ignorance of our leadership that we continue to keep in office on both sides of the Isle.

richardknox  02/01/2011 05:16 AM Report

Tiresome,oh dear,just robotic,even Charlie couldn't offer an attractive human quality,ahh but well, except for his socks.

The contradiction in terms; Crimson Tide on a Blue Devil.

He might not get back in good favor with proud North Carolinian's, certainly not his foot in the door...

Feet represent our "understanding", Charlie not standing on solid ground,going through the motions. Like when you can't get past a bad fake moustashe on a great actor,the movies in trouble,every time hes on screen you remember its a bad script too. A rare mis-step,and forgiven "out of hand"...

AntonGrambihler  02/01/2011 04:27 AM Report

After watching this it is easy to see that Tim would make mistakes on his Income Tax Return, but he should still be in Prison like the rest of would be. What are his connections?

SharkswithfrikingLazers  01/31/2011 08:04 PM Report

Genius! Go all the way to Davos, Switzerland ($$,$$$) and interview our own guy but after he is jet-lagged and you are wearing your power socks.

One moment of sunshine, in what turned out to be mostly the same rambling, was this one question: "Could you address how the U.S. government is making itself more effective and efficient?"

". . . It’s about -- it’s about competence and creativity and care and the capacity to act and it trivializes the challenge to say it’s just about the math." Wow Timmy, what alliteration can do for you when direct answers are much too tough. Get some sleep buddy.

REMant  01/31/2011 11:56 AM Report

I hope Charlie is enjoying the skiing and networking, because I too thought this was a bust. Productivity will always increase in money terms if you fire people or decrease their salaries, shift their work to low wage countries overseas, and esp print a lot of money. But surely it cannot be said that we therefore have economic growth. In the mid-'30s Keynes declared you couldn't have inflation until you had full employment, but, as we know, that came out in the Phillips curve as you can't have employment unless you have inflation. It has been frequently pointed out that the Fed is virtually the only place that continues to believe that. A study of college syllabi recently showed it hadn't been taught for decades.

Surely Japan's malaise has nothing to do with its savings rate. Inasmuch as the Keynesians the non-economist Mr Geithner parrots believe that these downturns are failures of "confidence" (enthusiasm no doubt the better term) they see their primary task as getting ppl to dishoard, which they try to do by making it unprofitable to save. The Keynesian, (and monetarist, as it is only a matter of degree), prescription for prosperity, like the mercantilists before, is therefore to continually print money to lower the interest rate and maintain the level of disincentive. Some may term this the theory of the going concern, but I'd call it a pyramid scheme. IMHO the Treasury ought rather to be hoping that there are no runs on the banks as a result of the increase of these debts, that enough interest can be paid to prevent people from doing that, because we can clearly never hand people enough money to sustain themselves.

The reason we have unemployment must be due to the moral hazards created by this sort of welfare for rich and poor alike. The 1970's saw this in the rise of stagflation. Today, given that we are now price-takers, the Fed's money is being sent overseas and workers under- or unemployed instead of prices rise, at least except for some commodities and assets, but the result is the same, a diminution of wealth. We need to be more productive, yes, but we need to have the jobs first. If the Fed is really concerned about a deflationary spiral, it ought to stop creating the incentive for one.

If not mergers or overseas investment, equipment purchases are surely to be expected if you hand firms money and there's no employment income to increase sales. Eighteenth-century Scotland pioneered this, sending its gold overseas to buy capital stock, praised by Adam Smith in his WN chapter on money, (which, however, is mostly an account of the abuse of paper issues). But if there were sustainable employment, there would be no reason to substitute capital for anything except to increase productivity. The presence or absence of automation is not the issue in employment, it only alters the return.

Smith, eschewing mercantilism, of course, turned to the French idea of enlightened self-interest, based on the idea of circular flow. A butcher would realize that he could not sell meat unless others could afford to buy it, and that his living depended on them. Take away that market discipline and you make meat either unaffordable or unavailable. This idea is tied up with the notion of the fitness of things or design in nature exemplified in Pope's Essay and Paley, both very influential in the 18th c and early republic, and ridiculed today by ppl, who, like Smith's opponents, see things only in black and white. And who, of course, also collapse the division of labor and shrink the market, which far from being the cause of loss of jobs, Smith maintained, is the source of them. The moral hazard does not lie there either.

I do not see how a zero-sum game can be avoided if we persist in the kind of mercantilism we have been engaged in. In the place of China, confronted with this question two centuries ago, Jefferson asked why we could not simply declare our markets open, and was laughed at. It was, of course, why most had fought the revolution. Tho the size of the market is not the cause of unemployment anymore than the lack of machinery, we must realize that with the fall of Communism, and the development of the 3rd world we have considerable inequality, which, if we are to have a desirable emulation (the word the president should have used) must first be eliminated. The faster this is done, the better off we will be, individually and socially. We ought to be seeing riots in the streets of Washington to oust Mr Bernanke.

Apropos of our current domestic situation, John Flynn relates FDR's Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau saying to a gathering of Wall St moguls in 1937: "We believe that much of the remaining unemployment will disappear if private capital funds are increasingly employed in productive enterprise. We believe that one of the most important ways of achieving these ends at this time is to continue progress toward a balance of the federal budget." Flynn goes on: "This sounded terribly like Mr. Hoover or Mr. Ogden Mills or Mr. Landon. Yet the whole theme of Mr. Roosevelt's New Deal had been war on business. It was a Holy War. And Roosevelt and the men around him took a delight in picturing business itself as evil and profit as criminal. Now Morgenthau was sent as the emissary of the President to deliver this belated appeal to business.... The audience first tittered and then guffawed out loud.... Actually Henry didn't know the half of it. The country had now really reached a greater crisis than in 1933. The public debt, which was 22 billion when Roosevelt took office - almost all a heritage of World War I - was now 37 billion." Today, however, I am not sure even Wall St would welcome a truly balanced budget.

salgadoce  01/30/2011 08:26 AM Report

Nice socks there, Charlie.

kals  01/29/2011 10:50 PM Report

I have to agree with the below comments. Nothing new in this interview or in any of the interviews with Tim.

I thought Charlie was taking it easy here with Tim (again). Its always the same response every few months...and nothing new. Tim really does not install 1 ioda of confidence.

robdverity  01/29/2011 02:46 PM Report

Huh? After an hour Geithner didn't say a damn thing worth hearing. What a tool. After you drink the kool aid of Wall St. bailout as a success, while simultaneously ignoring millions of foreclosures and the world ec. in the toilet - caused by the very Wall St. thieves themselves - then the crass head-in-ass posture of Geithner and the Adm. is understandable. The impunity of these acts will assure moral hazard all too soon. Complicit regulators are still extant and well. No imprisonments, no fiduciary responsiveness. We deserve the outcome, but not the rest of the world - unfortunately.

blank  01/29/2011 01:49 PM Report

i think the better people are at math and science the better they will be at art and so the better they are at art the better the world around them they will create and so the happier people will be and it will grow from within and quality of life is the most important thing which directly involves the health of it's citizens happiness among it's citizens results in the desire to help the people around you and take pride in the world you live in the reason i think art is related to math is related to science is because they all involve recognition of the patterns throughout the world and the universe and if you combine that with happiness which results from feeling good having good health having friends feeling like you are free to pursue what is in your mind that will naturally translate into wanting the best for everybody and wanting everybody to feel good

if you make the argument that wall street people all are educated and went to good schools to learn how to crash the economy would you rather people from other countries came up with all of these same investment ideas to take control of the united states financial markets

seeing what is wrong with a situation or a problem can result in the desire to engage in it which can be a motivational factor that leads to excitement that can be a direct result of having the experiences of being in school and successfully solving problems it doesn't need to lead to frustration and anger and having the desire to prevent other people from not deservingly achieving happiness i think it's important to allow people to work on their goals and attempt to achieve things without having the constant threat of sinking into death and oblivion and i think having shows like this on tv helps people

i think the idea of simplicity and efficiency at everything you do can mentally be very complex but therefore stimulating and can help clear up any heavy fog that might exist in one's mind and that in many ways is actually unrelated to quantity and i'm very happy that that distinction was a theme brought up in this interview

that being said i don't have any answers to any of these problems and i'm glad there are people like this working on these types of issues and i think the ability to try to clearly explain what is going on in simple terms helps everybody overall it's easier than trying to piece together subtle points and see if it coincides with a vast plan you may have not ever even formulated in your mind i think often times the confusion leads to panic which can result in severe way out there extreme actions or a total denial and disengagement from the issues

Ellen_Dibble  01/29/2011 01:32 PM Report

Geithner, toward the end of the hour, was restating, I believe, Obama's SOTU agenda as to finance, with the third part being "make sure capital is allocated where the returns are highest," or "where the rate of return is greatest." On the surface it seems a no-brainer; I believe he's talking about getting government outlays back ASAP, government "investments" as profitable as possible given the national debt.

Two points. One, this certainly resonates with an article I just read at Aljazeera.net, "The 'bin Laden' of marginalisation: The real terror eating away at the Arab world is socio-economic marginalisation," by Larbi Sadiki, senior lecturer in Middle East Politics at the University of Exeter, with much commentary attached. "Underemployment is their ideology." ...

He covers histories of uprisings in the Maghreb, the Levant, briefly. "Potentially, they ["objects of social dumping in capitalism's sweat shops"] are the fodder of chaos in the absence of social justice, culturally sensitive sustainable development, and democratic mediating networks and civic channels of socio-political bargaining and inclusion."

Take a look at that prescription.

He says "For Tunisia, Algeria, Jordan and Egypt ... in need of the liquidity of Euro-American and IMF aid, infitah (open-door policy) was the only blueprint of forward ecoomic management. Within its bosom are bred greed, land grab, corruption, monopoly and the ew entrepreneurial classes who exchange loyalty and patronage with the political masters as well as the banknotes and concessions with which both fund flash lifestyles."

Remind you of anything?

He (or she?) continues: "Thus the map of distribution was gerrymandered at the expense of the have-nots who are placated with insufficient micro credits or ill-managed national development funds. The crumbs -- whatever subsidies are allowed by the new ecoomic order built on the pillars of privatisation, the absence of social safety nets and economic protectionism -- delay disaffection but never eliminate it."

So that's the Arab world.

And I was fulminating about Geithner aiming to "make sure capital is allocated where the returns are highest."

Wasn't that obeisance to the quarterly profits statement and the greed of investors what brought the USA to its knees? Isn't long-term, beneficial investment so out-of-favor that the government is having to take on more and more? Didn't Geithner talk about just that, how various things have to be undertaken by government because they don't have immediate (quarterly, annual?) returns on investment? Long-range planning is getting more and more important, given global economic tidal waves and projections of long-term environmental damage. Is there a role for short-term profit at all? It seems to me plenty of enterprises take years to germinate and start to flourish. Do they have to acquire non-profit status? Or be a government "baby"? It's bad enough to have a almost predatory private economy, but to have a government trying to be right on the edge of predatory as well is almost scary. As Al-Jazeera points out, it opens the door to furthering the inequalities that for the most part disable societies rather than enable them.

My funds are not directed as much as possible for long-term goals that are the maximum in benefit, nationally and globally. I thought the government would have similar goals. "Highest return" begins to be suicidal, if you look at the recent past.

doodah  01/29/2011 11:56 AM Report

One year later, it's the same old story. Hooray the Ship didn't sink! Too bad it's just floating around in the water aimlessly now. No Sails. No Motor. Not a single luxury (well, the Politicians and Financial Manipulators still have their 'Luxurys', it's just difficult for them to Enjoy them now, currently). They feel bad about the situation too; what they HAD to do to 'get ahead' and stay that way. It's the Democrats and their 'Community Initiative' crap, 'conveniently coinciding' with the republicans repeal of the Glass-Stiglitz regulations that 'enabled' the great transfer of wealth to the rightful owners of it's creation, the bankers and their politicians.