 I'd like to introduce Nomi Pringe. She's someone I've gotten to know over the last couple of years. She started her career as what we might call a quant. She has advanced degrees and a background in both math and stats, and spent some time in the Death Star known as Goldman Sachs. But it did not rub off on her. The 2008-2009 crash really changed her life and her perspective and her outcome. And she's written a couple of really fantastic, really detailed, footnoted books. One of them is called All the President's Bankers. One of them is her new book called Collusion. And she really does the painstaking hard work of documenting how not only the federal reserve in the U.S. but central banks around the world are cronious in operation and how they really manipulate economies around the world to all of our detriment. So please welcome Ms. Nomi Pringe. I'm going to say good noon because it is three minutes past 12. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you, Jeff. And thank you all for coming here today. I am always thrilled to work with Jeff because I think that a lot of the themes that relate to central banks, to finance, to Wall Street, to how that equates to personal responsibility on the other side, is to transcend every form of politics, every form of ideology, and really get to the core of sort of what money is, what monetary policy is, and how that impacts everyone no matter where they are or what they do throughout the world. Just as a little background, Jeff mentioned, yes, I did work at Goldman. That was the last place I left from the investment banking side of my life. But one of the places I also worked at was Lehman Brothers, which, as you may know, no longer exists. It's almost the 10th year anniversary of Lehman Brothers having gone belly up. And I say this because life works in circles, you know, and you may think of your own lives in that way as well. And one of the things that happened when I was at Lehman Brothers many years ago, early 90s actually, is I was a quant. I was working with a sales team and a trading team on the trading desk at Lehman Brothers. I was right opposite the office of Dick Fould, who later on tried to save the company 10 years ago, and it didn't do so well, but at the time was, you know, sort of on his way into the stratosphere of Wall Street. And I was working on a product that, not to get too quanty, it's noon, it's taxes, but a product that basically would enable Lehman to sell a lot of treasury bonds, so a lot of U.S. government debt, which is one of its functions as a primary dealer of that debt, as today are J.P. Morgan Chase and Goldman and Morgan Stanley and some of the other banks that still exist. And in order to do that, I had to do analytics to show why buying treasury bonds would be good for, among other central banks, the People's Bank of China and other central banks throughout the world. At the time, the People's Bank of China was starting to help to supply money to the United States, effectively lend it in return for receiving the treasury debt or the bonds from the U.S. government. But Lehman Brothers and other companies could make money out of that transaction as brokers of those bonds. Now I had a salesperson who was incredibly aggressive, like super aggressive could sell, you know, that whole, it could sell you like, you know, I don't know, heat suits in the middle of Fort Worth, Texas, on like Sundance Square, right? Really, but kind of a jerk. Yeah, shocking. And so one of the things that Dickfold and Lehman Brothers management decided to do was to use my analytics and his sort of salesmanship ability to sell treasury securities throughout the world and help Lehman sort of get number one in the league tables of doing that and sell some other things called futures and options along the side of those treasury securities. So as a package, packages are always sort of dangerous to people who buy them potentially. They're very lucrative to anyone who's packaging them. This was sort of the onset of what became more complex securities going forward. I didn't like this guy and I didn't want to work with him because among other things he was kind of a jerk, but also because he kept taking credit for things I did and didn't know how to explain them and that just sort of bothered me. Danielle's nodding her head. She's been there. And what management decided to do when I decided as a very young banker that I did not want to be involved with this person was say, you know what, we have an idea. We are going to send you and this person around the world, together. And either you will decide you like each other or we'll sort of take it from there. So from that point on, me and this person and the whole sales team, we wind up going to all throughout South-East Asia. And we take the sort of long 22-hour flight. We start in Malaysia. We go around all the central banks throughout South-East Asia and including the People's Bank of China. And yes, somewhere along the way, we wound up selling a lot of treasury bonds to the People's Bank of China and we also didn't kill each other. And that's only because there was this taxi driver in the Philippines trying to get us to an airport to get to China. And it was a kind of situation where we were going to potentially die because the taxi drivers going over the side of the crossroads into oncoming traffic to get us there in time. Because at that point, the sales person said, look, if you can get us to the airport on time to make this flight, there's, you know, 100 US dollars in it for you. And that just changed the dynamic of things. Years later, I returned to China several times. But I returned to China as one of the places where I analyzed the relative decisions of the People's Bank of China to what the Federal Reserve had done in the wake of our financial crisis in 2008 and wound up talking with not the same people, but sort of the next generation or a couple generations forward to the next people and they still own a lot of treasury bonds. And now, they use the fact that they own treasury bonds to also want to reduce the risk of owning them and reduce the risk of their exposure to what Fed policy might be, what Wall Street might be doing and what the US economy might be doing. And that's kind of the crux of the book. And that's kind of the crux of my travels. The book itself, aside from taking me back in time to this historical Lehman Brothers moment, kind of started out of a meeting that I had with members of the Federal Reserve, the IMF, the World Bank and other central bank leaders from around the world that were gathered in Washington. A non-public kind of event. I mean, the event itself was noted publicly but it wasn't sort of a press-oriented event. It wasn't sort of a photo op kind of situation. It was literally central bankers from around the world gathering together annually as they do to discuss the state of their policies. And so the topic that they asked me to address and this is three years ago in the spring of 2015 was why Wall Street isn't helping Main Street. That was the topic. And I, when I first got the email to come and address this topic and address the Fed in the same room where the FOMC meets to discuss rating and how the cost of money is going to be allocated in terms of how much it is, up or down in interest rates, was why you asking me because you know I'm very, very critical of what you've been doing for the last number of years. Some of you are nodding. You know that as well. And their point was, well, we want to hear what you have to say. So I get up there after a former chairperson of the Fed, Janet Yellen, speaks and talks about how the state of Wall Street, the state of banking is actually very secure now. This was 2015. Banks are doing fine. We've got this. We've fixed it. It's good. I am paraphrasing that's not how she speaks, but that was basically what she said. She was followed by an assistant treasury secretary individual from the Obama administration who basically said the same thing but just with more enthusiasm. We've created the Dodd-Frank regulations. We have a situation where everything is stable. Wall Street will never need to be bailed out. Again, everything's good. This is then followed by a cardinal who literally had been meeting with the Vatican and with the Pope right before he flew in to do this particular address that morning who just turned to all the central bankers in the room and said, you know what? You're forgetting one really fundamental thing here and you need to remember this. You need to remember the poor and what you can do to basically help not the banks but sort of everyone else. I get up and I have a different sort of perspective on the first two speakers, Janet Yellen and the former treasury assistant. And I said, look, the reason Wall Street isn't helping Main Street is super, super simple. That's because you never made them. You never said here's trillions of dollars of effectively conjured money or electronically fabricated quantitative easing policy and zero percent interest rates not just in the United States but throughout the world to help you to become liquid, to make your books look better, to overvalue the assets that you had because we bought other assets that you had so we made them look better, etc., etc. And you never required these banks to do anything with any kind of strings attached to that money at all. And so as a result, you're asking this question. I'm not even asking this question to you. You are asking the question eight years later as to why Wall Street is not helping Main Street. Meanwhile, Wall Street, the particular six banks or the largest six banks in the United States, J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are paying $110 billion of fines for frauds and other crimes they've committed on the way to today, on the way to pre-financial crisis through the financial crisis and since the financial crisis. And that's just six banks. They are also buying hundreds of billions of dollars of their own stock with the money that you have provided them. Nowhere in any of those equations does helping Main Street actually rate. So that's one of the reasons. But, you know, when I looked at that room, like I'm looking at you all, I've been in Texas a week, y'all here this morning, I realized that in that room that day there were a lot of central bankers from smaller banks, from sort of outside the main group of the G7 major central banks of the European central bank, the ECB, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of England, the Fed and so forth who were kind of on the outside of the monetary policy that rendered money so cheap for so long throughout the world that fabricated what became $21 trillion worth of assets on the books of the major central banks in the form of quantitative easing policy in order to liquefy, in order to help, in order to subsidize, in order to socialize the financing for the largest banks in the United States and throughout their countries. And the central banks that didn't have the ability because they had economic issues that require them to keep rates at a certain higher level, to deflect inflation of real prices because of real food shortages, or real problems with their real economy and couldn't be involved in that same policy, we're looking at sort of catching up, we're looking at being left out and we're looking at a lot of political and economic turmoil within their own countries while all of this was going on outside of them. And so I realized that a lot of those central bankers had stories that needed to be told as well as the bigger story that the public needs to be told, which is how these major banks colluded, how they did create money and how they continue to work in conjunction with each other such that if the Fed raises rates, which it started to do later that year at the end of 2015 in December by a mere 25 basis points and has since raised rates by another 150 basis points, that in that situation, every time the Fed moved a little bit up, the colluding central banks, the incooperation, the incoordination, the ones that were involved in the global policy of 0% interest rates on average and quantitative easing up to $21 trillion in total, they would counterbalance. So in 2016, in January 2016, when the market reacted very negatively to the first Fed hike in eight years, the European central bank said, we've got the other side of this. We are going to reduce our rates from zero to negative. We're basically going to pay banks to give us money to liquefy supposedly the economy. The Bank of Japan did the same thing. They reduced rates to negative. They started to buy not just quantitative easing policies of the short end of their government bond market of the JGB market, but up the longer end of the JGB market so that they could render all the cost of borrowing throughout 10 years at effectively zero. That was just to counterbalance a policy where the Fed was just raising rates by a little bit and where they were all coordinating quantitative easing throughout all of these years. And that's what is still happening today. So when I went back to the beginning of the financial crisis to untangle not just how the quantitative easing policy came into effect, not just how zero interest rates have become prevalent throughout the developed world, but also the responsibility of all of those nations to their own economies and to each other and to the global community and how this policy has changed the world, has changed geopolitics, has changed trade alliances. A really interesting story begins to develop. Ben Bernanke, who was the chair of the Fed at the time of the financial crisis, said in 2007, and I read this because I never want to get this wrong. It's the first quote in my introduction. It is not the responsibility of the Federal Reserve nor would it be appropriate to protect lenders and investors from the consequences of their decisions. This is what he said in 2007. He also said in 2007 that there wasn't going to be a housing crisis, as did my former boss's boss from Goldman Sachs, Hank Poulsen, who was the Treasury Secretary at the time under George W. Bush, also said there is no housing crisis or if there is one we can handle it. Tim Geithner, who was the president of the New York Fed, said the same thing. So there's multiple levels of collusion. There's the collusion of denial and there's the collusion of the deception of the process that's been put in place in terms of monetary policy by the Fed in the wake of the financial crisis and throughout the world. I went to Mexico as the first country in this book and it's a geographical tour which goes back to kind of my Lehman days and all my days as an investment banker where in order to actually talk to people and get real information you have to be on the ground and that's something I use in my journalism as well. And I actually had a really great research team in different countries who knew languages I didn't know and I was on the ground. I was also looking at the real data and the real reports and the real articles that were coming out as financial crisis was developing as quantitative easing was growing and as there was criticism throughout the world of what the Federal Reserve was leading and what that could ultimately cause in terms of other ramifications down the line. In Mexico it was interesting because very soon after I gave that talk at the Fed I attended another talk in Mexico in Monterey which is its major industrial city on the top three cities in Mexico and I was sitting next to a former number two person at the central bank of Mexico and he had been at that central bank position until right before the financial crisis subsequent to which a man named Guillermo Ortiz took over the top position of the Mexican central bank, Bagaldi Medical. And sitting next to him he turned to me and he said, look, you know, I knew from the beginning this was going to be a policy that was not going to have an end or if it did have an end it wasn't going to be pretty. And he didn't want to, you know, he didn't want to jump back into his position in terms of being public about that but that was basically what he told me in the side of this breakfast before this event. Now Guillermo Ortiz who became the head of the central bank in the financial crisis period and had been involved in Mexico for years had been involved in the 1994 tequila crisis where there was a big banking collapse in Mexico had been involved in trying to reinstate confidence with the people to instill confidence in the economy and the government and so forth beforehand went to Ben Bernanke in Washington at the beginning of the financial crisis and this was publicly documented by the Wall Street Journal and others and he said, look, I've been there, I've done this you have to understand that if you start to do what I think you're doing and this is in the beginning, this is documented, this is in sort of November of 2008 if you start to supply effectively a lifeline to the private banks who basically caused the financial crisis from which you're trying to dig yourself out what you will do is you will detach confidence not confidence amongst the Wall Street players because they're getting the money but confidence from the standpoint of citizens with respect to their financial system with respect to their banks and once you lose confidence he said to Ben Bernanke you can't get it back and those words were actually very telling because translating those to what happened along the way in the last 10 years in Mexico, in Brazil, in China, in Japan throughout Europe and so forth there's a very clear pattern of what happens to people on the ground their political decisions, geopolitics, trade alliances that tie back to that moment that tie back to the Federal Reserve making a unilateral decision to start a quantitative easing policy that they might not have known was going to ultimately be four and a half trillion dollars on their book and five and a half trillion dollars on the European Central Bank book and five and counting trillion dollars of quantitative easing on the Bank of Japan's books and eight hundred billion dollars on the Bank of England and so forth they might not have known to what extent what they called an emergency policy was going to evolve but 10 years into that emergency those numbers are continuing to grow quantitative easing is not over the fact that the Fed is talking about tapering their book and they have by less than two hundred billion out of four and a half trillion so not really a lot and while they have done that the other central banks have upped their purchasing of assets so net net there's a straight line up in terms of the current path of quantitative easing so regardless of what happens in the news regardless of what some of these leaders say about their economies and how this process has worked and how it's finally working and how it's going to work and all the different ways that they project success the reality is this emergency process is still going on back in Mexico after the financial crisis happened at first they thought you know what we're insulated this is a U.S. banking problem we're just kind of giving advice along the outside but it was very quick for them to see that no one was insulated from not just what the Fed did in reaction to the financial crisis but the U.S. banking system the lack of regulation the ability of these large banks to hold hostage people's deposits and loans as effectively collateral against requiring subsidies and liquidity from the Federal Reserve and other central banks and so the Mexican economy started tanking the Brazilian economy started tanking in Brazil that tanking led to a lot of shifting in politics it ultimately led to a shifting from a government that had been in place to a government that is now in place pivoting around one man who's currently running for president in Brazil who was the central bank leader at the time a man named Ulrich Marialis now Ulrich Marialis was a friend or an ally of Hank Paulson they are currently on a sort of committee together for a trans Latin American sort of charity thing but at the time he wanted to do what the U.S. was doing he wanted to do what the Fed wanted him to do and there was a government that came in and basically removed him from his position and said we need our central bank to be accountable to the people we need our central bank in Brazil to be accountable to our banks which are corrupt and among themselves that's a whole other story it's in the book and we need someone here who can actually be aligned with us Ulrich Marialis gets upset he sort of moves around the private sector for a while ultimately he pops back into the ministry of finance in the current government the Michel Temer government now and now he basically quit that position in order to run for president along the way the person who had appointed him originally to his position at the central bank of Brazil that he was in as the crisis was beginning President Lula is in jail waiting to not be in jail or whatever might happen to him so a lot of things happen around these sort of central bank leaders that continue to to an extent sort of stay clean and pop around from position to position and often times it's from a central bank to finance or back again and that's kind of what happened in Brazil in China it was interesting because when I was in Brazil right before this all happened and I was there during the period of sort of the transitioning of the government lots of demonstrations in the street and so forth was that China at the time because it had started to criticize the Fed's policy also started to use its funding power its central bank connection of its central bank the People's Bank of China to its government to push the policies of China which had to do with creating trade alliances and development alliances with countries that had had them more strongly with the United States so going into this period as a result of the crisis and their criticism of the dollar of US policy and in particular the post financial crisis subsidizing of the banks by the Fed policy they started funding and developing relationships throughout Central America and in particular with Brazil and that started to change alliances in general throughout the world because the BRICS countries Brazil, Russia, India China and South Africa had kind of just been a concept up until that point you know it was a concept actually termed by a Goldman Sachs person a number of years before that to really label it as a sort of place to sell securities I mean it was sort of like we'll just labor them have a tag team sort of deal with these countries we'll call it an acronym and we're good to go but this acronym in the wake of the financial crisis started becoming a real live thing and in that real live thing it started accumulating funding and financing and more political clout and economic clout as it grew throughout the world and so the BRICS countries started having like this smaller and then bigger and bigger and bigger meetings amongst themselves to the extent where the original meetings happened in Brazil to create an alliance between the BRICS countries on a monetary policy basis on an economic basis on a trade basis became what started as like a 40 person meeting in the wake of the financial crisis a 4,000 person conference in India one of the countries last year so the development of other alliances in the wake of the monetary policy that the Fed created exported to sort of the G7 countries started to and accelerated and shifting sort of world alliances so after I spent time in China looking at this on the other side I met with the leaders of the new development bank of the BRICS Bank which is headquartered in Shanghai and on the way by the way and this is where some of that money gets spent there I don't know how many of you have been to China but there is a fast speed and when I say fast I mean like really fast I mean there is a railroad that goes from Beijing to Shanghai and I wasn't actually going to take this train I was going to take an airplane from Beijing to Shanghai it takes like three hours just to get from any hotel in Beijing to the airport in Beijing driving because the traffic is like worse than well I'm from LA now but I mean it's just it's really bad and so I I got to an airport thought I missed my plane and it turned out there were no planes going to Shanghai that afternoon because there is all these like weird air traffic things that happened to which many Chinese at the time friends of mine at the time were sort of like why would you take a plane anyway that's just so I head back to the train station I take the super fast train to Shanghai it's beautiful it talks to you you can't even see the countryside you're going by so fast so all of these stories of all the sort of ghost towns that China has funded along the way as it's been developing like too fast supposedly for the debt it's creating to do this you barely even see them but what you do get from the experience is the knowledge that when they do start to populate which is the point of having a fast speed railroad connecting cities is to create more cities along the way so you sort of decentralize your cities and you create better air and you create more jobs and so forth for people outside of the cities and more affordable apartments and so forth is to have infrastructure that works to do that that's one of the things that China was developing with Brazil that's one of the things that China used its quantitative easing power to do unlike for example what the Fed did what the Bank of Japan does what the European Central Bank does which is just put it into financial securities in the Fed's perspective they believed that buying treasury bonds and buying the toxic mortgage assets that were created by the financial institutions that screwed up the U.S. and global economy was a good way to spend its money so currently today the Fed owns $1.75 trillion worth of mortgage assets as 26% of the mortgage market and those assets were overvalued from the beginning so the Fed's basically sitting on the stockpile of overvalued assets that represents more than a quarter of the mortgage market today which allowed all of these banks along the way to overvalue all their other mortgage assets that's just one of the many bubbles that is currently involved in. The European Central Bank is involved in a corporate debt bubble they also bought government bonds throughout Europe but they also bought and still buy and actually openly have a list of what they buy corporate bonds throughout Europe as well in doing that and that number is increasing they've been able to politically create this by the choice of which corporate bonds they buy and in which countries less stability in Europe they buy German corporations or they buy corporations in the Netherlands or they buy corporations in Belgium the stronger countries to begin with and they tend to ignore or sort of not buy as much in countries like Greece and countries like Italy and countries like Spain that's what they chose to do is to basically buy corporate bonds and government bonds. Bank of Japan decided to buy stocks so the Bank of Japan buys things called ETFs or exchange traded funds which are just collections of stocks in different areas and they just create money to do this. So in this entire process of quantitative easing these major central banks not only fabricated this money and bought debt with it they've also bought other financial securities and by virtue of that created bubbles throughout all of these types of securities and they are artificial they are bubbles I mean the definition of a bubble is something that effectively is inflated by air. Now in this situation it's affected by money supply it's affected by sort of electronically created money but the reality is when you create money and it goes into certain financial assets and not into the ground not into building a train not into building a bridge not into increasing wages not into research and development not into tangible things it tends to ultimately create a risk that those bubbles will pop. You put too much air into a balloon at some point it can't hold all of that air and it sort of pops and every financial crisis that has happened even before central banks were a thing has happened because there was too much borrowing and there was too much betting and there was too much speculation on financial assets that ultimately were driven up in value by that very speculation or by that very amount of money chasing that sort of concept and when debt can't be repaid defaults start to happen and delinquency start to happen and countries economies start to tank and people start to not have jobs and corporations start to pull back and all of the money that came into this process disappears more quickly than it came in and that's the danger that China was talking about when it criticized the Fed back in 2010 and 29 and 2011 that Europe was talking about when it first criticized the Fed and then sort of doubled down on the policy between 2008 and 2009 and then sort of went high on the policy in 2011 and so forth and that Japan never criticized the Fed but has just been involved in this policy very very quickly since 2013 they are ignoring or at least not discussing these types of risks so Japan for example second to last chapter in my book is very interesting to me because they are in this process of being caught because of all this monetary policy decision making and the ten years of connection to the Fed they are in this process of developing alliances with China that they never had before and alliances in the region that they never had before as well as continuing to try and nurture the alliance that they have with the US and this is not even just on monetary policy this is on trading policy the impact of the criticism of monetary policy of the non G7 central banks to the G7 central banks is actually shifting alliances even within the G7 Japan and Europe actually when I was in last time I was in Japan they had just signed an agreement that had been in process for four years to trade with each other and actually it was one of the largest trade agreements in the top three trade agreements that's ever been established in the world this excluded the US this came out of conversations that had started in the wake of the financial crisis and just happened to be signed a number of years into that process a number of years later Japan is continuing to discuss relationships with China that can facilitate real development real infrastructure building and real diplomatic connections that they have not had before trying to hedge themselves or sort of mitigate their risk to what US policy had been into the financial crisis and the decisions of the Fed in the wake of that financial crisis and relative to the dollar as well in Europe and I just came back from the UK I had spoken before Parliament the LSE and so forth about the issues with the Bank of England because the Bank of England did the same thing I just did it in a lesser amount well the economy of the UK is smaller the rest of Europe and Japan and the US but the upshot was that the Bank of England did the same exact thing because they were part of sort of this G7 connection in terms of quantitative easing buying their own government bonds and ultimately pushing this narrative that by injecting fabricated money into the banking system it would somehow trickle down to the rest of the economy and promote real growth and they really want to believe this Mark Carney who is the head of the Central Bank of England who actually used to work at Goldman Sachs as did the current European Central Bank head Mario Draghi also used to work at Goldman Sachs so I mean they sort of had a similar I think ideology in terms of funding financial institutions and potentially pushing the narrative that that would somehow be economically useful for the rest of the world or for citizens and economies everywhere continues to try and believe that so in the beginning of this year like other Central Bank leaders have done throughout this process he said there's going to be growth look there is growth wages are growing GDP is growing inflation is rising this is finally working and then a couple months later he said you know what there's not a lot of growth inflation is kind of low and actually wages relative to the cost of living aren't the worst they've been in four decades even when there's this moment of you know of being able to step in of Central Bank leaders to actually declare victory of these policies in terms of their stated purpose which was to trickle down to the real economy it doesn't even hold so for the last 10 years not just in the UK but throughout Europe throughout all of these major countries there has been less on average than 2% growth per year collectively throughout every year of this period there has been less than collectively on average 1.5% inflation throughout this entire period there has not been a wage increase that substantiates a cost of living increase in any of these countries throughout this period with the exception of Germany and that has a sort of sort of different model and as a result of that there's been a lot of economic angst and financial insecurity and heightened inequality amongst the people in these countries because if you have money that's purportedly coming down to the economy and it's getting lost in the private banking system and it's getting lost in inflating financial asset bubbles and it doesn't come down in a meaningful way to the regular economy people get pissed off right so I mean this has been the largest subsidy program for the private banking system ever and so as a result when people look at their own pocketbooks at their own finances maybe take into account the fact that the stock market is really really high and that's supposed to make them feel better and if you're participating in the stock market there is an upside in that for now but it makes them really concerned about their leaders most people don't think about central bank leaders who know who they are in the last 10 years some people know a little bit more of who they are than they did in the past but for the most part you don't blame Ben Bernanke or Mario Draghi or anything for your economic problems you kind of blame whoever's in power in your government and that's one of the ways and reasons for you to vote for whoever's not in your government to try and run the government because what's happening seems like a lie what's happening is that in the last 10 years there's been a lot of money that's been given out but it hasn't necessarily created a real secure economic perspective for most people and as a result people tend to want other that's why the most recent votes in Italy have voted other in Spain they voted other and other can be left or right other just means whoever's not there at the time in the UK other meant voting for Brexit other meant voting for getting the hell out of Europe because surely it's their fault that like government leaders aren't responsible for their own choices and their own allowances of the behavior of their central banks or just the sheer cluelessness of the dialogue to their people as to what they're really going through versus what central banks are what is supposed to be happening on the financial system side they are also accountable people are accountable for not holding their governments to be accountable and not looking behind the curtain and seeing how their money their economies actually have a bigger story attached to them and it is the central banks because the central banks don't have to be vote their leaders don't have to be voted in they are appointed by presidents or they are appointed by prime ministers in our case in the US the fed leaders are appointed by the president and they can be confirmed or rejected by the congress that has never happened there has never been an actual rejection of someone who's come up for real appointment as a leader of the central bank there's a connection about the realities people don't appoint them people don't elect them and people don't have the ability at this point in a legal framework in any country to cap what they do so the fact that there's 21 trillion dollars of quantitative easing money hanging around with 0% interest on average in general attached to it throughout the developed countries is something that no actual person has the ability to vote out there's literally no connection of people to central bank leaders in that way or limitations or general transparency as to where their money goes some of them show their books European central bank says exactly which corporations it's going to buy and when but the reality is there's no outside accountable source or body to say look maybe that's enough and by the way maybe you should have an exit plan so I'll leave it on that because I'm sure Danielle made my address the exit plan as well but the reality is with all this debt that's hanging around with all these asset bubbles that have been created there is risk it's been a lot of years on Wall Street looking at downside risk in fact why I really left Goldman Sachs is because well one of the reasons was because they said you should stop telling clients what their downside risk is that will make them not buy things stop doing quantitative analysis on that but the reality is the risk of any asset bubble particularly a large debt bubble large credit extension bubble popping is that when it does it doesn't just pop a little bit all of these banks remain codependent all of the blending remains codependent whether it is a consumer or whether it's a corporation or whether it's the government of a country if rates even go up by a little bit for whatever the reason or if there's fear in the system and bonds are dumped and therefore rates go up so whether it's created by a central bank or not created by a central bank all the cost of all that debt rises a lot and it rises a lot in percentage terms from a very low level of 0% interest rates on average throughout the last 10 years and that can create the same credit squeeze that the Fed started the policy for avoiding banks not trusting each other banks not trusting their clients banks cutting off funds to small businesses small businesses firing people and so forth everything that it sought to avoid and in order for that to not happen there has to be some form of an exit plan I don't think that the leaders of these central banks have a exit plan I think their exit plan is we would like to not be running the central bank when this goes down we would like to be getting six figures of speech somewhere like in some like locale or off Wall Street or wherever and we just don't want to be involved so we can say that under our watch it was successful that's not a really good plan for the rest of the world I think a lot needs to be done maybe we cover this in Q&A but it's all of that debt needs to be addressed all the debt that's been created not the stock asset bubble so much but all the debt asset bubbles all the quantitative easing needs to be addressed if we keep it at the same level then what is outstanding the money that's been allowed to go out to buy these assets has to be re-addressed has to be restructured has to be re-diverted to real economic goals to something like and this is where we can take a page out of China's book and not like they don't have other problems but something like using money that was created out of nowhere for the purposes of long term growth rather than short term even if that short term is a decade or a decade point two or a decade and a half but of less meaningful less solid growth in just the financial assets and simply to continue to subsidize a private banking system that is at the core of manufacturing and brokering those financial assets and I think if we don't do that if they don't do that if these conversations aren't had if you're not aware of them and if people don't start to talk about them and sort of trickle it up to the top from an awareness basis those are the kinds of problems that will happen because the system hasn't been restructured it's just been subsidized and that's a really dangerous position to be in so with that cheery note I do want to thank you I also want to say there will be later a video that sort of addresses all of these people and this idea and when you see it after Danielle speaks it's a song that actually goes with collusion it's called You and Me and I know this is very close to your values in here from a core perspective change is about what we do awareness is about what we have and information is about what we can analyze and that's really important in this particular environment today and so when you watch it I urge you to think about your ability to sort of get more information to yourselves and sort of be aware of where we're at today and where we might go thank you so much