A war torn country with sectarian ism is wrong its just nonsense you cant do it you know if these people they are yet until proven we can thank you michel and eventually all of innovation i would love to but im afraid thats all we have time for thank you to both of my guests independent journalist and keith best former chief executive of the Immigration Advisory Service thank you both. And if you have any thoughts on this story or anything else than do get in touch by following us on social media and media comments that were back in 30 minutes say that. Max kaiser here with cassar port hey you know before george zorros became vilified as a globalist and market manipulator and election writer he wrote a lot of interesting books and of course. Jim rogers of the quantum fund which was one of the best performing as funds ever kind of invented the modern hedge fund and hes got a lot of things to say if you look at his old work and were going to get into a Stacy Herbert were going to talk about reflexivity because i think its quite important in this day and age and in fact just so you know george soros versus Warren Buffett 2 different source of investors one speculator one is Value Investor and theyve both and this is a downtown josh brown compare them in 2013 there annualized returns are 20 percent per year for the past few decades and both born in 1930 said they have similar returns in 2 different ways some of the best ng but george soros did write long ago about reflexivity and is quite important to looking at the markets today because i want to point out that according to wikipedia reflexivity refers to a circular relationship between cause and effect especially as embedded in human belief structures as an anthropologist for example goes into a remote tribe in amazon the observer affects the observed so the fact that this anthropologist this guy or this gal from new york city goes into the amazon to a tribe whos never seen somebody from new york they act differently than they would have perhaps if it were somebody else from another tribe in the amazon so what you observe might not know youve influenced their behavior so you can actually observe their behavior with economics how george soros explains reflexivity reflexivity refers to the self reinforcing in effect of Market Sentiment whereby. Rising prices attract buyers whose actions drive Prices Higher until the process becomes unsustainable george soros saw all this fact as incompatible with equilibrium theory and well get into that in a bit but i know you study because when i 1st met you 17 years ago you were talking about this you were talking about george soros and reflexivity can describe it as smoking your own belly button lint you describe that you are being reinforced in your beliefs by the manifestation of your actions to take further actions which then gave you more to believe in i mean minsky call this a minsky moment where you know stocks are high because stocks are high people are buying stocks because theyre high and theyre high when theyre buying stocks that are high basically on their own delusion about their importance in that moment of getting stocks the place when he talks about is a repudiation of the equilibrium theory this is an important idea because theres this idea of efficient market that markets are efficient all information known about stocks and bonds are in the current price thats the efficient market theory if there was such thing as an efficient market then either george soros or Warren Buffett could compound money at 20 percent for 20 or 30 years because that would be impossible if markets were efficient and all information was known in the price reflected all that information so clearly markets are not if not efficient and this idea of reflexivity its a bit of a Quantum Mechanics entering into the finance space you know this like schrodingers cat as a quantum Fund Operator right now and thats very. Scientific in that way but it nevertheless it does have a huge impact and i do think that we are seeing that in markets today people are looking at stock markets and assuming you know they hated the dow jones when it was at 9500 you know 1011 years ago after the 2008 financial crisis remember it was too high of 9500 its going to go to 3000 well here we are near 29000. And people are saying well its got to go to 50000 they love it at this price because somebody famously wrote in a book people are predictably unpredictable i believe is the title right and you know in terms of equilibrium theory in equilibrium theory prices in the long run equilibrium reflect the underlying economic fundamentals which are unaffected by prices remember in the last episode where i showed you that the s. And p. 500 is way outpacing the actual growth of the economy that shouldnt happen in equilibrium theory and yet this is what the economists working at the fed will keep on telling you that this is all equilibrium the prices are you know as they should be and reflect the underlying fundamentals but what soros pointed out reflexivity asserts that prices do in fact influence the fundamentals and that these newly influenced set of fundamentals then proceed to change expectation thus influence in prices the process continues in a self reinforcing pattern because the pattern of self reinforcing markets tend towards a disequilibrium and thats why we have boom and bust boom and bust and they get bigger and bigger over the last 20 years since 1990000 says he wrote that theres been the emergence of ai Artificial Intelligence and there the emergence of ai journalism so a lot of the Financial Press and forbes already has this digitally assisted editorial content that they produce where machines are reading prices and then they generate stories those stories are then picked up by trading algorithms on wall street and 90 percent of the volume on wall street is by robot so the robots are reading the output of the robots and theyre changing prices on the exchanges which are then well go back to the editorial robots who write about those new prices so robots are trading based on the editorial robots who are then impacted by the price changes generated by robots so thats a new chapter in this reflexivity story the observer changes the observed so Warren Buffett issues and annual newsletter for shareholders and Berkshire Hathaway everybody. In the world reason i think its every february right and he observed a few years ago if you recall that most investors would be better off in a passive index fund just stop trading in and out stop trying to be like soros just that thats how you lose money just do a passive index fund and everybody listen to him thus changing the dynamics of the market i thats why he has 128000000000 in cash but now this is what has emerged a new risk to the market caused by these sort of observations that everybody would just be better off and a passive index fund perhaps that would be ok if it was just a few people following his advice but when the entire market follow a set of his advice were nearing a future where 3 index Fund Companies control Corporate America the largest asset manager in the world blackrock with ice shares has 7 trillion dollars under management then guard has 5. 00 trillion and state street with s p d r manages 2. 00 trillion these Companies Hold 80 percent of all indexed funds as weve covered just recently more more of our of the markets are just passive investors so back in 1907 before the crash you had the emergence of whats called portfolio insurance yes now when i was a stockbroker at the time so i know this quite well so the amount of this portfolio insurance product was sold in many multiples of what was actually supposed to be insured the underlying stocks and when that became clear you had the crash of 87. 00 now it currently with these passive Investor Funds and also e. T. F. Exchange traded funds if you have an Exchange Traded fund that supposed to cover the Mining Sector and an Exchange Traded fund the supposed to cover lets say north american stocks they would both own the the same stock but they dont actually own the shares of the same stock they just own the they just referenced the number of where that stock is trading without owning the stock so youve got now many many multiples of these e. T. F. And index funds that are. From sing stocks but dont own the stocks so if there is a down stick in the actual stock price its magnified 102030. 00 times because youve got it impacts in a highly leveraged manner this whole facade this whole ponzi scheme of index an e. T. F. Better owning 2030 times more of equity than actually exists in the actual Stock Exchange so remember back in the to see 1007 to 2009 period when the whole Global Financial system fell apart and we had Something Like 7000 banks in america and now we have like 4000 but 3 or 4 huge ones right j. P. Morgan citibank Goldman Sachs bank of america they own like the vast majority of the funds there are too big to fail so again here you have even more concentration 3 own all these funds for the majority of the ordinary american obviously george soros and warren buffets or its. Operate differently in the market but in terms of what they own here you see a good summary of the various risks resulting from passive funds increasing ownership of the largest firms blackrock vanguard and state street combined own 18 percent of apples shares up from 7 percent at the end of 2009 so theyre owning more and more of the Largest Companies and the Largest Companies like apple or microsoft become bigger and bigger percentage of the s. And p. 500 and they become too big to fail these 3 funds are too big to fail member one the money markets were too big to fail back in 2008 so what are the extraordinary measures that like for example that are happening in the repo market we dont know what the causes could it be connected to this it could be just as valid as any hedge fund or or any bank going under as well we dont know. Because were supposed to read the market but because of all this reflexivity we dont know who drive what came 1st the chicken or the fed in the case of apple because you have so much concentration in these funds. As you point out the market is reflects the concentration of apple in the index so these passive index funds are required to have the allocation that represents the market so they buy more apple shares but they do so concurrently across multiple e. T. S. And they do so without actually having the shares on their books they dont take delivery of those shares they dont have those shares they just reference that number as something that they would own so its exactly the problem of issuing claims against an asset too many claims against that asset its like the broadway show the producers right the idea was the oversold the play he sold tickets to the play and then he purposefully did a horrible play because he figured everyone would not go and cancel the tickets and they would just take all that money upfront well it was a smash hit then people came to the theater with their tickets but they had no seats for the 6 e. T. F. Market currently is the exact same they have many many of these funds they claim they own apple shares but they own but they dont so if in fact they want to all simultaneously collect their shares they couldnt blackrock really needs a close examination on this of course black rock is much bigger than most european economies if you look over in europe there is a lot of controversy about black rock having so much of a dominant position in places like ireland spain france i think france just they had some protesters stormed the offices of black rock only in the past week or 2 so this is the reality of the amount of power theyre getting as this article here and that in bloomberg points out and then finally in terms of this reflexivity of course its Warren BuffettValue Investor who came up with that that number of 100 percent as soon as stock market equals 100 percent of g. D. P. Thats perhaps bubble territory thats why he has 120000000000 in cash just sitting there well weve never had it so good Global Equities now worth 88. 00 trillion dollars the highest value in. History and it equals 100 percent of world g. D. P. So again that reflexivity of the prices were going to start youre going to see i dont know how fast its going to go but youre going to see more and more people chasing this price higher because they the observer and the observed right and a lot of people do cash in some of those gains and increases g. D. P. And then itll look like the stocks are not quite sure to get out of percentage e bay they go up again thats another reflexivity its all real reflectivity is at the heart of everything because we live in a simulation. Even really none of its real this shows an area im not even here im a hologram. I think we have to go to the break and when we come back we wont be here just pure holograms. In the United States president ial candidates debate the future of the u. S. And the world. Mexico is a red state you see her but to get into the burning questions of this election cycle one celtic every week will tax student debt trade was corporate money universal basic. Catch up with whats front running this sunday exclusively on. Welcome back to the kaiser report imax keyser time that to continue our conversation they got. Gold starts on dot com and welcome back thank you you know you got i got to ask you a quick question hair i used to hear all the time particularly when i was working on wall street this phrase the no of switzerland or the gnomes of switzerland are you anonymous for someone. No one knows and no tool someone was trying to tell if you people do very well because you know right now i think that go is the best insurance against physical gold is the best insurance against the risk i see in the world and thats what i decided to worry back in 2000 too many for our own money we started with and a few people we had buys them in the bench and we opened it up. So as you know only. A wall financial says go and so theres just a minuscule amount and very very few people who are actually even good looking at gold are considering using gold as insurance. For you know i wouldnt call most of the normal home all im saying is that the few people who are interested in preserving well some of those we are trying to help and you know its a real pleasure to meet people who are actually Free Thinkers because most of the investors in the world just think about the stock markets going up and of course every other period for a long long time i mean i wrote an article somebody called alfred and he invested through his family when he was born in the stock market or even 945 and today by just keep it hes staying in the market the whole time never selling now going through a big correction 405060 percent hes still just using his savings and that is sending his today 16000000 dont as he hasnt ever worried about it hasnt had to read any Company Report he just invested in the index and no skills so its you know its been an easy game i think that game is over now and therefore you know were trying to help if you will to actually protect against what i see coming so 2 now last discussion we were talking about something he gave us a data point that i wanted to cover because a lot of times markets are an odd data that people like yourself spot who are in these markets are studying them very closely youre talking about the m. A c. The the moving average convergence and divergence i think is down versus the golf at this could be a fascinating data point and i think it could be revealing some interesting transair it could. Get 11 more into as far as they got so this is a trending indicator it is not you know its obviously that there is a delay in this because the turn only happens are after something has turned it doesnt walk off the butt but is a very long term trending indicator and as i said that on a quarterly chart of the of the dow against go thats been going out since 2010 so its got been going up for 9 years and it just turned the end of 2019 and that is a very very strong indication it doesnt tell you that the markets in a crash tomorrow because actually says we do about a quarter inch off but the trend is not that the trend has not changed from up to down. And those are these are long term trends that are a lot are likely to play out with now. A market in dow and the dow or in old stocks lets say all stock markets in the world will be the same again is real money against gold and thats not surprising because you know all the old stocks as weve talked about in previously all stocks have just gone up because of brendan money and massive injection by Central Banks massive massive credit expansion so the fact that were not going to see a turn. Against real money im not surprised now because as you rightly said gold has outperformed every single asset market in the 2000 buses 2009 stocks have outperformed gold and because so we so we had a very big fall of the dow by about while it fell about the dow gold ratio fell from its high sell by an incubus percent between 2002011 then we see in a correction now to just over 20 of the racial. And i know that correction is finished and that correction still only took the market up i took the down to 50 percent of the form so is still on it only recovered 50 percent of the falls in 2000 so the goal still dow is still down 50 percent right now against goals as 2000 and now comes the next leg and this next leg down of the dow against go well be bishes and as i said our being we are going to go down at least 2 to one to one we are around 800 now and that ratio 18 to one down divided by by go and i think we are going to go at least one that would be a 95 percent from now and i see that coming i think is inevitable. Due to what has happened in markets and always liquidity will fade into the created and in the last 10 years or so right while another negative indicator might be ta