Arianna Guest Hosts Squawk Box: Interviews Jim Grant, Nassim Taleb, and Roger Altman, Discusses The New Financial Euphoria
Arianna guest-hosted CNBC's Squawk Box Wednesday morning, joining Black Swan author Nassim Taleb, former Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman, and Jim Grant of Grant's Interest Rate Observer for a spirited discussion about the economy. Watch a selection of segments from Arianna's guest-hosting stint below.
Arianna shares her ideas on whether the economy has a solid foundation:
Former Deputy Treasury Secretary and Evercore Capital Partners chairman Roger Altman provides feedback on former AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre sitting at the driver's seat of GM when the company emerges out of bankruptcy:
Jim Grant of Grant's Interest Rate Observer on the rebounding of gold prices as central banks around the world print more money:
Black Swan author Nassim Taleb shares his thoughts on how evolution in economic life helps those with the maximum ammount of hidden risks:
Arianna explains how misplaced hope and happiness might bring premature assumptions that the economy is better:
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Lookin' good. Kickin tail and taking names.
OK, folks, so now we have upped the ante to Nassim Taleb.
You heard what he said.
Same thing I've been saying.
The symptom is there is just TOO MUCH DEBT out there and not enough money to pay those debts.
He is both correct and incredibly honest.
But the doesn't know what to do about the symptom of too much debt.
So, here's a clue for Nassim.
I hope he takes it.
Debt-free money.
The Chicago Plan for Monetary Reform.
The symptom of the problem is what we call an upside-down monetary system.
The problem itself is actually the failed debt-money system, the one that has been set up and managed by the private Federal Reserve bankers.
The debt-money system is a flawed system, incapable of sustaining itself without ever-increasing quantities of "unproductive" debt.
The link, again, to "How Debt Money Goes Broke."
http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/2005/1212b.html
We are here*.
Nassim is onto the symptom.
He can't be far from the cause.
So are you Dems happy with the Changes so far? Is this really what you expected when you voted for Obama? Let's review:
10 Million jobs lost since Obama took over
Quadrupled the Federal Deficit in first 100 days in office
Let Black Panthers go scot free after their billy-club voter suppression
Selling out Israel to the Arab world
Now says Iran canhave Nuclear Power, no inspections needed
Redirecting all Iraq combat troops to Afghani instead of bringing them home as promised.
Now says he will tax health care benefits - after criticizing McCain for saying this.
"Loaning" $78 Billion to Chrysler and GM and then they file bankruptcy !
No changes in Wall St. or Banking Regulations. This announced yesterday.
Giving more TARP money to non-bank entities without details being made public.
Where's the transparency??
16 Czar's appointed who only answer to Obama and subvert our system of checks & balances.
AND YOU THOUGHT BUSH WAS BAD? I thought Bush was bad too. But Obama is worse in his first 100 days then Bush was in 8 years. Is this really what you expected when you voted for Obama??
You're full of it. Bush started major unnecessary war, spent 11 trillion dollars with nothing to show but an economic depression...and you say Obama is worse in his first 100 days when he is trying to fix the mess you Republicans made? As usual, your facts and opinions are so far out there nobody can get a radar fix on them. Why do you GOPers attack all out and project on the Democrats what YOU are guilty of? I wish you all were made to pay for the damage you've done to America and that the media would stop giving you people such an undeserved megaphone. Your party is 'the church of the living failures" and you have the gall to judge Obama?
allen great answer
Where do these whack jobs come from.? Its like they have closed their eyes to what 20 years of GOP policy have done to the US. and the world. They are scary.
GOP in power 20 + years Obama 5 short months !
GM....born again?
Opposition to the bailouts and predictions of failure sometimes get close to sounding like the "want him to fail" that we get from the right.
DING!
Taleb's interview abruptly ends... Can you post the full version?
Arianna helped to put the people in place that are responsible for this economy; didn't she understand 'share the wealth'? Conservative believe every person is capable of generating wealth, making all lives better. This gvmnt believes no more wealth can be made, it must be taken from others and given to those that they deem worthy.
BTW, why do the commntatrs limit good comments on SarahP?
oh, is THAT what conservatives believe? You know us libs, we can't figure anything out for ourselves. We need conservatives like you to explain what THIS government (the one by and for the people) believes. The majority does care what your belief system is, we are MovingOn now. It really must get your goat to know that we are fixing things and you can't do anything to stop it.
Fixing things in the sense that an aircraft engine mechanic might use a hammer as his primary tool.
Conservatives believe in using the framework of the society that we have all built to climb the ladder of success and enrich themselves. I have no problem with that. What I don't like is their propensity to do everything in their power to pull the ladder up after them.
You conservatives believe in 1 percent of super rich hoarding the wealth. For the last 30 years the rich have failed to trickle down anything but misery and lack of reform for the common person. Instead it was grab your hands into taxpayer money with both hands and they called that "smaller government". How can every person generate wealth as you say, when only a tiny handful has any wealth and the rest are going jobless and homeless? How does that make life better? And as far as taking from 'others', maybe it's about time some of the STOLEN loot that these fat cats have taken ought to be taken away from them. They didn't earn it. They stole it from the American people. We need a little redistribution of wealth to correct the hoarding of wealth by the right wingers for the last several decades but especially the last eight years. Who did you deem worthy, you right wingers? CEO's, Oil companies? Bernie Madoff? Enron? Halliburton? (and the list of elitist pirates goes on), I think the common person in America is MORE worthy than the aforementioned villains your heart bleeds for. And as for limiting "good comments": Rush Limbaugh won't even let liberals post any opinions on his EIB and even right wingers have to pay for the 'privilege' so don't criticize the Huffington post moderators. They're a lot more fair to you cons than you guys are to liberals.
anti fluff NO You guys always frame the argument to suit your views.
There is Nothing wrong with generating wealth.!! Its how you get wealth and how many folks you screw in the process- that is the problem - NOT WEALTH ! GOP policy has been helping the rich get richer with their policies that give many more breaks to their corp base.
The Middle class have NOT gotten a fair shake in many years - and wages have been either flat or not kept up with others - that are more wealthy . Started with Reagan - who began his policy of deregulation of banks and WAll st.
Turn off FOX and Rush and read a fact filled book. ..
Arianna Wow you sound like the Conservative you used to be, But!
it's your guy who is hanging the dry wall over the fundamental problems and who won't let GM go into Bankruptcy; so it is now a Pension Fund masquerading as a Car Company, and the lobbyists you reference happen to be from the United Auto Workers, after Billions & Billions (thanks Carl Sagan)
of TaxPayer Dollars, Gov Motors will eventually Go Down the Drain, and the Waste we Know Will Happen will have Actually Happened, say Bye Bye Money . . . the Messiah he is NOT!!!
President Obama was pretty accurate when he said: "You've got some economists and some folks who think they're economists. By the way, these days everybody thinks they're economists."
premature ej.....? wha??
Arianna,
I wish you had given Joe something like this list of boardroom reforms when he asked you what you would do:
1) No compensated executive of the company can sit as a voting board member; the CEO can be an ex officio non-voting member in order to co-ordinate policy;
2) Nominations for board seats can be made by any shareholder with at least 1% of the company's shares, and the proxy statement must include such non-board nominees;
3) Board members must have owned at least $50,000 worth of stock in the company for at least 1 year before being proposed;
4) Board members may not be compensated executives of any company with which the company for whom they are a board member does more than $1 million of business in a year;
5) Board members may not serve on more than three corporate boards
6) Board members should pay their own Officers and Directors insurance premiums
Arianna's assessment of the economy and criticisms of the irrational "back to normal" mentality are correct. I would further add: the economic situation is dangerous to the majority of the population. I implore Arianna and others in the media to give Lyndon LaRouche a forum to communicate the exact economic processes that contract the economy and threaten the population's capacity to survive. Re-inflating the monetary financial bubble is not going to work. The unemployment is a disaster which no one will discuss honestly. Medical services will be rationed so that only healthy people benefit. Absurd.
Fuel prices are spiraling upward again, for no good reason (there is a glut on suppliers' hands).
Unemployment is through the roof, and the trend is NOT reversing itself. Trying to put an optimistic spin on it by saying jobs are still being lost...but at a slower rate...is like telling a terminally ill cancer patient, "your tumor is still growing, but at a slower rate". Preposterous and insulting.
There is NO evidence that the economy is getting better. Nada.
The slowing of the rate of job losses IS evidence. The fact that you don't want it to be doesn't make it not true.
You're just DESPERATE to claim a victory of some kind. No one is buying it. Anyone with an ounce of common sense can see that our economy is getting worse, and not better.
Job loss rate hasn't slowed. The number of people qualified for unemployment has decreased. The actual number of layoffs INCREASED over the past two weeks. You better stop watching MSNBC and gather facts from an independent source. Everything that JDW1981 said is true. The bubble of Bailout and TARP spending is about to burst as the truth that neither has created any meaningful number of jobs, the higher taxes coming down the line from Obama, higher gas prices and inflation will continue this recession for at least 2 more years. These aren't my words, these are Bernanke's and other Obama-appointed people's words. You just don't hear this on MSNBC.
unemployment will be over 10% soon - no help in sight - stimulus has done absolutely nothing - "jobs created or saved" is a total myth -- the Obama economy
Because the fundamentals were so strong until just a few months ago, right?
You might want some basic information about economics before you post here and look foolish. Unemployment is a trailing indicator. It is one of the last aspects of an economy to recover when you pull out of a recession.
Do us all a favor and just say "Thank you" to the Dems for saving your bacon yet again. Go sit at the kid's table.. the adults are talking.
The Democrats have saved nobody's bacon. They TALK about saving it....a lot....but nothing has been accomplished. Not one significant achievement.
And I AM a Democrat (check my early posts if you don't believe me).
I browsed through the stimulus bill, and it appears the vast sums of money allocated that will provide employment opportunities is largely through hiring temporary govt. workers to do essentially labor jobs, and we know who that favors, increase in funding for existing government contractors where the company gets lion share of profit versus hiring more employees off the street, and additional funding to government agencies for resource projects waiting to get money to implement. Are the job loses being off-set by this bill? Hardly!
This was a sham as change we can believe in is a sham! And I wasted my vote, but giving it to Mc Cain is wasted also. All the more proof for a 3rd party progressive party candidate in 2012. Because given what we are seeing, this President may not even make it through the first term w/o impeachment if we scream loud enough for the change we voted for.I
Most of the comments from administration officials have been cautious. They identify that there are some "green shoots" but that we have a long way to go to get out of this economic mess. At the risk of my message being censored (I post on HuffPo frequently but whenever I criticize Arianna - for whom I have enormous respect and admiration - but when I criticize her, my messages do not appear) I ask when has any administration official been anything but cautious in their pronouncments. Can anyone identify an official being exultant?
Saying that you have saved 150K jobs without once of verifiable data, solely to earn some political capital, is irresponsible. If they were cautious with their words in this economy they would not be claiming victory in which we continue to bleed jobs.
Not just irresponsible, it is a LlE.
Sorry, but it was the other president who claimed victory.
When the May job loss was half of January's job loss and the lowest in 9 months, that's a positive sign . . . for everybody except those invested in Obama's failure.
I cannot speak to the issue of verifying the 150,000 jobs but that does not address the issue I raised which is proof of exaltation. I have not seen any examples from administration officials on that.
On the other hand, I have seen this administration which I have strongly supported backpedal on regulatory reform and executive compensation caps. They are making fools of those of us who believed in those reforms. I am beginning to worry that Obama has capitulaled to those who believe that only a greed-based economy can be fruitful. After months of personal agreement with the administration, they are sorely testing me. They expect me to forfeit what I thought were rational views and reasons why I have so wholeheartedly supported Obama. Geithner's views that enticing investment bankers with big paydays is the only solution seems to be prevailing.
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