kitco news special coverage of the new orleans investment conference is brought to you by uranium energy corp uranium royalty gold mining and gold royalty corp we're at the NUMBER_TOKENth annual new orleans investment conference one of the most preeminent gatherings of private investors from across the country and around the world i'm michelle mccoury and joining me now is mike larson senior analyst at weiss ratings and editor of the safe money report good to have you with us mike glad to be here all right mike i want to start off with the some breaking news we've just learned that the federal reserve is now going to ban policymakers from owning individual stocks and restrict trading that's following the controversy we had disclosures that some fed officials had been buying and selling stocks whilst making fed policy in the middle of this covered pandemic what are your thoughts on that i mean it's not surprising i think that this was going on i think it might be surprising that it took so long for it to come out and be reported on i mean and let's be honest the federal reserve in the last couple of years really going back to NUMBER_TOKEN and NUMBER_TOKEN has gotten so much more entrenched in the capital market you know it used to be they just bought and sold treasury securities and sort of operated in the background but if you look in the wake of the financial crisis and in the wake of the coveted crisis what have they tied themselves up into corporate bonds junk bonds not just treasuries mortgages they've been bailing out or backstopping all kinds of asset classes so what you have now is even trades in mutual funds or etfs or or as you mentioned individual stocks that some regional bank presidents may have done or others on the fed may have done it creates that that sort of image of that that look that this is a conflict of interest so again i think it's just part and parcel of the fed being involved in so many corners of the markets uh and now sort of being caught and saying okay we've got to do something to at least look like we're you know we're an uh not focused on that not focused on personal gain so this is all all wrapped up in that yeah you would think that some kind of regulation of this nation should have been implemented sooner but does it speak to the broader trend or notion that there is a loss of faith in the fed oh absolutely i mean again when the fed goes down you know goes down this rabbit hole gets so much more involved um you know you see all the anger over the bailouts in NUMBER_TOKEN NUMBER_TOKEN and so on and saving wall street and big firms and everything um there was a lot of populist anger about that right now coming out of the kobud crisis while people certainly were happy that something was done to stabilize the economy these kinds of reports this kind of news only does sort of create that that uh that image in people's heads that you know wall street the fed they're in bed with each other they're willing to do things that you know might help wall street but not main street and this certainly does create that that image concern it does create that sort of perception uh that the the the man and woman on the street aren't getting the same access that uh that we're seeing on wall street yeah sort of feeds into this idea of um a world gone mad which was the
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