Waters. I got those are your headlines of one of those stories you can go to r t dot com for more information right now stay tuned for more great programming this is our international. Hello and welcome to cross talk were all Things Considered im Peter Lavelle with good reason Public Discourse is focused on addressing and finally containing the code 19 pandemic the focus is on devastated economies were in a recession will it morph into a depression will the recovery be you. Know. Crosstalk economic recovery im joined by my guest Benjamin Kyle in lubbock he is the director of the Free Market Institute a professor of economics at Texas Tech University as well as the senior fellow with the independent institute and in los angeles we cross to he is an independent economic and geo political analyst as well as a former commodities trader all right gentlemen crossed up rules in effect that means you can jump in anytime you want and i was appreciating lets go to los angeles 1st year time i said in my introduction i guess probably the most important question there is as we come out of this pandemic and its all going to be about the economy and its everything were going to think about for the next few months if not years is about recovery so infer a very simple question will it be a v a you or in hell go here well weve been in an l. Shape depression since the 2008 financial crisis i mean only the true Economic Data on unemployment inflation g. D. P. And the like have been warped or hidden outright while the fed pumped up the stock market to give the appearance of a genuine economic recovery and weve been in a structural downturn rather than a typically cyclical recession and those arent easy to get out of all of this since february is essentially marking to market if you will of collective economic mattrick such as the fake money pumping charade is being wrapped up in favor of a longer term plan monetary paradigm shift out right and i remember the last time we spoke we were talking about the turbulence in the oil market the oil price that that seems like a kindergarten play to consider considering whats going on now ben let me go to you the same question a you or d an l because that will really dictate what kind of policy is necessary to get out of this lump go ahead ben. Well i think policy has a lot to do with what type of shape it is so right now were in a flat line and thats because we have a shutdown orders that are essentially telling people not to produce so the question is when shutdown orders are lifted what is normal Economic Activity and recovery look like and i dont think it looks like a of b. Because that would imply that were going back to the economic role we all lived in at the start of the year but the virus is still going to be with us so opening back up means taking account of that and weighing that in our economic transactions so restaurants working at half capacity or 3rd capacity whatever customers and entrepreneurs do you say airlines that much less than capacity all of these things dont abide by bouncing back to where we were now i think whats important is that we dont have dumb Government Policies preventing Entrepreneurial Solutions that let us make our recovery as quick as we can and that stick us in how so its somewhere more like a you somewhere in between but thats really got to be for the market process to sort out you know the name them that seeing that cycle about the market here you know pie we have now as we speak and i think it was as of today 26000000 people over the past 5 weeks have gone on unemployment and the this is massive i mean if someone would have told me this is a scenario what it is i would have been in comprehensible to me a month and a half ago and now. What needs to be done because that these are the people that consume in the get out of a slump you need a lot of consumption and you know i know that theres been a potential aid being sent directly to individuals but it seems to be a pittance because most people will use that allowance from the government to pay off debts more than anything else than consume and ben is absolutely right i mean just because you open up. Economy doesnt mean this pandemic has been completely nailed down and vanquished and i still think people will be very very hesitant to go out in public and consume even if they have the money and having the money is a big if right now go ahead by having the money and money i say increasingly in quotes some may have certain banks in the south and southeast outright revolting wanting to get back to work and trying to dilly dallying and flip flopping between supporting them versus not whereas the northeast the northwest the west where i am just diligently by the book falling whatever the government mandates i mean i think theres a wider plan afoot because that mega banking and white or corporate conglomerate of stablish and swanton need them all of these Smaller Companies for instance to fail Small Businesses will soon be vacuumed up by banks they owe debt to already merged into the larger corporations under forced. Write monopolies in each industry its a repeat essential of the consolidations which took place 12 years ago only on a larger scale so these banks these mega banks for instance j. P. Morgan wells fargo b. Of a theyre being sued in class action tellingly for funding larger Small Businesses then smaller businesses with this Paycheck Protection Program p. P. P. Before that 350000000000. 00 in federal funds ran out why has the smallest Small Businesses dont pay these banks as much in fees as the larger Small Businesses quote unquote this is yet another unsustainable contradiction in the modern Economic System where clear socialistic government handouts are nonetheless being prioritized through private institutions foremost by their profit motives i mean all this stuff begs deeper questions yeah its a man and you know i hear only a lot about. Democratic socialism and all that and i lived in Eastern Europe during communism and i know what thats about ok so i dont really want to go that direction here but the interesting thing is here banks are picking winners ok i mean it is very socialistic in that way because its not the its not the market picking winners its individuals with their very specific interests in mind in the course that is profit here and being the big supporter of entrepreneurship in small and medium sized businesses because as a conservative that is the very raw base of a Civil Society and im terrified to see these unemployment numbers and im terrified to see these Small Businesses go out of go out when fail and this consolidation here more inequality and we dont need to go in this direction what policy would you suggest to avoid that because it may be even too late for so many of these businesses go ahead so lets bring it back i dont think we have a consumption problem what we have is a supply problem where people have been ordered to stop supplying things to the market to cease work and thats where unemployment spike comes from and thats the heart of all of our problems including the Small Businesses because i agree completely its a travesty whats being done to them right now but rather than government bailouts for businesses what we need is to be entrepreneurs including and especially small entrepreneurs to figure out how they can best serve consumers and who want to do that and then of course the banks if the banks are avoiding them letting them just. Just fade away i mean how do we take the banks out of this because theyre the ones that are calling the shots go ahead ben. But we stop borrowing government money through these banks to do it that instead of our banks that get rivers and losers based on profit and loss and the problem is when you socialize losses through or through the government its ceased being a profit and loss estimate reallocates resources efficiently so government i think is gumming up the works in this process now we need to get back to business as usual in order to go hard and that will mean some bankruptcies both the small and large firms the key is that you want to collect the labor and Capital Market to reallocate those assets to where they can best serve consumers as quickly as possible. But i but you know you know in looking at this entire saga over the last few weeks in i think its absolutely shameful that Congress Goes on vacation you know will come back when theres an emergency that theres 26000000 a merchant sees out there right now ok i mean they were very quick to pad their own pockets and their friends and their special interests here and now theyre still grieve thinking about how to continue dealing with the other parts of the economy but were talking about small and medium sized businesses they dont to seem to feel the fire on their under their feet to deal with that they took care of their friends and themselves right off the bat like in 2008. Yeah i mean its 2008 and in a certain sense it was just kind of like a dry run of sorts for this multiple and all means and forms of what happened then you have to consider since 2008 i mean the money that the fed i mean the fed drove Something Like 93 percent of the stock market run since the 2008 financial crisis meanwhile real on employment was in double digits real inflation was much higher than what they stated that it was real g. D. P. Which is much lower than it was lies damn lies and statistics as the trite phrase at this point goes by do you know just since february again you know flipping the switch off in the living room thats the equivalent of what the. What the powers that be have done essentially to. The economy so theyre no more corporate stock buybacks as of this point after februarys lockdowns so expect further eventual hemorrhaging within the stock market this is all meant to further benefit the ruling transatlantic a late which thinks in terms of app extend plans accordingly its aimed partly to call a portion of the population while conditioning the yearning for the non means tested kweisi universal basic and come via Digital Currencies for the millions of unemployed who fall into destitution. Cashless society is planned which has been sop for for years if you think about it by transnational banks the i. M. F. That b. A. s in switzerland is maggette institutions will be and should theyll be introducing a Cashless Society after the modern dollars reserve status and the currency collapses under aggressive inflation and mass treasury bond dumping globally which is already in procession i mean before this corona virus pandemic hit us private debt was over 150 percent of g. D. P. With corporate debt being like 73 percent and finance generally was like at 350 percent of g. D. P. Completely brittle. Sustainable system we had were most dad at this point will be non serviceable under a depression triggered by stay at home orders so homelessness will spike even further as will infrastructure decay plagues crime and public riots anarchy and Small Businesses again going away near entirely it may sound extreme but if if you were to say that there would be lockdown orders and nobody would be able to go to work let alone to their family members 3 months ago that would have sounded extreme well ok benjamin yeah i saw it thank goodness were doing it on skype because i can see your expression go ahead and jump in reply go ahead. Yeah i mean that was the most. I dont share these big mister. Assumptions about how things are going to go forward i mean i do think its all as contingent and i agree with you completely that this this shutdown water was like a light switch shutting off the economy or a large chunks of it thats detrimental to all of us but i think turning the light switch back on doesnt throw the power back on the way it wasnt january but our trip or nurse through this process begun small banks big and small will figure out the ways to serve consumers and bring some law to market as long as the government doesnt get in the way this market process i think was recovering relatively well. It was the Great Recession i agree completely there was crony bailouts during the Great Recession for those political elites and those connected but thats largely washed out of the system now were Going Forward rather productively and thats what id expect to happen if we got to make a really didnt have to go to a heartbreak and after that heartbreak will continue our discussion on economic recovery. Summer Solutions Series imax guys are here with Stacy Herbert you know in a month in which we were meant to have the 2 Party Conventions officially nominated donald trump for the republican and joe biden for the democrats the 10 demick has thrown the election and even more chaos than usual so joining us is greg palast journalist author of many books including as the latest out now skyrocketing up all the bestseller lists its called troll stole 2020. Welcome back to crossfire things are considered im Peter Lavelle discussing the recovery of the economy. Ok me im kind of to go back to you because i think you know done a number of programs on this particular topic just looking at it from different trajectories and i think one of the most probably the most common denominator in all of these programs ive been doing on this topic is that it is the government doing too little or is it doing too much ok the end it seems to me that everybody has a very strong opinion about that we can only use the same numbers and we can you know look at unemployment we can look at debt but then its always not you know that tool box that the government has to be doing enough are they doing too little go ahead. Thats an excellent question a really. Points to other questions over the role of government and you know these these pillars ideological pillars over the past 200 years of communism socialism and corporate capitalism market fundamentalism what is the meaning there of you know the february shutdown. Is just a rapid bringing up to pace of you know really these questions over the role of government because that government more or less hand in hand with that with private institutions like blackrock or pimco. You know married to the treasury and the fed are essentially dictating everything not just geo economics but politics domestically than geopolitics if you think about it but under the auspices of this of this pandemic of this massive crisis or as its just you know really piecemealing of its role prior crisis not again and prior to the 2008 financial crisis crisis the 2000 dot com burst you know and greenspans role and hike you know dropping Interest Rates artificially and aggressively you know void deflation its like what is socialism versus a genuine market fundamentalism in genuine free market capitalism when you have this quote unquote free hand free hand in the market not being so free and basically dictating so much if anything february showed overtly the very you know socialistic direct involvement of central banking and hybrid public and Private Banking and dictating the mors of our existence to our i dont care how efficient you run your company youre only 20 people i mean youre literally being put to the back of the line versus she you know shake shack for instance which you know is still making money is still bringing in revenue whether takeout or otherwise and yet you know they get pushed to the front of the line because the relationships column crony esther otherwise but its like wheres free market versus where its not. You know its all met to synthesize towards further hybridisation of what we would know classically as as market fundamentalism versus just straight up you know giving 2000. 00 a month to folks that are destitute and or sick and not putting in them into poverty traps where the same time questionably limiting them from all of a sudden wanting to become entrepreneurial wanting to become elon musk wanting to learn. And in advance these are bigger questions that are just being brushed to the sidelines because again you dont want to get sick and ill and die so those you know its like theres purposeful confusion so that people arent able to think lucidly and rely further and further emotionally and psychically on government which transcends issues involving classical ideological definitions yeah i mean in the me in set yes it makes you kind of request question again so many assumptions here you know ben you know the thought of just sending out checks to individuals you know 1500. 00 and you know 2500. 00 for a family i mean if someone suggested that to me to with a 2 or 3 months ago my instinct would be in no i mean use the tax code ok giving money is something i dont really like doing now ive had a conversion because i see all of these people massive number of people a growing number of people they need cash in their pocket just to reboot even if its a one time thing which i still think is very small here i mean im just trying to point out how i have changed during this crisis because something that i would have not would have been very not agreeable with now im thinking you need to do more of it because you know we improve getting revoked when we have to get on the right foot instead of having an elbow him probably be a you but its certainly not going to be a v. Its certainly not going to be a b. If people cant consume go ahead ben well its certainly not going to be if they cant produce so this cash handouts youve got to remember its government has ordered people not to work so big sound something. New on this might be changing from before just giving a cash handout when the governments actually doing the harm to the people but of course the government has no money of its own it has to take it from somebody else somewhere else either through inflation taxing or borrowing and