tonight you all for coming i love being in seattle you're just you're just so on it was very excited to come here been doing this for a week now this book tour thing i think it's like my th city in seven days but here i feel at home  so thank you that video actually i just just to give you some some context it was i was listening to music one night in ohio california a small town outside of los angeles and this band came on and they were just playing all these like just really well there are songs and you don't have a lot of great lyrics or meaning in a lot of the songs that are around today that get so popularized and it just sort of spoke to me because here i am sort of taking breaks from being around the world dealing with talking to central bankers talking to bankers talking to people at the i m f and so forth and also getting the scoop on the ground as to how people are affected by all of all the things that happened which i'll talk about in the last ten years since the financial crisis  and that song the words are just sort of like a list is what's going on it's going on and on and on and on and on no end in sight it's like that's kind of what all of the economic words that are used by the people in financial system three and i use them to want to sort of to regular basis are really saying that that there is something going on and on and it isn't it's not discussed that much and so what i wanted to do in this book is discuss it and the book came out of a talk i actually gave or at least it seeded in my mind because of talk that i actually gave at the federal reserve so it's the summer of two thousand and fifteen i've written and some of you may know read some of my other work some disparaging things about the financial system and the fed and private banking and wall street and so forth and i got an e mail from the regulatory department at the federal reserve now the federal reserve is supposed to be the regulator of all of the banks but yes they also have a department that does this specifically and they said you want to come and talk where they have these annual conferences for three days that are just the internal people from the federal reserve the i m f and the world bank so they're not sort of public media things they're not really handshaking photo op things they're they're sort of internal it takes place at the fed and supposedly they address the topics that are of concern at the time so the topic of concern at that time or at least the one for my segment of the three days was why is week helping main street so i after i asked them if they really meant to have me they're supposed to someone actually supported wall street they said yes we want you there we want to hear your opinion so i go to washington and i speak after janet yellen who is the former chair of the federal reserve spoken addressed everyone this is all internal it's all central bankers from around the world and she speaks to the room full of them and says position now where things are are fine the banking system is healthy everything's all good all these policies have worked and i'm looking around the room sitting kind of at the side and she's in the front and waiting to talk and there is this feeling of we don't quite feel we're on the same page as you janet yellen from from some of the central bankers in the room and they tended to be the central bankers as i found out from the smaller central banks around the world that aren't sort of controlling  influencing or depositing into the financial system lots and lots of money and they're sort of on the sidelines having to sort of deal with the ramifications but anyway she says everything's fine then a couple people get up from the treasury department and they they're even more enthusiastic about how great all of the last eight years have been there's been more regulations everything's fine banks are good economies healthy we've got this and then this cardinal talks just been at the vatican and he comes in he doesn't talk about monetary policy or finance or anything like that he just looks at the room full of bankers kind of addresses the more senior ones and he says do you remember the thing about helping the poor and again sort of comfortability in the room and i stand up and i say look the question you have for me for this conversation right now today is why isn't wall street helping main street so i just say look it's really simple you never made them you never required anything from these banks that you have subsidized for at that time eight years at all you never said well if we give you trillions of dollars of fabricated money that you have forgive some student or you have to restructure some more mortgages or you have to give an additional amount of small business loans or you have to set aside a bunch for infrastructure development we never told you to do any of that so i said what will what did you expect but the narrative then and now is that what the central banks have done in particular federal reserve is that it's helped the economy the economy is all fine and i think we know that it's not really all fine it's fine for the people who got the money so let me step back and ask as it is so let me step back so what's a central bank what's what's what's the real point and there are many of a central bank in honor of book coming out a central bank is kind of like a parent who has money or can find money when a sort of bad child or sort of child that's running amuck you know drinking too much doing drugs running the car except for a keeps coming back and asking for money to go out and do the next thing and the parent keeps on saying you know ok fine so you need money for this you know you should really do drugs you know ok i want can i have money notes here some more money i really shouldn't drink you shouldn't drink and drive you shouldn't do any of the things you're doing but you know we're going to keep on providing you the money to do that and that's how the central bank has behaved because what the fed has done over the last ten years in particular in the wake of the financial crisis is to provide a blank check affectively an unlimited sum of money in an unregulated manner by people that are on elected sort of four and a half trillion dollars just the that's a very big number which is still on offer right now to have the banks become healthy again to enable them to have money again to continue doing what they were doing before the financial crisis to use that money to buy their own stock to use that money to enhance their own c o's and chair people and not to use the money to do anything any of the things that were at the crux of that question that day to help main street now it's not their job but it is the fed job theoretically to regulate the banking system and so when the banking system goes off the rails you know when when when a when a kid is going off the rails and it's the job of a good parent to turn in and say look that's not ok things need to change you can continue to be like that but that's not what the federal reserve did instead they came in and they said don't worry we've got this now the feathers there was created in one thousand nine hundred and thirteen and it was the result of a panic and i talked about this in my last book so i won't go too far on this that happened in new york in one thousand and thirteen where a bunch of spec in one thousand and seven where a bunch of speculators rigged the copper market and they got caught out they made some bad bets they were starting to lose money but they were attached to banks that had real people's deposits in them and those real people got very concerned that the top of their banks were losing money and they started walking into the lobbies of those banks and they started standing outside in the pavement and they started walking on the sidewalks  started getting beat up by cops at the time when there was like mass chaos in new york because these banks had better wrong they had people's money and people wanted their money out and it looked bad it was cosmetically bad and j p morgan who was the head banker at the time in the world and in new york was concerned because to an extent all the people were involved in all of the banks the more sort of powerful people at the larger banks but it just didn't look good because medically for anyone else so he goes to teddy roosevelt was a present at the time he says look i can fix this and it's money from the treasury department so the st bailout of the banking system happened in one thousand dollars know seven it was twenty five million dollars it was the treasury department giving the money to j p morgan and saying look you just figured out just just fix it help the banks you don't help the banks whatever you do just fix it make it go away and you took the twenty five million dollars he gave it to his friends at other banks fail and at the end of that he was still concerned going forward that you know perhaps if there was another panic like this for whatever reason it was kind to get together and create a federal reserve system an insurance policy up parent for the banking system so that they wouldn't have to ask the president for money or ask the treasury department for money or comment on congress to vote to give the money it was  just a place that could literally create money that they could use in the event of an emergency in the way it was sold to the people of the united states in one thousand nine hundred and thirteen when the act was passed by woodrow wilson was kind of like how it's being sold now history does repeat in the way it was sold was a federal reserve exists and there's a problem on wall street and money needs to go out to the farmers in the middle of the country or the people building up the western part of the country and it's not flowing west which is kind of how a lot of that money was going there is a place and there's twelve banks within the federal reserve system located in san francisco and dallas and richmond in new york and so forth that will sort of handle the problems and make sure the money goes through and it's liquid there's a lot of water terms and finance that it goes through to wherever it needs to go and that was how it was sold the other way it was sold and what's in the federal reserve act is that it's supposed to maintain a stable financial system via the regulator and sure there is something called full employment which has changed in sort of what that really means over the years and over time anyway and that inflation or the level of price increases is capped at a level of two percent and the other thing it was supposed to do is in an emergency and there was a clause in the federal reserve act it was the lender of last resort in an emergency it would be there to provide money for the system so in two thousand and eight there's a big emergency and that all of these banks have effectively room the system they've lost a lot of money they've committed a lot of crimes and the entire global economy is suffering because of that because countries like mexico and greece and even areas like puerto rico regions like we were all doing ok before the financial crisis they were balancing incoming and outgoing money in terms of their own areas and when the financial crisis happened it how to very very quick effect everywhere because the u s banks were connected to banks everywhere the federal reserve because the dollar is the reserve currency of the world was kind of the parent of parents central banks throughout the world and how to ensure that money throughout the world kept moving and so where collusion comes into  other central banks in the world to work together to ensure there was enough money in an emergency for the financial system to continue to operate and for it not to close its doors for a t m s not to stop giving money to  depositors and all the reasons that were sort of given to the world as to why it was necessary for all this money to be fabricated and given to the financial system and so the european central bank which is the head central bank of the european union the bank of japan in japan to a lesser extent the bank of england in the u k and basically the g seven central central banks all kind of worked on the same policy and they're all sort of like taking direction from the federal reserve because the other thing the federal reserve didn't want to have happen and u s major banks didn't want to have happen is for money to leave the u s and so when the fed started making money available at very cheap interest rates or zero percent which is like no percent to the banking system which you know now it's a little bit higher than that but effectively globally it's still zero percent on average to the banking system it was it was partly a way to trying to fix the problems in the books of these banks that they knew were still going on and in or if you give enough money to a problem at some point it's going to look like the problem is not necessarily solved but that it you don't to worry about it anymore it's like if you're at a blackjack table and you're losing hand after hand after hand in some casino and someone next to you is giving you one hundred bucks for the next hand and a one hundred bucks for next hand and eventually you're going to win a couple hands and if you're given enough money you can play it enough tables that at some point you're winning somewhere and that was one of the points of what the federal reserve did in a policy that had never been to the extent it currently exists and the extent that it has grown over the years been so much of a subsidy for these banks so when i talk about trillions of dollars here and here it's kind of their unimaginable their big numbers but if you think about it like this the amount of money the trillions of dollars of in manufactured to help the banking system in an emergency situation that is apparently gone for a ten year emergency that's a really long emergency or that's really unhealthy financial system is about twenty one dollars trillion dollars now today you know it's been more and less and stuff over the ten years but it but currently that's what's been fabricated is still like on offer to subsidize the financial system now that is about the size of the g d p of all the goods and services of the united states that's basically like saying there's two united states is out there there is one that's kind of here and then there's one that subsidizing the financial system and when the fed has these meetings and these central bankers get together like like in the sides they're in all these places around the world as they and switzerland and jackson hole wyoming wyoming and all the places they get together to discuss whatever the problem of that year happens to be and how ever it is they're going to solve it the net result of the last ten years is whatever they're talking about there's a credit crisis in it really printing money it's more sophisticated they're electronically providing money and they're not requiring anything they exchange for and they're not asking for it back so it's like you go to your a t m machine and you think you have a balance of one hundred dollars and all of a sudden you have a balance of like a one million dollars right that would be nice it would be nice if that happened i mean if you took you know trillions of dollars and you divide it out not even necessarily for a person but you know with perth things that could be useful to to growing the real economy that's a healthy sum and what happens in finance what happens in banking is if there's a certain amount of money available it allows for other things to happen a sort of by products of just existing and so if there's twenty one that has gone into buying bad mortgage assets from the u s banks or buying certain very selective corporations in a bonds in the european union or stocks in japan all of these things are choices that these central banks make as to who to help and then the other side of that is who they're not helping and so the result of having all this money go into certain pockets of countries in certain pockets of financial assets is that there is a greater inequality that comes from from just f x so well reveal are people are getting interest on their deposits these banks are getting cheap money with which to buy their own stock so if you look at just  big six banks in the united states because of this policy they have been able to among other things have a record quarter this past quarter they also saved an extra three billion six hundred million dollars collectively because of the tax cuts they needed so badly  they have increased all of the pay for their c e o s substantially and they have not really raise the interest rates on people's savings accounts in fact a regular person who's let's say has a one thousand dollars of a deposit at a bank like j p morgan chase or wells fargo bank of america or citigroup is probably paying about twenty dollars a month for the honor of keeping their money with these banks for which they're receiving close to nothing in interest which means they are paying twenty four percent interest to banks to keep their money now banks are paying almost nothing on interest to receive much more money than that from the federal reserve so when they go in they buy their own stock and that looks good for their shareholders they have an option to not buy their own stock and to use it to basically give to their customers to increase their reduce their fees increase their deposits restructure some of their loans whatever could be done if this was for a totally different system or the fed made them do what was the problem behind that question if they made wall street help main street and i say wall street i mean collectively banks throughout the world are just so happens that the wall street banks were sort of miscreants at the sort of  the mouth of the financial crisis and they continue to do what they've been doing since then just from now higher hate and with more subsidies and as i said before that has ramifications throughout the world i'm going to go very quickly because i throughout the world now because i  out in the world i travel to different regions and i specifically picked those regions because they were represented different results of this particular policy they were either collusive with the policy they try to be  couldn't they have political problems because they tried to be in couldn't and smaller countries had to deal with helping their own economies and in a policy that worked for them internally but then there was flak from the u s and so forth and so they just represent different things mexico  the st place i went to and we spent a lot of time there are these these are not the st times i want to know these places but to sort of dig into this and i had a breakfast in monterrey mexico which is the rd largest and it's in sort of the industrial city in mexico one morning after soon after the janet yellen experience in washington and i was sitting next to a former senior member of the central bank of mexico who left in two thousand and eight he actually left as the crisis was the beginning and most countries didn't think the crisis was going to become the crisis and i have a lot of documentation  them thought is this this you know this is a blip this is bad but we're going to weather this we have nothing to do with these banks you know this is this is not us but then of course as the banks started hurting the economy and money started getting put into different places it started to creep into all of these other countries that have relationships with the u s that had to deal with the fallout of a basically a recession or depression here and so he said that at the time they were talking there they were looking at sort of washington and hoping that they would pick a different direction from what they did so instead of providing money and sort of a reward for all the bad things banks had done you know sort of maybe beat them back do something to them regulate them make it sort of better for the future and they actually some of the individuals i have a whole  career list in the book because you it's hard to keep track of all these people that float around from country to country there's a lot of names in the books as little glossary of names but this one person i thought was very critical to the meaning of the giving money in the face of a crisis who was the head of the central bank of mexico when the crisis hit and he went up to washington and he said to ben bernanke who is the chair of the fed at the time look if you are going to do what i think you're going to do then that's going to ultimately decrease confidence in the system not increase it for the regular people now it's going to ultimately you know come back to haunt you and then bernanke you of course completely ignore him did not even mention him in his memoirs that actually by the memoirs to make sure the electronic copy i have they did not mention this guy's name or any of the central bankers that warned that there could be ultimate problems from this particular policy in the very beginning were completely ignored so ortiz actually winds of not being appointed to run the central bank of mexico in the next time he's up for that position because he was openly critical of what the u s was doing he did go on the circuit he is still involved in sort of the he actually is an advisor now to the dallas fed so these people do sort of recycle but he did try to warn as to what would happen in the nd had  mexico so they tried to follow the same policies the fed they made money cheap debt increased inflation in mexico because in mexico inflation actually was related to this policy because the central bank was closer to actual people than the central bank here is to people in our country and ultimately he got disillusioned as well and he wound up quitting i quit once trump was elected but he wanted quitting and going to run the bank of the international settlements which is which is in europe which was created  ultimately to be the central bank of central banks and that it has all the information it looks at all the reports and for the most part for decades it was created in the one thousand nine hundred and thirty one it was a cheerleader of any policy any fed would do any e c b would do any any central bank would do anywhere but even if it became critical in its reports now have gone from being very comforting to being very critical of a policy that's basically dumped a lot of money into the market require nothing from it dumped a lot of money into the stock market in that sort of fuel for very risky policies without any sort of request to restructure and now there is this shift in the world and this is actually the positive part of the book of countries like mexico countries actually even like china who've actually question this policy of the united states and are trying to develop alternatives where if money is being fabricated it's at least being fabricated for real growth in real infrastructural development in real people real bridges and real trains and so forth which ours is not i spend a lot time too much time in washington talking to people of congress on both sides of the aisle and about financial issues and my i don't work for a bank obviously anymore so i'm really talking about this from the perspective of just sound policy just a sensible things and it is not sensible to reward bad behavior it's not it's not a good economic policy ultimately that's what we're really dealing with over the last ten years in the fact that it also creates inequality and it reduces the amount of savings people get reduces what pension funds can be worth in the future and all these all this blame gets stirred up at the sort of bottom of the economy and that's kind of going back to the video although you're blaming immigrants blame terrorist blame workers blame blame as you know lazy people in greece who aren't working hard enough to like montagne a balanced budget there just just just outwardly shove the blame where there has been this massive trickle down narrative policy that is not being pushed by the republicans or the conservatives or whatever any political party is being manufactured by central banks they have larger checkbooks today than they've ever had before and they work together to basically promote that so in europe where i went  all over as well there was a real choice to not help greece obviously and there was a power choice in that but it works even worse it looks even more foul when the european central bank actually has surpassed the federal reserve in terms of fabricating money over the last ten years so federal reserve federal reserve a four and a half trillion european central bank is somewhere between five dollars and five dollars and a half trillion and they choose every day where they look at the money that they're continuing to manufacture thirty billion dollars to sixty billion dollars euros a month they choose where that goes and they choose not to put it into greece and they choose not to put it into small corporations and say portugal or italy they choose to put it into germany they choose to put it  in belgium they choose to put it where they want to but it's not like this is money that are that has been earned this is money that they make up and the thing that just really gets me about all of an avenue to create money when money was needed in an emergency situation but not only is this ave been sort of rejigger to be sold so generous to so so subsidize the financial system it just makes all the problems that are that it creates that much worse because that choice happens every day it's a choice of the fellow reserves sitting in for a half trillion dollars of subsidies that it provided the banking system including one and a half trillion dollars worth of mortgages two and a half or more trillion dollars of u s treasuries it has bought and given money to the banking system in return for buying those assets cheaply and that debts not getting used anywhere the treasury bonds aren't getting used anywhere we're supposed to borrow money to do things that's not what's happening it's sitting on the fed's books the mortgages that were still toxic ten years ago some of those assets are still sitting on the fed's books and in corporations that are failing in europe and stock as companies that are not doing as well in japan there is money for that but there's not money for sort of the basic foundation of the economy and that's where this is just such a crime so some people ask you know why i picked the word collusion and i'll finish with that open the two for questions but collusion according to google i was actually at google today i found out that at google they have like an arts and crafts sort of woodworking area so it's like in between working you can you can go in like you know make things but i actually thought that was cool but anyway so it's a long google the if you look at different definitions for collusion it's basically talks about you know secret or only sort of group of people that are committing fraud or criminal behavior or whatever and one of the words is also deceit so i look at it like this is an elite group of people the people at the head of central banks are not elected they're generally appointed they sort of go back and forth between the private sector  each other central banks depending on who they are how high they are they pop out and they get lots of money for making speeches as as one does when they come out of places like washington and sort of you know sort of richer cities throughout the world and they man ufacture money and then an olive the narrative about the manufacturing the money they talk about how it's helped with growth and it hasn't really helped with growth by definition because it is sitting on their books  it's not even like logical to assume it has trickled down somewhere into growth yes stock markets are higher but if there's an availability of money to one group of institutions to use to buy their own stock and banks actually have to kind of the the biggest deceit in all of this and the deceit is that this policy this ten years of emergency policy has somehow funneled in to the major economy and i'll finish on that with i was on c n b c on friday and i don't know if you haven't you saw this at some it was cut short because trump was talking about something in the beginning of segment and it was short segment going as me and some hedge fund guy and we were talking about wages and the topic was not unlike last week not helping main street but it was sort of like why aren't wages going up as much of the stock market is up so high of what's going on what's the deal with that and wages had increased by zero point one percent last month that would be like nothing right now banks put in a record quarter over that period of time they bought lots of their own stock their stock lots of other things happen so so we're talking about this and i'm explaining that this this money didn't go into wages it's gone into stocks and the guy on the other side is saying yeah but apple just announced a one hundred billion dollars stock buyback and they announced higher bonuses and level bonuses and wages are just so not the thing this is or like this portion of stock goes into your pocket and wages are like the thing you actually have to count on to live on and it hasn't moved but the thing was he got the last argument so the way it worked on the media was he said something st he was asked a question st about this i responded something like what i just told you and then he basically said no you're wrong and that's how this segment was cut right and i don't do that i'm sitting there you know that i wasn't you know if you're in a chair you're looking at the camera you know you have no control over or any of that and then when the segment is actually put out on google i don't mind it said something like our wages going up and that was the title of the segment so so so also there is a lot of other factors in terms of continuing to spin this narrative that don't sort of bear out in the real data so so alternately what my book is about is looking at how this collusion of fabricating money has impacted countries throughout the world who's been doing what when every single chapter and every geography kind of starts with the crisis in two thousand and goes through to today or basically when i handed in the book so it's sort of like recently and then goes back so you're constantly looking at that this ten year period from a different perspective around the world and so hopefully that provides if you if you read the book a just just just a composite of what's what's happening because we are actually all in this together the fed is sort of been the dominant parent in terms of providing financing to the system but ultimately this is a world in which there are many around for cations everywhere and we are in that together and so that's really how i positioned it in terms of solutions which i end with to this there's lots of things that could be done just in terms of financial policy in the united states and those of you who know my work i am a big advocate of glass steagall reenactment of separating the deposits in the loans from everything else that banks do including our buying their own stock with lots and lots of money from the fed and having at least some sort of stability at that level the system reducing their size how many deposits of assets they can have as a percentage of what's available in our country and countries throughout the world we do this here and we do it in other places to have central banks if they if they exist to do their actual job which is regulating financial institutions not sort of rewarding them for bad behavior and certainly not having unlimited and audited check writing capabilities that they have right now having the people who run these banks actually elected rather than appointed so that  to the public because their policies affect the public and actually canceling a lot of the debt that's been created in the wake of the financial crisis throughout the world that has been created in countries and by smaller companies that have required they're required to do that to basically borrow because they're not really recipients of the sort of big money that's coming from the top and sort of creating a more stable environment from that perspective and taking some of the money that's on offer and ensuring that it goes into development infrastructure in wages and reduction in student loans and everything else that it could go for which could actually do what all the central banks have promised their policies will do which is really promote real growth real sort of main street and the equivalent of mainstreet throughout the world so i'm going to open it to questions from you guys on that thank you thank you so much so we have about twenty minutes for questions please keep your question shorts we can get through as many as possible do use the microphone us people are already lining up and after question period is over books are for sale back there and then  shifted off to wall street but to have for the federal government to have a full court process policy where they could be the employer of last resort and to see if there's any hope or new strategy where we could get to something like that sort of totally transform well i think there's always hope and i do agree with that strategy i mean the idea is that if the fed wasn't able to create all of this money and the other central banks were unable to create all of this money because they just can but but did it for a purpose that actually helps more one people or funds more jobs or funds more quality i think that would be a really good use of that money and that's not the philosophy under which these people are operating and that's the problem janet yellen leaves her position as chair of the fed in the st place she goes is to get like a six figure speech and gig in try back and basically just off the wall street so she's basically making in an hour or whatever you want she made in almost a year running the fed so so there's an incentive to kind of keep the throughout the world look at the brics countries getting together and so forth and saying look you know there has to be an alternative to this kind of policy and perhaps collectively with tween shifts in geopolitics and also from individuals we can get there so yeah there there's a talk now about going for guaranteed full employment in the money could be printed it would not be borrowed it would not be inflationary and you could limit unemployment and also address health care green economy with bernie's proposal right now for full employment the question people are asking is how to actually some of the same people i've talked to on the hill about glass steagall including working with you know various people besides the aisle is to do an infrastructure kind of situation or not you know a program sets of programs where you take the debt that's already there so you take the money that's already printed and you start with that you take the electronic digits that have already been added and you say look the fed has four and a half trillion dollars of subsidies right now you cut off a trillion you cut off a trillion and a half and that becomes the base the collateral because most of it's government guaranteed some of it's junky mortgages you take the good parts and that becomes the basis for using money for those other programs for helping to so you're not  cool thing about it is because there's been such an inflated amount of money created already that that idea can actually start with literally diverting it literally using what's already there as the base for those those ideas and i think that's the way to do it you don't even have to start with anything new you can start with what's already there if the european central bank for example can print thirty dollars to sixty billion dollars every month just just don't have a go into like tech corporations in germany or wherever you know have it go into things that are real but m m c would actually bypass the private banks and be more direct now that's what i'm saying that's the the the fed the central bank is already there providing money to the to the banks what i'm saying is you basically take back the provision you still have the debt on your book already you still purchase these treasuries from the private banks but you redeploy them they already are there they're already on the fed's books to start something like a public bank something like an infrastructure a national bank that you bypass the private banking system and you have more of a public banking system but it is funded by death that's already created so there's no  you my name is doug underwood on the home front here in seattle where we are probably the most booming economic city in the country i wondered about a comment that george orwell once made about how hard it is for us to inflation is so low inflation in housing in seattle last year was twelve point six percent and i think it's been going on double digits since almost since this recovery started  that is allowed money to flow into development and the development has been largely condos homes highly and affordable prices because driven people out of the city and yet continually are met monetary policy is based on that on the argument that there is no inflation how does that tell you and what and what is going on it is ridiculous that i'm glad you bring that up i've had a question like yours not that yours is not originally put but but in  all the places that i've been talking about this why is inflation official affiliation like you know sort of general way that inflation is computed not going up there's a lot of other factors so so there's a lot of inflation though there is inflation in real estate prices at the top there's inflation in the stock market there's inflation in the bond market there's inflation in the cost of college there's inflation in the cost of health care you know there's inflation in rents there's a lot of inflation going on so it isn't like the money that's gone into the system hasn't produced inflation it just hasn't produced inflation as it's calculated by the people that run the fed you know and and and therefore the official level of inflation in the benchmark the sort of limit of inflation that central banks have decided needs to be achieved in order for them to stop what they're doing in terms of keeping the money sort of abundant for for the system is is that two percent and we are not at two percent inflation except in like any of these measures and europe is like point seven bankers are not connected to the actual real world when they talk they can like sit there and say well as mario draghi just did last week when he was talking about european central bank policy of continuing to buy bonds there because inflation is so  low or in japan where inflation is just been low forever but it's not like it's that low because people in japan even though it looks low enough where if you don't go to japan you think of it as it's really expensive to do anything in japan you take a taxi like you know five minutes in japan and it's like sixty dollars i mean isn't that what it's very expensive little teeny tiny hotel rooms are very very expensive rents are very expensive people are living with their parents forever there isn't fle ship of prices just not as central banks to to look at classical computations of inflation that gives them the excuse to continue their policy like oh it doesn't create inflation in ten years so we got to keep doing it we should do it we should do it because we need to have growth and growth is measured by two percent inflation and it's like yeah have you looked at some way prices in new york mean anything literally anything there has been inflation there just has been no inflation in the official narrative cheerios are still cheap yeah but there's less in the box i promise live in a half ounces yeah you're talking about public banking and i read about public banking because north dakota has a public banker in the united states and i read benefits the public bank head you know it's that main street economy you're talking about they loan the all the people who need the loans as they make actually go back into the community so when i read about public banking i realize there's really no need for private banks so when we get a system problem banks throughout the country i'm worried there might getting they're more worry about the cliff they know what you know better right they're worried about the pitchforks they see a different right so public banking i think there was that i'm going to create a question only that what is that should we just have more  absolutely true then and this goes back to the companion of having you any glass steagall reinstatement or having public banks do public things take deposits give loans you know fund infrastructure all that sort of thing would be happening other banks they could be private they continue doing whatever speculation they do they can create whatever they can but when they fail they don't have a fed they don't have an f b i see back in the deposits and back their transactions they're just cut out on their own and that's that's fine are advocating and people that have them as a public banking institute and so forth they're advocating and in doing real research to show why public banks do exactly what you said which is they use public money for the public it's really simple  a public money is it's our deposits it's our tax receipts and it is and the idea is if they go into helping the locality so north dakota for example they go into providing cheaper student loans and therefore a cheaper cost of education in general for a good university education in north dakota the idea is that they help on multiple levels the public and if there's more of them doing that yes now that said private banks really don't like that and so there's a lot a lot of lobbying against a few few people the public banks for these really big institutions saying that public banks wouldn't know what they were doing as if you know wells fargo who just like routinely steals money from its customers is somehow this this then they have a zero temps long go thirty seven percent raise last year because they bought their own stock so so that would be a way another way  to reduce the risk and just sort of help grow the actual economy and it again it also makes sense public banks community banks credit unions all of that the obligation is to that locality that state that city and the idea is that that money stays in a sort of foundational way in the choice of where that money goes and what it helps is going into something that's real that you can see that if money goes to like the bar next door and the bartender goes and he buys you know clothes for himself at the other local store next door and that person goes and buys whatever you know so on and on and on and on but but in a way that actually has people helping each other because they're financed in an appropriate way the money doesn't go into some crazy derivative to do whatever it does i think i agree i think the website is public banking institute dot org that you get five minutes left so we great i work with lyndon the rouche and we've been promoting the belts and road of china as a as an alternative to the corruption of the of the transatlantic financial system as you've discussed very eloquently what i wanted to  raise or just kind of propose i think you've you've you've you've said more than i could i ever say but the idea of collusion struck me very nicely because you have this idea of subtle shift it's almost like a it's a mental shift where you view the assertion of sovereignty is that you have nation states taking back their economies and public credit and banking institutions from that system and what i want to hold and so i want to i want to ask you to comment on that idea because we have a wonderful opportunity you know for the united states china and other nations to come together around an actual new financial architecture so to speak  that economies anywhere and also therefore if they work together can thrive sort of at what i call in the book a foundational economic level at the sort of brick and mortar of the world of the hierarchy of the countries of  it is true china's involved in in a lot of funding for its choice for using its quantitative easing or its manufacturing of money has been longer term development and that is something that we can learn and redeploy we've done it in the past we did it here under eisenhower's time money was used and deployed from both the federal budget as well as private as well as individuals as well as local thanks to to create a highway system and to basically produce jobs and we had a time then where there was actual real growth it wasn't speculative growth and there wasn't this major dislocation between c e o pay and sort of regular people's payment was high compared to other countries but nowhere near what it is today and i think that's just a way to get back to real economics real foundational economics here and in partnership with other countries like you coming i don't really know much about you because i just found out about you today so this question i don't know if it's in your realm of expertise but you were talking about the relationship between the federal reserve and the financial sector i was curious about the relationship between the federal reserve and the military industrial complex and how the the defense sector how does that influence the decision making in the policy down it's a really good question it's it would require a very long answer to get to get really into it but just because i was bringing up eisenhower before and and he had talked about the military industrial complex and warning about there being sort of too much in breading there and that could relate to instability well i think as eisenhower also talked about was was connecting economics into that and so at the time in the wake of world war two when the i m f and the world bank and sort of the global central banking institutions were being created the idea was that their funding their money would go into developing countries that were allied to them and so just if you go back in his i do this in my last book in all the president's bankers but if you go back in history you'll see that a lot of the the development funds in a lot of the world bank bonds are going towards building either infrastructure or funding certain infrastructure related to the military or whatever it was your ports except for in an areas that were allies of of europe sort of the winners of the war in europe and the united states so there has been for a while for decades a relationship between sort of that economic concept and the military industrial complex through central banks and to an extent the fact that the dollar has been the reserve  did have the effect of proliferating the military industrial complex as well and so when you're saving the dollar when you're creating money to prop up the u s banking system and the u s banks which have been an int part of financing for the military as well there is a strong connection so it's it isn't necessarily and it might be some people the fed might not realize that's a very strong connection some might not even consider because they're really focused on the sort of economic part and the wall street part and the saving the banks and creating stability par in their minds but there's certainly a relationship between how many dollars in the world and what part of our military they go to and how having a lot a lousy our military to continue to be sort of over budget relative to the rest of the world it's almost another book but it's a good question that's another long question there are people that think that because of this whole sort of situation in the instability all of them that we had that we you know the fed sort of supported our banks and sort of gave them rewards for being criminals that it's going to impact the dollar and that's going to create all this sort of room for other countries and other currencies to create alliances with each other to take out the dollar and so forth to an extent that is happening but that is a very long term process so it's not like tomorrow the dollar's going to collapse the dollar has been weakening for the last few and the dollar has periods of weakening in part of that is because other countries are developing relationships with each other they're choosing to trade not in dollars but in their own currencies back and forth there is exchanges and sort of markets that are being developed every day to do that more and more and that just you know if you look at it as one pile you're basically taking a piece out of the dollar part of the pie and it is therefore shrinking but it's something that will evolve i think over time i talk about that a lot in the book just in different pieces you can see all these trade agreements and currency agreements and relationships that have been forged in the wake of our financial crisis and because of this monetary policy the cheap money in the fed and all of that and you can you can sort of track how they develop so it does go away from the dollar but it's going to take a long time her question was how long it will take for the for the dollar is no longer i'm paraphrasing the reserve currency the main currency used in the world i think we have to stop but yes and i was a part of the way i would like you need to read one of the chapters and i put my friend anyway i would like to thank all of you so much i guess i'm going to be signing books over there so i'll be over there but thank you very much