Charlie Rose

vongleichent  02/20/2012 03:47 PM Report

what a great team of speakers.

JohnGelles  08/17/2011 07:03 AM Report

http://ustaxreform.us/me98

Link above ties recent related interviews together.

doodah  08/14/2011 08:35 PM Report

Or does Arianna Huffington sound like the female version of Count Dracula?

bleh bleh

salgadoce  08/13/2011 01:02 PM Report

Is is just me, or does Roubini sound like the male version of Arianna Huffington?

Ellen_Dibble  08/11/2011 05:38 PM Report

John Gelles, you know what? You write the way I write when I don't think people are going to try to understand me. So long as I understand what I'm trying to say I figure that is good enough. Anyway, that is why I seem to understand some but not all of what you are saying to me. Rather, I think you are saying what a local person here always refers to as "a boatload," of which only a part might shine through. Right now I'm not sure what did shine through, but thanks.

JohnGelles  08/10/2011 06:22 PM Report

China -- below these corrections.

Corrections:

... economists would preserve

... money to be matched

... if they knew how to vote to demand it.

... but you

===========

China and its Russian deep sea half-aircraft carrier:

The solution to avoiding an arms race now and in future:

A new treaty organization to form the world's policeman and first responder to nature's furies:

Composed of

China-Japan

Russia

Europe (UK France Germany Scandanavia Italy Spain)

America (Argentina Brazil Mexico USA Canada)

South Asia (India Pakistan Vietnam Indonesia)

OR any better combinations that would police the world and feed and rescue victims of storm, fire, earthquake, etc.

Unavoidable inequality must be turned to the advantage of everyone.

Avoidable evil must be avoided.

If nothing is at it seems -- everything must be done turn lemons into lemonade.

Stop resisting the obvious: Lawful money is the gift that keeps on giving. Hyperinflation is not stronger than science and human rights -- joined at the hip and inside our heads.

JohnGelles  08/10/2011 05:54 PM Report

The puzzle of money can only be solved with "invention, thought experiment, and trial and error". It cannot be solved by bankers, accountants, lawyers, politicians or economists who would pre4serve all they are used to and refuse to see the potential for creating money out of having the things in stock that money must buy.

In particular we are hung up on TAXATION -- as opposed to central bank QUANTITATIVE EASING.

Ellen and others are convinced that people and organizations with money in the bank, or wealth that can be collateral for same, can be taxed or appealed to for grants. But that central banks with programs and debt-free money to create under law, are, as I might say, chopped liver.

It was Keynes, and later Nixon, who knew that money was money for as long as it works. Now, what would I do if we had too much money be be matched to new Cadillacs and rice and beans?

I would match it to incentivised savings (high interest for specified accounts) and programs for economic growth that would take time to produce all that money must buy.

What is wrong this notion? Absolutely nothing.

Meanwhile we have unemployed people, capital, potential. And untold suffering by many who could have all the money they need if they knew how to vite to demand it.

A few of you here know I'm right. But yuou also know such solutions have been rare -- and are only universely used in time of war.

Well idiots in Washington -- we are at war.

=====

New subject -- China building a blue water navy? Comment later.

JohnGelles  08/10/2011 04:13 PM Report

Ellen writes: {parapheased)

..... "We have become five peoples: (1) Plutocrats (the money-powered); (2) Libertarians -- a kindly variety of anarchists; (3) knee-jerk progressives (like very rich Hollywood liberals); (4) penniless people and stinking rich ones -- who see merit in the tax system (if only modestly reformed; and (5) Autocrats who believe in czars and benign kings." She wants these 5 to avoid civil war.

So she wonders if Lincoln might also have avoided the one between North and South. Ellen, many scholars wonder -- no one will ever know.

Lincoln lovers, like me, never wonder. It was a war he could not avoid if America was not to be Balkanized.

================

There is a sixth category of Americans -- very few in number.

They demand monetary and tax reform to fit our system of production, called by all who are not ignorant, "a monetary system of production".

This is a Keynesian term. It recognized that (a) communism was a "command system of production -- police, spies, and planners" and (2) that money worked, while red fascism or dysfunctional autocracy or a command-only economy did not.

So Ellen, YOU must LEARN what money is, where it can be cound, what it is supposed to do, etc.

You are not alone. The President and his whole government and all the experts on this CR Show are in the same boat as near-clueless people are.

You liked Shalom Friedman. He had it right. People need jobs, affordable mortgages, and nest-egg capital protection. All of these necessities boil down to the two things there are plenty of -- if we stop being idiots:

..... (1) SUPPLY of everythihng, especially the necessities of life.

..... (2) DEMAND (monetized demand that is)-- created by law -- with which to buy the supply, and complete the virtuous cycle that replaces boom and bust.

You and your kind of defeated moderns refuse to see the simple truth that money is necessary (until replaced by something better) and that fear of hyperinflation must be honestly dealt with.

We know for sure that printing too much money can never work.

We know too that circulating too little money can never work forever.

We know that the right amount of money in existence can provide tremendous savings PLUS enough for full employment IF we create the system of production WE HAVE ALREADY CREATED for about 2 billion people.

Therefore, our task (for the reincarnated Lincolns) is to end wage slavery with robotics and education reform until we have supply enough for 7 billion or more people.

doodah  08/10/2011 02:07 PM Report

Thank you, Ms. Dibble. I hear you loud and clear; You must have read my book.

Ellen_Dibble  08/10/2011 09:26 AM Report

doodah, I think the "extremist wingnuts that empower... the politicians" are, for their part, empowered by corporate money. I became suspicious of this when we saw vociferous but very articulate, poster-bearing swarms showing up the August of the health debates when representatives went to their districts. And it turned out their positions pretty much squared with the moneyed interests behind the way the legislation was being pushed. Talking points and posters were the mask of money. Whose money? Who paid for the buses? Who organized the activism?

Maybe I'm exaggerating in retrospect, but that was hot on the heels of Citizens United, and my guard was up. And if my suspicions needed further substance, then comes the Tea Party, and articles in the New Yorker and much press coverage explaining the infiltration of Koch brothers' money into that activism. Citizens United leads to corporate entitlement/chutzpah, which leads to activism that is hard to reason with -- because it is fires built on emotion and the tinder of other people's money; whose money, which leads to elections that are adulterated by said money, which leads to legislation that is ... Which leaves: warped democracy; Real Problems.

Ellen_Dibble  08/10/2011 09:19 AM Report

Shalom's summary of what was said seems to me useful towards any discussion of the interview (I had tried the same earlier) because the effect was pretty overwhelming, to me. These were a lot of people with a lot of views, and not targeted over one specific point being argued pro and con. I'm grateful for that; most of life is not black/white, pro/con. But it was like eating a six-course dinner in 20 minutes. As to Gelles, John, I am tempted to take on each of your points, with more questions than anything else. I find myself reverting to a current obsession of mine, a realization that the shock of Lincoln's extremely timely death right after the close of the civil war, having overseen the war deaths of something like 630,000 Americans fighting AGAINST each other, and left us with thankless task of binding up a nation that had just spilled so much of its own blood -- his sudden death, his martyrdom at that particular moment, created a sacred shadow/myth and a monument, but I'm not wanting Obama to preside over another bloody attempt to become two nations: Autocrat/libertarians (paradoxically) and knee-jerk, penniless progressives.

doodah  08/10/2011 08:58 AM Report

what i got from this conversation, is that, if the politicians (and the extremist wing nuts that empower them) would just get out of the way, America (government and rest of us) will, thru common sense, solve the Real Problems.

For example, when the deer population gets out of hand ...

JohnGelles  08/10/2011 07:06 AM Report

1. Putting the whole problem of jobs, demand, return on education, return on savings, repair of bridges, etc., robotics, national security, inflation, deflation, Keynes, Hayek, bubbles, depressions, etc., etc., PLUS what the conversation holds, PLUS all the comments below (especially -- "I doubt this high- level conversation was of much consolation to anyone who has been out of work for a while, or for anyone stuck with a mortgage they can't handle the payments of, or for those small investors who could once make something on their investment, and now have nowhere to go with the little they have" from SF, below,) --we have enough ingredients to solve the WHOLE SITUATION -- but no one among us to present the solution in readable form.

2. So here goes Keynes from the grave who went through the whole nonsensical puzzle before it repeated itself over the last decade.

3. Keynes puts his hope in Bennanke who will inflate us back to where we were in happier days BUT not to hyperinflation.

4. We should attend to REMant's point that reward to savers and retired investors who must have income without more work cannot be JUST IGNORED. As we must provide jobs and income to every person looking for work, we must provide income to people whose work has left them withn capital that should not be made to take less than 5% annual interest by the law that Bernanke follows. It is not rockey science for government to intervene with REMant's demand for fair rates of interest on savings and retirement capital the same Keyhnesian way government intervenes in the labor market to put income and demand in place to sustain prosperity all the time.

5. It is all a matter of SUBSIDIZING a system with excess capacity instead of TAXING it. Keynes explained it. We are short of money-demand. We have plenty of stuff to sell and capacity to produce far more.

6. Everyone throws up his hands and cries WHO to subsidize, HOW MUCH to subsidize, WHAT will stop all workers from quitting at once? No one stops to think how much CRAP (THOUGHT) we have put into the TAX system to bleed MONEY away from whomever is now earning or spending it. OBVIOUSLY, THOSE VOTERS NOW EARNING OR SPENDING MONEY WILL NOT SURRENDER IT AT THE POLLS -- and OBVIOUSLY BERNANKE IS WILLING TO SURRENDER IT FOR US. IT IS MONEY HE TAKES WITH NO PAIN TO OR RESISTANCE FROM ANY VOTER. IT IS DEMOCRACIES ACE IN THE HOLE.

7. HYPERINFLATION remains and its now th ONE problem that replaces the MANY problems we started with. How do we solve IT ???

a. PRODUCTION, as money demand begins to ovdertake th excess capacity we started withn. We subsidize and contract for production -- as the shortage of supply replaces the shortage of demand.

b. CONTROL (as in wartime) of prices, wages, materials, etc. as the faith in equilibrium-ism is supplemented by faith in SOME degree of planning, simulation and high tech logistics that socialism needed but never developed. Remember -- what ruined socialism was police state-ism not planning.

c. HUMAN RIGHTS, SIMPLIFICATION, USER FRIENDLINESS, ETC., such that gobbledygook legalese and other sins of text-writers is corrected -- and we enforce the golden rule within the realm of REGULATION as much as within the realm of family law and our daily verbal intercourse with each other.

8. Enough said. All the above is too complicated for Congress to drive it to completion. Only a president like Lincoln or Roosevelt (TR or FDR or both) can do it without tyranny and without failure. Who does Obama admire? Lincoln -- yes. Reagan -- yes. FDR -- not enough.

9. There may be a few grammatical and correctable errors above. Please insert or delete text for me to make all I've said read smoothly and amount to something with which you wholly AGREE.

ShalomFreedman  08/10/2011 04:08 AM Report

I thought this a truly high- level and productive discussion. Steven Rattner's point that what is required is new policies seems obvious, but central. The suggestions for new policies were interesting. Nouriel Roubini spoke a great deal about the need for investment in people, in education. It is hard to believe that seventy- four percent of American youth do not because of obesity, lack of educational skills etc qualify to be part of the U.S. Armed Forces. William Salhman pointed to the area of new technological industries, such as Robotics where many non- highly skilled workers could be trained and employed. Bill Gross emphasized the importance of China's moving from being an exporting nation to a consumption nation and in the process raising the value of its now- artificially low currency. All seemed to suggest that the near- term future is quite dire. And the clear division between the need for stimulus for jobs immediately, and the fiscal responsibity of intermediate term, increasing of revenues, i.e. more taxes on the high- earning and high- wealth classes, plus cutting of entitlement programs, is clear to all. Rattner's point about the U.S. still having advantages in the Knowledge- Industry areas is a kind of consolation, I suppose. But the picture of a country unable to redirect its priorities, address its own infrastructure needs and put to work those who have been driven out of the industrial sector, is quite discouraging. It is as if there is some kind of general understanding of what the right steps to take are, but the Government seems incapable of making them.

I doubt this high- level conversation was of much consolation to anyone who has been out of work for a while, or for anyone stuck with a mortgage they can't handle the payments of, or for those small investors who could once make something on their investment, and now have nowhere to go with the little they have.

Sugarland  08/09/2011 09:27 PM Report

Very interesting discussion by heavyweights. But where is the beef? Where is the silver bullet?

The gentlemen are well versed on the economic theories that have been generated since the start of the industrial revolution. But do those theories relate to the present political and economic structures.

The FED has, and will continue to pump money into the top of the financial structure where it is stored….about two trillion dollars. It is said the institutions holding it will not invest in the US economy because there is little demand. But what happened to “build it and they will come”.

It increasingly looks like those institutions do not know how to invest in the US.

For over a generation the finance business has grown to 40% of the GDP by trading, financial engineering and such things but essentially doing very little investing in industry. They have learned how to create bubbles. All this concentrates money at the top but does little to create wealth and jobs.

Do we have to wait for this generation to pass before the US can get moving again?

Ellen_Dibble  08/09/2011 08:42 PM Report

Sharks, lolol. If S&P had been able to keep Fannie and Freddie in line, and to keep the porn-watching regulators in line, and to keep the money-slathering corporations in line, from the banks to the banks' insurers, all that, wouldn't we be fine? But not even Congress can keep The Government in line, let alone S&P. Nice try, though. I agree with whoever says that Obama should have acted like a tyrant and greatly expanded the powers of the presidency in squelching any American exuberance left, or unsquelching it. That sounds like a testosterone-driven urge; just decide and let 'em have it. On the sidelines, I'd cheer, like at a bullfight. But this is no bullfight; hopefully not.

doodah  08/09/2011 07:45 PM Report

it would have been a regular recession. now, here we are, 4 years into it with no end in sight.

S&P just over compensating for past incompetence or corruption. But then again, big deal. Rating agencies, really?, aren't they just like real estate appraisers and expert witnesses, their 'objective' conclusions are wholey based on who's paying them. .. I guess they feel like they've been stiffed lately. So what's the big deal? Who cares? the Fed did the right thing by ignoring the whole childish (media) thing.

SharkswithfrikingLazers  08/09/2011 05:51 PM Report

S&P's own explanation of their decision to downgrade the U.S credit rating spreads the blame around. It slams the GOP's intransigence over letting the Bush tax cuts expire. Overall, it paints a bleak picture of the whole political system.

Then of course there is the S&P itself which helped cause the financial crisis with its dubious ratings. Until the eve of Wall Street's collapse in late 2007, S&P gave triple-A ratings to what turned out to be some of the Street's riskiest packages of mortgage-backed securities.

Had S&P done its job, we wouldn't have had the debt and housing bubbles to begin with. That means taxpayers wouldn't have had to bail out Wall Street. We probably wouldn't have had a Great Recession. Millions of Americans wouldn't be jobless and collecting unemployment benefits. There'd be no need for the stimulus that saved 3 million other jobs. And far more tax revenue would have been pouring into the Treasury.

In other words, had S&P done its job, the federal budget deficit would likely be far smaller than it is today.

So the "fixers" broke it more and one of the problem causers made the problem even worse. Please don't "help" us anymore. GO LAY DOWN!

SharkswithfrikingLazers  08/09/2011 05:47 PM Report

"75 percent of 17-24 year olds are unable to qualify for military service because of a lack of high school degree, criminal record or obesity."

The Sierra Club is working on this issue as is Michele Obama.

In April, Sierra Club announced $1 million in grants as part of First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Joining Forces” initiative to support military families. Sierra Club’s Military Families Outdoors initiative is partnering with the National Military Family Association’s Operation Purple® and the YMCA of the USA to send thousands of military children to camp this summer.

http://sierraclub.typepad.com/military/2011/07/is-national-security-another-reason-kids-should-be-spe nding-more-time-outdoors.html

charlizecourriers  08/09/2011 04:54 PM Report

Confidence will return with the dismissal of Bernanke, Geitner and Obama. Confidence will return with limiting purchases of junk from China; with limiting pay increases and benefits for overpaid, underworked union workers in the private and government sectors(including government sponsored entities like PBS). Confidence will return with a readjustment of attitudes of personal entitlement to greed in one's personal life. And finally confidence will return when Obama's clever stall game is exposed, and genuine reforms to blatantly bloated medical entitlement programs are implemented. America's only hope is to change the leader of the executive branch.

Ellen_Dibble  08/09/2011 12:34 PM Report

I believe it was William Sahlman who of the challenges to the USA of $60 trillion in vested unfunded liabilities (I assume pensions, Medicare, Social Security) and a rear-view focus on access to insurance rather than access to affordable health care, and a shift from labor to capital, workers to profit (financing), and houses to firms.

I was 100% with him, assuming I heard it correctly, up to "houses to firms," when he said that houses require people to buy "stuff," something like that, whereas firms just stockpile their cash, something like that. I hear that a house-building employs three people for a year. Thereafter people will do what they can with their money, but that money comes from the firms that employ them. And if those firms just sit on their profits or redistribute those in dividends, whose fault is that? It's the incentives that lead those firms to outsource, rather than diversity and build. Firms should be what we invest in BECAUSE they put money back in the economy through jobs and so forth, So That homeowners and renters can eat better, live healthier, get better education, have more fun. Houses do not buy things. Employees do; firms tend to employ them. I hope to hear from this group of people again, soon.

Ellen_Dibble  08/09/2011 12:23 PM Report

A remarkable discussion in that I thought I heard some shifting within their perspectives, even during the show. I don't mean that they were moving each other's positions, although it wasn't staged verbal conflict at all, but for instance, I thought Sahlman's position seemed in flux: The national debt/future-planning only awaits people to be willing to sit down and resolve it. I forget the parts I disagreed with; it was old school/old hat; to be precise biofuels production. But there were plenty of proposed avenues into the future, though, for a sustainable future, laid out. I think Sahlman pointed to "translation of [new technologies] into commercial products as our next great opportunity. And I think it was Rattner saying that America can still lay claim to the lead in the fields of intellectual capital, media, and financial services. Someone said that China could revalue its currency and start consuming (rather than exporting primarily). I think Roudini suggested putting 2+2=4 and requiring public service work say 20 hours a week (or schooling) from those long-term unemployed while paying unemployment benefits. However he points out, if I recall right, that 74% of 17- to 24-year-olds do not qualify for military service, due to obesity, drugs, criminal record, or lack of high school diploma. So. Someone said we should not waste dollars retraining the older laid-off but instead train the next generation better. Lots of great suggestions, evidently being thought of and worked out right now.

Idiolect  08/09/2011 12:02 PM Report

An interesting discussion but these men cannot conceive of the challenge of creating a sustainable economy. We have arrived at the time of an end to growth.

I'd like to see a conversation with Roubini, Sahlmanof, Richard Heinberg and, if you were really daring, Jay Hanson.

REMant  08/09/2011 10:50 AM Report

Mr Gross is saying, I assume, that in a Keynesian economy, inflation is expected, and accounted as growth. That's true. It is also a Ponzi scheme. I can't believe anyone except a speculator thinking that artificially low interest rates are a solution to anything. Certainly not a bond trader. If the Fed does what I fully expect it to - because they are speculators, not bankers - I'm sure we can expect the situation to become far worse, even if Gross is happier.

As they all acknowledged tho the problem is the disparity between the developed and developing worlds, as well as between assets and wages. China will not simply appreciate their currency, and thus depreciate our debt to them. We took the same attitude towards Europe 80 years ago. "They hired the money didn't they?" Coolidge snapped. But I fear China cannot, either, and the Fed can only make it more difficult for them. Brazil, itself, is also in the throes of a bubble, I'm afraid, and I doubt protectionism will make anymore sense there than Smoot-Hawley. I have a feeling US debt will begin to look less attractive, particularly in places like China, and surely sending money here doesn't do any more good than sending ppl here for the places it came from. It was a perpetual problem in the 1930's.

Prof Roubini seems to have forgotten whatever he learned from the Austrians. You certainly can't just bring unused capacity together with unemployed labor. If you could, by Say's law, neither would be unemployed. I have repeatedly heard it said that cos are sitting on a mountain of cash, which they are afraid to invest, because no one seems to be buying, and in turn that people aren't buying, because they are similarly afraid and it is all a matter of confidence. But I don't buy it. There have to be structural mismatches to overcome, the main being the above mentioned disparities. Another is the still unresolved issue of the mortgages.

A balanced budget will follow naturally from balanced trade, and not before. We are still obviously in a state of denial about this.

Attempts to physically increase demand make as little sense as central bank attempts to. I don't imagine anyone is going to (at least not yet) want to take up central planning, force cos to divest themselves of their earnings, pay farmers to destroy their crops (well, actually we still do some of that), and some of the other cockamamie things they did in the Depression, but I keep hearing talk in that direction, usually accompanied by claims that the president is too passive. Even so extending unemployment insurance makes a lot more sense than replacing sewers and water mains, or even funding schools, no matter how fat and incompetent our kids are. There are certainly no end of such projects. I was thinking we certainly have conservation problems on a scale faced in 1930's, as well. Unfortunately we can't afford any of them now. Prof Sahlman tho is right about the essential need for larger thinking. He would not, I hope, however, translate audacity into dictatorship.

Earlier yesterday I quoted the Roman poet Juvenal "… Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions - everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses"