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https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/age-of-easy-money/ TRANSCRIPT MALE NEWSREADER: Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell speaking at an annual economic summit in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. MALE VOICE: Yep, we’re on with him. FEMALE NEWSREADER: Powell and his colleagues at the Fed are under pressure to curb inflation. FEMALE NEWSREADER: Powell could take a harder line, or he could simply play his cards close to the vest. MALE VOICE: Here we go. He’s on the move. MALE NEWSREADER: It’s going to be a tough crowd at Jackson Hole because of the fact that he made a call simply last year that didn’t age well. Now— CHRISTOPHER LEONARD, Author, The Lords of Easy Money: Every year the Federal Reserve holds an economic symposium at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in August. It's sort of like the Oscars of the Fed world. And media comes from all around the world and the Fed chairman gives a keynote speech that gets all the attention. MALE NEWSREADER: All eyes on Jackson Hole this morning. MALE NEWSREADER: He’s giving a speech as central banker to the world. MOHAMED A. EL-ERIAN, Chief economic advisor, Allianz: So Jackson Hole plays a very important role in the central bank community, because you're basically bringing the central bankers of the world and economists to a place to discuss critical issues. So people looked to Jackson Hole to see, is there a reset in monetary policy? FEMALE FINANCIAL REPORTER: The economy has slowed. We’re likely in recession and perhaps going deeper into it. Are they going to keep taking us down this road? Are they going to keep slamming the brakes on rates? Raising 75 basis points until we've got job cuts across the corporate sector? RAGHURAM RAJAN, Fmr. head, Indian Central Bank: Central bankers were saviors post-global financial crisis. This time it was different. The mood was more "for the first time, we're failing." FEMALE REPORTER: Is Powell ready to risk recession? This is the question. MALE SPEAKER: Chair Powell, the floor is yours. Please come to the podium. NOURIEL ROUBINI, Economist: Jackson Hole in 2022 was quite important. JEROME POWELL: Thank you, Peter, and good morning, everyone. NOURIEL ROUBINI: The market were feeling in the summer that maybe the Fed would have a pivot, would stop raising rates and maybe start cutting them. MALE INVESTMENT ADVISER: The market started talking about a Fed pivot. FEMALE REPORTER: —market, so maybe they’ll just ease up a bit. MALE INVESTMENT STRATEGIST: The market is, I think, anticipating that they’re going to blink. JEROME POWELL: Reducing inflation is likely to require a sustained period of below-trend growth. NOURIEL ROUBINI: And what Powell told them in Jackson Hole, he said, "Listen, inflation is still way too high, it's not peaking, it's not going to fall fast enough. And if you guys think that we're going to stop raising rates, or even cutting them, you are a bit delusional." JEROME POWELL: The U.S. economy is clearly slowing from the historically high growth rates of 2021. NEEL KASHKARI, Pres. & CEO, Fed. Reserve Bank of Minneapolis: I think the chair’s objective at Jackson Hole was to deliver a very concise message that, "We know what our job is: Our job is to get inflation back down to 2%, and we're going to do what we need to do to get it back down to 2%." JEROME POWELL: While higher interest rates, slower growth and softer labor market conditions will bring down inflation, they will also bring some pain to households and businesses. These are the unfortunate costs of reducing inflation. But a failure to restore price stability would mean far greater pain. NEEL KASHKARI: His remarks were remarkably brief for a Jackson Hole speech, and that was by design to deliver a very direct message. And I think his message was very effective. FEMALE NEWSREADER: Pain. LARRY SUMMERS: Pain. MALE NEWSREADER: Pain. MALE NEWSREADER: Some big— MALE NEWSREADER: —pain ahead. FEMALE NEWSREADER: Pain for American families. SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN, (D) MA: What he calls “some pain” means putting people out of work. DION RABOUIN, The Wall Street Journal: Jay Powell is not messing around. And that is when the markets reacts and says, “Oh, my God. Things are going to change.” JEROME POWELL: Restoring price stability will likely require maintaining a restrictive policy stance for some time. CHRISTOPHER LEONARD: If the Fed puts us into a higher interest rate world, it will change everything. The financial system globally has been built around extremely low, ultralow interest rates for 10 years. All of these of things that got built up over the last decade are going to have to be dismantled or changed. JEROME POWELL: We will keep at it until we're confident the job is done. Thank you. NOURIEL ROUBINI: We lived in a bubble, in a dream, and this dream in a bubble is bursting. FEMALE NEWSREADER: —as rising interest rates in the U.S. and many other countries are intensifying fears of a recession. JAMES JACOBY: Ever since that Fed meeting at Jackson Hole, we’ve been getting mixed signals about the economy. Is it bound for recession, or is it in a booming recovery? MALE NEWSREADER: An economy with such a strong labor market is not in a recession. JAMES JACOBY: At the center of the debate are the actions of the Federal Reserve, which seems to have our economic fate in its hands. MALE NEWSREADER: The Fed is trying to stop inflation. But is the medicine worse than the disease? JAMES JACOBY: Lately, it’s been raising interest rates at the fastest pace in decades, trying to tamp down on inflation. But for most of the past decade, the Fed was keeping interest rates incredibly low, trying to stimulate the economy, creating what has been called an age of easy money. MALE NEWSREADER: Tonight, the economic alarms are blaring. JAMES JACOBY: For the past two years, I’ve been investigating the Fed and the far-reaching consequences of its easy money policies. THOMAS HOENIG, Pres., Fed. Reserve Bank of Kansas City, 1991-2011: I'm game if you are. JAMES JACOBY: I’m definitely game. I’ve been speaking to current and former Fed officials. Is that really the first time you’re in a suit since COVID? RICHARD W. FISHER, Pres., Fed. Reserve Bank of Dallas, 2005-15: From the waist down. SHEILA BAIR, Chair, FDIC, 2006-11: Can I take my mask off? JAMES JACOBY: Titans of finance. You were thinking what? JIM CHANOS, Founder, Kynikos Associates: I was thinking this is the craziest market I've seen in 40 years. JAMES JACOBY: Those who follow the decision making— CHARLES DUHIGG, The New York Times: None of us think about this because it’s boring, but it’s everything. It touches everything. JAMES JACOBY: —and those who have been hit the hardest by it. FEMALE SPEAKER: It’s like choosing between your rent and your food. JOHN ADEL, Client, Money Management Intl.: They do not understand what everybody's going through. CHAPTER ONE An Emergency Measure JAMES JACOBY: The Fed's easy money experiment traces back to pivotal decisions made over a decade ago in 2008— FEMALE REPORTER: Right now, breaking news here: Stocks all around the world are tanking because— JAMES JACOBY: —when investors, speculators and Wall Street bankers nearly brought down the global economy. MALE FLOOR TRADER: Right? Get on the train, otherwise it's going to leave the station without you. FEMALE FINANCIAL REPORTER: —with Wall Street shaken to its very foundation today. PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: We are in the midst of a serious financial crisis, and the federal government is responding with decisive action. FEMALE REPORTER: The Bush administration— JAMES JACOBY: The president and Congress spent hundreds of billions of dollars to restart the economy, but at the center of the rescue effort was the Federal Reserve. Richard Fisher was the head of the Fed’s bank in Dallas at the time. RICHARD W. FISHER, Pres., Fed. Reserve Bank of Dallas, 2005-15: What the Federal Reserve does is provide the blood supply for the body of our capitalist economy. And what happened in 2008 is all the veins and the capillaries and the arteries collapsed. So every financial function had failed. It had collapsed, and we had to restore them. MALE NEWSREADER: We’re at the precipice of the apocalypse. MALE NEWSREADER: We’re on the edge of the abyss. SEN. BARACK OBAMA, (D) IL: We are in the most serious financial crisis in generations. MALE NEWSREADER: There was nothing but panic yesterday. There's been panic all week. MALE NEWSREADER: The bottom to America’s financial woes appear nowhere in sight. FEMALE NEWSREADER: The banks are still not lending to one another, and as long as that’s not happening, the system remains stuck and imperiled. JAMES JACOBY: In normal times the Fed’s job is to promote employment and keep inflation in check, primarily by raising and lowering short-term interest rates, making borrowing cheaper or more expensive. But amid the crisis, Fed officials decided to do something they hadn’t done in half a century: They began dropping rates, eventually to almost zero. FEMALE FINANCIAL REPORTER: Those massive rate cuts have not been stimulating the economy, so it's the other things— JAMES JACOBY: With Americans still suffering and the banking system on the verge of collapse, Fed officials there at the time told me they felt compelled to go even further. RICHARD W. FISHER: And then the question was, "What else can we do?" And the committee came up with the idea of quantitative easing. FEMALE NEWSREADER: Quantitative easing. What in the world is it that? FEMALE FINANCIAL REPORTER: Quantitative easing. That’s just a Greek term to a lot of people. FEMALE NEWSREADER: A lot of people want to know what they’re going to say about what we call quantitative easing. JAMES JACOBY: Quantitative easing, or QE, was championed by Ben Bernanke, then the Fed chairman. BEN BERNANKE: The Federal Reserve is committed to using all available tools to stimulate economic activity and to improve financial market functioning. JAMES JACOBY: QE was an experimental way for the Fed to inject money into the financial system and lower long-term interest rates. RICHARD W. FISHER: It's almost like alchemy. You can create money out of thin air if you're at the central bank. So creating more money puts more money in the banking system, put more money out there for the economy to take it and put it to work and to grow and to restore itself. BEN BERNANKE: The Federal Reserve has been putting the pedal to the metal. So we're doing everything we can to support the economy, and we hope that that's going to get us going next year sometime. JAMES JACOBY: Their hope was that the new money would help shore up the failing banks and get them lending again. It would become the heart of their easy money policies. THOMAS HOENIG: It was an emergency measure. I mean, the economy was imploding. No one would lend to anyone. There was no ability to borrow. The economy was going to be a stop dead. JAMES JACOBY: Thomas Hoenig was the president of the Kansas City Fed and initially supported the quantitative easing plan. THOMAS HOENIG: These are trying times, and as you just heard, there is much to be done as we try and work through this financial crisis. When you have a crisis, that's when you want your central bank to be willing to put cash in, and so to avoid a major depression, where everything just stops, you provide the cash. So I agreed with, yes, we need to provide this money on the expectation that once we got through the crisis, we would go back to a more normal policy. ANDREW HUSZAR, Fed. Reserve Bank of NY, 2001-11: Again, you can tell me if I’m giving too long answers or what have you. JAMES JACOBY: The task of managing most of the program went to Andrew Huszar, a former Fed official who was then working on Wall Street. ANDREW HUSZAR: I realized very quickly what I was being asked. I was being asked if I would manage the largest financial markets intervention by a government in world history. JAMES JACOBY: The Fed began creating hundreds of billions of dollars to buy things like mortgage-backed securities and government bonds from banks and financial institutions. ANDREW HUSZAR: This was a $5 trillion market. This was the largest private bond market in the world, and the Fed had never once before bought a mortgage bond in its history. And basically in the fall of 2008, it announced that it would buy basically 25% of the entire market within 15 months. JAMES JACOBY: And that was your job to do that purchasing? ANDREW HUSZAR: That was my job, to think about how to get the program done. SARAH BLOOM RASKIN, Fed. Reserve Board of Governors, 2010-14: Many of these tools had not been tried before. They were definitely like "break the glass" kind of tools. Like, what are we going to do in order to restart the economy here? JAMES JACOBY: Sarah Bloom Raskin joined the board of governors while QE was already underway. SARAH BLOOM RASKIN: As QE began, it showed great promise. We started to see that people's sense of economic well-being was ticking up somewhat. People were finding jobs. People were finding homes. The foreclosure rate had slowed. So there was a sense that something was working. Now how it was working was a different question altogether. MALE NYSE FLOOR TRADER: Things are not as bad. We’re getting better. And things will get better. There’s no question about it. SARAH BLOOM RASKIN: So view it as an experimental drug that actually is doing some good things, but nobody quite knows how or why at the moment. JAMES JACOBY: The financial sector had begun to stabilize, but there were early signs that not everything would go according to plan. MALE NEWSREADER: The banking industry fat cats still aren't lending money. MALE NEWSREADER: Well, the big banks aren’t lending. JAMES JACOBY: Despite the money the Fed was pouring into the banks, they still weren’t back to lending. MALE SPEAKER: The government's not doing anything to help small business, and the banks are sitting on their butts and they’re still not lending money. JAMES JACOBY: Instead, they were taking a lot of the money and investing it themselves. MALE ECONOMIST: The banking sector is broken. It is not lending to small business. Somebody’s got to get the money there. The government is the actor in this case. JAMES JACOBY: You were injecting money into the banks, more than a trillion dollars worth at that point, and what were the banks doing with that money? ANDREW HUSZAR: The Fed's idea was the banks would be taking that money and lending it, effectively, at lower interest rates. What the banks were doing instead was that they were just investing in the same bonds that the Fed was buying. They were taking that money and they were turning around and buying the same mortgage-backed securities and other bonds. Why? Because the Fed had made very clear that its goal was to drive up the price of financial assets. And so Wall Street turned around and thought, "Why would I go through the effort of making a mortgage when I can just press a button and buy millions, if not billions, dollars of bonds and ride that trade, as the price of those assets are very consciously being inflated by the Fed?" JAMES JACOBY: Huszar grew increasingly disappointed by the program and would eventually leave in 2011. ANDREW HUSZAR: I hadn't seen the benefits accrue to the average American, and I wasn't seeing larger structural reform in favor of the average American. I began to question whether it was my role any more to be at the Fed. JAMES JACOBY: Were you seeing that the banks were gaming the Fed? That they were in some ways taking advantage of this program that was intended to help the real economy? ANDREW HUSZAR: I think you could say they were gaming the Fed, or I think you could just say that they have a different mind, and they're not part of the Fed, and they have their own interests. You know, it's sort of like the Aesop's fable of the scorpion and the frog. On some level, it's in their nature to do what's in their nature, and their nature is to make the most money possible in the quickest way possible. And just because the Fed wanted to do something, and wanted to help the average American, it doesn't necessarily mean that Wall Street has the same interests. CHAPTER TWO Volatility and Anger PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Twenty billion dollars worth of bonuses. It is shameful. MALE NEWSREADER: Are these executives greedy or stupid? Personally, I am stumped for an alternative word. BARACK OBAMA: There will be time for them to make profits, and there will be time for them to get bonuses. Now is not that time. MALE VOICE: It’s socialism for the rich. JAMES JACOBY: By the end of 2009 the banks were back to making money, and paying themselves record bonuses, while the real economy lagged. MALE ECONOMIST: Washington loaned them money at cut rates, so our thanks is they’re going to stuff it in their pockets even as many Americans are suffering from unemployment and reduced wages. MALE VOICE: People absolutely ought to be outraged. I mean, these guys just don’t get it. JAMES JACOBY: The inflation rate was well below the Fed’s target of 2%, signaling weak demand. Unemployment had shot up, and foreclosures were continuing across the country. MALE PROTESTER: Banks got bailed out, we got sold out! SARAH BLOOM RASKIN: People had lost homes. Household net worth had plummeted. It really wasn't an inclusive recovery. It was a recovery that benefited only portions of the economy. FEMALE PROTESTER: I’m here to support all of the people who want their taxpayer dollars back, me included. SARAH BLOOM RASKIN: There was a sense that the banking sector, the financial sector benefited primarily, and not so much everybody else. And that had a political taste to it which became the basis, I think, for a lot of anger, and really set the stage for the next chapter in our country's political history. MALE PROTESTER: We have you surrounded. Come out with the Constitution intact, you usurpers! FEMALE REPORTER: Demonstrators opposed to what they call out-of-control government spending begin a series of rallies this afternoon. JAMES JACOBY: That resentment helped give rise to the Tea Party— PROTESTERS [singing]: We ain’t going away! JAMES JACOBY: —fueled by the belief that government spending and bailouts had been out of control and ordinary people weren’t seeing any benefits. MALE PROTESTER: Hedge fund bankers, Bear Stearns—they didn’t build this country. Workers like us did. CHRISTOPHER LEONARD: The only political constant in 2010 was volatility and anger. FEMALE PROTESTER: Hell no, we won’t go! FEMALE PROTESTER: Nobama, Nobama! CHRISTOPHER LEONARD: And there was a real loss of faith in the political and economic system. And that manifests as the Tea Party. SARAH PALIN: Tea Party Americans, you’re winning! You’re winning! JAMES JACOBY: They were especially outraged by the $800 billion stimulus package that President Obama and Congress had passed in 2009 to get the economy going again. PROTESTERS [chanting]: Can you hear us now? Can you hear us now? CHRISTOPHER LEONARD: The entire principle of the Tea Party, the entire platform was to stop Washington, D.C., from intervening. MALE PROTESTER: This is just the beginning. CHRISTOPHER LEONARD: It was an agenda of "no." SEN. RAND PAUL, (R) KY: We’ve come to take our government back. JAMES JACOBY: As Republicans swept the 2010 midterm elections, aided by the Tea Party’s growing influence— SEN. RON JOHNSON, (R) WI: We need to restore fiscal sanity to this nation. JAMES JACOBY: —the prospects for Congress and the White House working together to pass another stimulus bill were growing dim. REP. CHIP CRAVAACK, (R) MN: Let this serve as a warning to Congress: We don’t work for you, you work for us. JAMES JACOBY: Into the political vacuum stepped the Federal Reserve. Was it palpable that the Fed was sort of the only game in town here? RICHARD W. FISHER: Yes. The fact was we were carrying the load all by ourselves. CHAPTER THREE Unintended Consequences FEMALE NEWSREADER: Resurgent Republicans racked up huge gains Tuesday. MALE REPORTER: A devastating night for the Democrats that fundamentally changes American politics. BARACK OBAMA: People are frustrated, they're deeply frustrated, with the pace of our economic recovery. JAMES JACOBY: The Fed wasted no time. The day after the midterm elections, they took a dramatic step: another round of QE, not just to stabilize the economy, but to boost it. CHRISTOPHER LEONARD: What happened on Nov. 3, 2010, represents a step change in the Fed’s role in our economy, when the Fed changes from a central bank that manages the currency to the primary engine of economic growth in America. Whatever your philosophy is—small government, limited government, big government that hires people to go out and build roads to stimulate growth—whatever it is, it's supposed to be our democratic institutions that do that, not the central bank. JAMES JACOBY: You're basically saying that because our democratic institutions are so paralyzed and there's so much political dysfunction, that we as a society, we as a country have become overly reliant on the Fed to run things? CHRISTOPHER LEONARD: Totally. Economic affairs. I think one of the most important things to think about is that our democratic institutions in America are becoming less and less capable and less and less effective. I think that point is almost undeniable. So what we're doing in this country is we're relying on our nondemocratic institutions to take up the burden, like the central bank in economic affairs. Which leads you to the surreal place where we are today, where this committee of 12 people is making these decisions that could very well plunge our economy into a deep, deep, deep recession and cause financial crisis. JAMES JACOBY: In the early days of the easy money experiment, Fed Chair Bernanke promoted his plan saying it would create a wealth effect—that boosting the stock market would make people feel wealthier and start spending again. MALE REPORTER: There’s no doubt that there is quite a bit of opposition. JAMES JACOBY: But he was met with some skepticism and concern that the decision risked causing runaway inflation. He went on television to push back on the critics. BEN BERNANKE: What they're doing is they’re looking at some of the risks and uncertainties associated with doing this policy action. What I think they’re not doing is looking at the risk of not acting. FEMALE NEWSREADER: QE2 has become a punching bag for everyone from top-tier economists to Sarah Palin. JAMES JACOBY: Inside the Fed itself, Thomas Hoenig was sounding alarms about the long-term consequences. FEMALE REPORTER: You are the one member of the Fed that has been critical of 0% interest rates. Why? JAMES JACOBY: Over the course of 2010 he argued against Bernanke’s plan at every meeting and cast the lone dissenting vote eight times in a row. THOMAS HOENIG: It was difficult, but this was fundamental. And so I really did think that it was a wrong policy, and I didn't want to be associated with it, so I voted no. JAMES JACOBY: Did you think it was a radical policy? THOMAS HOENIG: I most certainly did think it was a radical policy, and I think most people did. It was meant to be radical. And so my concern was we had come through a crisis and we provided the liquidity necessary to come through it and we were on the other side of that crisis. The economy was recovering. And yet we were engaging in a deliberate effort to have easy money. JAMES JACOBY: What were you most concerned about, if easy money continued? THOMAS HOENIG: I thought that it was unnecessary to do. I thought it brought new dangers. When you keep interest rates at zero and keep pumping money into the economy, you favor the debtor and you penalize the saver. You are saving for nothing. I mean, you get nothing for that. And if you are a borrower, well, life is good. You borrow for nearly nothing. And so you actually encourage speculation. You encourage additional risk-taking. In fact, that's one of the reasons they did quantitative easing, was to encourage greater risk-taking. CHAPTER FOUR Dangerously Addicted FEMALE NEWSREADER: The stock market rally on Wall Street today pushes the Dow to its highest level in nearly nine months— MALE NEWSREADER: That figure includes activity fueled by recent government stimulus programs. JAMES JACOBY: The Fed’s quantitative easing set off what would become the longest bull run in the stock market’s history. MALE NEWSREADER: Investors took the good news and, well, they basically ran with it. JAMES JACOBY: By design, QE effectively lowered long-term interest rates, making safer investments like bonds less attractive and riskier investments like stocks more attractive. RANA FOROOHAR, Associate editor, Financial Times: The Fed goes out and buys certain kinds of assets, and it kind of puts a floor under the market, and it artificially pushes up prices. And when I say artificial, what I really mean is nothing changed at Apple or IBM or GE. It wasn't like somebody invented the new new thing, post-2008, but a lot more investors got bullish in the stock market, so the stock prices of those companies go up. But what's really happening? Nothing's changed. Nothing new has been invented. It’s a sugar high. It’s like drinking a Coke instead of having a meat-and-potatoes meal. FEMALE NEWSREADER: You’ve got oil up. You’ve got gold up. You’ve got copper up. You’ve got stocks up. Stock futures are up. All because of central banks and the stimulus they’ve been putting into the economy. JAMES JACOBY: On Wall Street, no one seemed to mind. The stock market rally continued. FEMALE FINANCIAL REPORTER: The old saying is "don’t fight the Fed." FEMALE FINANCIAL REPORTER: Don’t fight the Fed. MALE FINANCIAL REPORTER: Don't fight the Fed. MALE FINANCIAL REPORTER: Rule number one as a young trader you’re taught is "don’t fight the Fed." FEMALE FINANCIAL COMMENTATOR: I don’t know what the hangover’s going to look like down the road from all this extraordinary stimulus, but for now the markets love it. Don’t fight the Fed. MOHAMED A. EL-ERIAN: Don’t fight the Fed. The one institution that has a printing press in the basement, and there's no limits to how much it can use it. That is what makes the Fed such an influential player in the marketplace. JAMES JACOBY: Mohamed El-Erian remembers it well. He was running the largest bond fund in the world at the time and helped advise the Fed on its QE experiment. MOHAMED A. EL-ERIAN: Keep an eye on the Treasury market— JAMES JACOBY: He shared with them his concerns that the markets were becoming dangerously addicted to the Fed’s easy money. MALE NEWSREADER: To taper or not to taper. JAMES JACOBY: His prediction played out in 2013 when after multiple rounds of quantitative easing totaling more than $2 trillion, Bernanke signaled the Fed might start to taper off. BEN BERNANKE: If we see continued improvement and we have confidence that that is going to be sustained, then we could, in the next few meetings, we could take a step down in our pace of purchases. MOHAMED A. EL-ERIAN: I was on the trade floor. I remember Chairman Bernanke saying that he would taper. First we had to figure out "what does taper mean?" And the minute people realized what "taper" meant, which is that the Fed would step back from buying all these securities, and even though the Fed said it's going to be gradual, it's going to be measured, the markets had a massive tantrum. FEMALE FINANCIAL REPORTER: The market selling off after Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said that the central bank could start tapering its economic stimulus measures— RICHARD W. FISHER: It shows you how addicted the markets are. The markets went into a fit, became dysfunctional. It was known as the "taper tantrum." FEMALE FINANCIAL REPORTER: Well, we all know it: When Ben Bernanke talks, and the Federal Reserve speaks, the markets listen. MOHAMED A. EL-ERIAN: Markets are like little kids. They want candy, and the minute you try to take the candy away, they have a tantrum. SARAH BLOOM RASKIN: You had big Wall Street reaction, right? You have extreme volatility where Wall Street says, "Whoa, whoa! No, no, no! Unacceptable!" and values plunge. And of course the Fed doesn't like that. Nobody likes that. That's a precursor to instability, right? But it put the Fed in a real bind. MALE ANNOUNCER: Chairman Bernanke. MOHAMED A. EL-ERIAN: And Chairman Bernanke had to go in a conference in Boston and say, "No, no, no, we're not tapering." BEN BERNANKE: You can only conclude that highly accommodative monetary policy for the foreseeable future is what's needed in the U.S. economy. RANA FOROOHAR: Every single time the Fed would start talking about, "OK, we're going to maybe taper back faster, or we're going to think about raising rates." Boom! Stocks would correct, because stocks wanted that easy money dopamine hit. JAMES JACOBY: Bernanke’s successor, Janet Yellen, had better luck the following year. She was able to pause the quantitative easing part of the easy money policy without a tantrum, in part by suggesting she’d maintain the Fed’s massive balance sheet of assets it had bought and to keep short-term interest rates low. JANET YELLEN: The FOMC reaffirmed its view that the current zero to one-quarter percent target range for the federal funds rate remains appropriate. JAMES JACOBY: The Fed justified its actions in part because the fears about runaway inflation hadn’t materialized, and in fact it was running below its target of 2% because economic growth was still low. But Yellen’s partial easy money pullback didn’t dampen concerns and criticisms about the ill effects of the Fed’s policies. CHAPTER FIVE Who Owns the Stocks JOSEPH STIGLITZ, Chief economist, The Roosevelt Institute: So you're doing a documentary on the Fed and monetary policy? JAMES JACOBY: We are trying to. JOSEPH STIGLITZ: OK [laughs]. JAMES JACOBY: Are we insane? JOSEPH STIGLITZ: No, no, no. I think it's a great idea. JAMES JACOBY: OK. Joseph Stiglitz is one of the most well-known economists in America and a winner of the Nobel Prize. JOSEPH STIGLITZ: The intention of the Fed was to stimulate aggregate demand. JAMES JACOBY: He told me that while the Fed had done some good, he worried at the time that by stoking the stock market so aggressively, it was exacerbating economic inequality. JOSEPH STIGLITZ: The main thing I was concerned about was that the way they were trying to revive the economy was a kind of trickle-down economics. The way quantitative easing works is that it's a lowering of the interest rates. That leads stocks to go up. And so who owns the stocks? It's the people in the top. Not just the top 10%, 1%, one-tenth of 1%. And so it increases enormously wealth inequality. We had had increasing inequality really since the late '70s, and this was putting that on steroids. JAMES JACOBY: What sort of response did you get from folks at the Fed to what you were saying at the time? JOSEPH STIGLITZ: "Our mandate is to do what we can to increase employment, to use the tools that we have, and that's what we're doing." JAMES JACOBY: I heard a similar response when I raised these issues with the president of the Minneapolis Fed, Neel Kashkari, in March of 2021. He was the only current Fed official who agreed to speak to us. NEEL KASHKARI: The Fed has been on a mission—I've been on a mission—to put Americans back to work and to help them get their wages up, especially for those lowest-income Americans. And if it has had some effect on Wall Street, to me, the trade-off is well worth it if we can put Americans back to work so that they can put food on the table, they can take care of themselves. That is profoundly beneficial to society. JAMES JACOBY: One of the things that we have seen in this country is a widening wealth gap. The question is what role, if any, the Fed has played in widening that wealth gap? NEEL KASHKARI: Well, this is a great point, and I'm glad you raised it. Most people who make this argument ignore the fact that for many Americans, they don't own a house. They don't own stocks. They don't have a 401(k). The most valuable asset they have is their job. So by putting people back to work and helping to boost their wages, we are actually making their most valuable asset more valuable. BARACK OBAMA: Middle-class economics works. FEMALE NEWSREADER: President Obama today in Wisconsin fired up over jobs. Another 223,000 added in June. Unemployment at its lowest— JAMES JACOBY: In fact, by 2015, the employment was heading toward record lows. But critics I spoke to said the Fed’s focus on jobs was missing the full picture. I mean, Neel Kashkari told me that a job is a great asset. That when I— KAREN PETROU, Author, Engine of Inequality: [Laughs] His may be. I'm not so sure that that's true for the folks working three jobs behind the counter at the supermarket. Sorry, Neel, I think that is an elitist assumption of what labor income is good for. JAMES JACOBY: Karen Petrou is an unlikely critic of the central bank. We’ve got Pete here— KAREN PETROU: Go lie down. Down. There we go. JAMES JACOBY: She spent her career inside the financial system, advising banks and big investors. MALE CAMERA OPERATOR: Interview [inaudible], take five marker. JAMES JACOBY: 2015 to 2020 was actually considered a time of recovery. Unemployment was getting to record lows and there was a kind of conventional wisdom that the economy was in a good place at that point in time. So, you disagreed with that? KAREN PETROU: I did, because most Americans disagreed with that. The majority of Americans said they were economically anxious. Significant percentages of people who were in the statistical middle class were skipping medical treatments because they didn't think they could afford them. Forty percent of the United States didn't have $400 in a rainy day fund and they were at risk of imminent financial peril if a tire blew. That's not a good place. JAMES JACOBY: What about this idea that there was record unemployment? KAREN PETROU: Record unemployment was judged the way conventionally the Fed chooses to judge it, not by taking into account the people sitting out working because they couldn't get enough wages with their jobs to make going to work pay. Employment was fine, by at least some numbers. Wages weren't, and people work to eat. They don't work because of some noble ideal. JAMES JACOBY: So just to understand, what was wrong with the models that the Fed was using in order to judge the success of their programs? KAREN PETROU: Paul Krugman, a well-known economist, has a great example. You've got four guys in a bar, each one of whom is making $60,000 a year. Jeff Bezos walks into the bar, and he's making two gazillion dollars. Does that mean that the four guys in the bar are doing any better? No, it doesn't. It's distorting statistics. You have to look at how much each person has, not at what the averages are, to understand what's going on in the economy. And when four out of five guys in the bar are not doing well, the country isn't doing well. CHAPTER SIX A Missed Opportunity JAMES JACOBY: The growing sense that the system was not working for the poor and middle class became a central theme of Donald Trump’s populist campaign. DONALD TRUMP: Sadly, the American dream is dead. CHRISTOPHER LEONARD: When you have a society with the middle struggling and the rich realizing almost unimaginable gains, it starts to corrode the civic foundation. DONALD TRUMP: We have to clean up the country. Our country is a mess. CHRISTOPHER LEONARD: People start to feel like this cliche you hear all the time: that the system is rigged. MALE TRUMP SUPPORTER: Like he says, I think the system is rigged. MALE TRUMP SUPPORTER: You know what? He’s just speaking what we’re all thinking. But he’s saying it in the public domain. He’s saying it in the political domain. CHRISTOPHER LEONARD: You know, the fact that a huge portion of Americans were willing to vote for a president like Donald Trump, whose entire campaign seemed to be burning down the system— DONALD TRUMP: We are going to drain the swamp. CHRISTOPHER LEONARD: —that doesn’t just happen in a vacuum. CROWD [chanting]: Drain the swamp! Drain the swamp! DONALD TRUMP: We are going to fix our inner cities, and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals. JAMES JACOBY: It was a moment of potential for the Fed’s easy money policies. Trump promised to take advantage of the low interest rates and create jobs by investing in new infrastructure. DONALD TRUMP: We will create millions of new jobs and make millions of American dreams come true. JAMES JACOBY: But once in office, the political paralysis in Washington only intensified— FEMALE VOICE: Congress simply hasn’t been willing to find the amount of money necessary to do it. JAMES JACOBY: —making big economic investments all but impossible. RANA FOROOHAR: There just wasn't the political cohesion to push through these major programs. And you saw a lot of op-eds, by a lot of economists, and even Fed bankers themselves, after the first or second, or certainly third and fourth round, of quantitative easing. They were saying, "Please, give us some fiscal policy," meaning "Give us some government action to direct this money to the right places. We can't do all this alone. We can keep rates low, we trying to keep rates low here, trying to keep confidence high. But we can't make you spend on a bridge or revamp a school." JAMES JACOBY: Are you saying that there was sort of a squandered opportunity here? RANA FOROOHAR: A hundred percent it was a missed opportunity. We didn't use the cheapest money in memory—I don't want to say in history, but certainly in the last several decades. We didn't use that opportunity to spend on the things that would have been almost free, in terms of debt. We really missed something that now will be more costly, because now that interests rates are going up—I still think, for example, we should do more infrastructure spending. That we should revamp education. But it's going to be more costly to do it now. PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It’s the largest—I always say the most massive, but it's the largest tax cut in the history of our country. And reform, but tax cut. JAMES JACOBY: The marquee legislative achievement of the Trump administration would instead be a tax cut that further boosted the markets and deepened economic inequality. DONALD TRUMP: That’s your bill. JAMES JACOBY: The jury is still out on whether it contributed to the economic growth that had started to tick up during the Trump presidency. But to some inside the Fed, it seemed like an ideal time to pull back on the easy money experiment. One of them was Jerome Powell. CHAPTER SEVEN The Fed Blinked DONALD TRUMP: It is my pleasure and my honor to announce my nomination of Jerome Powell to be the next chairman of the Federal Reserve. Congratulations. JAMES JACOBY: Trump appointed Powell in late 2017. CHRISTOPHER LEONARD: Jay Powell is a profoundly competent, smart guy who has spent his entire career at the nexus of big money and big government. JEROME POWELL: In the years since the global financial crisis ended, our economy has made substantial progress toward full recovery. CHRISTOPHER LEONARD: A self-acknowledged Republican. He's a conservative. He tends to embrace the deregulatory view of the economy. And he's also a Wall Street guy, who came up through the business of corporate debt and deal-making. MALE FINANCIAL COMMENTATOR: The Fed is seen continuing to raise interest rates going forward. JAMES JACOBY: The Fed had already begun raising rates and reversing QE. They’d call it quantitative tightening, or QT. Powell took office eager to accelerate the effort. JEROME POWELL: The really extraordinarily accommodative low interest rates that we needed when the economy was quite weak, we don’t need those anymore. They’re not appropriate anymore. JAMES JACOBY: Once again the market threw a tantrum. MALE NEWSREADER: The Dow closing down more than 500 points today. FEMALE FINANCIAL COMMENTATOR: A brutal week in the market. The Dow and the S&P now on track for their worst December since the Great Depression. CHRISTOPHER LEONARD: The global financial system short circuits. MALE FINANCIAL COMMENTATOR: The decline will accelerate if Jay Powell doesn’t walk things back. JAMES JACOBY: The president threw a tantrum, too. DONALD TRUMP: I think the Fed has gone crazy. It’s a correction that I think is caused by the Federal Reserve. If the Fed knew what it was doing, they would lower rates and they would stop quantitative tightening. MALE NEWSREADER: The president has been attacking the Fed chair on Twitter very often for raising interest rates. FEMALE NEWSREADER: —with the Fed's decision to raise interest rates. He suggested it would hurt the economy. MALE FINANCIAL REPORTER: In a tweet, he said that quantitative tightening is a killer, should have done the exact opposite. JAMES JACOBY: Powell would change course. FEMALE NEWSREADER: The Federal Reserve cut a key short-term interest rate today after raising it as recently as December. DION RABOUIN: You see this complete reversal and what a lot of investors and economists saw as a capitulation to financial markets. Financial markets don't like this, so the Fed's going to reverse course. And that has defined Chair Powell ever since then. MALE NEWSREADER: A tricky balancing act for Chairman Powell. He’ll now face criticism that the Fed has bowed to pressure from the White House or Wall Street or both, sacrificing the central bank's precious independence. JIM CHANOS, Founder, Kynikos Associates: The Fed blinked, and the Fed reversed course when the market was down 20% and went from tightening policy to easing policy. And it became very clear to the market that saving the stock market was now one of the Fed mandates, and I think that had really ominous ramifications for the future. CHAPTER EIGHT A Giant Bloodsucker JAMES JACOBY: By 2019, the Fed’s easy money experiment had been going on for a decade. MALE FINANCIAL REPORTER: The Fed’s job isn't to help the president of the United States. JAMES JACOBY: What had started out as an emergency measure to save the economy had become the status quo. MALE FINANCIAL REPORTER: Yes, quantitative easing is there, but it’s a tool you don’t want to overdo. JAMES JACOBY: And it was deepening the concerns about how the Fed was fueling troubling trends. Taking advantage of the Fed’s low rates, private equity firms had been buying up huge swaths of the economy with borrowed money— MALE AUCTIONEER: A hundred and ten thousand, 128,000. MALE REPORTER: For multimillion-dollar private equity firms, this is a bargain hunt. JAMES JACOBY: —concentrating wealth and ownership of everything from houses to hospitals. BLACKSTONE SPOKESMAN: Across Blackstone, we own a range of things. So SeaWorld, Busch Gardens, Birds Eye Foods, Michaels Stores, Hilton and Waldorf. What we like to do is come in, buy either real estate or companies. We see an opportunity to grow something faster, to invest capital, fix whatever that is that's broken, and then sell it. JAMES JACOBY: The Fed’s policies had also been fueling a frenzy in Silicon Valley— MALE REPORTER: WeWork has announced it’s received a massive $4.4 billion investment from SoftBank Group. JAMES JACOBY: —leading to all sorts of excesses— MALE NEWSREADER: Venture capitalists pumped nearly half a billion dollars into the food delivery start-up industry. FEMALE NEWSREADER: Airbnb is now valued at $10 billion, more than big hotels chains, including Hyatt and Wyndham. JAMES JACOBY: —and enabling certain tech companies to disrupt and dominate entire industries without ever turning a profit. FEMALE FINANCIAL REPORTER: WeWork is saying its total opportunity is $3 trillion dollars. I mean, that’s 3.5% of the entire world’s GDP. JAMES JACOBY: But perhaps the most destabilizing consequence to the economy was how the Fed’s low interest rates had been incentivizing public companies to take on more and more debt. MALE FINANCIAL REPORTER: Valuations are generally elevated, especially corporate debt. MALE FINANCIAL COMMENTATOR: We have flagged the rise in corporate debt. FEMALE FINANCIAL REPORTER: We have entirely too much corporate debt out there. JAMES JACOBY: I saw numerous studies and reports detailing the extent of the debt and how even marquee companies were becoming so leveraged their credit ratings plummeted. The Fed had hoped that companies would put all that borrowed money to good use and invest in their workforce and their infrastructure. But in reality, it played out differently. FEMALE NEWSREADER: Buybacks. MALE NEWSREADER: Buying back stock. FEMALE NEWSREADER: Stock buybacks. FEMALE NEWSREADER: Stock buybacks robbing the American worker. JAMES JACOBY: Companies were often borrowing money to buy back their own stock, making the remaining shares more valuable and the prices higher. DION RABOUIN: As a corporation you realize all that matters is the stock price. So what do we have to do to increase the stock price? And more often that is buying back the stock. So it used to be the Fed would lower interest rates. Businesses would then take on more debt. They would use that debt to hire more workers, build more machines and more factories. Now what happens is the Federal Reserve lowers interest rates, businesses use that to go out and borrow more money, but they use that money to buy back stock and invest in technology that will eliminate workers and reduce employee headcounts. They use that money to give the CEO and other corporate officers big bonuses and then eventually issue more debt and buy back more stock. So it's this endless cycle of things that are designed to increase the stock price rather than improve the actual company. MALE FINANCIAL COMMENTATOR: GE just authorized a $50 billion stock buyback. JAMES JACOBY: The numbers were astounding: More than $6 trillion in corporate buybacks during this easy money decade after the financial crisis. MALE FINANCIAL COMMENTATOR: Fifty billion dollar stock buyback. That makes a big deal, big difference to the stock price. SHEILA BAIR, Chair, FDIC, 2006-11: Buybacks were an embarrassment, and so it’s just another example of things that used to be viewed as kind of "ew" just going mainstream. JAMES JACOBY: Sheila Bair, a former top banking regulator, was issuing public warnings at the time that the Fed was incentivizing bad behavior on Wall Street despite its best intentions. SHEILA BAIR: I can't fault the companies so much, because this interest rate environment creates very strong economic incentives to do exactly what they're doing. It's hard to create a new product. It's hard to come up with a new idea for a service. It's hard to build a plant and hire people and run the organization. It's real easy to issue some debt and pay it out to your shareholders to goose your share price. That's real easy to do, but it doesn't create real wealth. It doesn't create real opportunity. It doesn't create jobs. It doesn't improve the labor market. But it's just another example of how these very low interest rates have really distorted economic activity and frankly been a drag on our economic growth, not a benefit. FEMALE NEWSREADER: Warren Buffett likes Apple’s buybacks. MALE NEWSREADER: Well, why wouldn’t he? He’s a shareholder, and they’re buying back $100 billion in stock. RANA FOROOHAR: When you get an age of easy money like what we've seen, you get a financialized economy that's really more in service to itself. So, most of what it's doing is buying and selling existing assets rather than helping real businesses and real people make real investments. But one of the things that's so diabolical, I would say, about easy money and our financialized economy in general, is that we're all in it. We're all part of this Faustian bargain of pretending that there's something wonderful happening in the real economy, when really it's just Wall Street going up. But we all kind of want the market to go up, because we're in it, with our pension funds, and with our 401(k)s. So everybody's money is kind of helping to push this whole cycle along. JAMES JACOBY: Even some of the largest beneficiaries of this trend told me it made them uncomfortable, like legendary investor Jeremy Grantham. JEREMY GRANTHAM, Co-founder, GMO LLC: In my career in America, the percentage of GDP that goes to finance has gone from 3 1/2 to 8 1/2 [laughs]. We're—In a way, we're like a giant bloodsucker, and we have more than doubled in size and sucking more than twice the blood out of the rest of the economy. And we do not generate any widgets. We do not generate any real increase in income. We are just a cost. JAMES JACOBY: When you say "we," you mean you and other members of the financial community have been this kind of bloodsucker on the economy? Is that what you're saying? JEREMY GRANTHAM: Yes. Collectively we fulfill a completely necessary service, but what we have done is created layers upon layers of more and more convoluted, expensive financial instruments. And that's what makes all the profits for the financial industry. It's taken a lot of ingenuity and salesmanship to make this happen, and a lot of lobbying in Congress, etc., etc., and we have imposed on the rest of the economy the idea that banking and finance are utterly important at all times. If you do anything wrong to us, the entire economy will collapse in ragged disarray. JAMES JACOBY: Corporate buybacks. The elevation of corporate debt. How was that viewed by you and others at the Fed? NEEL KASHKARI: Something we pay a lot of attention to. But when companies are buying back their stock, one of the things they're telling us is, "We don't have profitable places to invest, and it's easier for us just to buy back our stock." That's concerning in terms of the future of our economy, but that's not because of the Fed. So we pay attention to it, it really matters, but in my view, we don't—It's not something we control. JAMES JACOBY: Kashkari and others have pointed out that it’s the job of Congress and regulators to address some of these concerning trends. And when we sat down in 2021, he was quick to dispute the criticism that the Fed’s policies had really just been boosting financial markets and helping Wall Street. We hear it all the time from Wall Street people, that basically that prices are completely untethered from some fundamental reality. There is this idea on Wall Street that the Fed has our back, and that because you may have well-intentioned policies that are trying to get everybody to work, there is this side effect, this unintended side effect, of just kind of really helping the rich. NEEL KASHKARI: That argument ignores the benefit to the poor. And for sure, if you're going to ignore the benefit to the poor, then we're only helping the rich. But of course, that's an incomplete analysis. When you actually sit down and say, "Well, let's go through the trade-offs of the choices that the Fed has," whether it's interest rates or it's quantitative easing, it's not just about Wall Street. It's not just about asset prices. It's also about thinking about the men and women in America who are trying to find work and who want to have higher earnings and who deserve higher earnings. If we are benefiting them by helping them find work and helping them have higher wages, I will take that trade-off. CHAPTER NINE A Source of Instability JAMES JACOBY: Beyond the debate over the effects on Main Street, there were increasing concerns about the risks on Wall Street. What would happen to all those companies that had gone deep into debt—and their investors—if there was a downturn? But some of the most dire warnings were about a largely unregulated sector of the financial world that had become a key player in all the borrowing going on. MOHAMED A. EL-ERIAN: Finance was getting bigger and bigger and riskier and riskier. And then there was something else going on that was only noticed later on. The risk had migrated to what we call the non-banks, to the financial system that are not banks, and it had morphed, it had changed. And in doing so, the ability to understand what was going on came down, because the non-banks are not supervised and regulated as well as the banks. The phrase that was used at the time was "shadow banking." That there were banking activities happening, but they were happening in the shadows, in the shadows of the banks themselves. These are the asset management companies, these are the hedge funds. These are not well-regulated, but suddenly become systemically important. JAMES JACOBY: When it comes to shadow banks, what was your big concern? LEV MENAND, Economist, Fed. Reserve Bank of NY, 2016-17: The core of the problem of the shadow banking system is that it's extremely fragile. JAMES JACOBY: Lev Menand, who’d been an economic adviser to the Fed and Treasury Department, was warning that even though Congress had imposed regulations on big banks after the financial crisis, shadow banks were largely untouched—and they were endangering the whole system. LEV MENAND: Anybody who is an investor in a shadow bank, who has their money in a shadow bank instead of a real bank, is going to have an incentive to withdraw in the face of any uncertainty. So little economic shocks that cause asset prices to fall have the potential to trigger runs and panics. And so what we've done is, by allowing this shadow banking system to develop, is we've inserted a source of instability in our entire economic system that doesn't need to be there and that has the potential of throwing us all off course. JEROME POWELL: Let me start by saying that my colleagues and I strongly— JAMES JACOBY: That potential instability posed by the shadow banking system was on the Fed’s radar. REP. JIM HIMES, (D) CT: How are you thinking about potential risk bubbling up in the broader shadow banking system? JEROME POWELL: This is a project that the Financial Stability Oversight Council is working on now. And also, the Financial Stability Board globally is looking carefully at leveraged lending. And we think it's something that requires serious monitoring. JAMES JACOBY: But by the end of 2019, little action had been taken by the Fed, financial regulators or Congress to rein in the shadow banks and other growing risks. The system remained vulnerable to a shock. It would arrive in early 2020. CHAPTER 10 Whatever It Takes MALE NEWSREADER: A preliminary investigation into a mysterious pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan, China, has identified a previously unknown coronavirus— NEEL KASHKARI: When the pandemic hit, it was so unlike anything any of us have experienced in our lifetimes. MALE NEWSREADER: Already, 45 cases have been reported in China, including two deaths. The victims are thought to have contracted the virus in a meat and seafood market. NEEL KASHKARI: We'd been paying attention to what was happening in China for a few months. MALE NEWSREADER: There are new images out of Wuhan that purport to show the dire conditions in hospital. NEEL KASHKARI: I was calling my contacts, global businesses that had big operations in China, to understand what their employees and staffs were seeing. And we were all trying to learn as much as we can about pandemics and what it's likely going to mean. FEMALE REPORTER: Major selloff across Europe this morning. NEEL KASHKARI: I think we all figured out very quickly the pandemic and the virus would drive the economy. FEMALE NEWSREADER: Investors are spooked by the growing number of infections outside China. NEEL KASHKARI: But how fast would it hit us? How widespread? What would the health care response be? It was maximum uncertainty. And you were seeing that uncertainty manifest in financial markets. MALE NEWSREADER: What you have here are concerns, fears, worries and deep uncertainties about what’s likely to happen next. NEEL KASHKARI: People were scared. Investors were scared. Individuals were scared. And they said, "You know what? I just want cash." FEMALE NEWSREADER: Markets giving us the worst two-day point drop ever in history. NEEL KASHKARI: "I don't even want Treasury bonds. I don't even want corporate bonds. I don't want stocks. I just want cash." And when everybody in the economy says "I want cash" at the same time, that leads to potentially a collapse of financial markets. MALE FINANCIAL TRADER 1: On the bell, on the bell! MALE NEWSREADER 1: Means the first circuit breaker— MALE NEWSREADER 2: For whom the bell tolls. MALE NEWSREADER 1: —has been triggered. MALE FINANCIAL TRADER 2: I knew we were going to [unintelligible]. JAMES JACOBY: All the weaknesses of the system that had built up over the years of easy money were being exposed. MOHAMED A. EL-ERIAN: Market functioning was starting to cascade into failure. MALE NEWSREADER: The Dow plunging again today. The 11-year bull market has ended. DION RABOUIN: Stocks were just on a downward free fall. You had credit markets seizing up. People were selling anything that wasn't nailed down. MALE FLOOR TRADER: I can’t do anything, I'm frozen. JAMES JACOBY: Attention was focused on the highly leveraged shadow banks. LEV MENAND: What we saw was a full-blown panic in the shadow banking system. It wasn't something that you have when you have a pandemic, you have a bank panic. It was you have a bank panic because you had some exogenous shock in the economy and you have these underlying vulnerabilities in your monetary system that you haven't resolved. JAMES JACOBY: The Fed responded to this new crisis with an old tool—once again, quantitative easing. FEMALE NEWSREADER: The Fed will try to steady the ship after a week that echoed the financial crisis of 12 years ago. JAMES JACOBY: It bought up hundreds of billions in debt from financial institutions. MALE REPORTER: We have seen the Fed inject money into the economy in the last couple of days. JAMES JACOBY: By mid-March they had made more than a trillion dollars available to the shadow banks and they cut interest rates back down to near zero. FEMALE NEWSREADER: What that tells all of us is that the economic impact of the coronavirus is going to be crippling. LEV MENAND: The Federal Reserve lent half a trillion dollars to securities dealers, half a trillion dollars to foreign central banks, bought $2 trillion of Treasury securities, another trillion dollars of mortgage-backed securities. It flooded the zone with new government cash to stabilize this system. FEMALE NEWSREADER: Incredible effort from the Federal Reserve, taking major action to— CHRISTOPHER LEONARD: Everything that Ben Bernanke's Fed had done over the course of the financial crisis of 2008, Jay Powell did that in a weekend. The scary part is it wasn't enough. The crisis continued, and they had to intervene even further. MALE NEWSREADER: Good morning. We are here for you on this morning when the stock market has taken a dramatic plunge. At least— FEMALE NEWSREADER: —as the emergency rate cut failed to calm investors. In fact, it did the opposite. Futures immediately dropped— JAMES JACOBY: Despite the Fed’s actions, the corporate debt market froze up and companies were unable to pay their bills, putting the wider financial system at risk. RANA FOROOHAR: There's just this corporate debt picture out there, and we're just beginning to see how those dominoes are going to fall. MOHAMED A. EL-ERIAN: Then comes the realization that we have to lock down. FEMALE NEWSREADER: The list of closings and activities being suspended is growing from coast to coast. JAMES JACOBY: In the White House, Eric Ueland was the Trump administration’s point person dealing with Congress on the response. ERIC UELAND, Dir., Trump Office of Legislative Affairs: Every day and into the evening as we're going through and hearing more information and trying to explore the health side of this exploding virus crisis, there's also an economic impact that is just getting larger and larger and more significant. And so what's the impact on a community when suddenly you're telling it a significant amount of economic activity needs to slow or actually cease? That's pretty dramatic. FEMALE NEWSREADER: Three point four million people filed for unemployment last week. FEMALE NEWSREADER: You can't really compare this to the financial crisis, or even 9/11. There's never been a time in history where the U.S. government told the economy to shut down. ERIC UELAND: Then we're talking about impacts on businesses—from small businessmen, who are the real heartbeat of our economy, communities, and how to keep people employed. What's the impact on industries and significant economic sectors of the American economy? But the policy response that we need to design and hopefully execute here inside this crisis is a lot broader than anybody conceived up to that point. REP. ANTHONY BROWN, (D) MD: The motion is adopted. JAMES JACOBY: In a rare moment of bipartisanship, the Trump administration and Congress would end up passing the largest economic stimulus ever. DONALD TRUMP: All right, thank you, all. JAMES JACOBY: The $2.2 trillion CARES Act, which unlike after the crisis in 2008, was aimed not just at Wall Street but directly at individuals and small businesses as well. ERIC UELAND: You encouraged your team to be bold, be brave and go big, and we certainly delivered today: $6.2 trillion. MALE NEWSREADER: You ain't seen nothing yet, from what the Fed is about to do. JAMES JACOBY: Part of the money would go to the Fed, which announced a new range of loan programs worth trillions. And for the first time, it began buying up corporate debt. The easy money experiment went into overdrive. CHRISTOPHER LEONARD: A guy inside the Fed was telling me that what they were doing was not that sophisticated. They were just looking at any part of the market that looked like it was on fire and dumping money on it. FEMALE NEWSREADER: We often talk about the Federal Reserve using a bazooka to tackle markets and the economy. This is bazooka, cannons and tanks all at once. DION RABOUIN, Axios, 2018-21: So this was huge. This was the Fed stepping in on an unprecedented scale and saying to the market, "We will do whatever it takes." JEROME POWELL: Many of the programs that we’re undertaking rely on emergency lending powers that are available only in very unusual circumstances such as those we find ourselves in today. We will continue to use these powers forcefully, proactively and aggressively until we're confident that we are solidly on the road to recovery. JAMES JACOBY: I don't think most people are aware that we came this close to a bona fide financial crisis. LEV MENAND: Yeah. I think a lot of it is missed for two reasons. One, there was a lot of other stuff going on in the news at the time. The other is the Federal Reserve did an amazingly good job at putting out the flames of this panic. And even though the panic in March 2020 was more severe along many metrics than anything we saw in 2008, the government's response was more powerful in certain respects. And we're lucky that the government was successful or we could be living through a true depression. CHAPTER ELEVEN Moral Hazard MALE NEWSREADER: Everything has been thrown at this market to try to keep it floating. MALE NEWSREADER: The Federal Reserve now getting into junk bonds. MALE NEWSREADER: It's a joke. The market is manipulated. They're printing trillions of dollars to pump up the value of publicly traded stocks. JAMES JACOBY: In trying to keep workers employed and companies afloat, the Fed had also used its power to rescue some of the riskiest parts of the financial system, like the junk bond market. MALE FINANCIAL COMMENTATOR 1: Is this just like a high-yield junk bond bailout? I mean, I don’t get— MALE FINANCIAL COMMENTATOR 2: Yeah, we've got to live with it now, Tom. MALE FINANCIAL COMMENTATOR 1: —why this is an emergency. MALE FINANCIAL COMMENTATOR 2: We've got to live with it. JAMES JACOBY: To the critics, the Fed was rewarding the same players and practices that had helped make the system so fragile in the first place. JEREMY GRANTHAM, Co-founder, GMO LLC: Over the years, we've been trained to believe that the Fed is on our side. What the Fed has trained us to believe is that if we make a bet in the market and we win, we're on our own. We get to keep the profits. If we lose, they will bend every effort and every dollar they can get their hands on, one way or another, to bail us out. This is asymmetry of the most splendid kind. MALE CAMERA OPERATOR: A speeds. Go ahead and clap it off, please. JAMES JACOBY: Billionaire bond investor Howard Marks called the Fed out at the time, saying it was undercutting the way the free market is supposed to work. HOWARD MARKS, Co-founder & co-chair, Oaktree Capital Management: There are negative ramifications to this. One called moral hazard, which means conditioning people to believe that if there's a problem the government will bail you out. And if people really believe that, then there's no downside to risky behavior, because if there's a problem, it won't fall on you. You'll get bailed out. If you play it aggressively and succeed, you make money. If you play it aggressively and fail, you'll get bailed out. MALE NEWSREADER: We are truly getting to a point of moral hazard. MALE NEWSREADER: Do we want to live in a world—Do central banks themselves want to live in a world where their interventions are so central to the market outlook and of market performance? JAMES JACOBY: So has moral hazard gotten worse as a result of this bailout? HOWARD MARKS: There’s no barometer of moral hazard, so I can’t give you a reading. All I can say is that for the last year or so, risk-taking has been rewarded, and that tends to bring on more risk-taking. FEMALE FINANCIAL COMMENTATOR: I don't think it's anything that investors should be applauding, necessarily, because it's a nail in the coffin of capitalism. MALE FINANCIAL COMMENTATOR: This is going to be a test of whether or not capitalism is just a call sign when CEOs are looking for bailouts. JAMES JACOBY: Do you see moral hazard in what has just happened? SHEILA BAIR, Chair, FDIC, 2006-11: Oh, absolutely. I think now the entire business community has had a taste of bailouts [laughs]. And boy, doesn't it work really, really nicely. Yeah, so I fear that now, the Fed stepping in, not just to bail out Wall Street, but the entire corporate America, is starting to be embedded into people's thinking. People talk about the survival of capitalism, but this is the biggest threat to capitalism. In good times, when anybody can make money, you reap those profits. In bad times, the Fed just keeps stepping in. You have this never-ending ratchet up. The markets never correct. JAMES JACOBY: It's like a no-lose casino. SHEILA BAIR: It is. It is a no-lose casino. That's exactly right. JAMES JACOBY: This is the second time in 12 years that you and your institution have had to funnel into the financial system trillions of dollars, and there is this sense that the financial markets have an iron-clad backstop from the Fed. NEEL KASHKARI, Pres. & CEO, Fed. Reserve Bank of Minneapolis: Well, I completely agree that it is unacceptable that 12 years after 2008, we had to do this again. I am proud that we did what we did. It was the right thing to do. It was necessary. But it is unacceptable as an American citizen that we have a financial system that is this risky and this vulnerable. JAMES JACOBY: But what, if any, responsibility or accountability does the Fed have for the financial system having been so risky and so vulnerable to a shock? NEEL KASHKARI: Well, I think all financial regulators that have a seat at the table have responsibility for what was left incomplete after 2008 and where we go from here. We need to use this crisis to finish the work that we did not finish after '08. JAMES JACOBY: With all due respect, I wonder if you could be a little bit more explicit with me. What will the Fed own when it comes to the vulnerability of the system? NEEL KASHKARI: Well, I reject the thesis. I actually don't think it's been the Fed's monetary policy that has led to these vulnerabilities. I think it's been incomplete regulatory policy that has led to these vulnerabilities. CHAPTER TWELVE Orgy of Speculation FEMALE NEWSREADER: The coronavirus pandemic has left millions of Americans out of work. MALE FOOD BANK VOLUNTEER: The people have gone now without four or five or six or seven paychecks, and it's starting to catch up. They need food. It's the most basic thing. JAMES JACOBY: In the months following the Fed’s rescue, we saw a troubling disparity. MALE BBC REPORTER: Have you got any income at the moment? FEMALE SPEAKER: No. No. And we have kids, too, so— JAMES JACOBY: As businesses were shuttered and millions of Americans were living on the edge, the markets did indeed look like a no-lose casino, thanks to the Fed's safety net. MALE NEWSREADER: The economy may be facing major hardships, but the stock market is thriving. MALE NEWSREADER: The best quarter for the Dow in 33 years, it surged 17%. MOHAMED A. EL-ERIAN, Chief economic advisor, Allianz: We ended up in a world where bad news was good news. MALE NEWSREADER: The unemployment rate is now a staggering 14.7% MOHAMED A. EL-ERIAN: Bad news for the economy was good news for markets. Why? FEMALE NEWSREADER: In the midst of all the economic turmoil, Wall Street actually closed out its best week in 45 years. MOHAMED A. EL-ERIAN: Because when people saw bad news, they said, "The Fed will have to do more." MALE NEWSREADER: Anna, today the markets say, “Bring on the next quarter!” MOHAMED A. EL-ERIAN: And then over the next few months we saw one record after another in stock markets. MALE NEWSREADER: Stocks surging even as America enters its darkest chapter yet of this pandemic. CHRISTOPHER LEONARD, Author, The Lords of Easy Money: Even after the initial emergency passed the Fed was pumping $120 billion a month into the economy through quantitative easing on an indefinite basis. The fire hose was simply turned on and left on the curb. The extraordinary measures of 2010 literally become the daily operating procedure of 2020. FEMALE NEWSREADER: The S&P 500 hitting another record high today after surging 55%. CHRISTOPHER LEONARD: The stock market didn't just regain all of its losses in a matter of months but started breaking new records. MALE NEWSREADER: I see quite a bit of green on the markets this morning. Dow, S&P, NASDAQ—all of them higher. JAMES JACOBY: Over the next two years, tech stocks would soar. MALE NEWSREADER: Apple is now the first publicly listed U.S. company to be valued at $2 trillion. MALE NEWSREADER: Tesla shares are soaring. MALE NEWSREADER: This company has just gone through the roof this year. The stock price has more than quadrupled. FEMALE NEWSREADER: Right now it's a seller's market, and homes are selling fast. JAMES JACOBY: The price of real estate would shoot up across the country. MALE NEWSREADER: The housing market has never been hotter. JAMES JACOBY: And corporate America would take on even more debt, which investors gobbled up. MALE NEWSREADER: Massive issuance of corporate debt. FEMALE NEWSREADER: More than $10.5 trillion. JAMES JACOBY: For the richest Americans, it was an extraordinary time. SEN. BERNIE SANDERS, (I) VT: Mark Zuckerberg has increased his wealth during the pandemic by more than $37 billion. MALE NEWSREADER: Elon Musk has added over $10 billion to his wealth just this week. MALE NEWSREADER: Jeff Bezos reportedly earning over $50 billion this year. MALE FINANCIAL REPORTER: Billionaires now hold two-thirds more in wealth than the bottom half of the U.S. population. Let that sink in for a moment. And as I mentioned— DION RABOUIN: Just the billionaires in the United States, from March 2020 to February 2021, have grown their wealth by $1.3 trillion. One point three trillion dollars. JEREMY GRANTHAM: It's the burst of euphoria that typically brings these things to an end. JAMES JACOBY: But even some of those billionaires were worried the Fed was fueling a dangerous bubble. JEREMY GRANTHAM: The housing market, the stock market and the bond market, all overpriced at the same time. If the Fed knew what it was doing it would not allow bubbles of this magnitude to take place. MALE SOCIAL MEDIA PERSONALITY: Smash the "like" button. Invest consistently. JAMES JACOBY: But the epic rise in the markets proved irresistible to millions of new small investors, too. FEMALE SOCIAL MEDIA PERSONALITY: So when a stock does well because of internal or external factors, you secure the bag, honey. ROBINHOOD COMMERCIAL: An app that's changing the way we do money. DION RABOUIN: All these brokerage platforms saw the largest growth of new users they'd ever seen because people said, "Now is my opportunity. I'm going to invest my money in the stock market. I may not understand what the Fed's doing or how it works or what exactly is going on—" FEMALE NEWSREADER: —the S&P 500 now on track for the best week going back since 2008. DION RABOUIN: "—but I understand the Fed takes action, stock prices go up, these people get rich." And it became a very clear mandate for people: "If I want to get in on this economic recovery we're having, I've got to buy stocks." FEMALE SOCIAL MEDIA PERSONALITY: I’m going to take my stimulus check and I’m going to put it in the stock market. DION RABOUIN: So they're online, they're trading stocks, they're buying and selling and putting money into these stock accounts. They started creating their own community. ROARING KITTY, Social media personality: Welcome, Declan, Michael Lee—ah, so many people. Bob Smith— MALE SOCIAL MEDIA PERSONALITY: We've got the get the Dow Jones up! JAMES JACOBY: Fed Chair Powell became a kind of cult figure, master of the money printer. REDDIT MEME VIDEO: Money printer go BRRR. MALE SOCIAL MEDIA PERSONALITY: Invest in these four tickers. I’ll put them right above. JAMES JACOBY: And billions poured into so-called “meme stocks.” ROARING KITTY: This GameStop situation, we will never encounter a setup like this again. JAMES JACOBY: And new, risky asset classes like cryptocurrency took on a life of their own. FEMALE NEWSREADER: Bitcoin. FEMALE NEWSREADER: Bitcoin. FEMALE NEWSREADER: Bitcoin has been on a wild ride. MALE NEWSREADER: It really is the new currency. DION RABOUIN: There's just too much money. [Laughs] People just have so much money and there's not really places to put it. So what folks have started doing is investing in these very speculative assets, things like bitcoin, because they're just seeing ridiculous rates of return. It doesn't really matter what the underlying value of the thing is, just like it doesn't matter what the underlying value of a company is, right? As long as the stock price goes up, you want to buy because the stock is going to keep going up and then you'll sell. It's the greater fool theory of investing. STEPHEN COLBERT: Cryptocurrency. BILL MAHER: Cryptocurrency. "SILICON VALLEY" VIDEO CLIP: Cryptocurrency. "THE SIMPSONS" VIDEO CLIP: Cryptocurrency. ELON MUSK ON SNL: Blockchain technology. BEN McKENZIE, Actor: It's actually—This is actually a very comfortable chair. JAMES JACOBY: Crypto was all the rage in Hollywood, where actor Ben McKenzie saw it being pushed on an unsuspecting public. With reporter Jacob Silverman, he began raising alarms. BEN McKENZIE: Crypto exchanges primarily were driving the advertising dollars here, so it's not unreasonable to think that these folks got paid not just multiple millions of dollars, but potentially tens of millions of dollars to sell this stuff. MEGAN THEE STALLION: Bitcoin is a new kind of money. NEIL PATRICK HARRIS: Cash into crypto. MALE SPEAKER: What's up? TOM BRADY: I'm getting into crypto with FTX. You in? MATT DAMON: History is filled with "almosts." BEN McKENZIE: When you're talking about an ad like the Matt Damon ad that went viral, and not in a good way. What does he work, one day? He walks around a studio and points at stuff that isn't there and talks about how brave you need to be to buy crypto? It's a pretty easy paycheck. MATT DAMON: Fortune favors the brave. BEN McKENZIE: I certainly understand how easy it is to get lured in to cryptocurrency, especially when you see, at least for one brief, shining moment, all of your friends and neighbors or people you follow on social media getting rich. Of course you're going to try it. JAMES JACOBY: How does the Fed figure into this? Was there just so much money sloshing around that it just needed to go somewhere, and crypto was one of those places where it just was like, "All right, we'll throw it in there." BEN McKENZIE: Yeah. When money is cheap, people gamble. It's just undeniable. And fraud runs rampant. JACOB SILVERMAN, Freelance reporter: You would hear, even within crypto circles, people started talking about Ponzi schemes in a non-derisive way, saying, "Well, maybe we're doing new types of economics." There are all forms of irrational thinking, and rationalization also, that come together to help sort of conjure this illusion that there's value here until something pops it. MALE CAMERA OPERATOR: Sound speed. JAMES JACOBY: A number of serious investors, like Jim Chanos, began speaking out. JIM CHANOS, Founder, Kynikos Associates: It just became this orgy of speculation by the first half of 2021. Anyone who wanted to raise money for anything could do so. The amount of fraud we saw being floated on top of legitimate companies was really concerning, particularly in places like the crypto space, which was sort of not being regulated. People were creating new coins or NFTs and selling them on to the public, who was eager to get in on the latest fad. And that bothered me. JAMES JACOBY: And you would draw a direct link between what the Fed was doing and the crypto craze? JIM CHANOS: Well I just—It was all part of speculation that led to people doing really silly things with their money. At the end of bull markets, at the end of speculative markets, all kinds of crazy schemes get floated to separate people from their money. NEEL KASHKARI: At least these are different questions and not the same question over and over again. JAMES JACOBY: Was last time the same question over and over again? NEEL KASHKARI: It was the same question for 90 minutes. JAMES JACOBY: I don't know about that. NEEL KASHKARI: Yes, trust me. I have a tape of it. JAMES JACOBY: Oh, yeah? When I sat down with Neel Kashkari again recently, I asked him how the madness in the markets looked to the Fed. It kind of was mania at the time, but the Fed was continuing to flood the markets with liquidity, with money. Did you not see all of that mania as a sign of overheating? That an indicator in the markets was telling you something about what was happening in the economy? NEEL KASHKARI: Yeah, I mean, we see froth in financial markets not infrequently. There have been other times when we've seen booms in financial markets. If we are going to try to raise interest rates to control excitement in the stock market, the cost—Who's going to bear the cost of that? The people who are out of work today. If we had said, "Let’s go raise interest rates to try to keep crypto down, keep bitcoin from going too high, and we're going to keep millions of Americans out of work as the way to do that," that strikes me as a bad trade. CHAPTER THIRTEEN Economics 101 MALE VOICE: I think interest rates and inflation are going to rise well above what the Fed has projected. JAMES JACOBY: As the markets were heating up, so were concerns that the Fed's policies would fuel inflation. MALE NEWSREADER: Prices are rising at the fastest pace in more than a decade. JAMES JACOBY: But it wasn’t just what the Fed was doing. PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I'm going to help the American people who are hurting now. JAMES JACOBY: The new Biden administration was sending $1,400 checks to many Americans— FEMALE NEWSREADER: —stimulus money from the latest COVID relief bill is arriving in bank accounts all over the country. JAMES JACOBY: —extending unemployment benefits, tax credits and other relief programs. LARRY SUMMERS: I think there is a real possibility that within the year we're going to be dealing with the most serious incipient inflation problem that we have faced in the last 40 years. JAMES JACOBY: Critics like former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers were publicly expressing concern that all the stimulus money from the Fed and the government would boost economic demand at a time when supply problems from the pandemic were still an issue. NOURIEL ROUBINI, Economist: People like myself, like Larry Summers and other, saw that that massive stimulus—it was unprecedented, an order of magnitude greater than the one we had after the global financial crisis—would lead to excessive demand, overheating and inflation. So we had an unprecedented fiscal stimulus. An unprecedented monetary stimulus. We had bail-out checks sent to everybody—every household, every firm, every financial institution. It was too much and should have been more selective. DION RABOUIN: There really just was all this money being pushed out in the economy. At the same time you've got the Federal Reserve, they're pushing out another $4 or $5 trillion into the economy, and so prices rose. MALE NEWSREADER: Core CPI inflation is set to rise sharply over the next three months. DION RABOUIN: This goes back to your Economics 101 textbook, right? When there's too much money chasing too few goods, prices go up, and that drives inflation higher. JAMES JACOBY: It only took a few months for the warnings to come true. FEMALE NEWSREADER: It seems like everything across the board is becoming more expensive. MALE ON-STREET INTERVIEW: Gas prices going up, food prices going up. JAMES JACOBY: But the Fed didn’t flinch. MALE NEWSREADER: A surge in energy, housing and food costs. JAMES JACOBY: It didn’t raise interest rates or pull back on quantitative easing. MALE REPORTER: The question now haunting economists is whether these price hikes are a pandemic blip or a sign of a long-term threat to the economy. JAMES JACOBY: And they had a word for the highest inflation in more than a decade. MALE NEWSREADER: Transitory. FEMALE NEWSREADER: Transitory. MALE NEWSREADER: Transitory. MALE NEWSREADER: Transitory. REP. PAT TOOMEY, (R) PA: Now, I know you believe this is transitory, but everything's transitory. Life is transitory. MOHAMED A. EL-ERIAN: This inflation round is not transitory. This is a very hot inflation environment, and the longer the central banks wait, the greater the risk. I reacted quite strongly to the assertion that inflation was going to be transitory. I remember warning at that time that we simply don't have enough evidence that it's going to be transitory. Transitory is a very reassuring term, because I tell you, "Don't worry about it, it is temporary. It is reversible. Therefore you don't need to change behavior. So yes, we have inflation, but don't worry." JAMES JACOBY: What kind of evidence were you seeing that this may be stickier inflation than it is transitory? MOHAMED A. EL-ERIAN: One, what companies were telling us. And companies were saying, "I am not sure it's transitory. This is beyond the pandemic." I was talking to CEOs, and they were giving me a very clear message, the same message that was in one earning call after another earning call: They did not view the disruptions as being transitory. JAMES JACOBY: Why transitory? Why that word? What did you think at the time? NEEL KASHKARI: Well, saw a number of factors that we thought were conspiring to lead to high prices and that many of those factors would fade away over time. So for example, supply chains we saw were getting gummed up. But we also know that businesses were working very hard to un-gum those up, to untangle those supply chains. So we thought that they'd probably make more progress there than we expected. JAMES JACOBY: The Business Roundtable, for instance, was coming out and saying—polling their CEOs and saying, "Look, we're seeing inflation everywhere in what we're doing, OK?" How does something like that land for you at that time? NEEL KASHKARI: I mean, I take it seriously. I don't dismiss it. But then I map it against the data that we're seeing. But I'll just say if we did not have an outlier view on inflation or the economy overall, if you look at the consensus of forecasts of my experts in America, on Wall Street, around the world, they all basically had the same forecast, which is inflation's going to be transitory. It's going to come back down. Yes, there were outliers, but if you look at the consensus, we were well within the consensus of the experts who study this. JAMES JACOBY: Any regret about not taking the foot off the pedal, seeing what, for instance, the federal government was doing at that point in time? NEEL KASHKARI: Well, I think, again, knowing what I know now, absolutely. JAMES JACOBY: I put the same questions to Brian Deese, one of the chief architects of the Biden administration’s $1.9 trillion Rescue Plan. Were the inflation concerns at the time part of your internal deliberation about doing the Rescue Act? BRIAN DEESE, Dir., National Economic Council, 2021-23: It was an issue that we were always aware of and focused on and weighing in the weighing and balancing that you have to make when you do policymaking in the face of uncertainty. JAMES JACOBY: You’re saying that you knew that that could be a potential tradeoff. BRIAN DEESE: It is always a tradeoff. It was always a tradeoff, and the logic behind our actions was to get ahead of the pandemic, help bridge for families and businesses and also ensure against the downside risks to our economy. And I think if we look back now and recognize that the inflation challenge that the U.S. economy faces is not unique, it is a global challenge. Inflation is higher in Europe and the U.K. today than it is in the United States. JAMES JACOBY: Was there a concern at the White House that the Fed was running the economy too hot for too long? BRIAN DEESE: That is a question that I will institutionally not answer. JAMES JACOBY: Why? BRIAN DEESE: Because one of the hallmarks of our system is the independence of monetary policymaking. This has been something that you can't take for granted in our system, that prior presidents have not necessarily honored. But this president, this administration is quite committed to the proposition that the strength of our system, one of the strengths of the U.S. economy, is the trust that people have in the independence of our monetary authority. And therefore we make deliberate choices to not make comments on questions like that. FEMALE NEWSREADER: We're going to begin tonight with the rough road to recovery for America's economy. JAMES JACOBY: Through late 2021 and into 2022, stimulus from the Fed and the government would contribute to a rapid economic recovery. JOE BIDEN: As our economy has come roaring back, we've seen some price increases. JAMES JACOBY: But inflation continued climbing at the fastest pace in decades, hitting the poor and middle class the hardest— MALE REPORTER: You know, these price increases will be a real impact on families, and they're not going away any time soon. JAMES JACOBY: —the people the Fed had hoped its easy money policies would help the most. CHAPTER FOURTEEN A Different World MALE NEWSREADER: This is the epicenter of this rise in inflation. FEMALE NEWSREADER: —the highest inflation rate of any major city in the country. Housing prices— JAMES JACOBY: No city had it worse than Phoenix, which had the highest inflation rate in the nation. When I visited St. Mary’s Food Bank, the cars were lined up first thing in the morning. TOM KERTIS, Pres. and CEO, St. Mary’s Food Bank: Every day, my key team, we get an email with the number of people that come through. Yesterday was a 1,007 households. And it's not people, it's households coming through. They're feeding four or five people. And it's like, wow. And that's five days a week. They just don't have any other choice. We're hearing that their budget is being eaten up by all the impacts of inflation, and it's either that or they don't have food for their children. FEMALE SPEAKER 1: I'm a single mom, so sometimes at the end of the month I need the assistance. Because life has gotten a lot more expensive, and being a single parent, I can feel it. It's like choosing between your rent and your food. FEMALE SPEAKER 2: It's like, yesterday I spent a hundred bucks just to get cereal, milk and bread. And eggs. And that was basically it. And some lunch meat. And that was a hundred bucks, and that was our week's worth of food. And that's not going to feed six kids. JAMES JACOBY: When you did start seeing an increase in people coming? TOM KERTIS: It was the end of February this year, 2022. We saw a slight uptick, didn't know if it was real, but it kept climbing. And it's climbed all through summer. We thought that was a plateau, and then at the end of summer, it's continued to climb. And here we are today with 1,000 households coming through. We've seen a 26% increase year over year in the number of people coming to us for help. JAMES JACOBY: From 2021 to 2022? TOM KERTIS: Yes. And of that, 18% of the people are first-time people coming to the food bank. JAMES JACOBY: Is what you're seeing now actually worse than what you saw during the height of the pandemic? TOM KERTIS: It is worse now. And it's worse because the food was more available during the pandemic. We're seeing food availability going down. What was once predictable doesn't appear to be predictable anymore. It's probably going to get worse before it's going to get better, unfortunately. JAMES JACOBY: What brings you here? MALE SPEAKER: I'm just trying to get a little extra food. Can't really—you know, trying to stretch the dollar. JAMES JACOBY: Yeah. MALE SPEAKER: It's not hard to spend $200 at a grocery store and only have one week's worth of food for two people. JAMES JACOBY: Have you been coming here for a long time, or this is more recent? MALE SPEAKER: It's more recent, since probably the last six months I've been coming here. JAMES JACOBY: Are you working? Are you— MALE SPEAKER: Yeah, I'm working, but it's just not enough. JAMES JACOBY: We heard similar stories from credit counselors and their clients at a money management counseling center. KATE BULGER, Dir. of research, Money Management Intl.: You know, we're getting all these folks who are telling us for the first time they can't pay their bills, they can't make ends meet. And often when when they say that, they say, "I'm a good person. I've always paid my bills before." CRAIG BLECK, Counselor, Money Management Intl.: With the inflation, they have just eaten away their savings. People have told me, "I did the three to six months of savings for an emergency fund. That’s gone." JAMES JACOBY: So you're saying that it's not just folks that you're seeing that have had chronic problems with credit or—these are, there's a lot of new people that are coming to you now. OK. WANDA JENKINS, Counselor, Money Management Intl.: Yeah, a lot of new people. KATE BULGER: These are folks who had been making it before and were solidly middle class now, and today are struggling to make ends meet, struggling to keep their utilities on, struggling to stay in their apartment or their home, and are really in danger of falling out of the middle class. It's a shrinking middle class problem. JAMES JACOBY: How real are rent increases right now? DOMINIQUE PAYTON, Client: At a local shelter here in Phoenix, we've seen an uptick of new families and individuals coming in that just could no longer afford where they were living. Because even where they were living, their rents increase $500 to $1,000 in one month. WANDA JENKINS: Sometimes clients have called me—now, and they're angry when they call. They need our help, but they're angry, and I understand it. They're ashamed and they're crying and all of that, but I was there. I was one of them. JAMES JACOBY: Are your numbers up in terms of people that are seeking out help at the moment? KATE BULGER: So it's not just that we're getting more calls, it's that the folks who are calling us are in greater distress. Because now instead of calling us because they're just behind on their credit cards, they're calling us because they're behind on their credit cards and they're behind on their utilities and they're struggling with their housing payment. They are facing greater economic challenges I think and more diverse economic challenges than what they faced just a few years ago. JOHN ADEL, Client: It's a different world, but I have to tell you, I go to the store and I am just shocked. I'm keeping my nose above the waves right now, but I feel like that wave is a lot bigger than I thought and it's behind me and it's coming. CHAPTER FIFTEEN Things are Gonna Get Harder JAMES JACOBY: In the fall of 2021, with inflation at 6.8%—well above the Fed’s 2% target—Chairman Powell acknowledged it might not be transitory after all. JEROME POWELL: So I think the word "transitory" has different meanings to different people. To many it carries a sense of short-lived. We tended to use it to mean that it won’t leave a permanent mark in the form of higher inflation. I think it’s probably a good time to retire that word and try to explain more clearly what we mean. JAMES JACOBY: It would be the start of a new phase in the easy money experiment. JEROME POWELL: The committee is determined to take the measures necessary to restore price stability. Thank you. I look forward to your questions. JAMES JACOBY: Over several months, they’d raise interest rates. May 2022 JEROME POWELL: Good afternoon. It's nice to see everyone in person for the first time in a couple of years. JAMES JACOBY: In response to the rising inflation, the Fed would also pause quantitative easing and begin tightening. JEROME POWELL: At today's meeting, the committee raised the target range for the federal funds rate. We also decided to begin the process of reducing the size of our balance sheet. MALE FINANCIAL COMMENTATOR: But neither Powell nor any other Fed official has explained with any precision just how far the Fed will go. MALE NEWSREADER: The Federal Reserve raising a key interest rate three-quarters of a percent. MALE NEWSREADER: —its biggest hike in nearly three decades. MALE NEWSREADER: The Federal Reserve has raised its key interest rates again. MALE NEWSREADER: —and a move that seemed unfathomable to many just months ago has now happened twice in a row. JAMES JACOBY: Other events, like the war in Ukraine— MALE NEWSREADER: Russia is picking off Ukraine's military facilities one after another. JAMES JACOBY: —lockdowns in China— MALE NEWSREADER: China has decided to put its southern tech hub Shenzhen under a citywide lockdown. JAMES JACOBY: —and companies raising prices— RODNEY McMULLEN, CEO, Kroger: A little bit of inflation is always good in our business. JAMES JACOBY: —would all send inflation even higher and accelerate the Fed’s moves. MALE NEWSREADER: Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell speaking at an annual economic summit in Jackson Hole, Wyoming— JAMES JACOBY: Which brings us back to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in August 2022—that annual meeting of central bankers where Jerome Powell signaled that he’d keep the Fed on course— MALE NEWSREADER: He made a call simply last year that didn't age well. JAMES JACOBY: —raising rates to try to combat inflation. JEROME POWELL: While higher interest rates, slower growth and softer labor market conditions will bring down inflation, they will also bring some pain to households and businesses. JAMES JACOBY: How do you explain, for instance, to someone who is seeing their gas bills go up, their food bills go up, and groceries, their rents go up, how is it that higher interest rates and what you're doing with this very blunt instrument, how do you say that that's going to help them with those issues in particular? NEEL KASHKARI: Well, one of the reasons prices are high is because there's too much demand in the economy. And by raising interest rates—For example, we are going to slow down demand for housing, people going out and buying up homes, which eventually should prevent home prices and rents from continuing to climb. That should benefit workers. But things like gas prices, that's not being driven by us. I mean, that's being driven by the war, Russia invading Ukraine, Saudi Arabia cutting back production, big geopolitical forces. So there's some pieces of this that we can directly affect. Some pieces of this are out of our control. JAMES JACOBY: I mean, some people have said you're kind of—interest rates are almost like a hammer, a sledgehammer. It's not like a scalpel. Can these problems be solved with a scalpel, or you really do believe that you need to bring the hammer down to some extent? NEEL KASHKARI: Well, here's the thing. I would love to be able to bring it with a scalpel, and a year ago I argued that I thought many of these factors were transitory, meaning you've got these one-time events, they're going to pass and then inflation will come down, so let’s not bring out the hammer. That was my view. That didn't happen. So now we have to bring the hammer, because if we don't bring the hammer, this thing can get out of control. JAMES JACOBY: So to those who point to the Fed and say you ran it too hot for too long and that was an epic mistake, you say what? NEEL KASHKARI: I say look around the world. Other central banks adjusted more quickly than we did, to their credit, and unfortunately their economies are facing very similar inflation. And so yes, with the benefit of hindsight, I wish we had tightened sooner, but I'm not kidding myself to think it would have made a big difference in where we are in inflation today. MALE NEWSREADER: Stick around for just a second as we watch the clock here, counting down to 2:30. JAMES JACOBY: A month after Jackson Hole, I caught up with business reporter Chris Leonard as the Fed was announcing another rate hike, moving at the fastest pace in 40 years. JEROME POWELL: Good afternoon. Today, the FOMC raised its policy interest rate by three-quarters of a percentage point. CHRISTOPHER LEONARD: It can be a little bit hard to understand, because you hear, OK, the Fed hiked rates today to 3 1/2%. Well, what does that mean? That my credit card rate is going to be a little bit higher, or I'll have to borrow more money for a house? He is talking about a fundamental restructuring of the financial system. The financial system globally has been built around extremely low, ultra-low interest rates for 10 years. JEROME POWELL: My colleagues and I are strongly committed to bringing inflation back down to our 2% goal. CHRISTOPHER LEONARD: I think people don't appreciate the magnitude of what the Fed did over the last decade, and so this is going to be like a long-term thing playing out over time, probably over a year or two, of shifting to a higher rate environment and then the correction that that's going to cause. So he's talking about a huge adjustment that's not going to be an adjustment upward. Things aren't going to get easier. Things are going to get harder. MALE NEWSREADER: Tonight, the economic alarms are blaring. JAMES JACOBY: The specter of this kind of economic upheaval has heightened concerns about a recession— FEMALE NEWSREADER: The Fed has made it clear its number one priority is fighting inflation, even if it means the jobless rate, unemployment, goes up. MALE UNION ORGANIZER: Good evening! Are we going to let this corporation stop workers from joining a union? CROWD: No! JAMES JACOBY: It's also raised fears of layoffs, which has aggravated the organized labor movement. LIZ SHULER, President, AFL-CIO: I'm here with 12 1/2 million union members— JAMES JACOBY: Liz Shuler leads the largest union in the country. She's been urging the Fed to slow down. LIZ SHULER: Listen to your workers! We met with Chairman Powell and six board of governors because I think the Fed doesn't often get to hear from actual working people and how they're seeing things in the economy. JAMES JACOBY: What was your message for the Fed when they started to raise rates? LIZ SHULER: That raising the interest rates is bad for working people. That we think it puts the trajectory that we're on at risk, in terms of coming out of this pandemic. We know that we're in a consumer-driven economy, right? And if working people are not able to make ends meet, they're not going to be buying goods, and it's going to grind the economy to a halt. We can't take aggressive moves that are going to throw people out of work and basically balance the economy on the backs of working people. JAMES JACOBY: But I mean, the Fed is tasked with controlling inflation, and inflation is definitely bad for working people. So why advocate for the Fed to take its foot off the pedal? LIZ SHULER: Well, because the interest rate hikes they were implementing were happening quickly, and we thought it was happening too fast. And also, though, their tools aren't necessarily going to impact the things like gas prices and food prices, which is what most working people are worried about. DION RABOUIN: The Fed doesn't ever want to say this out loud, but their goal is, quite literally, to make businesses not want to hire people or to get businesses actually to lay people off. The Fed has estimated that the unemployment rate, under their very rosy projections, by the end of this year would rise to 4 1/2%. There is no real way for unemployment to get from 3 1/2% to 4 1/2% without millions of people losing their jobs. JAMES JACOBY: I understand the best-case scenario being that you bring down inflation without unemployment going up, and that somehow we avoid a recession. But if employment does stay strong and inflation stays high, then don't you have to basically hurt the jobs market? Isn't that the bottom line here? NEEL KASHKARI: We do have to. We are going to have to keep raising rates until we get inflation back down, that is absolutely true. And one of the sources of optimism, and it's mild optimism, is when there have been recessions that have been caused by the central bank raising interest rates, the good news is, once inflation is in check and they reverse the policies, the bounce back can be very quick. So we're not trying to engineer a recession, but if one were to happen, I feel pretty confident that we could have a very fast recovery. JAMES JACOBY: So how remote is the possibility that there could be much higher unemployment in the next couple of years? NEEL KASHKARI: I mean, I wouldn't say it's remote. It's hard to put the odds on it. CHAPTER SIXTEEN The Tide Goes Out JAMES JACOBY: Throughout 2022, the economy remained strong. Unemployment hovered near historic lows. FEMALE NEWSREADER: —showing unemployment at a half-century low. JAMES JACOBY: Wages were on the rise. MALE NEWSREADER: We also saw some wage growth, about 5% annually. JAMES JACOBY: —causing the Fed to continue pumping the brakes to try to cool down inflation. FEMALE NEWSREADER: The Fed has been raising rates in hopes of slowing the economy, and with so many businesses still hiring, that means the economy isn't really slowing that quickly. JAMES JACOBY: That riled Wall Street. MALE NEWSREADER: Facing the growing possibility of a recession, Wall Street spent another day in turmoil. FEMALE NEWSREADER: And you're probably feeling it in those 401(k)s. Stocks are headed— JAMES JACOBY: For the stock market and bond market, it was the worst year since the great financial crisis in 2008. FEMALE NEWSREADER: The NASDAQ down for four straight quarters for the first time since the dot-com bust. MOHAMED A. EL-ERIAN: In 2022, we've had this very unusual situation whereby you've made double-digit losses on both risky assets, stocks, and risk-free assets, U.S. Treasuries. That's not supposed to happen. But there's been absolutely nowhere to hide. That is a big issue for retirement plans, pension systems, because no matter how well you diversified your portfolio, there was no risk mitigation in it at all. JAMES JACOBY: It was all losses? MOHAMED A. EL-ERIAN: It was all losses. FEMALE NEWSREADER: U.S. existing home sales plunged to a 12-year low in December. DION RABOUIN, The Wall Street Journal: You've seen a huge impact on the housing market. FEMALE NEWSREADER: The Federal Reserve's interest rate hiking cycle has pushed housing into a recession. DION RABOUIN: Housing prices have started actually coming down for the first time in a very long time. Mortgage applications have decreased. The crypto market, you've seen a number of companies wiped out. MALE NEWSREADER: Crypto winter is here. DION RABOUIN: That is not unrelated to what's happened with the Fed. MALE SPEAKER: Hold on to me, Sam. Let's go. FEMALE NEWSREADER: Sam Bankman-Fried faces investigations from U.S. regulators and potentially the Department of Justice. MALE SOCIAL MEDIA PERSONALITY: He invested $3 million into Luna, and now it's worth $1,000. STEVEN PEARLSTEIN, Contributing columnist, The Washington Post: You create these asset bubbles—that is, bubbles in stock markets and bond markets and real-estate markets and art markets, whatever people invest their money in with borrowed money. And then those bubbles burst, and then that causes a downturn. So rather than having— JAMES JACOBY: Steven Pearlstein has been reporting on the financial markets and the economy for almost 40 years. STEVEN PEARLSTEIN: Bubbles tend to be everything bubbles these days because if the source of it is cheap money, then you can be pretty much sure that it's not just real estate, or it's not just stocks, or it's not just tech and telecom. It's not just bitcoin. These things are connected by rubber bands with each other in a sort of way, and what propels one propels all of them. JAMES JACOBY: There's a famous line by investor Warren Buffet. WARREN BUFFET: You don't find out who's been swimming naked until the tide goes out. [Laughter] JAMES JACOBY: Almost everyone I spoke to repeated that line to describe what's been happening. RANA FOROOHAR, Associate editor, Financial Times: When interest rates start to rise and the tide pulls out, as Warren Buffet would say— CHARLES DUHIGG, The New York Times: You don't know who's swimming naked— DENNIS KELLEHER, Pres. & CEO, Better Markets: —until the tide goes out. AARON BENDIKSON, Partner, Onsight Capital Management: You see who's swimming without a bathing suit— NOURIEL ROUBINI: —when the tide is receding. SCOTT MINERD, Chief investment officer, Guggenheim Partners: We'll find out who's wearing their swimsuits when the tide goes out. RANA FOROOHAR: What's amazing is that a lot of people, and I would say I'm included in this, think that there probably will be a bigger correction at some point. JAMES JACOBY: Look, when you say you expect there to be a bigger correction, what does that actually mean? I mean, a lot of people are going to see this and get concerned about that, obviously. RANA FOROOHAR: Yeah. Yeah, let me try and be honest but not scare people [laughs], if that's possible. So the markets were down 20% last year. That seems like a lot, and if we were in a normal market cycle, I'd say, "OK, we're done. We're probably at the bottom." I don't know if I can safely say that we're at the bottom because of what we're looking back at, this age of easy money. Not just even since the financial crisis, but before that, for the decades that rates have been going down and down and down and debt has been going up and up and up. That's a long period of time where assets have arguably been artificially inflated, and so is it possible that you could see a continued correction at some point? It is possible. Now, I'm personally not going out and selling my entire stock portfolio; I don't want to scare people. But I do want to say that I think we are in a once-in-a-lifetime financial transition, and I think that everybody needs to sort of strap in for that, and if you need your money in the next couple of years, I would be more cautious than not. JAMES JACOBY: In these early months of 2023, on Wall Street, some have been betting that the Fed will relent and stop raising interest rates. Maybe even tolerate higher inflation. Because the higher it pushes rates, and the longer it does, the greater the risks. MOHAMED A. EL-ERIAN: So the marketplace is saying the Fed is going to go too far and is going to be forced to reverse course. That is really unusual. And we've got to a situation now where the markets dismiss what the Fed is telling us. It's a moment where there are many more potential outcomes. Some are fine—a "soft landing." Some are not—a hard landing. And the truth is, you cannot distinguish enough between them. JAMES JACOBY: One of the most pessimistic voices is economist Nouriel Roubini, who became famous for his accurate prediction of the financial crisis in 2008. NOURIEL ROUBINI: We have had literally a few decades of ever-increasing bubbles that have been fed and supported by central banks. And not only have we had bubbles, but we've had bubbles that have been fed by excessive leverage, excessive private and public borrowing and excessive risk-taking. The party is over. Inflation is high and rising. Central banks have to increase interest rates. That is bursting the asset bubble. It's increasing the amount of the debt servicing of everybody who over-borrowed like crazy. So we lived in a bubble, in a dream, and this dream in a bubble is bursting and is turning into an economic and a financial nightmare. JAMES JACOBY: If Roubini's prediction of a debt crisis is correct, then Jim Millstein would be on the front lines of it. He’s known on Wall Street as the guy who countries and companies turn to when they run into trouble and need their debts to be restructured. Wouldn't a debt crisis actually be good for your business? JIM MILLSTEIN, Co-chairman, Guggenheim Securities: [Laughs] You know, I'm getting a little too old for this. [Laughs] JAMES JACOBY: [Laughs] Meaning what? Too old for what? JIM MILLSTEIN: This business! No, I—Yeah, no, it'll be a boom for the restructuring business. But I just don't think it's avoidable at this point. I think we're just—The bill has come due and it's going to have to be paid. JAMES JACOBY: How worried are you about what's happening right now? JIM MILLSTEIN: I've never been more worried in the 42 years that I've been a professional, either as a lawyer, banker or government servant. The American corporate sector has never been more levered in American history, never had more debt, and American households are just about as levered as they were heading into the 2008 financial crisis, whether it's student loans or mortgage loans or car loans or personal loans or credit card loans. We've borrowed a lot of money as a people. And so the Fed is absolutely right to try and get it under control by raising interest rates and slowing economic activity. But the most highly levered players in our economy are going to come under real stress, whether that's households or businesses or governments, as interest costs rise. JAMES JACOBY: Are you basically saying that we should be preparing right now? That there would be a bursting of this massive credit bubble? JIM MILLSTEIN: It's happening right in front of us. It may—It's happening right now. JAMES JACOBY: Are you usually this gloomy, or am I just getting you on a bad day? JIM MILLSTEIN: You got me on a bad day. [Laughs] JAMES JACOBY: One of the concerns is that there's a kind of debt bomb out there, both in the American economy as well as the global economy. How concerned are you about a credit bubble popping? NEEL KASHKARI: We're looking at the data. We're not seeing evidence of such a popping. We're not seeing evidence of delinquencies taking off. Might it happen in the future? It might, but I'm not seeing evidence of it. Households on average have very strong balance sheets. The big banks, which can be very risky for the economy, are well-capitalized relative to where they were before 2008. So we're not seeing evidence of it yet. Can't rule it out. JAMES JACOBY: So I guess the question though is how much disruption in the financial markets are you willing to tolerate now that they're adjusting to this new interest rate environment, after more than a decade of zero rates? NEEL KASHKARI: We live in a market economy, and market participants need to find a way to adjust to a changing economic landscape. It's not the Fed's job to bail out Wall Street investors if their stock portfolios go down. Obviously, we need to keep systemic risk from spilling across the whole economy, and when those events happen, we are prepared to act. But from—in my view, the bar of us acting, the bar from us acting should be quite high. JAMES JACOBY: I mean, the Fed has come to the rescue several times, and we've talked about this in the past, of the financial markets that had grown vulnerable and brittle. So, are you saying—I'm just, again I'm asking, what degree of disruption would you have to see in order for the Fed to intervene? NEEL KASHKARI: We're a long, long way away from that. I guess I would say it that way. We're a long, long way for any kind of disruption that would warrant us stepping in in that way. JAMES JACOBY: Less than five months after that interview, the Fed would indeed have to step in. FEMALE NEWSREADER: In breaking news, a U.S. Federal Reserve has bailed out the Silicon Valley Bank, which had collapsed over the weekend. JAMES JACOBY: It enacted emergency measures to shore up the banking system after two banks collapsed. MALE NEWSREADER: This is the biggest bank collapse since the 2008 financial crisis. JOE BIDEN: There are important questions of how these banks got into the circumstance in the first place. SHEILA BAIR: We're seeing a potential fragility in the system related to monetary policy. If we hadn't been driving our economy for 14 years with easy money and then trying to really quickly undo that, no, we wouldn't be having these problems now. Absolutely not. JAMES JACOBY: What should the Fed do? SHEILA BAIR: So, for a long time, I've advocated that the Fed should be raising rates. But even I believe now they need to hit pause. They've gone too far, too fast. They need to hit pause and assess the impact on the financial system and the economy. JAMES JACOBY: It's unclear what the Fed will do next. But just days before the bank failures, Jerome Powell appeared before Congress to answer tough questions about the economy. JEROME POWELL: We actually don’t think that we need to see a sharp or enormous increase in unemployment to get inflation under control. SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN, (D) MA: I’m looking at your projections. Do you call laying off 2 million people this year not a sharp increase? JAMES JACOBY: The hearing was a showcase of partisan politics and government gridlock. SEN. KEVIN CRAMER, (R) ND: Raising interest rates won’t stop Senate Democrats and President Biden from overtaxing, overspending, overborrowing, overregulating. JAMES JACOBY: And it was yet another reminder of how, in an era of political dysfunction, we’ve become so dependent on the Fed, and on easy money, to drive the American economy. STEVEN PEARLSTEIN: The economy needs to get back into balance, and that will be painful. And if we keep putting off the day of reckoning, we’ll just make the day of reckoning a bigger day of reckoning. JAMES JACOBY: How do you think we’ll look back at this era of easy money? STEVEN PEARLSTEIN: Unfortunately, I think we may look back on it as something of a golden era, because cheap and free money, without consequences, is great. But in other ways, we will think about it as a lesson for the future, which is that it was a mistake. MOHAMED A. EL-ERIAN: I think that we're going to look back on this era as being totally exceptional historically, and one where we didn't fulfill its potential. We lost sight of something critical: We lost sight of how we grow our economy in a sustainable and inclusive fashion. The world of easy money went way too far. Way, way too far. Let's do the other stuff that's needed. The stuff that really promotes genuine, durable, inclusive growth and not this stuff that creates artificial growth. We are capable of producing that. None of that is in the hands of the Fed. They don't invest in infrastructure. They can't reform the tax system. They can't help labor retraining. This is a political problem.

Day 3 SUMMIT KEYNOTE A Conversation with the 2024 National Black Writers Conference Honorees Friday, March 22 6:30 pm - 9:00 pm Honorees 1-> Paul Coates [ https://aalbc.com/authors/author.php?author_name=W.+Paul+Coates ] • Percival Everett [ https://aalbc.com/authors/author.php?author_name=Percival+Everett ] 2->Peniel Joseph [ https://aalbc.com/authors/author.php?author_name=Peniel+E.+Joseph ] • 3->Bernice McFadden [ https://aalbc.com/authors/author.php?author_name=Bernice+L.+McFadden , https://aalbc.com/authors/author.php?author_name=Geneva+Holliday ] M-> Moderator: Gloria J. Browne-Marshall [ https://aalbc.com/authors/author.php?author_name=Gloria+J.+Browne-Marshall ] Emcee: Wallace L. Ford, II M Question # Answer My thoughts M-> What writers you carry with you? 3-> Alice Walker then Toni Morrison 2-> CLR James Black Jacobins. Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, James Baldwin. Baldwin's ability to talk about history shaped him. I carry Zora Neale Hurston with me. The black storytellers or griots or jaliyahs from ancestral times to know that carried the stories of anansi to high john. I carry the lyricists who made the negro spirituals to the pop music at the end of the 1900s. M-> What inspired you to do obscure? 1->Obscure connects the more well known. Malcolm X, Baldwin, but he followed Richard Wright more. He grew up with Richard Wright. Haki R. Madhubuti. Drusilla Dunjee Houston [ https://aalbc.com/authors/author.php?author_name=Drusilla+Dunjee+Houston] wrote a book in 1926 [[the wonderful ethiopians]]. She was just 26. Her book informed him on what it means to tell your own story. She was a witness to the attack of the black populace of Tulsa by the white populace of Tulsa. He said she said, she was happy she didn't have a son cause on that day she would had sent him to die. Doctor Ben. Amy Jacques Garvey, it was she who recorded all of Marcus Garvey's stuff . When we read Garvey we are reading her. One thing I notice is when you write against audience expectations it doesn't lead to the path of money as a writer. Even if people praise a work, its uncommon setting styles or character definitions tend to push the potent commercial crowd away, for the identities common in the potent commercial space. M-> You say the first reconstruction was the exodus from the south and the second reconstruction is the 1960s but what was brought back from 1877 to 1960s to now? 2-> He goes against the commonly attributed timeline suggested for reconstruction. Two main factors come in. Dignity , which is god given. He thinks of IDa B Wells as exemplary of this. Citizenship- external form of dignity. From eighteen hundred and fifty four to eighteen hundred and sixty eight was the first reconstruction. From nineteen hundred and thirties to the nineteen hundred and seventies is the second reconstruction. From Barack Obama's presidency to now is the third reconstruction. From first to second to third the duality of dignity side citizenship is battled over or redefined. In the third reconstruction, we all count or no one counts. For him, the locus of Black art is with Lorraine Hansberry. We are in it together. For me, Slavery ,the enslavement of Black people by whites took several forms, each legally weaker than the prior, but none less potent or influential than the other, especially on black people. The first form, which was global, was direct white european imperialism, black people no matter where they were indigenous to: africa/asia/america [[as in continental usa from modern day canada to argentina]] were enslaved to whites living in the region of earth they lived in for the most part, barring rare exceptions. Siddi or Negrito in Asia, the city states along the coast of west africa as tributary states aiding in enslavement for arms which kept them protected from larger military entities like the hausa caliphate, who through the islam route enslaved as well. Black indigenous people, meaning indigenous people in the american continent who are phenotypically fitting the label black. The second form in the usa, mirrored by the creation of governments after the end of direct white european rule in various places outside of europe, is blacks in the USA enslaved to whites in the usa. This form's key point is that governments were started with enslavement of blacks as a pillar of identity. You see this in south africa , australia, India, Brasil. or many others. This pillar was about generational wealth for white people, regardless of european ancestry. This is why you see mestizos or blancos in latin america who from the strictest anglo american view are not white statians, benefit from being white in the usa, no different than other white people. The third form in the usa I will call the thirteenth amendment. In this form, slavery no longer is completely allowable or legal as in the prior two forms in the usa. In this form, slavery is allowable once incarcerated under the law. So in this form, even though black people were legally enslaveable before at the desire of whites, the negative manipulation of black homes or populaces becomes the norm as an automatic strategy for the thirteenth amendment simply states that to continue the enslavement of blacks in the usa you have to legally bind the actions, regardless of legal quality. Slavery in the third phase is no longer a natural right for whites to impose on blacks, while slavery can be an aspect of a legally bound condition whites through the government impose on blacks. This is why violence was so expansive. The thirteenth amendment didn't change the heritage of white people, it simply forced white people to change from a culture of public pride as enslavers to the non white which made the black to non black relationship simple into public liars about all abuses to the non white using statistics or laws as the cover, which turned the relationship of black to non black complex. A complex relationship the black populace has never been able to handle internally well. The fourth form is what I call the 1960s. This form is about deleting enslavement in the federal government of the usa, while allowing states or cities all controlled by whites to expand abuses to black people in states or cities. The third form isn't dead but mutated so that within the federal government alone in the usa, multiphenotypical peaceful coexistence can grow or become . This leads to more black elected officials. A huge growing presence of blacks in the usa military. Which can be deemed by peaceful integrationist as a positive, while in the cities or states, you have the white flight alongside urban plight which was cities supported by states, moving all wealth to where white people displaced themselves while placing black people in financially destitute city environments, void farmland or land ownership capabilities as well as local governments with enough whites to deny black governmental control or dominance, thus maintaining the urban plight. The fifth form is The End of the Old USA empire. The enslavement of blacks to whites went from under the british empire to under the declaration of independence to a province of illegality to planned obsolescence in the federal administrative apparatus to residual functions through the usa's administrations or organizations. I argue reconstruction, meaning to build again for black DOSers can never happen in the usa cause the rebuilding to an enslaved people requires two things the usa can not give, physical freedom from the usa plus a commonly accepted idea from black people in the usa on what they want their future to be as a group or what they want reconstruction to lead to. M->To your book Sugar, it deals with an underclass of women, can you speak about that? 3-> She wrote Sugar 25 years ago and she was thinking about her family and wanted to know them more. She sneaked about and listened to their stories as a kid. We carry twelve generations of Deoxy ribo nucleic acid in our body. She wants to make ancestors proud. M->You decide who will be published. What books do you think? 1->He was looking for his wife all night and glad he found her in the crowd. ... He wants to know more about the three reconstructions from Peniel Joseph's book. He wants to know about the periods. Publishing for him is a way to resist. He doesn't have the luxury of thinking commercially. He has a different approach than Simon and Schuster. The first book he published predated the New Negro in time. He is focused today on black cookbooks which need to be republished. He has the responsibility to decide impact and right now it is obscure cookbooks From Black newspapers to Black publishers to Black owned websites, Black owned avenues of information emission have always existed. But the problem is they never had the kind of financial support needed to be expansive in the black populace of writers or other artists. M-> What do you carry from cookbooks? 1->The way black people made good out of things that are no good . His father knew how to cook waste products . He will love to know where his father got that from. How do you build the nutrition when they say you are lower than dirt. Like Chitlins, which is the gut of the pig. Many people in modern humanity speak of recycling and yet, the ability to reuse waste is mostly in the Black Statian heritage which is disconnected from the methods or ways implemented by white statian firms who control the plans on recycling. M->Geneva Holiday is a pseudonym for Bernice McFadden. Why was she created and what does she carry? 3-> It took her ten years to sell her first novel , Sugar. Publishers were saying their was no audience for her work in 1998. She decided she would write a chick flick. From nineteen hundred and ninety nine to two thousand and three or two thousand and four she will write a different type of writing. She didn't want to confuse audience , not all who read Mcfadden love Holiday or vice verse. Holiday carries sexual liberation. M->The Stokely Carmichael definitive book you wrote? 2-> He met Kwame Toure at college before Toure's cancer. Toure asked him, what are you doing for our people's liberation. In his dissertation he thought to Toure. He thinks Kwame Toure doesn't get the credit he deserves. After MLK jr + Malcolm , Toure is the leader. Toure lives in Africa and critiques USA imperialism everywhere. HE devoted ten years to write the biography and media turned the biography into the MLK/X show. As a teacher he knows students who know MLK/Malcolm/Ida B Wells /Fannie Lou Hamer but not Stokely. Well, I argue this is an internal black statian issue. Stokely showed he had garveyism in him, and was a segregationist. These two elements, leaving non black countries for black countries, or living in a Black country or a Black space in a non Black country was and is against many black adults in the usa in the mid to late nineteen hundred or still today. Many Black people parents or guardians in the usa speak to their children adopting the usa, embracing the usa or the whites in it. Kwame Toure was vocal in not doing that except under beneficial circumstances for black people. M-> What do you want your work to carry to readers , want readers to carry forth? 3-> She didn't know in the Book of Harlan black people were in death camps in germany. She didn't know that and wonder why no one else around her knew. So learn and pass on knowledge. 2-> The older he gets the more he comprehends Black folk have a lot of empathy. Ida B Wells for example had a deep profound love for Black people. He recalls a press conference where Malcolm was asked , what is his credentials, and Malcolm responds, his sincerity. To often we buy into denigration like the Moynihan report. It happens in churches as well . Good black people become mesmerized. Black Lives Matter was by three black women, showed what happened to Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, George Floyd , Breonna Taylor. To give dignity and by honoring them we honor ourselves. M-> Maybe if we talk more about our joy, it may help the young people. Brooks, you chose the black panthers for your skills then you chose The Black Panther Party to place into Howard. What do you want writers/researcher to carry out of the Black Party archive? 1-> He realized coming out of the Black Panther party, Black folk talk too much. The rhetoric is no critique-able which helped carry that small movement, the black panthers for self defense. But, overall Black people talk too much and do too little otherwise. He wants a researcher to come with what Black Classic Press is, a catalog of resistance. Prescence African [[ https://www.presenceafricaine.com/ ]] eh thought of as drum and spear. Presence African go itself from the Harlem Renaissance. Black Classic Press has documented that resistance. He listened to earlier speakers and no one used the term white supremacy. Stop talking about book bans, it is a system of white supremacy. Black people are attacked all over the world. In Black Classic Press it is only the Black presence in the USA but everywhere on Earth is a black presence and that global or holistic approach is the best way to battle white supremacy. Being nonviolent in a populace of people who want to be violent, have every reason to be violent, while guided by a more powerful populace beyond or a part of a populace within to be nonviolent tends to lead to a very talkative nature. Speaking against tends to become more potent or influential while other non violent actions repeatedly yield negative results. I will never forget a black woman who owns a house in texas, that her bloodline has owned since a time period nearest the end of the war between the states , telling how her great grand mother as head of her clan told two grand cousins who sought violent actions against whites to go to chicago. Now, people may say this saved their lives. But it also taught lessons and made problems. Two black people who wanted to use violence against non blacks who are attacking the home of their clan, are not being supported by their clan but told they have to leave to a white city devoid of black potency. What should the cousins think? Should they want to be active? why? They wanted to be active in texas and just to ensure stay alive were taken from a better place of black empowerment to a worse place of black empowerment by their own clan. I think Black people in the USA , especially DOSers make too little of what the path of nonviolence does to black people who are engaged. Question and Answer session Q->Question # or M->Answer My Thoughts Q->Malcolm X was asked about what he thought about the noble peace prize, what was his answer? 2->Malcolm X said if he was the general of an army he would not accept a peace prize in a time of war. But he was asked the question alot, and asked it variantly. Malcolm always comprehended that being nonviolent living aside those who are violent to you is a dysfunction on the part of the nonviolent. Cause the violent can attack the nonviolent naturally. While the nonviolent can be abused naturally. PEace isn't always a positive. Q-> At his children's school they don't have a library but a tech center. How can we carry this knowledge to a generation that may not be reading it, how to build a bridge that can keep ? 3-> Everything begins at home. If I am reading a book the child will. You can't depend on outside influencers to guide what we want M->We don't need a license. We have to take young people to the library. We can do things going back to midnight schools post war between the states and why would we expect schools run by the government in the usa to do that. 3-> He learned as a parent , that time or ability to not rely on school systems is a luxury. M-> One of her books is banned in florida and sometimes you have to go online to get some resources 2-> We introduce them to literature where they are at. He shows his students videos. What we do wrong sometimes is criticize young people for their way so the comparison is unfair between generations. This is not 1923. We have to meet them where their at. The home is correct but it must be said, over one hundred and fifty years since the end of the war between the states, it is telling that the Black populace in the usa doesn't have in any city or town in the entire usa a publicly funded organization to maintain black heritage/history/culture absent in that city robustly enough to demand all embrace it at some level who live in said city. Q-> How do you get out of Weeds of research ? What about a process? 3-> I probably shouldn't answer. She hears the challenge all the time. She doesn't struggle. The characters make it form. 2-> I struggled and I continue to struggle. In the last few years, he has been in the groove of writing every day . Chester himes said: "fighters fight and writers write". He stopped writing when he felt inspired. He learned from Amiri Baraka. Baraka is one of the most important artist that lived. Baraka said Max Roach said: "you have to put in the time". The great artist comprehend it is a labor, not a ditch digging but it is a labor. he teach students we are all a writer. You narrate your life every single day. The only thing preventing unleashing their literature is themselves. You are all brilliant writers as a memoirist and it is your story. So you need to think about the labor. It doesn't mean abandon your family, but if you do i t everyday you will have a manuscript after three hundred and sixty five days , and then you revise it. That is writing. Q-> I read the Sugar series. You go into graphic detail about abuse of black women. How did you tend to yourself writing that and what can I tell students who think it is trauma porn. 3-> When she has to reread she feel the emotion but when creating she doesn't . She inherited it from her mother. She regrets the term trauma porn is used. Slavery was not manufactured. Many young black people see the enslaved as slaves and that has to change. Many black people call our forebears slaves when they were enslaved. Free people whose freedom was taken from them. M-> I am doing a book, a history of activism, due in a week. She tells students if it becomes to much, walk around the block, watch something silly. She can compartmentalize. Remember, we are not being harmed, separate from this and gain from the courage of those survivors. Give the heroic experience from those who survived the respect it deserves. So have researchers not put themselves in peoples shoes but put their story and the responsibility of telling their story because the people they are writing made it where the modern can be. This goes back to one of the negative results of the nonviolent path the black populace in the usa has brewed for over one hundred and fifty years. When Black peoples homes generation after generation speak ill to violence, speak ill to anger, speak none to enslavement, speak none to white abuse, generation after generation supposedly to spare black children the deadly truth to their blood relationship to the country they live in, you allow for the growth of an anti violent culture, which is against black people themselves bringing up the truth, cause the truth is not mostly positive or pretty for black people in the usa. It may be unfortunate, but that is the truth. Q-> White liberals seem to eradicate the militant aspect of some leaders? 1-> The history isn't attacked because of militancy but a counter narrative against one whites have made. unless you tell your story the way whites want, your story is attacked, unless you tell it their way. It is not coincidental that wherever you see black people you see a white narrative, it has nothing to do with the variation of black people or how radical or not a black person is. We have to comprehend we are under assault from those who want to enslave all who are not them. A system of white supremacy, no matter what you, non white, are talking about. I don't know if Blacks, or nonwhites, or anyone we can unify around opposing the system of white supremacy. And, today white supremacy isn't the Klan coming down the road. 2-> When you tell stories of Ida B Wells or Stokely or other Black leaders people would delete elements from them. Malcolm was talking about Congo in the 1950s and 1960s. Pedagogical or university organizations would save what Malcolm said but would cut out Congo. Ida B Wells plsu Malcolm X remind us of this. Students ask me, what did Malcolm accomplish. They comprehend MLK jr and I answer, MAlcolm turned negroes into blacks. Toni Morrison was a champion of this. When Toni Morrison replied to Charlie Rose who asked , where are the white people, and she replied, it isn't about you. I concur the larger issue is the non black oppressing the black. The complication is that modernity was reached with the less simple relationship of over one hundred and fifty years ago of non black enslaver, black enslaved. So you have interminglings of black side non black that are internally complicated and flexible enough to serve various actions. Q-> How to bridge generations? 3-> Have conversations with elders 2-> Share stories. Young people need to attack the redemption version of the usa and support the multiracial. Oral histories are more important than written histories. Maga got an oral story on January 6th , and emit that story through voting or violence. We must share our oral history with elders. Financial literacy , equitability. Black wealthy haven't helped the community back enough but doing that is not enough. Black people in the 1860s could had been president. Black people in the past could had been president. M-> A lot of young black people today have white friends. But that white friend don't have to like any other black people. The Tom Test . Do you pass it? Ten or fifteen years go before the black youth with white friends realize white powers negative affect in their lives , wasting years. I do think specificity may help also. Find the black people young to old who are similar minded.

Add this book Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill : Alexander Hamilton’s Old Harlem Neighborhood Through the Centuries Davida Siwisa James FRONTLIST | On Sale Date: April 2, 2024 9781531506148, 1531506143 Hardcover $34.95 USD, $45.99 CAD, £29.99 GBP, €33.90 EUR Discount Code: HC from @DeeSiwisa It showcases books, maybe some sort of interactive will engage more. Crossword puzzle or something?

Before I go into the segment I will speak on Stageplays + screenplays. One of the things I like about stageplays or screenplays is they are made to be performed. Which means what? They are meant to be the basis of a collective art work. A book of fiction is meant to be read but not performed. That simple variance , in my mind, opens up stageplays or screenplays to a different set of allowable judgements. The best example I can think of showing the power of screenplay fluidity is "THe Jungle" from "The Twilight Zone" . In the original short story from Charles Beaumont it is located in Africa and in the future with a technologically advanced manner. The characters are all the same but the visualization is starker. The goal is to show an encroachment by the wealthy white powers onto a Black space, and the price for some agents of that white power. It is that blunt. But when Beaumont wrote the teleplay for the show. He changed alot of aesthetic. But kept the basic idea, still kept the story. But why? A play is a collaborative artwork as is a film and both are open to interpretation. It isn't about rigiidity , it is about interpretation. Another example is Baum, writer of the wizard of Oz, who loved the 1902 stage production, a musical, whose language and tone was far more adult. But I paraphrase him:"as long as people do well by the work he is fine" . In the same way , he would had loved "The Wiz" stageplay in my opinion for its quality while reflecting another community or the earlier Judy garland movie, whose dorothy is significantly older than in the book. Whether the work is turned into something meant to be laughed at with gawdy humour, or reflecting another communities ways, or just some tweaks of the original works , stageplays or screenplays are interpretations and if they achieve their goals then no critique to a standard storytelling is warranted. Immediately below is an excerpt from an article presented ultimately. I will continue my prose after the excerpt THE EXCERPT In 1979, Paramount needed an answer to Star Wars, so it revived Trek in the form of movies. Then T.J. Hooker came along a few years later. What did you get out of the show? It was a terrific show. It had all kinds of drama. I got to direct several of the episodes. And some of my shots are in the opening. I was totally involved, committed to the writing, committed to the directing. You're running all the time. You've got to make decisions and you don't have enough money. You directed a big-budget feature, Star Trek V, in 1989. It was considered a disappointment, but it has its fans today. Were you hoping to expand what a Trek movie could be by filming around the world? I wish that I'd had the backing and the courage to do the things I felt I needed to do. My concept was, "Star Trek goes in search of God," and management said, "Well, who's God? We'll alienate the nonbeliever, so, no, we can't do God." And then somebody said, "What about an alien who thinks they're God?" Then it was a series of my inabilities to deal with the management and the budget. I failed. In my mind, I failed horribly. When I'm asked, "What do you regret the most?," I regret not being equipped emotionally to deal with a large motion picture. So in the absence of my power, the power vacuum filled with people that didn't make the decisions I would've made. You seem to take the blame, but outside observers might say, "Well, the budget wasn't there. You didn't get the backing you needed." But in your mind, it's on you. It is on me. [In the finale,] I wanted granite [rock creatures] to explode out of the mountain. The special effects guy said, "I can build you a suit that's on fire and smoke comes out." I said, "Great, how much will that cost?" They said, "$250,000 a suit." Can you make 10 suits? He said, "Yeah." That's $2.5 million. You've got a $30 million budget. You sure you want to spend [it on that]? Those are the practical decisions. Well, wait a minute, what about one suit? And I'll photograph it everywhere [to look like 10]. (Editor's note: The plan to use one suit famously did not work well onscreen and was ultimately abandoned.) MY CONTINUED PROSE It seems to me, Shatner made two mistakes. When you go from low budget television to large budget film, the financial scale requires greater care. In a low budget television show, your financial scale is predetermined low so you know limits, there is no suggestion of overspending. But when you do a high budget film the allowance for misuse or waste is higher and sequentially ruinous or dangerous to the overall collective experience. I am not sure but shatner alludes to not presenting a screenplay or storyboard list. And while I comprehend film studios love pitching a concept in a sentence. I think an artist is wiser to have a screenplay plus storyboard list in hand , to aid in the pitch when questions may be asked. Leonard Nimoy supposedly had the script for Wrath of Khan before the pitch he made, so there lay the variance. When I look at Star Trek Generations, I can see that being a remake of Star Trek v tweaked to bridge the original series + next generation. The Nexus is what? a science fiction element that is as close to the gateway to heaven as you can get. It literally exist as a natural phenomenon in space, moving about destructive to interface with but if very lucky it can grab you or if unlucky or purposed can spit you out. And the place it goes to is so powerful part of you remains there, ala Guinan's character. This is heaven. Shatner said he wanted the Enterprise to meet god and essentially that concept was tweaked so that two enterprises meet , as close as possible in star trek world, the gateway of heaven. From my little knowledge I imagine the screenplay for Generations was around for a while or at least the writers to it had access to screenplays or other content concerning star trek v, if not the simple pitch itself. But this is why the screenplay/stageplay is such a fluid creature. They are meant to be manipulated for purpose. They are not meant to be treated as rigid works, ala why so many have it wrong when they treat shakespeare's work rigidly. It was meant to be performed, speculated in various ways. I will love a chance to redo The Meteor Man. I think the screenplay isn't bad but can be interpreted in a way various with even the same budget. THE COMPLETE ARTICLE William Shatner on His Biggest ‘Star Trek' Regret – and Why He Cried With Bezos Story by Aaron Couch When writing about a legend who's still working as a nonagenarian, it's almost obligatory to include a line about how they are seemingly busier than ever. William Shatner, 92, may no longer be on set 12 hours a day for the roles that made him the first Comic-Con celebrity (Star Trek), or that transformed him into a late-career regular at the Emmys podium (The Practice, Boston Legal), but it's difficult not to marvel at the pace at which he lives his life. The actor, who looks and speaks much like he did 20 years ago, maintains a healthy travel schedule that includes appearances at a dozen or so fan conventions every year. Always popping up in new projects (he hosted the extraterrestrial base camp-simulating reality contest Stars on Mars that aired on Fox over the summer), in 2021, he became the oldest person to travel to space, pouring that experience into a music-and-poetry performance at Washington D.C's Kennedy Center a few months later with friend and musical collaborator Ben Folds. (That recording, So Fragile, So Blue, will be released as an album April 19). Now, Shatner is the subject of the crowdfunded documentary You Can Call Me Bill (in select theaters March 22, his 93rd birthday), a meditation on his life, career and mortality. The Montreal-born actor began performing at the age of 6 at camp and never stopped, transitioning from Canadian radio dramas to Broadway to 1950s TV Westerns. He's been an omnipresent pop culture fixture since 1966, when he was cast as Captain James T. Kirk in Star Trek under unusual circumstances never seen again in Hollywood. NBC had a pilot that didn't work, but the network wanted to try again with a mostly new cast. Where the original pilot was a somewhat dry affair, Shatner brought much-needed humor to the Enterprise. Though the show was canceled after just three seasons, it earned a cult following in syndication, and Shatner reprised the role for seven feature films. Along the way, he reinvented himself over and over, as a hard-a** cop who didn't understand the value of Miranda rights for five seasons on ABC/CBS' T.J. Hooker, and again as a comedic sendup of himself as the spokesperson for Priceline.com, with ads beaming into homes from 1998 to 2012. His comedic chops led him to the Saturday Night Live stage - 38 years later, people still ask him about a sketch in which he mocked Star Trek fans with the exasperated line "Get a life!" - as well as multiple Emmy wins playing lawyer Denny Crane on David E. Kelley's ABC procedural The Practice and then Boston Legal, which concluded after four years in 2008. And he has penned books, released albums and directed documentaries. During a Zoom conversation in early March, Shatner discussed why Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, his first and only theatrical feature as a director, was the biggest regret of his career; that history-making Star Trek kiss with Nichelle Nichols; and what could lure him back to the captain's chair. Some say acting is a way to find the love they aren't getting elsewhere. Was that true for you? I'm sure it's true. I spent a very lonely life in my younger years. Being able to join a cast and be a part of a group of people, I'm sure that was an element in my starting to be an actor when I was very young. Though you acted throughout childhood, you got a practical degree, a bachelor of commerce, from McGill University in Montreal. Was the plan to use that degree? I've bumbled my way through my life with a growing realization that all the plans you have for your life are dependent on the guy driving a car behind you or in front of you. The accidents that you have no control over, whether they're physical, like falling down a flight of stairs, or emotional, like the person you love the most doesn't love you - and everything in between - you have no control over. So you may think you're like, "I'm going to control. I'm going to choose that motion picture," or go onstage choosing elements of your career, thinking you're making a career move. It has nothing to do with reality at all. But as an actor, you do have some control, right? You understudied for Christopher Plummer on Henry V in 1956, and he once said, "Where I stood up to make a speech, he sat down. He did the opposite of everything I did." I had no rehearsal. I didn't know the people. And it was five days into the opening of the show [when Plummer got sick]. The choreography was one of the other things that I didn't know. I was in a macabre state of mind. So that had nothing to do with "I stood where he sat." [It was, rather], "I've got to move around the stage somewhere. I think I'll sit down here, I'm exhausted!" You worked with director Richard Donner on the classic Twilight Zone episode "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," which was in fact a nightmare for him, as it was technically complicated and the shooting days were halved. Did you sense the pressure he was under? It's complicated. When you get those science fiction choices: The guy is dressed in a furry little suit and you say, "Well, why isn't the suit aerodynamic? Why is it a suit that'll catch every breeze that blows?" What kind of logic do you use in any science fiction case? When I looked at the acrobat [Nick Cravat, who played a gremlin terrorizing Shatner's character from the wing of a plane], I said to myself, "That isn't something you'd wear on the wing of a 747," but then again, what do you wear on the wing of a 747? So yeah, it was complicated in that way. Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry had strict rules about what was appropriate for his show. Were you privy to what informed that thinking? He was in the military, and he was a policeman. So there was this militaristic vision of "You don't make out with a fellow soldier." There are strict rules and you abide by the rules. Around that, [the writers] had to write the drama. But within that was the discipline of "This is the way a ship works." Well, as Star Trek progressed, that ethos has been forgotten [in more recent shows]. I sometimes laugh and talk about the fact that I think Gene is twirling in his grave. "No, no, you can't make out with the lady soldier!" The writers of Star Trek: The Next Generation butted heads with Gene when he was alive. The fights that went on, to my understanding, were big, because the writers had their difficulties. "We need some more material." "We need to get out of here. It's claustrophobic." When you joke that Gene is twirling in his grave, you mean he wouldn't approve of onscreen romances between crewmates on the later shows? Yes, exactly. I haven't watched the other Star Treks very much, but what I've seen with glimpses of the Next Generation is yes, the difficulty in the beginning, between management, was all about Gene's rules and obeying or not obeying those rules. You and Nichelle Nichols are credited with the first interracial kiss on TV. Is it true that you pushed to make every take real, despite the network asking for faked takes so they would have the option? I do remember saying, "Maybe they'll try and edit it. What can I do to try and discourage the editing of the kiss itself?" I don't remember quite what I did because it's difficult to cut away [from the kiss in an edit]. But yeah, I remember thinking that. After three seasons, NBC cancels Star Trek in 1969, and you find yourself broke, doing summer stock theater on the East Coast. Did you think acting might be over at that point? I'm broke, living in a truck, sleeping in the back and trying to save that money so I could support my three kids and my [ex-]wife, who were living in Beverly Hills. The only thing that ever occurred to me was, "I can always go back to Toronto and make something of a living as an actor there." I never thought, "Oh, I've got to become a salesman." It never occurred to me from the age of 6 to do anything else. Which is weird because [today] I hear it all around me: "God, I can't make a living anymore [as an actor]." And that's true. People with names can't make a living under the circumstances that the business has fallen into. In 1979, Paramount needed an answer to Star Wars, so it revived Trek in the form of movies. Then T.J. Hooker came along a few years later. What did you get out of the show? It was a terrific show. It had all kinds of drama. I got to direct several of the episodes. And some of my shots are in the opening. I was totally involved, committed to the writing, committed to the directing. You're running all the time. You've got to make decisions and you don't have enough money. You directed a big-budget feature, Star Trek V, in 1989. It was considered a disappointment, but it has its fans today. Were you hoping to expand what a Trek movie could be by filming around the world? I wish that I'd had the backing and the courage to do the things I felt I needed to do. My concept was, "Star Trek goes in search of God," and management said, "Well, who's God? We'll alienate the nonbeliever, so, no, we can't do God." And then somebody said, "What about an alien who thinks they're God?" Then it was a series of my inabilities to deal with the management and the budget. I failed. In my mind, I failed horribly. When I'm asked, "What do you regret the most?," I regret not being equipped emotionally to deal with a large motion picture. So in the absence of my power, the power vacuum filled with people that didn't make the decisions I would've made. You seem to take the blame, but outside observers might say, "Well, the budget wasn't there. You didn't get the backing you needed." But in your mind, it's on you. It is on me. [In the finale,] I wanted granite [rock creatures] to explode out of the mountain. The special effects guy said, "I can build you a suit that's on fire and smoke comes out." I said, "Great, how much will that cost?" They said, "$250,000 a suit." Can you make 10 suits? He said, "Yeah." That's $2.5 million. You've got a $30 million budget. You sure you want to spend [it on that]? Those are the practical decisions. Well, wait a minute, what about one suit? And I'll photograph it everywhere [to look like 10]. (Editor's note: The plan to use one suit famously did not work well onscreen and was ultimately abandoned.) Paramount+ is rumored to have tossed around ideas for you to reprise your role, à la Patrick Stewart in Star Trek: Picard. Is that something you would entertain? Leonard [Nimoy] made his own decision on doing a cameo [in J.J. Abrams' 2009 Star Trek]. He's there for a moment, and it's more a stunt that Spock appears in a future. If they wrote something that wasn't a stunt that involved Kirk, who's 50 years older now, and it was something that was genuinely added to the lore of Star Trek, I would definitely consider it. Did hosting SNL feel like a breakthrough, in terms of showing what you could do with comedy? That was a new show then, it was a big sensation, and hosting it was good. They really wrote comedy for me. I played comedy since I was 7. There is a timing. There is a way of characterizing a line. It's a kind of spiritual thing playing comedy, letting the audience know they're open to laugh. After decades in the industry, you achieved your greatest critical success in your 70s playing Denny Crane on Boston Legal. What was the genesis of Denny? David E. Kelly invites me to breakfast. He says, "I've written this character. He's a little bit senile." I said, "Well, I can play that." He'd write, "The character would say his name, Denny Crane, four or five times." How do you act that? What rationale pulls that together? David didn't offer any explanation. I learned somewhere that snakes stick their tongues out. It's assessing what's out there. So I thought that's what the character is doing. Denny Crane is reading what your reaction is to the words "Denny Crane." In 2021, at age 90, you became the oldest person to go to space. Upon landing, you had a tearful exchange with Jeff Bezos. How have you processed that? I was weeping uncontrollably for reasons I didn't know. It was my fear of what's happening to Earth. I could see how small it was. It's a rock with paper-thin air. You've got rock and 2 miles of air, and that's all that we have, and we're f****** it up. And, that dramatically, I saw it in that moment. What are your thoughts on legacy? At Mar-a-Lago, I was asked to help raise funds with the Red Cross. I had to be at Mar-a-Lago Saturday night, and Leonard's funeral was Sunday morning. I couldn't make both. I chose the charity. It just occurred to me: Leonard died. They got a statue up. It's not going to last. Say it lasts 50 years, 100. [Someone will say], "Who is that Leonard Nimoy? Tear the statue down, put somebody else up." But what you can't erase is helping somebody or something. That has its own energy and reverberation. That person got help - and then is able to help somebody else. You've continued an action that has no boundaries. That's what a good deed does This story first appeared in the March 14 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. URL https://www.msn.com/en-us/movies/news/william-shatner-on-his-biggest-star-trek-regret-and-why-he-cried-with-bezos/ar-BB1k6dbN

Day 1 Eric Dyson was fun, as in media. I argue he is funier. I think he pulls back as he knows the federal audience is mostly not black. He described his youthful self as a "ten year old atheist nerd in the ghetto" As I love libraries as well, my parents home is a library, I stand with him on the value of libraries. His points about the selflessness of great black leaders in the past or how the government of the usa tried to subvert them with displaying personal information to various others while not assisting said black folks in alerting to white threats to them , should be well known but is simply true. The shift as Dyson admitted from black advocacy to black government representatives has been messy. It's funny I saw a version of the robin hood story which took a lot from ivanhoe in my opinion. I do think that added with the immigrant populace post immigration act, the usa is having a mountain to climb to get these populaces all as one. To be honest, multitudes , no matter how many , eventually become one under any government if that government live long enough. Simply because the people eventually merge their own cultures together one by one. His point about older black leaders , like al sharpton who has a hair scenario close to washington the first president [though dyson admitted it is to honor james brown] being spoken to ill by younger black people who lack selflessness , sometimes in a major way [ he referred to some leaders of black lives matter using funds to get homes in parallel to younger black leaders not liking kings desire for silk underwear, though mk jr gave all his money to causes] is also well known or should be, but is a truth. I have to admit I am lucky, but many of the black children I knew well offline growing up had similar parentage that didn't allow disrespect to black leaders or black elders in that way. Opposing strategy is an acceptable thing. Varying aesthetic is an acceptable thing. But rejecting based on aesthetic plus speaking ill while one does worse was not the way I Was raised. He reminded me of sharpton's quote, about how black people who support non violence have to speak till to black violent actors because you can't say white people can't be violent but black people can if the goal is integration under an unbiased law for all, when Dyson said black people not voting cause things didn't go there way is the same as the january 6th from mostly whites. As I have said many times. The Black populace in the usa, which is always under white pressure, has always had a problem handling its many paths. To restate , where do black nonviolent people condone black violence? The obvious answer is no where but when you have black people who have suffered at the hands of white power, telling said black people not to be violent issimply not going to lead to acceptance most of the time. He spoke honest to Trump's ills but explained his one meeting with trump and how congenial it was, regardless of trump's intentions or motives. But admitted he would vote for trump over haley cause people like haley actually believe what trump spews for advantage. I think four years from now will be a time for change as four years from now, the Ocasio Cortez side the Haley's will be in the drivers seat and share an anticentrist stance that has a high chance of leading to violent friction He spoke of how some black people relatively well known didn't think hillary clinton was any different than trump. Though he admitted the failure of hillary clinton wasn't in the popular vote but in the electoral college. The electoral college system which is in the constitution is not accepted enough by people in the usa, even those who active in government advocacy. When Schrumpf won that was the electoral college working the way it is meant to. The point of the electoral college isn't to subvert the majority vote. It is designed to not allow simple majority calculations to dominate the presidency, who at heart is a position at the head of the usa military above all. If popular vote was to dominate, then all you need is new york/california/texas and maybe one other state and all other states can be and will be ignored. It is a myth that strict popular voting with the unevne distribution of populace in the usa will not lead to simple strategic realities. He mentioned not enough local governmental interest by black people. In my own experience I think the past or present has soured many black people on local or state government. I never forget hearing a black woman say, she thinks the states need to go and just have federal law the whole way. Which when I think about it, while an extreme thing, a thing that will definitely lead to friction, has value. Isn't the experience of black people in the usa one where all positives come from the federal level, none from the state or city level? I think at the least you can say the federal government of the usa from a black perspective has yielded positive fruit while states or cities yield much of nothing. If federal power is absent restrictions from smaller municipalities in the usa, then the long game strategies are gone but it does fit the reality of positive returns from government in the usa I had a few questions to him but I didn't deliver in time, I wanted to wait till he was done to give them. But they had collected and presented already when he was finished and I was ready to give. 1) was MLK jr's anti fiscal capitalism that made him misread Black elected officials? 2) is the trump base's inability to be swayed by someone like haley a good sign for the usa? 3) Is the black populace in the usa in modernity hyper federalist? IN AMENDMENT A side note. A black woman with lovely legs, she likes to show off, had on coffee stockings on and, although she had on creamy crack hair in a sea of mostly black women with natural hair, was enjoying the event side her friend. The black man behind me for some reason couldn't hear Dyson or was bothered by their voices, which didn't bother me for a second. I heard Dyson side his host perfectly. As did most people. The man sitting behind them wasn't upset at their voice. So, my point is, if you are a black man, and if you like the way a certain black woman look or like to bother black women for the sake of it, stop or don't. If you want to get laid say you want to get laid, don't make up a false scenario of rudeness, just to get closer or hope to irritate to get black women to act negatively. The host side Dyson shouted out a black writer named Daryl Robinson but I failed to find his content on MSNBC. It was a reply to someone but I forgot it and didn't it write it down on my notes.

@Troy I have continually made the argument that the black populace in NYC and the larger usa is large enough to have many different places. That has been my point when someone black says they grew up in hell, well someone else black in the same city grew up in heaven and that is not an impossibility and my only issue here is the idea from you plus pioneer that it is somehow impossible that some black people had a brilliant time in the same city where you lived in hell. I tell you , people in my bloodline older than you Troy, never lived in a hell, and I was honest and said that others in my family had a similar experience to you. It is all NYC, the fact that it is impossible for that to be true for some black people leads to the larger issue. From schools to the condition of the street, i can tell you of various black experiences in NYC but speaking for myself plus similars it was great, it was flat out great being in this section of the black populace in NYC. You grew up on park avenue. 113th street. to close to whites for me. You know what's is one of the odd things for me. I see more homeless, all colors but more importantly all ways now, than i did as a kid and harlem has so many whites. but it makes sense, the poorest flow nearest the money. To @Pioneer1 ok, again, i want it known, i know black people in nyc who said and say like you as well as black people who said and say like me. In terms of policy or laws, i think what this situation proves is a key problem in the black populace. This is unbridgeable, like I think many frictious issues in the black populace historically. I have always opposed that positon. You want people to be happy, then you have to help them be happy. Wealth is the key, money is the key. But of course, this goes back to another simple prolbem in the black populace in the usa. All black people know whites run things so black empowerment or improvement will not happen easily and moreover, black people haven't been able to have access to the financial betterment that genocide to natives or enslaving a people who don't look like us brings. The national urban league suggest 200 years to equity and I think of james baldwin, whenone of his last speeches he said, when will it happen, for my children or their grandchildren. That rate is slow but it makes sense to me as black wealth in the usa has never been through financially opportune scenarios, again, let black people in the usa have access to the financial wealth garnered from slavery + genocide and we will jump up quick. That is how white people did it. They were not working the land or working their own land. https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/inside-city-hall/2024/03/08/national-urban-league-president-discusses-new-report-on-black-americans so, you get black people who say, since black financial betterment, which is the true solution in fiscal capitalism to make anybody content is barred for most black people, you better simply stick dogs on the poor. Cause most black people have always been in the usa , the financial bottom. Which si what the enslaved are. I comprehend your position, i know you may not like my language but it is your position's reality. and one that has been uttered again in harlem by many blacks, most importantly by blacks whose financial fortunes are ... better. well, in my experience the phenotypical association of latinos isn't a simple generaliztion witin the latin american popualce in the usa or outside of it. I will simply say i concur that the demographic data has challenges in nyc. from my view, you want to discount my real life because my real life is different than yours. But again, this isn't something new in the black populace in the usa. It is an old story. Earlier in your prose you suggested I don't care about reality or am ignoring reality but you just admitted that commonality is not worth to be shown cause it is common. I accept your position but I am sticking with mine. but you said you wanted 0% so the truth is, you know 0% is unachievable but you want to reach it, that is a cycle to nothing. I choose ot live another way. Maybe where you live or lived most illegal drug dealers want to hang out with children but not where I live. And, will i be ok with an illegal drug dealer trying to get a child? no. But if 99% of drug dealers are not trying to get children I can accept it. Again, 100% is impossible. And As the latino illegal drug dealing covers where children recently died in NYC showed, latinos didn't suggest the same as you to their populace when a child was found dead by their drug dealers negligence or uncaring. why? it isn't a common thing. Ar epeople unhappy or upset, yes, but it isn't a symbol of their community though i know.. we all know many drug fronts exist in nyc. this issue we have gone back and forth with proves media not actions matter. It doesnt matter who commits a crime it matters how media present it. The real estate industry burned the bronx to the ground, a public secret all in harlem or the bornx knew, the law enforcement knew, the fire department knew, but the media said it was black people, black people who share your views said the wild criminal blacks, and that is that. and less poor. again, black people in the usa collectively have more welath today, wealth all earned nothing through slavery, genocide, tricks, even the illegal money is earned cause we never controlled the sources of any drug, which is where the real money is, dealers is what 95% of black illegal drug traffickers are. but to the point, it is more money. money in fiscal capitalism breeds more contentment cause who is more content when they can't pay rent, buy food, pay for electricity, buy clothes. And again, black people, the majority come from enslaved bloodlines that had to literally work every generation to make money, no shortcuts. better happiness helps. but why should most black people be happy in the usa, historically at the least? one thing, when any of you on this platform speak your truth i see it as your truth, i can either oppose it, or concur to it, or have a neutral view, but it isn't a matter of like or dislike. My question is not to your position or truth, but to the larger village. You , and I sadly have to repeat this constantly, like Troy or others I have met offline, offline, have said similar. I believe I said that so many times in this one comment stream, I will promise myself not to say it again. But I also said tha tme side others said different and the larger point is, these positions don't have a bridge so this maintians the deep issue in the black populace in the usa , which it has always had, starting with the usa's founding where again, most free blacks fought against the creation of the usa, the minority of free blacks fought for the creation of free blacks, and the majority of the black populace, the enslaved, hated whites plus the usa and only wanted to kill whites and leave the usa but wee shackled to whites or the usa. Three positions that don't fit each other and that heritage of positons that don't fit each other remains strong.

In a speech before the Scottish Anti-Slavery Society in Glasgow, Scotland on March 26, 1860, Frederick Douglass outlines his views on the American Constitution. I proceed to the discussion. And first a word about the question. Much will be gained at the outset if we fully and clearly understand the real question under discussion. Indeed, nothing is or can be understood. This are often confounded and treated as the same, for no better reason than that they resemble each other, even while they are in their nature and character totally distinct and even directly opposed to each other. This jumbling up things is a sort of dust-throwing which is often indulged in by small men who argue for victory rather than for truth. Thus, for instance, the American Government and the American Constitution are spoken of in a manner which would naturally lead the hearer to believe that one is identical with the other; when the truth is, they are distinct in character as is a ship and a compass. The one may point right and the other steer wrong. A chart is one thing, the course of the vessel is another. The Constitution may be right, the Government is wrong. If the Government has been governed by mean, sordid, and wicked passions, it does not follow that the Constitution is mean, sordid, and wicked. What, then, is the question? I will state it. But first let me state what is not the question. It is not whether slavery existed in the United States at the time of the adoption of the Constitution; it is not whether slaveholders took part in the framing of the Constitution; it is not whether those slaveholders, in their hearts, intended to secure certain advantages in that instrument for slavery; it is not whether the American Government has been wielded during seventy-two years in favour of the propagation and permanence of slavery; it is not whether a pro-slavery interpretation has been put upon the Constitution by the American Courts — all these points may be true or they may be false, they may be accepted or they may be rejected, without in any wise affecting the real question in debate. The real and exact question between myself and the class of persons represented by the speech at the City Hall may be fairly stated thus: — 1st, Does the United States Constitution guarantee to any class or description of people in that country the right to enslave, or hold as property, any other class or description of people in that country? 2nd, Is the dissolution of the union between the slave and free States required by fidelity to the slaves, or by the just demands of conscience? Or, in other words, is the refusal to exercise the elective franchise, and to hold office in America, the surest, wisest, and best way to abolish slavery in America? To these questions the Garrisonians say Yes. They hold the Constitution to be a slaveholding instrument, and will not cast a vote or hold office, and denounce all who vote or hold office, no matter how faithfully such persons labour to promote the abolition of slavery. I, on the other hand, deny that the Constitution guarantees the right to hold property in man, and believe that the way to abolish slavery in America is to vote such men into power as well use their powers for the abolition of slavery. This is the issue plainly stated, and you shall judge between us. Before we examine into the disposition, tendency, and character of the Constitution, I think we had better ascertain what the Constitution itself is. Before looking for what it means, let us see what it is. Here, too, there is much dust to be cleared away. What, then, is the Constitution? I will tell you. It is not even like the British Constitution, which is made up of enactments of Parliament, decisions of Courts, and the established usages of the Government. The American Constitution is a written instrument full and complete in itself. No Court in America, no Congress, no President, can add a single word thereto, or take a single word threreto. It is a great national enactment done by the people, and can only be altered, amended, or added to by the people. I am careful to make this statement here; in America it would not be necessary. It would not be necessary here if my assailant had shown the same desire to be set before you the simple truth, which he manifested to make out a good case for himself and friends. Again, it should be borne in mind that the mere text, and only the text, and not any commentaries or creeds written by those who wished to give the text a meaning apart from its plain reading, was adopted as the Constitution of the United States. It should also be borne in mind that the intentions of those who framed the Constitution, be they good or bad, for slavery or against slavery, are so respected so far, and so far only, as we find those intentions plainly stated in the Constitution. It would be the wildest of absurdities, and lead to endless confusion and mischiefs, if, instead of looking to the written paper itself, for its meaning, it were attempted to make us search it out, in the secret motives, and dishonest intentions, of some of the men who took part in writing it. It was what they said that was adopted by the people, not what they were ashamed or afraid to say, and really omitted to say. Bear in mind, also, and the fact is an important one, that the framers of the Constitution sat with doors closed, and that this was done purposely, that nothing but the result of their labours should be seen, and that that result should be judged of by the people free from any of the bias shown in the debates. It should also be borne in mind, and the fact is still more important, that the debates in the convention that framed the Constitution, and by means of which a pro-slavery interpretation is now attempted to be forced upon that instrument, were not published till more than a quarter of a century after the presentation and the adoption of the Constitution. These debates were purposely kept out of view, in order that the people should adopt, not the secret motives or unexpressed intentions of any body, but the simple text of the paper itself. Those debates form no part of the original agreement. I repeat, the paper itself, and only the paper itself, with its own plainly written purposes, is the Constitution. It must stand or fall, flourish or fade, on its own individual and self-declared character and objects. Again, where would be the advantage of a written Constitution, if, instead of seeking its meaning in its words, we had to seek them in the secret intentions of individuals who may have had something to do with writing the paper? What will the people of America a hundred years hence care about the intentions of the scriveners who wrote the Constitution? These men are already gone from us, and in the course of nature were expected to go from us. They were for a generation, but the Constitution is for ages. Whatever we may owe to them, we certainly owe it to ourselves, and to mankind, and to God, to maintain the truth of our own language, and to allow no villainy, not even the villainy of holding men as slaves — which Wesley says is the sum of all villainies — to shelter itself under a fair-seeming and virtuous language. We owe it to ourselves to compel the devil to wear his own garments, and to make wicked laws speak out their wicked intentions. Common sense, and common justice, and sound rules of interpretation all drive us to the words of the law for the meaning of the law. The practice of the Government is dwelt upon with much fervour and eloquence as conclusive as to the slaveholding character of the Constitution. This is really the strong point and the only strong point, made in the speech in the City Hall. But good as this argument is, it is not conclusive. A wise man has said that few people have been found better than their laws, but many have been found worse. To this last rule America is no exception. Her laws are one thing, her practice is another thing. We read that the Jews made void the law by their tradition, that Moses permitted men to put away their wives because of the hardness of their hearts, but that this was not so at the beginning. While good laws will always be found where good practice prevails, the reverse does not always hold true. Far from it. The very opposite is often the case. What then? Shall we condemn the righteous law because wicked men twist it to the support of wickedness? Is that the way to deal with good and evil? Shall we blot out all distinction between them, and hand over to slavery all that slavery may claim on the score of long practice? Such is the course commended to us in the City Hall speech. After all, the fact that men go out of the Constitution to prove it pro-slavery, whether that going out is to the practice of the Government, or to the secret intentions of the writers of the paper, the fact that they do go out is very significant. It is a powerful argument on my side. It is an admission that the thing for which they are looking is not to be found where only it ought to be found, and that is in the Constitution itself. If it is not there, it is nothing to the purpose, be it wheresoever else it may be. But I shall have no more to say on this point hereafter. The very eloquent lecturer at the City Hall doubtless felt some embarrassment from the fact that he had literally to give the Constitution a pro-slavery interpretation; because upon its face it of itself conveys no such meaning, but a very opposite meaning. He thus sums up what he calls the slaveholding provisions of the Constitution. I quote his own words: — “Article 1, section 9, provides for the continuance of the African slave trade for the 20 years, after the adoption of the Constitution. Art. 4, section 9, provides for the recovery from the other States of fugitive slaves. Art. 1, section 2, gives the slave States a representation of the three-fifths of all the slave population; and Art. 1, section 8, requires the President to use the military, naval, ordnance, and militia resources of the entire country for the suppression of slave insurrection, in the same manner as he would employ them to repel invasion.” Now any man reading this statement, or hearing it made with such a show of exactness, would unquestionably suppose that he speaker or writer had given the plain written text of the Constitution itself. I can hardly believe that the intended to make any such impression. It would be a scandalous imputation to say he did. Any yet what are we to make of it? How can we regard it? How can he be screened from the charge of having perpetrated a deliberate and point-blank misrepresentation? That individual has seen fit to place himself before the public as my opponent, and yet I would gladly find some excuse for him. I do not wish to think as badly of him as this trick of his would naturally lead me to think. Why did he not read the Constitution? Why did he read that which was not the Constitution? He pretended to be giving chapter and verse, section and clause, paragraph and provision. The words of the Constitution were before him. Why then did he not give you the plain words of the Constitution? Oh, sir, I fear that the gentleman knows too well why he did not. It so happens that no such words as “African slave trade,” no such words as “slave insurrections,” are anywhere used in that instrument. These are the words of that orator, and not the words of the Constitution of the United States. Now you shall see a slight difference between my manner of treating this subject and what which my opponent has seen fit, for reasons satisfactory to himself, to pursue. What he withheld, that I will spread before you: what he suppressed, I will bring to light: and what he passed over in silence, I will proclaim: that you may have the whole case before you, and not be left to depend upon either his, or upon my inferences or testimony. Here then are several provisions of the Constitution to which reference has been made. I read them word for word just as they stand in the paper, called the United States Constitution, Art. I, sec. 2. “Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included in this Union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other persons; Art. I, sec. 9. The migration or importation of such persons as any of the States now existing shall think fit to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such importation, not exceeding tend dollars for each person; Art. 4, sec. 2. No person held to service or labour in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from service or labour; but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labour may be due; Art. I, sec. 8. To provide for calling for the militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions.” Here then, are those provisions of the Constitution, which the most extravagant defenders of slavery can claim to guarantee a right of property in man. These are the provisions which have been pressed into the service of the human fleshmongers of America. Let us look at them just as they stand, one by one. Let us grant, for the sake of the argument, that the first of these provisions, referring to the basis of representation and taxation, does refer to slaves. We are not compelled to make that admission, for it might fairly apply to aliens — persons living in the country, but not naturalized. But giving the provisions the very worse construction, what does it amount to? I answer — It is a downright disability laid upon the slaveholding States; one which deprives those States of two-fifths of their natural basis of representation. A black man in a free State is worth just two-fifths more than a black man in a slave State, as a basis of political power under the Constitution. Therefore, instead of encouraging slavery, the Constitution encourages freedom by giving an increase of “two-fifths” of political power to free over slave States. So much for the three-fifths clause; taking it at is worst, it still leans to freedom, not slavery; for, be it remembered that the Constitution nowhere forbids a coloured man to vote. I come to the next, that which it is said guaranteed the continuance of the African slave trade for twenty years. I will also take that for just what my opponent alleges it to have been, although the Constitution does not warrant any such conclusion. But, to be liberal, let us suppose it did, and what follows? Why, this — that this part of the Constitution, so far as the slave trade is concerned, became a dead letter more than 50 years ago, and now binds no man’s conscience for the continuance of any slave trade whatsoever. Mr. Thompson is just 52 years too late in dissolving the Union on account of this clause. He might as well dissolve the British Government, because Queen Elizabeth granted to Sir John Hawkins to import Africans into the West Indies 300 years ago! But there is still more to be said about this abolition of the slave trade. Men, at that time, both in England and in America, looked upon the slave trade as the life of slavery. The abolition of the slave trade was supposed to be the certain death of slavery. Cut off the stream, and the pond will dry up, was the common notion at the time. Wilberforce and Clarkson, clear-sighted as they were, took this view; and the American statesmen, in providing for the abolition of the slave trade, thought they were providing for the abolition of the slavery. This view is quite consistent with the history of the times. All regarded slavery as an expiring and doomed system, destined to speedily disappear from the country. But, again, it should be remembered that this very provision, if made to refer to the African slave trade at all, makes the Constitution anti-slavery rather than for slavery; for it says to the slave States, the price you will have to pay for coming into the American Union is, that the slave trade, which you would carry on indefinitely out of the Union, shall be put an end to in twenty years if you come into the Union. Secondly, if it does apply, it expired by its own limitation more than fifty years ago. Thirdly, it is anti-slavery, because it looked to the abolition of slavery rather than to its perpetuity. Fourthly, it showed that the intentions of the framers of the Constitution were good, not bad. I think this is quite enough for this point. I go to the “slave insurrection” clause, though, in truth, there is no such clause. The one which is called so has nothing whatever to do with slaves or slaveholders any more than your laws for suppression of popular outbreaks has to do with making slaves of you and your children. It is only a law for suppression of riots or insurrections. But I will be generous here, as well as elsewhere, and grant that it applies to slave insurrections. Let us suppose that an anti-slavery man is President of the United States (and the day that shall see this the case is not distant) and this very power of suppressing slave insurrections would put an end to slavery. The right to put down an insurrection carries with it the right to determine the means by which it shall be put down. If it should turn out that slavery is a source of insurrection, that there is no security from insurrection while slavery lasts, why, the Constitution would be best obeyed by putting an end to slavery, and an anti-slavery Congress would do the very same thing. Thus, you see, the so-called slave-holding provisions of the American Constitution, which a little while ago looked so formidable, are, after all, no defence or guarantee for slavery whatever. But there is one other provision. This is called the “Fugitive Slave Provision.” It is called so by those who wish to make it subserve the interest of slavery in America, and the same by those who wish to uphold the views of a party in this country. It is put thus in the speech at the City Hall: — “Let us go back to 1787, and enter Liberty Hall, Philadelphia, where sat in convention the illustrious men who framed the Constitution — with George Washington in the chair. On the 27th of September, Mr. Butler and Mr. Pinckney, two delegates from the State of South Carolina, moved that the Constitution should require that fugitive slaves and servants should be delivered up like criminals, and after a discussion on the subject, the clause, as it stands in the Constitution, was adopted. After this, in the conventions held in the several States to ratify the Constitution, the same meaning was attached to the words. For example, Mr. Madison (afterwards President), when recommending the Constitution to his constituents, told them that the clause would secure them their property in slaves.” I must ask you to look well to this statement. Upon its face, it would seem a full and fair statement of the history of the transaction it professes to describe and yet I declare unto you, knowing as I do the facts in the case, my utter amazement at the downright untruth conveyed under the fair seeming words now quoted. The man who could make such a statement may have all the craftiness of a lawyer, but who can accord to him the candour of an honest debater? What could more completely destroy all confidence in his statements? Mark you, the orator had not allowed his audience to hear read the provision of the Constitution to which he referred. He merely characterized it as one to “deliver up fugitive slaves and servants like criminals,” and tells you that this was done “after discussion.” But he took good care not to tell you what was the nature of that discussion. He have would have spoiled the whole effect of his statement had he told you the whole truth. Now, what are the facts connected with this provision of the Constitution? You shall have them. It seems to take two men to tell the truth. It is quite true that Mr. Butler and Mr. Pinckney introduced a provision expressly with a view to the recapture of fugitive slaves: it is quite true also that there was some discussion on the subject — and just here the truth shall come out. These illustrious kidnappers were told promptly in that discussion that no such idea as property in man should be admitted into the Constitution. The speaker in question might have told you, and he would have told you but the simple truth, if he had told you that he proposition of Mr. Butler and Mr. Pinckney — which he leads you to infer was adopted by the convention that from the Constitution — was, in fact, promptly and indignantly rejected by that convention. He might have told you, had it suited his purpose to do so, that the words employed in the first draft of the fugitive slave clause were such as applied to the condition of slaves, and expressly declared that persons held to “servitude” should be given up; but that the word “servitude” was struck from the provision, for the very reason that it applied to slaves. He might have told you that the same Mr. Madison declared that the word was struck out because the convention would not consent that the idea of property in men should be admitted into the Constitution. The fact that Mr. Madison can be cited on both sides of this question is another evidence of the folly and absurdity of making the secret intentions of the framers the criterion by which the Constitution is to be construed. But it may be asked — if this clause does not apply to slaves, to whom does it apply? I answer, that when adopted, it applies to a very large class of persons — namely, redemptioners — persons who had come to America from Holland, from Ireland, and other quarters of the globe — like the Coolies to the West Indies — and had, for a consideration duly paid, become bound to “serve and labour” for the parties two whom their service and labour was due. It applies to indentured apprentices and others who have become bound for a consideration, under contract duly made, to serve and labour, to such persons this provision applies, and only to such persons. The plain reading of this provision shows that it applies, and that it can only properly and legally apply, to persons “bound to service.” Its object plainly is, to secure the fulfillment of contracts for “service and labour.” It applies to indentured apprentices, and any other persons from whom service and labour may be due. The legal condition of the slave puts him beyond the operation of this provision. He is not described in it. He is a simple article of property. He does not owe and cannot owe service. He cannot even make a contract. It is impossible for him to do so. He can no more make such a contract than a horse or an ox can make one. This provision, then, only respects persons who owe service, and they only can owe service who can receive an equivalent and make a bargain. The slave cannot do that, and is therefore exempted from the operation of this fugitive provision. In all matters where laws are taught to be made the means of oppression, cruelty, and wickedness, I am for strict construction. I will concede nothing. It must be shown that it is so nominated in the bond. The pound of flesh, but not one drop of blood. The very nature of law is opposed to all such wickedness, and makes it difficult to accomplish such objects under the forms of law. Law is not merely an arbitrary enactment with regard to justice, reason, or humanity. Blackstone defines it to be a rule prescribed by the supreme power of the State commanding what is right and forbidding what is wrong. The speaker at the City Hall laid down some rules of legal interpretation. These rules send us to the history of the law for its meaning. I have no objection to such a course in ordinary cases of doubt. But where human liberty and justice are at stake, the case falls under an entirely different class of rules. There must be something more than history — something more than tradition. The Supreme Court of the United States lays down this rule, and it meets the case exactly — “Where rights are infringed — where the fundamental principles of the law are overthrown — where the general system of the law is departed from, the legislative intention must be expressed with irresistible clearness.” The same court says that the language of the law must be construed strictly in favour of justice and liberty. Again, there is another rule of law. It is — Where a law is susceptible of two meanings, the one making it accomplish an innocent purpose, and the other making it accomplish a wicked purpose, we must in all cases adopt that which makes it accomplish an innocent purpose. Again, the details of a law are to be interpreted in the light of the declared objects sought by the law. I set these rules down against those employed at the City Hall. To me they seem just and rational. I only ask you to look at the American Constitution in the light of them, and you will see with me that no man is guaranteed a right of property in man, under the provisions of that instrument. If there are two ideas more distinct in their character and essence than another, those ideas are “persons” and “property,” “men” and “things.” Now, when it is proposed to transform persons into “property” and men into beasts of burden, I demand that the law that completes such a purpose shall be expressed with irresistible clearness. The thing must not be left to inference, but must be done in plain English. I know how this view of the subject is treated by the class represented at the City Hall. They are in the habit of treating the Negro as an exception to general rules. When their own liberty is in question they will avail themselves of all rules of law which protect and defend their freedom; but when the black man’s rights are in question they concede everything, admit everything for slavery, and put liberty to the proof. They reserve the common law usage, and presume the Negro a slave unless he can prove himself free. I, on the other hand, presume him free unless he is proved to be otherwise. Let us look at the objects for which the Constitution was framed and adopted, and see if slavery is one of them. Here are its own objects as set forth by itself: — “We, the people of these United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America.” The objects here set forth are six in number: union, defence, welfare, tranquility, justice, and liberty. These are all good objects, and slavery, so far from being among them, is a foe of them all. But it has been said that Negroes are not included within the benefits sought under this declaration. This is said by the slaveholders in America — it is said by the City Hall orator — but it is not said by the Constitution itself. Its language is “we the people;” not we the white people, not even we the citizens, not we the privileged class, not we the high, not we the low, but we the people; not we the horses, sheep, and swine, and wheel-barrows, but we the people, we the human inhabitants; and, if Negroes are people, they are included in the benefits for which the Constitution of America was ordained and established. But how dare any man who pretends to be a friend to the Negro thus gratuitously concede away what the Negro has a right to claim under the Constitution? Why should such friends invent new arguments to increase the hopelessness of his bondage? This, I undertake to say, as the conclusion of the whole matter, that the constitutionality of slavery can be made out only by disregarding the plain and common-sense reading of the Constitution itself; by discrediting and casting away as worthless the most beneficent rules of legal interpretation; by ruling the Negro outside of these beneficent rules; by claiming that the Constitution does not mean what it says, and that it says what it does not mean; by disregarding the written Constitution, and interpreting it in the light of a secret understanding. It is in this mean, contemptible, and underhand method that the American Constitution is pressed into the service of slavery. They go everywhere else for proof that the Constitution declares that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; it secures to every man the right of trial by jury, the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus — the great writ that put an end to slavery and slave-hunting in England — and it secures to every State a republican form of government. Anyone of these provisions in the hands of abolition statesmen, and backed up by a right moral sentiment, would put an end to slavery in America. The Constitution forbids the passing of a bill of attainder: that is, a law entailing upon the child the disabilities and hardships imposed upon the parent. Every slave law in America might be repealed on this very ground. The slave is made a slave because his mother is a slave. But to all this it is said that the practice of the American people is against my view. I admit it. They have given the Constitution a slaveholding interpretation. I admit it. Thy have committed innumerable wrongs against the Negro in the name of the Constitution. Yes, I admit it all; and I go with him who goes farthest in denouncing these wrongs. But it does not follow that the Constitution is in favour of these wrongs because the slaveholders have given it that interpretation. To be consistent in his logic, the City Hall speaker must follow the example of some of his brothers in America — he must not only fling away the Constitution, but the Bible. The Bible must follow the Constitution, for that, too, has been interpreted for slavery by American divines. Nay, more, he must not stop with the Constitution of America, but make war with the British Constitution, for, if I mistake not, the gentleman is opposed to the union of Church and State. In America he called himself a Republican. Yet he does not go for breaking down the British Constitution, although you have a Queen on the throne, and bishops in the House of Lords. My argument against the dissolution of the American Union is this: It would place the slave system more exclusively under the control of the slaveholding States, and withdraw it from the power in the Northern States which is opposed to slavery. Slavery is essentially barbarous in its character. It, above all things else, dreads the presence of an advanced civilization. It flourishes best where it meets no reproving frowns, and hears no condemning voices. While in the Union it will meet with both. Its hope of life, in the last resort, is to get out of the Union. I am, therefore, for drawing the bond of the Union more completely under the power of the Free States. What they most dread, that I most desire. I have much confidence in the instincts of the slaveholders. They see that the Constitution will afford slavery no protection when it shall cease to be administered by slaveholders. They see, moreover, that if there is once a will in the people of America to abolish slavery, this is no word, no syllable in the Constitution to forbid that result. They see that the Constitution has not saved slavery in Rhode Island, in Connecticut, in New York, or Pennsylvania; that the Free States have only added three to their original number. There were twelve Slave States at the beginning of the Government: there are fifteen now. They dissolution of the Union would not give the North a single advantage over slavery, but would take from it many. Within the Union we have a firm basis of opposition to slavery. It is opposed to all the great objects of the Constitution. The dissolution of the Union is not only an unwise but a cowardly measure — 15 millions running away from three hundred and fifty thousand slaveholders. Mr. Garrison and his friends tell us that while in the Union we are responsible for slavery. He and they sing out “No Union with slaveholders,” and refuse to vote. I admit our responsibility for slavery while in the Union but I deny that going out of the Union would free us from that responsibility. There now clearly is no freedom from responsibility for slavery to any American citizen short to the abolition of slavery. The American people have gone quite too far in this slaveholding business now to sum up their whole business of slavery by singing out the cant phrase, “No union with slaveholders.” To desert the family hearth may place the recreant husband out of the presence of his starving children, but this does not free him from responsibility. If a man were on board of a pirate ship, and in company with others had robbed and plundered, his whole duty would not be preformed simply by taking the longboat and singing out, “No union with pirates.” His duty would be to restore the stolen property. The American people in the Northern States have helped to enslave the black people. Their duty will not have been done till they give them back their plundered rights. Reference was made at the City Hall to my having once held other opinions, and very different opinions to those I have now expressed. An old speech of mine delivered fourteen years ago was read to show — I know not what. Perhaps it was to show that I am not infallible. If so, I have to say in defence, that I never pretended to be. Although I cannot accuse myself of being remarkably unstable, I do not pretend that I have never altered my opinion both in respect to men and things. Indeed, I have been very much modified both in feeling and opinion within the last fourteen years. When I escaped from slavery, and was introduced to the Garrisonians, I adopted very many of their opinions, and defended them just as long as I deemed them true. I was young, had read but little, and naturally took some things on trust. Subsequent experience and reading have led me to examine for myself. This had brought me to other conclusions. When I was a child, I thought and spoke as a child. But the question is not as to what were my opinions fourteen years ago, but what they are now. If I am right now, it really does not matter what I was fourteen years ago. My position now is one of reform, not of revolution. I would act for the abolition of slavery through the Government — not over its ruins. If slaveholders have ruled the American Government for the last fifty years, let the anti-slavery men rule the nation for the next fifty years. If the South has made the Constitution bend to the purposes of slavery, let the North now make that instrument bend to the cause of freedom and justice. If 350,000 slaveholders have, by devoting their energies to that single end, been able to make slavery the vital and animating spirit of the American Confederacy for the last 72 years, now let the freemen of the North, who have the power in their own hands, and who can make the American Government just what they think fit, resolve to blot out for ever the foul and haggard crime, which is the blight and mildew, the curse and the disgrace of the whole United States. REFERRAL https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/1860-frederick-douglass-constitution-united-states-it-pro-slavery-or-anti-slavery/ Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 from James MAdison https://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/debcont.asp

@ProfD I paraphrase the great james baldwin, how much time? one hundred years from now, five hundred? if by matter of time you mean one thusand years, well yeah. I quote myself intentionally any answer will require a significant sacrifice of time. I always give the caste parallel in india, the second most multiracial populace i humanity. The caste can't go casue the caste allows for the multiracial populace to exist. In the same way the usa's individualism allows the multiracial populace to exist. yes, the individualism kills communal strength which is why all populaces are suffering to be better communally now in some way or form in the USA. But, to undo the system and build a new one better suited from within the usa while not having drastic financial or militaristic changes to the usa is really a task. The USA had a sixties generation of leaders who were willing but the rich white europans murdered them so... The current system is dysfunctional in many ways but where it does serve best is the individual mandate which allows for latinos who came into the usa illegally in modernity to vote for greater measures against illegal immigrants. It has always allowed for blacks led by the black church folk or black one percent to speak of all sorts of lies or falsities or half truths concerning the majority of the black populace in the usa which has always been fiscally nihil and only had illegal activity to provide financial opportunity. I know you see the usa in the context of two sides of the same coin but I a complex uneven many sided polygon that can't find balance on any one group with ever changing sides, far more than two, and is only held together by an individual allowance, which is rare under most governments in humanity, for positive reason.

topics The thirty-second of the Cento poetry series Dates with astrology + astronomy IF YOU MADE IT THIS FAR: Patrice Rushen Trio in Black Omnibus with JAmes Earl Jones, In A Lonely Place from Ask Eddie of noircity, Honest Bunch Vibrator discussion, The Preacher's Wife from Movies That Move We URL https://rmnewsletter.over-blog.com/2023/08/12/31/2023-rmnewsletter.html

I don't know if Frank James was the shooter in the subway, but if he was, he offers an interesting query challenge. NYC's black community always had black people in it, who love to suggest a usage of violence is incorrect. The reason why is complicated, it isn't merely about right or wrong. But, one of the juxtaposes between white controlled media of nyc /the black church in the black community of NYC/black employed class in NYC is the idea of gun violence in the Black community as something of youth. The narrative is, the youth must get the violence out of them. But, Frank James is sixty something years old. Frank James was an elder teen in the 1970s. So Frank James is not a Black person who is without a decades long look at the Black community in NYC, in NYS, in the USA and with that a high potential for a very honest while negative appraisal of many things in this area. Many will suggest mental imbalance, as in NYC that is suggested for anyone who is violent. From white media to many or most black homes in NYC, mental dysfunction or imbalance is always the reason behind any violence as if, being violent can not be from a mentally sane person, which of course is a lie.

One recurring theme in modernity is that the fifty states of the USA are not the same, in racial composition, legal structure, heritage, culture, or current path. They are merely in a union. https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2087&type=status

When the secrets of the military combat suit known as WEAPON are exposed to the public, before long they flood the streets and it seems every civilian is using a power suit for crime, chaos or their own selfish ends. To avert the possibility of civil war, General Patricia James, amid dissent from both superiors and subordinates, sponsors a tournament to encourage the "WEAPON-wielders" to compete for fame and fortune, and to inspire the populace. But just as the world begins to embrace the WEAPON as the wave of the future, a dark secret about the origin of the technology emerges, threatening to destroy everything Patricia sought to build. WEAPON Combat League; an action-packed tale in a world of fantastic technology, with stories of action and conflict, of drama and heartbreak, of love and loss, of rivalry, of haves against have-nots, of the balance of power, of the ripple effects of past sins thought buried. Weapons Combat League Book1 https://www.am*zon.com/dp/B005LIMMWK Book2 https://www.am*zon.com/dp/B00HRZCGO4 This project is a prototype ‘battle’ game based on my WEAPON Combat League concept, initially planned as a multimedia project with comics and prose novels. (If you are interested in reading the stories of WEAPON Combat League, you can find links to them here: https://jonathanpriceart.net/products/ ) I do not consider it a ‘fighting’ game because it’s not strictly about martial arts or weapon-based duels (despite the name). This project was meant to mimic the versus modes in classic games such as X-Kaliber 2097, Guardian Heroes and Streets of Rage 2; allowing the core game’s playable characters to duke it out in a versus mode for fun. It’s not a game designed to be in the same genre as a Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat, as that was never my intent. The original design philosophy of the project is "King of Fighters meets Mega Man". More on the Mega Man side. Characters control in platformer style, rather than fighting game style. Some characters have melee attacks, others use projectiles. It has two functioning modes: Team Versus and Team Edit Versus. Both function similarly, but the difference is one focuses on the story’s default team lineups while the other lets players choose their own team members. There is also a database of information about the game and the characters within. However, the versus mode got the lion’s share of my development efforts as I became obsessed with making all the characters ‘feel’ the way I envisioned them. Time passed and I realized that the project’s large number of characters and underdeveloped single player concept made it far too ambitious for me to complete. I realized that I was never going to finish the game under the circumstances, and thus halted development. I’m uploading it here as-is for no required charge, to allow anyone who’s interested to play what I made. Some important notes: There are likely to be glitches as I haven’t balanced or bug-tested all that thoroughly. Much of the art assets are placeholders (such as the arena background and HUD). The game can ONLY be played in two player versus mode. There is no AI single player mode at all. The first player can control with either keyboard or gamepad. Player 2 can only use a second gamepad. However, if one player just wants to mess around, Player 2’s team or characters can be chosen and selected with the Numpad on the keyboard. Inputs can’t be changed, but the controls should be simple enough to understand. The middle segments on the Team Edit screen were for planned characters that were never finished. There is no way to unlock them. Same characters cannot be chosen by either the same player or the opponent. I intend to resurrect WEAPON Combat League with a different approach in the future as I learn new tools for game development. However, this project as it stands is at an end. That said, feedback is fine and welcome, as I'm always eager to learn how to improve my craft. Thanks! url https://dualmask.itch.io/weapon-combat-league-demo

topics Cento series, 23rd round Rainforest pokemon Fright-ing poetry challenge part 1 Cursed costumes entries Dates IF YOU MADE IT THIS FAR: 5 minute yoga, Mary Lou Williams plus James P Johnson play, Statian wives, sustainability multilog, halloween visual game https://rmnewsletter.over-blog.com/2023/07/10/29/2023-rmnewsletter.html

@Stefan Can you provide a link of when i ever said crypto was a viable investment for black people ? I will help you. The following is a link to all post from me with the word crypto in it, in aalbc. https://aalbc.com/tc/search/?&q=crypto&quick=1&author=richardmurray&search_and_or=or&sortby=newest The only truly credible proof is a private financial investment ledger which I am not privy too. Cause I repeat , I have never personally supported investing in crypto. And if I was privy to such information I doubt i would display it without the permission of the people it relates to. Now, I have never suggested I can provide irrefutable proof on anything. And regardless of my offline information, which I wouldn't convey online anyway, that isn't proof. I wanted you to help me write something. I don't recall I ever wrote anything like that. Here is one half of my proof , these are all the posts with frank james concerning me. Never once did I ask or desire you to help me write anything. You like proof, check yourself. https://aalbc.com/tc/search/?&q=frank james&quick=1&author=richardmurray&search_and_or=and&sortby=newest The following is the other half. I don't usually submit a private multilog, but your lies force this. If you notice, you started this private message, not me. I never asked you for... anything. I never wanted anything from you. And I refuted your view toward me. You kept suggesting your assisting me by communicating to me. Now, for your next positions Again, I never said ideal. I have never said offline or online that at any moment in the history of the usa or the european colonies that proceeded it that anything was ideal concerning black people, no plans no situation no ideas have ever been ideal for black people in the usa. What I said, and here is your proof https://aalbc.com/tc/search/?&q=black political party&quick=1&author=richardmurray&search_and_or=and&sortby=newest is the following I want you to quote when I said anything was ideal some of my earliest quotes, say nothing about ideal situations. And you can use the link above if you want more proof. I messaged in a public post that it is a Black party of Governance. And I never said one existed , I said one was needed, and hasn't been tried. And for the historical record, so many black men were lynched , black women raped, black towns burned completely, I don't comprehend why a Black party of governance would had made more of a negative difference, when even whites will admit that violence against black people after slavery in those early years was worse than during slavery. https://aalbc.com/tc/blogs/entry/194-richard-murray-creative-table/page/5/?tab=comments#comment-495 https://aalbc.com/tc/blogs/entry/194-richard-murray-creative-table/page/5/?tab=comments#comment-496 https://aalbc.com/tc/blogs/entry/194-richard-murray-creative-table/page/5/?tab=comments#comment-498 https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/5787-black-party-to-governance-after-listening-share-your-thoughts/ https://aalbc.com/tc/blogs/entry/194-richard-murray-creative-table/page/8/?tab=comments#comment-898 https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/9211-the-black-community-in-the-usa-need-an-alternative-to-black-officials-from-the-party-of-andrew-jackson-or-abraham-lincoln/ And lastly, your position of black ignorance of the past. The articles are all cited. And clearly show the idea that black people were ignorant to their condition in the past is a lie, or that they were disengaged. I repeat, black leadership made a choice and that choice led to the changes black leadership wanted in the black community but they had other options that I think were better and still today, the black community in the usa has elements it lacks which its leadership isn't supporting. https://aalbc.com/tc/profile/6477-richardmurray/?status=2346&type=status My only problem was I went against what I said and I replied to you. That was my mistake. I will not make it again.

How a Pricing Change Led to a Revolt by Unity’s Video Game Developers In an industry where customers are slow to trust and quick to criticize, a new fee from Unity infuriated studios that use its platform. Mike IsaacKellen Browning By Mike Isaac and Kellen Browning Reporting from San Francisco Oct. 2, 2023 John Riccitiello probably should have seen the outrage coming. A video game industry veteran, Mr. Riccitiello is the chief executive of Unity Technologies, a company that isn’t a household name but is a fixture for more than two million game developers who use its software to power their games. For most of the company’s 19-year history, Unity’s software business was relatively straightforward: Every developer who used Unity’s professional tools to build software paid a fixed, annual licensing fee. The software acts like an engine. It is the underlying technology that developers use to build and run their apps. In mid-September, Mr. Riccitiello proposed an abrupt change. Instead of an annual fee, he wanted to charge developers a fee every time someone installed a copy of their games, meaning they would pay more as their titles grew in popularity. The about-face would make a significant difference for Unity, which has never turned a profit. But in an industry where gamers and small game development studios are reluctant to trust big corporations and quick to take umbrage at perceived attempts to nickel-and-dime them, the proposed fee change has snowballed into a crisis. Developers around the world who use Unity — including those behind hit games like Among Us and Slay the Spire — have threatened to leave the platform, saying the new pricing model could effectively kill their businesses if their games grow too popular. There was talk of a class-action lawsuit. Someone even called in a threat that required Unity to inform federal law enforcement officials and evacuate its San Francisco headquarters and its office in Austin, Texas, a person familiar with the decision said. Developers said they felt betrayed. Many spent years learning and coding in a particular programming language used by Unity called C# — pronounced “C-sharp” — making it hard for them to switch to a competitor. Executives at Unity were using that leverage, the developers complained, to engage in digital rent-seeking behavior. “They completely abandoned the creative, punk software developer community that was a big part of their ongoing success,” said Tomas Sala, an independent developer in Amsterdam whose game, The Falconeer, was built in Unity. The episode highlights the precarious position that companies can find themselves in when trying to keep a community happy at the same time that executives want to find ways to make more money. Trip Hawkins, the founder of the video game giant Electronic Arts and an adviser to some game developers who use Unity, said he understood the outrage. He likened it to a hardware store’s selling a carpenter a hammer and nails and then suddenly charging a fee for every nail the carpenter has ever pounded into a wall. “It gets at what feels right versus what feels wrong in people’s gut,” said Mr. Hawkins, who left EA in 1994. Now, Mr. Riccitiello and his executive team are scrambling to contain the fallout. Unity has rolled back some of the changes in a series of concessions aimed at placating developers. Among other changes, it raised the revenue threshold for games that will be charged the per-install fee — so larger developers, primarily, will be charged — and allowed developers to pay either the fee or 2.5 percent of their company’s monthly revenue, whichever is lower. But the company still plans to go ahead with the new fee model. In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Riccitiello said he was “truly humbled” by the response, and had spent the past two weeks talking with partners and indie developers. “It reminded me just how foundational Unity is to the developer community,” Mr. Riccitiello said. Unity’s engine is one of a handful of software development tool sets in the video game industry. Developers can use the tools to create 3-D character models that can run, jump and shoot enemies in games. They can also use the software to design rich landscapes and textured environments. Every time a game is booted up, the software engine from Unity or another company is running underneath. Most of these engines have charged companies using the software a fixed annual amount for every one of their developers. Unity’s new fees turned this predictability on its head. Many developers felt that they were being punished if their game turned out to be a hit, and that Unity had the potential to take a much larger cut of revenues. “The new business model just doesn’t work for the rest of us,” Mr. Sala, the game developer, said. “A lot of people feel like we just got played.” Unity was founded in 2004 in Copenhagen as a project of three developers who collaborated on an internet forum dedicated to coding. The premise was to “democratize” game coding tools so that anyone — from high school hobbyists to professionals — could build games from scratch. “The key for me was the community and resources around it,” said Will Todd, a 28-year-old developer. “You can hop on a forum and quickly get an answer to any questions you might have.” He and his partner at the London indie studio Coal Supper, James Carbutt, used Unity to build their hit game, The Good Time Garden, in 2019. Under fire for poor financial results, Mr. Riccitiello left his job as chief executive at Electronic Arts in 2013. He joined Unity the next year, when the company was relatively small. He brought with him a reputation for squeezing cash out of games in ways that sometimes angered developers and players. Mr. Riccitiello led Unity to a successful initial public offering in 2020, and Unity’s shares hit a high of around $200 by the end of 2021. But they have since fallen to about $30. In its most recent quarterly financial results, Unity reported $533 million in revenue — up 80 percent from a year earlier — but $193 million in net losses. It also laid off about 8 percent of its employees in May. Unity has an advertising business that allows developers who use its platform to insert ads into their mobile games. It’s the part of the business responsible for about two-thirds of the company’s revenue. But it is under pressure from changes on Apple’s software for mobile devices that limit the data that Unity’s system can collect from the developers who use it to serve ads inside their mobile games. Mr. Riccitiello told The Times that Unity’s software pricing changes had “absolutely nothing to do with” challenges to its ads business, which he described as healthy. He said the new model was “designed to be a fair and appropriate exchange of value” between Unity and its customers. In other words, Unity thinks it can make a lot more money from its engine business than it does now. Behind the scenes, many employees were furious. Numerous Unity workers told management that it was a bad idea that would betray the small developers who used Unity’s tools, three current and former employees said. A handful of employees left or are in the process of leaving the company as a result, two people said. Mr. Riccitiello acknowledged in the interview that the new pricing model had been communicated poorly and needed some changes. And Marc Whitten, one of the company’s top executives, wrote an apologetic blog post. But the company is not rolling back the pricing change. It will be some time before Unity knows if there is permanent damage to its business. Mr. Sala, the developer of The Falconeer, said that his upcoming game was also built on Unity, and that he would still need to support it with software updates and expansions of more in-game content for at least two years. But after Unity made some concessions, Mr. Sala said they were welcome changes. He added that if he decided to switch to another engine, learning that software could take him months, if not years, to get to the comfort level he had with Unity. Mr. Carbutt, the Coal Supper studio developer, said sticking with Unity felt like “an operational risk.” “They broke trust with devs over all of this,” he said. “Irreparable damage has already been done.” A correction was made on Oct. 2, 2023: An earlier version of this article misstated how much Unity would charge video game developers. Unity will charge developers who qualify a percentage of their company’s monthly revenue, not annual revenue. When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more Mike Isaac is a technology correspondent for The Times based in San Francisco. He regularly covers Facebook and Silicon Valley. More about Mike Isaac Kellen Browning writes about technology, the gig economy and the video game industry. He has been reporting for The Times since 2020. More about Kellen Browning A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 4, 2023, Section B, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘We Just Got Played’. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe READ 29 COMMENTS Share full article URL https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/02/technology/how-a-pricing-change-led-to-a-revolt-by-unitys-video-game-developers.html MY THOUGHTS The underlying problem here is engineering. Like many crafts, its most optimal form isn't financially fast. The reason firms need unity isn't because programmers can't develop all the tools they need on their own, it is because doing that will take longer than all the accountants or lawyers who own firms are willing to wait. Using tools to speed up business is a pillar of the usa led global fiscal capitalism and in engineering , that is the path to lower quality or financial management. Remember, building a program is like making a table.Artist can make the same table, but the process of making the table, makes each woodworker actually better. To the fiscal reality of unity, they are a firm that is usually unprofitable overall. It is that simple. This situation reflects Google/Facebook/NEtflix/Tesla motors/ and many others firms who spent years , sometimes over a decade not being able to cover their cost of existence, but stayed afloat by stocks and investments and various financial mechanism which in my view are all anti fiscal capitalistic.