Qe 2 News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Welcome back. we're back with our panel. john hilsenrath, ed rollins. steven ratner, chairman of willett advisers, former counselor to the u.s. secretary of the treasury. steve, thanks for joining the conversation. >> thanks for having me. >> i want to ask you about the economy where we are. tim geithner just out with his book "stress test." it's been seven years since the dark days or six years since the dark days. how would you characterize things? >> actually, i'm in the middle of reading tim geithner's book, and it gives you nightmares. it just brings back all of the fear and how close we ...

When they ended qe-1 and qe-2, stocks fell because the economy wasn't in a self-sustaining recovery. every data point will get that scrutiny between now and the end of the year. >> i'm going to ask both of you the question. stephen moore, what letter grade to you give the economy right now? >> you know, i would give it about a b-minus, but i'm optimistic about the future. when you take into account the fact that corporate balance sheets still look beautiful, american companies are lean mean fighting machines, low interest rates, the housing recovery, i'm optimistic we may see the b-minus turn ...

The dinosaur, it makes you a little nervous. so please calm us down. >> well, you should be very calm about this asteroid, a 1998 qe-2. we are the first humans as far as i know that can do something about an asteroid that had our name on it. like we like to say, we live in a cosmic shooting gallery. if you look at the surface of the moon, there are a lot of craters. if you look carefully to the surface of the earth, there are a lot of craters. so we don't ever want to get hit by unof these things, it would be a nice thing if the ung or nasa got very motivated about this, we worked with our col...

Space? joining us tom jones, a planetary scientist and a former nasa astronaut. tom, you've been working on such a plan talking about it with the united nations. tell us about it. >> well, at the united nations, jon, there is an effort to have international collaboration among the space agencies to share the resources and share information about the detection and warnings of asteroids in the future. with that warning information, the space agencies could collaborate on a deflection mission to ward off a future catastrophic impact. jon: this one we're talking about is called, qe-2. this is not ...

Than that. this is major. how long have they been tracking it? >> well, named since 1998 qe 2. they first discovered it in 1998. that is the closest it will come to us for at least 200 years. it is not dangerous to us now and it won't be for another 200 years at the minimum. what the encounter is just a reminder that we are just kind of zooming through space in a cosmic shooting gallery and there are all these rocks out there. millions probably and we only discovered about 10,000 of them. when you see he a monster rock like this more and a mile and a half wide and coming relatively close it so...