Printable View
With Mitchell Gold
Mitchell Gold wrote a book "CRISIS: 40 STORIES REVEALING THE PERSONAL, SOCIAL, AND RELIGIOUS PAIN AND TRAUMA OF GROWING UP GAY IN AMERICA"
Part 1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5IBfWD-Ee4
Part 2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mgvw0jQkWJE
With Bill Maher and Larry Charles - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3ylsTLWoxo
A conversation with Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kA_0W4hIhuA
A conversation about the film "Milk" with Sean Penn (2008 Oscar winner), Gus Van Sant and Josh Brolin
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/9670
Transcript - http://www.charlierose.com/view/intervi ... #frame_top
A conversation with Marissa Mayer, V.P. of Search Product and User Experience, Google
http://www.charlierose.com/view/intervi ... #frame_top
Ничего себе тараторит!
A conversation about Russia and Iran with Jim Hoagland of "The Washington Post" and Peter Baker of "The New York Times"
http://www.charlierose.com/view/intervi ... #frame_top
Если что не понятно, то вот здесь полный транскрипт интервью на английском.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lampada
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/06/ma ... of-google/
После этого вышло интервью с Эриком Шмидтом (Google's CEO). Видео и транскрипт здесь.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/07/er ... -into-tvs/
Barton Biggs and a look at the stock market on Monday, March 9, 2009
http://www.charlierose.com/view/intervi ... #frame_top (аудио и транскрипт)
"...CHARLIE ROSE: Ten years.
BARTON BIGGS: Yes, five or 10. Maybe not 10, but a long period where stocks are going to be lousy. And there will be a lot of very permanent wealth destruction, and the standard of living of America will be flat to down for 10 years. And then there’s a 20 percent chance that we’re going to have a real economic disaster.
CHARLIE ROSE: On that note, thank you for coming. "
A conversation with Adm. Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Thursday, March 12, 2009
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10142 (аудио и транскрипт)
"...He is the man who advises the president. ... "
A conversation with Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn on Wednesday, March 4, 2009
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10128 (аудио и транскрипт)
http://www.linkedin.com/
A conversation with author Joshua Cooper Ramo about his book "The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It"
http://www.charlierose.com/view/intervi ... #frame_top
Joshua Cooper Ramo is here. He is the author of a new book, it is called
“The Age of the Unthinkable. Why the New World Disorder Constantly
Surprises Us, and What We Can Do about It.”
He’s also a noted commentator on China where he spend spends time as a
managing director at Kissinger Associates. I am pleased to have him back
at this table. Welcome.
JOSHUA COOPER RAMO: Thanks, Charlie. It’s a pleasure to be here.
CHARLIE ROSE: So, tell me about the process of writing it and putting it
together and what you wanted to say, and how you go about doing that.
JOSHUA COOPER RAMO: What I found all over the place was a thread of an
idea that emerges in the age of the unthinkable. Which is this notion that
disruption is now an inevitable part of our future. And as we sit here now
talking about this with swine flu raging. Swine flu is really just an
expression, frankly, of the new logic power of our age. We have all kinds
of viral threats that we face, whether they’re terrorism or financial
panics.
What they all demonstrate is that the underlying physics of power in the
world has changed and changed dramatically, and our old ways of thinking
about these things, the ways that worked for hundreds of years, now no
longer serve us well. They don’t predict or explain what’s going on, in
many cases, and sometimes when we use them they backfire. So the war on
terrorism, when you’re not careful, produces more dangerous terrorists or
causes like the kind of problems we’re seeing in Pakistan today.
Trying to make the world better off by spreading capitalism everywhere has
now driven the gap between rich and poor wider than it’s ever been ever
before - in human history.
So we’ve arrived at a moment where we faced a lot of these perils and we’re
in trouble, not because we’ve ignored what the experts told us, but because
we did exactly what they said.
I think all of us watched Greenspan testifying. I interviewed Greenspan,
put him on the cover of “Time” magazine as part of the committee to save
the world in 1997. When he sat in front of Congress in October and said
the ideas I’ve relied on for more than 40 years aren’t working anymore.
That’s a sign that we needed new ideas.
And when I went out.
CHARLIE ROSE: They thought the market would take care of itself out of
self-interest, which is ideal.
JOSHUA COOPER RAMO: And that means, even people asked me a lot, why is it
we have such a hard time letting go of the old ideas? I think this is part
of it, that we have an emotional, spiritual attachment to some of these
ideas. It’s very hard to accept the fact that what capitalism appears to
be at this point is the most efficient engine for creating inequality in
human history. It does a lot of other good things but it’s creating a
situation where the wealth gap on the planet is greater than it’s ever been
ever before. That’s fundamentally unsustainable.
CHARLIE ROSE: This was pointed out by Machiko (ph) and other people here
and also in AP (ph). It is the most difficult thing to do. All of us can
go out and listen to a lot of extraordinary people. And with your skills,
write about it in an interesting way in which many people, critics I have
read, reviewers I have read, have praised it. Many of them come to this
one point which is so, he gets it, but he no more than anyone else, is able
to put his finger on the solution.
JOSHUA COOPER RAMO: Yeah.
CHARLIE ROSE: The hardest part. So you describe, which is important, the
world we live in, and the forces at play, but it’s hardest is to understand
how you use those forces to change.
JOSHUA COOPER RAMO: First of all, it’s true. The issue in the book is that
the kind of solutions we need are so radically different that they don’t
look like traditional solutions. The whole second half of the book is
filled with stories of people who are making great fortunes, who are
creating disruption, who are surviving this world.
CHARLIE ROSE: Right.
JOSHUA COOPER RAMO: But the lesson is there is no off the book set of
answers because we don’t even know what the questions are today. So the
four clear points that emerge from all the time I spent with these people
at the end of the book. First of all, you have to look at the world
differently. Today you do the focus thing. We don’t look at systems. You
can see that everywhere. You can see that even in our economic policies.
CHARLIE ROSE: And that’s a step, too. The beginning of a journey.
JOSHUA COOPER RAMO: So there are four steps here. The second one is we
have to focus more on resilience instead of deterrence. The idea that we
can scare our enemies off is what has shaped everything from our foreign
policy to our defense policy for decades now. You can’t deter most of the
threats we face. You can’t deter terrorists. They’re happy to die for
cause. You can’t deter bird flu or swine flu. We have to focus on our own
resilience.
I propose in the book that we have a Department of National Resilience
that’s as large as the Department of Defense. So that’s the second is be
more resilient.
The third thing I talk about which is a very important lesson is to not
always be direct in the way that we try to solve our problems. I have a
long chapter about how to negotiate differently. But the way we usually
negotiate with Iran or North Korea or China, is we have a disagreement, we
sit down, we say we want you to give in on this particular point. That’s
failed. We need to be indirect in negotiations. Just as the most
effective cancer drugs, and I talk about this in the book, work not by
going after the tumor, but by going after the blood supply that leads to
the tumor.
And the final thing I say is we have to learn to give away power. That
means elevating to the highest level of our international security
priorities. To the level of, do we bomb or befriend Iran? The challenge
of guaranteeing to as many people on the planet as possible the very basic
rights. It’s not a complicated set of rights but it’s a right of
education, it’s a right to determine the kind of lives they want to live
for themselves.
CHARLIE ROSE: The sand pile idea. Please explain that to me.
JOSHUA COOPER RAMOS: Today we live in a world with an exploding number of
actors. And the example of the sand pile comes from complex science, one
of the ideas I have. Is there anything complexity science or chaos theory
can teach us about the world we live in. Herrbach (ph) who is arguably one
of the greatest scientists had this notion which is when you have a complex
system, you can think of it like a sand pile. And if you keep adding
grains to the sand pile, eventually it gets steep enough that at some point
there’s an avalanche and stuff starts falling off to the side. But you
never know when exactly that’s going to happen.
So that’s our world today. It’s organized instability. Every day you’re
having new actors dropped on the world’s stage. Whether they’re new NGOs
or terrorist organizations or derivatives products. The world is
ceaselessly getting more complex. That sort of system never arrives at
equilibrium, it never arrives at stability.
And I think the mental error we sometimes were making is this belief if you
just let capitalism do its work, if you just spread democracy around the
world, the system over time would find equilibrium. That sand pile every
day was getting complex, and our world was likely to be less stable in the
future rather than more. And it didn’t mean disaster a disaster for us.
It just meant if we could change our thinking to think like the people who
understood that, we had a chance to really accomplish something
extraordinary. If we didn’t, we were going to end up out of business.
CHARLIE ROSE: Using that theory, what’s likely to happen?
JOSHUA COOPER RAMO: What disturbs me the most is walking around the world
today, walking around the United states, I feel there’s not an
understanding of how serious this crisis is. This is not a financial
crisis. This is an existential crisis. Every single American needs to
engaged in the project of having a more resilient life, we need to have a
major priority to try and do the sorts of things I talk about in the book,
and we need to find ways to re-engineer Washington. One of the things I
propose in the book, for instance, is the idea of a National Skepticism
Council that sits next to the National Security Council and says that’s a
ridiculous idea. We can’t have this thing where we focus on these one
ideas and we don’t change the policy.
CHARLIE ROSE: You always need somebody in the room like that who is going
to say, yes, but.
JOSHUA COOPER RAMO: Right.
CHARLIE ROSE: What is it about China? What do we need to know about China
post economic crisis? You are living in Beijing part time.
JOSHUA COOPER RAMO: Yes.
CHARLIE ROSE: And you’ve been there and you speak Mandarin now?
JOSHUA COOPER RAMO: I do.
CHARLIE ROSE: What do we need to know about China post-economic crisis?
JOSHUA COOPER RAMO: Well, probably the first thing to know is that they’re
still in the midst of the economic crisis and it’s having a profound
impact.
CHARLIE ROSE: But there’s an argument they’ll come out of it first because
of the nature of their economy, that they’re spending $500 billion on a
stimulus program that will work. On the other hand, you argue that it
created enormous fear in China of the absence of control.
JOSHUA COOPER RAMO: Yeah. The economic crisis in China has, I would say,
accelerated and intensified at the highest level of the government and
intellectual circles in Beijing, a serious set of self-questioning. The
process of self-questioning about the nature of the reform project.
One of the things to understand in China is that the reform process there
is so contingent. And this year we’re celebrating the 30th anniversary of
what’s called reform and opening in China. It’s so contingent and so
filled with uncertainty and unpredictability. In fact, one of the lines I
have is that China is sort of the capital of the age of the sand pile, it
is a place where there’s all these kind of chaotic forces at work. That
the party is constantly on edge, and worried about not only the state of
the country, but ultimately at the end of day it’s about preserving the
role of Communist Party as the sole legitimate holder of political
authority in China.
CHARLIE ROSE: Do they view that effort to keep stability and to keep it
together because they fear what the result of it exploding would be, and
the only want to manage it until the think everything is kind of
stabilized, so that it can, in fact, change politically without turning the
country into anarchy? Keep managing change?
JOSHUA COOPER RAMO: I think it’s managing change is what they would say
they’re trying to do. But the problem is, and the overwhelming lesson of
the last 30 years is that the change is ceaselessly racing ahead of the
ability to manage it. And over time that only accelerates. The system is
getting more and more complex. The Communist Party even though it has this
year 68, 69 million members, simply cannot continue to manage a system like
that centrally.
And so that then begins to raise all these very difficult existential
questions, which by the way, have been around a decade now about how do you
reform the party? Political reform in China is one of the most interesting
questions. All of my smartest friends in Beijing are working on the
question of political reform inside the party. This is the issue that
obsesses them.
CHARLIE ROSE: Believing they have to do it and so figuring out how they
can do it with the least amount of disruption?
JOSHUA COOPER RAMO: That’s right. But one of the important things - and
they have to do it, they know they have to do it. The party today is
simply -- needs to change because Chinese society is changing so much. But
you have to understand, the Chinese Communist Party is not a monolith.
There are people inside it is party who are in favor of more democratic
change and there are people who want to control power more.
CHARLIE ROSE: But that’s not an idea, because that was part of - at
Tiananmen Square they had that, in Tiananmen Square.
JOSHUA COOPER RAMO: They always have interest groups in the party. One of
the great challenges for them -- our system, as bad as it is in some
people’s eyes, we do manage interest group conflicts very well. The
Chinese system is still struggling with that. You see that. I have
systems who are in both camps, and my friends who are more pro-democratic
reform today are the more pro-Western ones are all walking around exhausted
and they have backaches. You can physically see in them this sense that
they’re on the defensive right now. Whereas the conservatives at the
moment are really succeeding.
That’s why the economic crisis in China is not simply about economics. It
is a stalking horse for these issues of political reform which are really
significant, substantive issues.
CHARLIE ROSE: Do they, in their own bones know, believe that by 2050,
they’ll have the largest economy and be the most powerful place on the
planet?
JOSHUA COOPER RAMO: You know, it’s a funny issue. A friend of mine said,
reminded me recently. He said in the last 10 centuries, of the last 10
centuries, China has had the biggest GDP in the world for the last nine.
And I think if you ask any of them what it was going to look 20 years from
now, they’d say China for those 20 years would be 20 for 20. So there’s
this ultimate confidence in the greatness of the Chinese culture, and the
sense that this is a nation that deserves a place at the table.
They’ve been incredibly psychologically traumatized by the last 150 years
of Chinese history, really going back to the Opium War. You can imagine in
1850, you think you’re the greatest nation on Earth, suddenly the British
show up with warships, and the next hundred years you’re invaded by nine
different countries. And you follow that with the liberation, the PLA
taking power .
CHARLIE ROSE: The Cultural Revolution.
JOSHUA COOPER RAMO: The Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, all
those things. It has been an exhausting period. And so they have in their
minds these two contending ideas. The kind of inevitability of Chinese
triumph, and the recognition that this is an incredibly unstable
environment they’re operating in.
CHARLIE ROSE: And how do they see the United States?
JOSHUA COOPER RAMO: The view of the United States has been a defining
question in Chinese foreign policy circles for, at least since 1997, but
significantly since 1997, but certainly before then. The question has
been, do you believe that the United States will permit China to peacefully
rise, or that it will oppose it? And there are people in both camps in
China. You talk to Chinese ordinarily on the streets, officials if you
don’t know people very well, they’ll all absolutely say that the
relationship between the United States is very important, the U.S. and
China is important bilateral relationship. But in the minds of people
there’s this constant calculation going on about whether or not a conflict
is inevitable.
CHARLIE ROSE: But if you read this book, don’t you have to come to the
conclusion that the U.S. can’t stop the rise of China. That’s part of the
lesson of the book.
JOSHUA COOPER RAMO: Yes. And another lesson of the book is when you use
your old ways of thinking about things, you tend to get the opposite of
what you want instead of what you want. And I would say if we negotiate
with China using an image of China that is even more than five or six years
old it’s going to be very problematic. The last major engagement between
the United States and China on sensitive issues was 1997 over WTO. If the
U.S. negotiates with China using that same protocol which is very much this
thing of giving the Chinese a check list of things we wanted, that will
backfire. That will only empower the anti-U.S. forces in China.
CHARLIE ROSE: Based on what you know about President Obama, where do you
think his head is on these kinds of things, not specifically China, but the
idea of giving a checklist, an idea of coming in with pre-conditions.
Clearly on Iran, he said during the campaign he’s willing to sit down
without pre-conditions.
JOSHUA COOPER RAMO: I think they’re in the process of shaping Chinese
policy, and I think it’s driven by two issues. The first is the question
of the degree to which economic policy is going to dominate those debates.
There’s a very powerful group in China that wants economic policy to be the
leading part of the negotiations because that’s an area where the Chinese
over us have a tremendous amount of leverage. I can tell you, one of my --
both my job and my hobby is negotiating with Chinese.
When you get into a situation like that, where you don’t have a lot of
leverage, it can be very, very difficult and very, very contentious.
CHARLIE ROSE: Because?
JOSHUA COOPER RAMO: Because it’s hard to make progress sometimes in areas
where you’re just left saying you should do this because it’s good.
Chinese negotiation is all about leverage, it’s highly positional. It’s a
cultural difference.
CHARLIE ROSE: OK. If somebody comes to Kissinger Associates and says we
want your best advice on China, I know a lot of very smart people including
CEOs and academicians who say that China’s rise is in our interest, we have
nothing to fear, and in fact, for China to be stronger, better, more self-
assured is better for us.
JOSHUA COOPER RAMO: I think - and by the way.
CHARLIE ROSE: Is there a negative -- is there a downside to that argument?
JOSHUA COOPER RAMO: I should preface by saying I speak for myself and not
for Dr. Kissinger. Having said that, I think a stronger.
CHARLIE ROSE: Henry will be pleased to know that.
JOSHUA COOPER RAMO: A stronger, more secure, more stable China is in our
interest, but at the same time we do have legitimate differences on
important national security issues. And to be honest about those, early in
the friendship it’s very important.
CHARLIE ROSE: What important ones?
JOSHUA COOPER RAMO: You mentioned Iran as an example. There’s a clear
idea where there’s a national security difference between how the United
States and China proceed on that matter.
CHARLIE ROSE: They view it as a source of oil and we view it as a threat?
JOSHUA COOPER RAMO: Yes. That’s the simplified version of it and I think
there’s other ones as well. China’s behavior in Burma, for instance, I
think what’s gone on in Sudan has all been very problematic and are areas
where I think the United States would like to see us change.
CHARLIE ROSE: They seem to be agnostic about the policies of other
countries.
JOSHUA COOPER RAMO: Yeah. They’re very obsessed with this idea of non-
interference in the internal affairs of other countries.
CHARLIE ROSE: Including their own.
JOSHUA COOPER RAMO: And that’s where it comes from. That’s where it comes
from.
CHARLIE ROSE: The book is called “The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New
World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do about It.”
Joshua Cooper Ramo, thank you.
JOSHUA COOPER RAMO: Thank you very much.
CHARLIE ROSE: Thank you for joining us. See you next time.
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/3457 - A conversation with Lee Kuan Yew
October 18, 2000
____________________________________
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/1257 - An hour with former Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew
September 24, 2004
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10681 Lee Kuan Yew, Former Prime Minister of Singapore
October 22, 2009
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11573 From Singapore, an hour with Lee Kuan Yew, former Prime Minister of Singapore and author of
'From Third World to First : The Singapore Story: 1965-2000'
March 28, 2011
http://www.charlierose.com/view/intervi ... #frame_top
CHARLIE ROSE: Rachel Maddow is here. She is the host of MSNBC`s "The
Rachel Maddow Show." It launched during the 2008 election year. Since
then, her mix of policy analysis, rye commentary in which she has called de
chic (ph) in which she has given MSNBC its newest hit.
Here`s a look at her show.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
RACHEL MADDOW: Today the State Department said it asked Twitter, the
microblogging service, to delay taking the service off line for its
scheduled maintenance because without Twitter people in Iran would lose one
of the important ways they have to communicate with each other and the
outside world about what`s going on in their country right now.
Guess who is going to be speaking at the Nixon presidential library on
this year`s 37th anniversary of the Watergate break-in. That would be John
Dean. Yeah, that John Dean, the one you know from "Countdown," the Nixon
lawyer who became the first administration official to testify against
Nixon during Watergate.
If specific interrogation techniques were being approved by people at
the political level in the cabinet, it doesn`t become -- the legal niceties
almost become less important.
GEN. COLIN POWELL, FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE: I don`t know where
these things were being approved at a political level.
RACHEL MADDOW: So it`s a principals meeting at the White House to
discus interrogation techniques?
COLIN POWELL: It does not mean it was approved, anything was proved
at a meeting.
"Consentual same-sex between two consenting adults is comparable to
marriage of uncle to niece, underage marriage. And the government needs to
preserve the traditional form of marriage. It is an age-old societal
institution." Those are the words of Pat Roberts -- no, actually -- no.
These would be the words of the Obama administration.
Senator Burn, I am more than happy to make corrections when I get
something wrong, honestly. But if you`re going to tell me I got something
wrong, I`m going to check to see if I did in fact get something wrong. And
in your case, I really didn`t.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
CHARLIE ROSE: Maddow studied public policy at Stanford University.
She was a Rhodes Scholar and went to Oxford. She worked as an AIDS
activist in San Francisco and London. She got her first break working in
radio in 2004, she joined Air America. A year later, she had her own two-
hour show on the station, which she still hosts today. I`m very pleased to
have her on the program for the first time today.
Welcome.
RACHEL MADDOW: Thank you so much for having me. I`m so flattered to
be asked to on your show I can barely even tell you.
CHARLIE ROSE: No. Thank you, thank you.
Let`s just talk about today, your thoughts on Iran and what`s
happening there.
RACHEL MADDOW: Right now, I think we are both spectators and
participants as Americans in this. As spectators, to see this uprising --
I don`t know what else you call it -- in Iran, to see the people of Iran
openly defy this regime, which has been so overt in the way that it`s
cracked down on any form of dissent in the past, to see their bravery, on
the one hand, is an international spectacle of the highest order. And how
America ought to and ought not to speak out and get involved here in order
to make sure we`re on the side of the angels in this fight.
CHARLIE ROSE: Would you prefer the president do more, or do you
believe it`s one of those things in which it has a life of its own, and the
best we can do is stand back and let it take its toll, unless something
happens that is beyond acceptance.
RACHEL MADDOW: I don`t always agree with this president on anything.
I certainly don`t always agree with him on foreign policy issues. I think
he`s doing the right thing on Iran. And I think that the thing that we, as
American citizens, can maybe even do more effectively than our government
is take as take as many steps as we can to ensure that the authentic voice
of the Iranian people is heard. Try to encourage freedom of the press, try
to encourage people to use proxy servers to get information uploaded out of
Iran and onto the web.
CHARLIE ROSE: Interesting, isn`t it, Twitter and Facebook, American
entrepreneurial and technology successes.
RACHEL MADDOW: Yes.
CHARLIE ROSE: In Tom Friedman`s words, "have replaced the mosque."
RACHEL MADDOW: Sure. Or this is a great observation today, replaced
the fax machine. I mean, it was the fax machine at Tiananmen.
CHARLIE ROSE: Exactly right. Yes, indeed.
RACHEL MADDOW: Students were trying to get the word out. Now it`s
through these other means. And the power of them -- it`s a little bit
techy. But the reason they haven`t been able to shut down Twitter, even
though they`ve blocked access to Twitter.com from Iran, is because you can
upload messages from anywhere to anywhere. You can do it from your phone.
You can do it from other web sites. You can do it through RSS feeds. It`s
too decentralized to stop. And that`s one of the things that makes
Twitter, I think, seem flighty and not a serious thing, nothing that could
actually contribute to important developments in the world. But it also
means that it is unstoppable. Decentralized things are powerful things
when you`re talking about mass movements.
CHARLIE ROSE: You said many things about this president`s foreign
policy you didn`t support.
RACHEL MADDOW: Yeah.
CHARLIE ROSE: Like what?
RACHEL MADDOW: Granted, I think that -- I think that in the broadest
terms, that Obama is doing a much better job on foreign policy than Bush
and Cheney. I think that he is doing better than John McCain would have
been done had John McCain been elected, but had I been a member of
Congress, I`m not sure I would have voted for that war funding bill. I`m
not sure that I believe that there is an American justification for
proceeding in Afghanistan in the long-term plan that we seem to be
proceeding on.
CHARLIE ROSE: There`s sufficient danger of a failed state there so
that we shouldn`t call on all the resources we have if it`s feasible to
achieve that objective?
RACHEL MADDOW: It`s hard to imagine any objective that would justify
18 years of American occupation in any country. We`re in year eight. And
we`re now talking about a 10-yuear plan on what to do. I don`t know that
we should operate in the world that way.
And I was very pleased when -- it didn`t get much attention, but when
Obama did gave that huge speech in Cairo, one of the ways that he described
the future he was describing -- we all want to see it. Of course, his
vision of the future, the way he wants it to be -- was a future in which
American troops have come home. It wasn`t the point of the speech that
everybody focused on, but it`s an important point. We should be working
toward a world in which American troops aren`t willy-nilly occupying other
countries in order to get our will around the world. I really believe
that. I think that we -- I`m not a pacifist. I believe that war is
appropriate sometimes, but we shouldn`t be having 18-year-long occupations
anywhere.
CHARLIE ROSE: But it does beg the question, when is the employment of
force appropriate and necessary?
RACHEL MADDOW: I think that war is a destructive force and not a
constructive force. And sometimes what needs to happen in the world is
that somebody, or someone, or some uprising, needs to be destroyed. I
think that we`re very, very, very good at locating, closing with, and
killing the enemy using our military. I do not believe we can build states
with our military. I just don`t.
I have a lot of respect counterinsurgency theory and for these
geniuses doing the sort of hard intellectual work of the counterinsurgency
movement right now. They`ve really taken over the Pentagon in quick order.
They`re very smart people. But I think they`re wrong that the military can
be used to build up countries.
CHARLIE ROSE: What`s interesting is that I`ve read this fascinating
stuff from General McCrystal, who is enormously successful as a warrior in
Iraq, now taking command in Afghanistan, and saying things like, we can`t
kill them all. What we have to do is build a strong, credible Afghanistan,
not kill all the militants.
RACHEL MADDOW: That makes sense depending on who "we" is. If we...
(LAUGHTER)
CHARLIE ROSE: If "we" is Europe, NATO, European Union, Afghanistan...
RACHEL MADDOW: All of the civilized forces of the world who feel
threatened by the prospect of international terrorism projected from this
place that is a failed state, if they collectively can use all of their
forms of power in order to create a legitimate state here, great. That
makes a lot of sense. Does having 160,000 American troops there get you to
that end? I don`t think so. I think militaries are for killing and that
governments are for building, and entrepreneurs are for building. And free
people who have their basic needs met are building.
CHARLIE ROSE: If somebody says, to accept what you say and use that
for American policy, with all the advantages it has, it also may lead to a
failed state. And a failed state is a haven for al-Qaeda.
RACHEL MADDOW: And yet we are not proposing invading Yemen.
CHARLIE ROSE: Which is a failed state.
RACHEL MADDOW: Which is a failed state. We are not proposing
invading Somalia. We are not proposing invading portions of Sudan and Chad
and Congo, I mean, any of the other places that you could decide. I mean,
we could say...
CHARLIE ROSE: So in the end, we don`t...
RACHEL MADDOW: We could it was Belarus. You could say -- it could be
New Orleans. There`s a lot of places in which -- the things that we ought
to be able to count on for order fail, and it is very rare in which war is
the solution to that failure.
CHARLIE ROSE: What about economic policy?
RACHEL MADDOW: Boy, you don`t envy him this job, do you, facing this
economic crisis?
CHARLIE ROSE: In some ways I do think -- no one envies having to know
that people are out-of-work, people are suffering and they`re losing all
kinds of things that they were counting on at various stages of their life,
and they`re no longer there. It`s hard to imagine the amount of suffering
that exists because of that. On the other hand, I think people who want to
be president, want to be president because they want to solve big problems.
RACHEL MADDOW: Uh-huh. Well, I don`t think he doesn`t necessarily
knew this was the problem he was getting.
CHARLIE ROSE: And there will be other big problems. It will probably
be how the next four years are defined, how well he does in terms of the
economic crisis.
RACHEL MADDOW: I think that`s right. I think it has eclipsed all of
changes that he is facing. Who knows, new challenges may rise that eclipse
that one. But he feels that way.
When he announced new financial regulations, that`s something I`ve
been anticipating for a long time, wondering how big a political deal it
was going to be. It`s not, it turns out, going to be a big political deal.
It`s going to be a big lobbying deal. There`s going to be a lot of fight
over it in Congress. There`s been a lot of negotiations with all the
special interests already. but the opportunity to essentially create the
first new big regulatory framework for our financial system since the Great
Depression was probably also an opportunity for a big meaningful speech to
the American people on the role of government in our capitalist society and
the proper role of government in our...
CHARLIE ROSE: Do you think they know that yet?
RACHEL MADDOW: Yeah. I think that they could write a -- I think they
could do a bang-up Obama speech on that topic and sell what I think needs
to be a pretty radical approach to the financial system.
CHARLIE ROSE: I suppose it would be a Rachel speech.
RACHEL MADDOW: Yeah.
CHARLIE ROSE: What would you say? What would you hope he would say?
Which I assume are the same two things.
RACHEL MADDOW: Well, I mean...
CHARLIE ROSE: About what is the future of this economic system, this
economic order that was part of America.
RACHEL MADDOW: I mean, if I were going to argue it, I would argue it
from analogy, and I would say, you know, regulation isn`t a dirty word, and
government having a role in the clean functioning of markets is not
something that should be resented, demonized and minimized. If you go back
to...
CHARLIE ROSE: And might give markets a way to operate more
efficiently.
RACHEL MADDOW: Yeah. If you`re hoping for an idyllic capitalist
future, try to investor now when we need it most, at a political crisis at
which we need it because of this financial crisis that we`re in, in smart
regulation that works, that allows the market to function, that protects
people from the -- from the inevitable incentives that have led us to what
we`re in.
I would argue from analogy with the foundation of the -- of the Food
and Drug Administration. Say, listen, you know, the same arguments against
regulation were made by the sausage-makers, and they`re part of the 20th
century in terms of it being impossible. The same arguments were frankly
made in the automobile industry about seat belts, that it would destroy the
car industry if we ever had to have seat belts and other forms of safety
regulation. It`s just not true. And there is a reasonable role to set
rules by which everybody has to play.
CHARLIE ROSE: But has this president disappointed the left?
RACHEL MADDOW: Yes.
CHARLIE ROSE: And are you surprised the left is not more vocal?
RACHEL MADDOW: In my head, the left is very vocal.
(LAUGHTER)
I can hear their voices right now.
CHARLIE ROSE: And what are they saying, those voices?
RACHEL MADDOW: Well, I`m not -- the president has disappointed the
left. I think it could have and was anticipated that this president would
be a disappointment.
CHARLIE ROSE: On the war or on economics or on health care, on
education, on budgetary priorities, on what?
RACHEL MADDOW: I would say on the war, on health care, on economic
issues...
CHARLIE ROSE: All of them, all of the above?
RACHEL MADDOW: Well, on civil liberties and on civil rights. On the
war, I think that the -- the decision to wind down in Iraq is close enough
to what he promised that at least there`s no surprise there, even if that
war does seem like it may continue for quite some time. In Afghanistan, as
I said, looks like we`ll be continuing indefinitely on a very long horizon
there that`s never been adequately debated in this country, because we
don`t like talking about Afghanistan, because we`ve been there for so long.
On civil liberties, preventive detention, prolonged detention.
CHARLIE ROSE: Why do you think he`s different than your expectations?
RACHEL MADDOW: He`s not. I expected him to be sort of a centrist.
CHARLIE ROSE: So you were not misled at all?
RACHEL MADDOW: No.
CHARLIE ROSE: You thought, going in, he was a very practical
politician whose essential instinct was central, of the center, of the
middle?
RACHEL MADDOW: I thought he was an antigay marriage, prodeath
penalty, mainstream, but not extremely antiwar Democratic centrist, and I
think that`s what he is. I think he looks liberal.
CHARLIE ROSE: In other words you think he...
(LAUGHTER)
RACHEL MADDOW: I guess people expected him to be liberal because of
all these things about him, but I don`t ever think he ran as a liberal.
CHARLIE ROSE: Because of the speech against the war in the beginning,
and because of the...
RACHEL MADDOW: In 2002.
CHARLIE ROSE: I know.
RACHEL MADDOW: Yeah.
CHARLIE ROSE: So he wasn`t that much different than Senator Clinton
in the end?
RACHEL MADDOW: I don`t know what Senator Clinton would be doing right
now. I`m not so much a candidate person as I am a policy person. It may
be that the Barack Obama of 2010 is my ideal candidate and the Barack Obama
of 2009 has been a disappointment. I think there are policy issues on
which I`d love to see him change.
CHARLIE ROSE: But...
RACHEL MADDOW: But I don`t know who embodies them. I don`t care who
embodies them. I just want politicians to do the right thing.
CHARLIE ROSE: How about this? U.S. to extend its job benefits to gay
partners, President Barack Obama will sign a bill to presidential
memorandum on Wednesday to extend benefits to same-sex partners of federal
employees, administration official said Tuesday evening, which in fact he
did today.
RACHEL MADDOW: Yeah.
CHARLIE ROSE: What do you think of that?
RACHEL MADDOW: Neat.
(LAUGHTER)
He`s been -- his actions and the distance between his actions and his
statements on gay rights have been actually a little bit shocking. I would
are thought that he would have been better on a good rights.
CHARLIE ROSE: Again, why not? Just political reality?
RACHEL MADDOW: Why hasn`t he lived up to his own rhetoric?
CHARLIE ROSE: Yeah.
RACHEL MADDOW: I don`t know.
CHARLIE ROSE: I mean, what I`m asking, what I`m interested in is
whether he is, as he was, or has he changed because of some experience in
the office or some recognition of political reality he didn`t know or some
lack of courage, or whatever it might be?
RACHEL MADDOW: My feeling is that on civil rights and civil liberties
he is less than he promised. On some of the other issues on which he`s not
satisfied the left, he`s exactly what he promised.
CHARLIE ROSE: Where is there most likely to be conflict that will get
more heated?
RACHEL MADDOW: Oh, I think that there`s going to be sustained
conflict with the left over the entire course of this term. I mean,
prolonged detention, Don`t Ask, Don`t Tell, you know, not the -- not taking
on the financial services industry in the way that he could, the wars. I
mean, this is not that there will be flash points and everybody will get
along. He`s going to face sustained opposition from the left for the
entire time in office as it should be.
CHARLIE ROSE: Let`s talk about you.
RACHEL MADDOW: Oh, great.
(LAUGHTER)
CHARLIE ROSE: As if we haven`t.
RACHEL MADDOW: Yeah.
CHARLIE ROSE: What do you like about your job?
RACHEL MADDOW: I love my job.
CHARLIE ROSE: I know. I can tell.
(LAUGHTER)
RACHEL MADDOW: I`ve had about 150 jobs in my life, and this is by far
the best.
CHARLIE ROSE: What makes it so good?
RACHEL MADDOW: I get to say what I want, and I work really, really
hard. And I`m operating at the very far margin of what I`m capable of
doing. And that is really satisfying to me. There`s no coasting
whatsoever.
(LAUGHTER)
Every day it is absolutely everything I`ve -- it like merging on to
the freeway, in the rain, at night, with only one windshield wiper and no
headlights and a lot of traffic and we`re going 80.
(LAUGHTER)
CHARLIE ROSE: Oh, my god.
RACHEL MADDOW: Yeah, every day. It`s exhausting, but I love it. I
really love the challenge.
CHARLIE ROSE: And how did you end up here? I mean, was it somewhere
in the back of your head when you were at Stanford, when you were at
oxford, when you, you know, decided you had to get a job, was it, man, what
I`d love to do is sit on television and engage interesting people about
important subjects.
RACHEL MADDOW: Never in a million years.
CHARLIE ROSE: Really? I thought you were going to teach?
RACHEL MADDOW: No.
CHARLIE ROSE: What did you think you were going to do?
RACHEL MADDOW: I thought I would be an activist.
CHARLIE ROSE: Really?
RACHEL MADDOW: Yeah. That`s sort of what I`d done. I was an old
act-up kid from back in the day, had been an Aids activist for a very long
time. I was traveling around the country running campaigns to overturn
some of the worst HIV policies in the country, and have a brilliant time,
and I thought it would be my life`s work until there was a cure and all my
friends came back.
I never planned to do anything other than that. But I`m not much of a
planner. It has to be said. I just thought I`d do that for a while.
CHARLIE ROSE: So how did this happen?
RACHEL MADDOW: In one of my periods of my weird -- In one of my
periods of taking weird jobs I randomly, on a dare, applied for a sidekick
job on a local morning zoo radio show. I applied. It was an open audition
on the air. I got hired on the spot and I started the next day.
CHARLIE ROSE: Yeah.
RACHEL MADDOW: I fell in love with radio. That led to Air America
and that let to guest appearances on other people`s TV shows and now here I
am.
CHARLIE ROSE: And it`s been very successful. Why do you think it`s
been successful? What is it that has...
RACHEL MADDOW: I have no idea.
(LAUGHTER)
Honestly. I`m assuming this is my flash in the pan, and I`m really
enjoying it.
CHARLIE ROSE: Your 15 seconds.
RACHEL MADDOW: Yeah.
(LAUGHTER)
CHARLIE ROSE: Except that 15 seconds may be 15 years, but there you
go.
RACHEL MADDOW: Honestly, I have no idea.
CHARLIE ROSE: You do have certain philosophies about it which is that
you ought to give people a chance to speak. You know, you ought to have
that -- that there is more to gain from civilized discourse than screaming
and shouting and calling each other names.
RACHEL MADDOW: You know something about that.
CHARLIE ROSE: Yes, I do.
(LAUGHTER)
CHARLIE ROSE: I do.
RACHEL MADDOW: I mean, honestly, there`s a continuum of different
ways to talk about politics and current events in American politics, and
this is one way to do it. I also believe that if you -- that these are
public airwaves in which we broadcast, even if they`re commercially
exploited to a greater or lesser extent, and it is a great blessing to have
this opportunity to literally be broadcast, to be sent all over the country
so people can watch you. Millions of people could tune in if they wanted
to. and to have that opportunity, I feel to waste it, bringing somebody on
the air with you, who you don`t think is worth listening to, or you think
is only worth shouting down, is a little bit of an insult to the gift we`ve
been given, the chance to broadcast. So I try to only host people that I
think it`s worth listening to.
CHARLIE ROSE: And what do you think of fame?
RACHEL MADDOW: I try to pretend it does not exist.
(LAUGHTER)
CHARLIE ROSE: Yet I have seen stories about you and your partner and
your house, and everything else. I know a lot about your life.
RACHEL MADDOW: Yeah.
CHARLIE ROSE: Because you`re a great curiosity to people because you
are there and you do it well and you have an audience.
RACHEL MADDOW: Yeah. You know, I`m flattered by people`s personal
attention, people`s personal interest in me. You know, "I saw Rachel
Maddow at a restaurant." That`s very nice you thought that was worth
tweeting.
(LAUGHTER)
It`s very flattering to me. I also -- I don`t want to be the story.
CHARLIE ROSE: So what`s the biggest misconception about you?
RACHEL MADDOW: I don`t know even what conceptions are about me.
CHARLIE ROSE: Let me read this.
RACHEL MADDOW: Yeah.
CHARLIE ROSE: This is from "The Observer," February 9th, so this
year, not too long ago. "In the same way Ann Coulter emerged as a public
face of the Bush era, Maddow quickly emerged as the go-to media figure in
the most picked over election in American history. Suddenly, on the net,
everyone was talking about their new girl crush."
(LAUGHTER)
So you`re a crushee. "Here was someone in television with whom they
connected. Who, in the cozy TV being on the screen five nights a week.
They imagined they could be friends with. They liked the fact she can mix
a mean cocktail, never shops for clothes, is more interested in her pickup
truck than lunchtime Botox injections."
(LAUGHTER)
"My husband is in love with Rachel Maddow. I`m in love with Rachel.
My 8-year-old son is in love with Rachel, gushed one fan. Gay, straight,
parents, teenagers, rabbis, Republicans, everyone, it seems, was smitten."
There you go.
RACHEL MADDOW: Rabbis, as a group, have I think for me. I love that.
That will make my family very happy.
(LAUGHTER)
CHARLIE ROSE: So MSNBC, now being viewed in some quarters as the
anti-FOX.
RACHEL MADDOW: I don`t know how I fit into the overall media
universe, but that kind of...
CHARLIE ROSE: Sure you do.
RACHEL MADDOW: No, I don`t. I don`t know how I fit in very well in
relationship to other people on TV. For example, I don`t know who`s on the
other networks that I`m opposite on my hour. Why would I? I`m on TV. I`m
busy, when they`re on. I don`t pay that much attention to that part of the
industry.
CHARLIE ROSE: Do you watch yourself?
RACHEL MADDOW: No.
CHARLIE ROSE: Clinically or analytically.
RACHEL MADDOW: I will occasionally watch myself to remind myself of
stuff I`ve done, or to critique it, if there`s been some sort of problem,
but I otherwise don`t.
CHARLIE ROSE: OK, two questions. Was the sexuality issue ever an
issue?
RACHEL MADDOW: I wish that I had figured it out earlier than I did.
CHARLIE ROSE: How did you figure it out?
RACHEL MADDOW: I sort of arrived at it through rational deduction.
CHARLIE ROSE: Emotions?
(LAUGHTER)
RACHEL MADDOW: Yeah, I woke up one and day and it was, oh, that`s
what`s been going on.
CHARLIE ROSE: Like this or more like this?
RACHEL MADDOW: Well it was like, oh, that`s what`s been going on.
(LAUGHTER)
We`re sort of like -- we`re just sort of a...
CHARLIE ROSE: Was it easy?
RACHEL MADDOW: No. And coming out, both to one`s self and to one`s
family and friends, and everything, I think is a different degree of
traumatic for everybody that goes through it. It wasn`t easy. I figured
it out when I was about 17. I wish I had figured it earlier. I am glad.
I`m happy for the decision to have this come out publically very soon after
I figured it out myself. My time as a closeted person, which I think is a
pretty awful place to be, was a very, very short period of time in my life.
For that I`m grateful.
CHARLIE ROSE: And that is the advice you give to every gay person?
RACHEL MADDOW: Well, I think it`s everybody has different
circumstances.
CHARLIE ROSE: Or do you say, everybody, find your own way?
RACHEL MADDOW: Find your own way, but it is better to be out than be
closeted. And I can say that in terms of quality of life and in terms of
what`s ethically right for your community. It`s better for other gay
people if you`re out. The more people that come out, the better. That`s
the only thing I encourage people to do. I certainly live that.
CHARLIE ROSE: Thank you for coming.
RACHEL MADDOW: It`s been such a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you for
having me. Thank you for doing this great, great, great show. I`m such a
fan of your work. I think the show is just an asset to the dialog of the
country, so thank you.
CHARLIE ROSE: Thank you very much.
Back in a moment. Stay with us.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdsMyTZhoss
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10839 (See transcript)
An hour with Lawrence Summers from The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland
The US Economic Outlook
Lawrence H. Summers, Director, National Economic Council (NEC), Executive Office of the President, USA
http://www.charlierose.com/view/intervi ... #frame_top (See transcript)
Large Hadron Collider with Lisa Randall of Harvard and Kyle Cranmer of NYU
James Chanos, President, Kynikos Associates. He is the man who predicted the Enron downfall and now predicting a housing bubble in China.
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/jim...full-interview
CHARLIE ROSE: James Chanos is here. He is the founder and president of the hedge fund Kynikos, there means "Cynic" in Greek. That firm manages roughly $6 billion. It specializes in investments against
assets that it considers overvalued. On Wall Street, this is known a short-selling.
Ten years ago, he made the first substantial bet that Enron was on the brink of financial ruin. His latest prediction is that the Chinese real estate market is headed towards a similar fate. In January, the "New York Times" took note with this headline "Shorting China -- the man who predicted Enron’s fall sees a bigger collapse ahead."
So I’m pleased to have Jim Chanos at this table for the first time.
Welcome.
JAMES CHANOS: Thanks, Charlie.
CHARLIE ROSE: It’s going to be that bad for China?
JAMES CHANOS: I think it’s going to be that bad for the property market in China. Let’s be clear. What we’re talking about is a world-class if not the world-class property bubble. And by property bubble I
mean primarily high-rise buildings, offices and condos going on in China.
It really is somewhat remarkable as to just how focused the investment in China is right now in property.
CHARLIE ROSE: What makes it a bubble? And why aren’t more people believing that it’s a bubble?
JAMES CHANOS: We consider -- what we define as a bubble is any kind of debt-fueled asset inflation where people are borrowing money to buy the asset, where the cash flow generation from the asset itself, a rental
property, office building, does not cover the debt service and the debt incurred to buy the asset.
So you depend on a greater fool, if you will. I think Hyman Minsky called it the "Ponzi finance," meaning you need the greater fool to come in and buy it at a higher price because as an income-producing property, it’s
not going to do it. And that’s certainly case in China right now.
CHARLIE ROSE: But why so many people resistant to your idea that it’s a bubble that the Chinese can’t take care of?
JAMES CHANOS: Well, that’s the issue. The issue is not in the facts, in the amount of real estate being built and being contemplated. They are what they are. You can see it, it’s tangible.
CHARLIE ROSE: Values and I don’t know whether this is rental or appreciation -- in 2009 it went up 50 percent.
JAMES CHANOS: It’s appreciation.
In fact, a lot of these apartments are empty. That’s the amazing thing. When you buy an apartment in China, typically a high end project, you get an empty shell. You don’t even get internal walls, floors.
And what’s even more interesting, as we did our research, was the realization that investors who buy more than one property -- as often we saw in Miami and other markets in the U.S. -- they keep them empty. They
don’t rent them because it’s much easier to sell an unoccupied apartment for the next speculator to flip it.
So we’re seeing some remarkable behavior that if we put our time machine back in 2005 in Miami or ‘06 and ‘07 in Dubai, people will say "Well, why didn’t they see this coming? This was obviously so silly."
Well, it’s happening in China right now.
CHARLIE ROSE: Not only that. You say it’s a thousand times worse
than Dubai.
JAMES CHANOS: We said that tongue firmly planted in cheek, but then again I’ve seen some news reports -- this week, for example, there’s a developer according to a news report out of China that’s going to put in a
new Times Square in suburban Beijing, replete with 32 Broadway theaters.
And you’re beginning to hear about these bizarre developments in China -- indoor ski resorts, similar to what we saw in Dubai. We were remarking on the country being much bigger than Dubai, of course. But keep at it
another couple of years and it will be Dubai times a thousand.
CHARLIE ROSE: And what can the Chinese government do if they buy into the idea their real estate prices are approaching a bubble?
JAMES CHANOS: Well, they’ve already begun to take some steps. We’re seeing what we call jawboning, some attempts to talk the market down. That’s not having much of an affect according to the prices we’ve seen in
February and March.
They’ve also begun to take some steps as requiring higher down payments for second homes. And so we’re seeing some things on the margin.
But the fact of the matter is the game has to keep going. They’re on this treadmill to hell, as I call it, because so much of their GDP growth is construction -- 50 percent to 60 percent of this country’s GDP is
construction. We’ve not seen that in terms of a major country I think for a long time if not at all.
And so for them to get off of stopping construction, you’ll see GDP growth go negative very quickly. That’s not going to happen, because in China it’s all about making the number. People are rewarded at almost
every level of government of making their economic growth numbers. The easiest way to do that is put up another building.
So they’re really hooked on this sort of heroine of real estate development to keep the numbers going. It’s not infrastructure. It’s not airports, high-speed rail. There’s some of that. And it’s not experts. Exports have been stagnant now for a while. And it’s not the consumer in China, either, despite what people believe. It is construction, real estate construction.
CHARLIE ROSE: Tom Friedman has waded in on this.
(LAUGHTER)
JAMES CHANOS: I know.
CHARLIE ROSE: He said "Never short a country with $2 trillion in foreign currency reserves."
JAMES CHANOS: Yes. The last two economies that had similar foreign currency reserves relative to the size of their economy was Japan in 1989 and the U.S. in 1929. I’ll let that be the end of that discussion. It
just -- it has no bearing on whether there’s a domestic credit bubble or not.
In fact, countries embarked on domestic credit bubbles often tend to basically accumulate foreign urrency reserves.
CHARLIE ROSE: But so many people -- this is my sense of disbelief -- look at the numbers that you talk about. So many people have so much invested in the future of China.
JAMES CHANOS: Literally invested.
CHARLIE ROSE: Exactly. I mean, I read today about a major private equity firm, billions of dollars, and continuing to invest --
JAMES CHANOS: Yes.
CHARLIE ROSE: -- believing that China is the future, that China will be the biggest economy in the world by 2035.
JAMES CHANOS: Yes. Well, it very well --
CHARLIE ROSE: And they wouldn’t do that if they didn’t believe China could handle this housing problem.
JAMES CHANOS: Well, again, the perception seems to be that China will grow into this real estate problem. But there’s a problem with that argument, and that is the real estate that’s being built is not being built
for the masses. This is not affordable housing for the middle-class. This is high-end condos in major urban areas and high-end office buildings.
Just to give you an idea, right now construction costs in China are starting to hit $100 to $150 in some of the cities. That doesn’t sound a lot by western standard -- per square foot, by the way. The typical
Chinese condo is 100 square feet, about 1,100 square feet.
So that means a condominium that is basically presented to you with no floors, no walls, no appliances, costs the average Chinese two-income couple $100 to $150 U.S. Now, that Chinese two-income couple in their 30s
probably makes combined $7,000 or $8,000 a year.
Now, you do the math. Incomes are about $3,500 per capita in China, urban areas slightly higher. Even if they were making $10,000 to $15,000 a year, you couldn’t carry a $150,000 condo. This is very similar to someone making $40,000 in the U.S. at the height of our bubble and buying an $800,000 house. And we know how that ended.
CHARLIE ROSE: I want to speak that. The similarities between the American housing bubble -- which was the beginning of the subprime crisis, which was the beginning of the global economic meltdown.
JAMES CHANOS: Yes.
CHARLIE ROSE: What are the similarities?
JAMES CHANOS: In many cases in this real estate area the excesses are hidden in terms of debts, the credit creation. In the U.S., it was fairly visible. People with very low incomes or non-verifiable incomes were
taking on large mortgages. And the mortgages were securitized as we now know and spread out throughout the world to do their damage.
In China, much of the hidden leverage -- and there’s been a lot of groundbreaking work on this in the last few months actually -- is at the state and local government area, where state and local governments make almost all their money from land developments. They don’t have property taxes.
And a lot of them simply recycle borrowed bank borrowings to do more land speculation to raise more government revenues.
So although consumers typically only put up 20 percent to 30 percent and borrow 70 percent to 80 percent, unlike in the U.S. where it was often 100 percent, there is a lot of -- the difference is there’s a lot of
implied leverage at the intermediate government area.
And that’s where a lot of this debt is going to go bad and where we think ultimately China will have to nationalize a lot of the bad loans.
By the way, there’s a history of this. This happened in the mid-’90s. There was a banking crisis in China. Property prices collapsed. The government nationalized the bad debts, put them in separate vehicles, and it was the outside speculators got burned, your private equity guys.
CHARLIE ROSE: Yes, indeed.
What’s the psychology of this today? Because -- and is it comparable to Enron? When you began to make noises about there’s something wrong with Enron, is it the same thing in terms of what you hear and what people say?
JAMES CHANOS: Well, I think that --
CHARLIE ROSE: That’s a company versus a country.
JAMES CHANOS: But it’s similar because Enron was symbolic. That’s as far as I go, that Enron was symbolic of a new type of company, a virtual company that was not really an energy company. It was in energy trading. And so a lot of people hooked their reputations and their money on this new vision.
China is much more tangible. I mean, we’re going to be able to tell whether we’re right or wrong on China literally by watching it. The thing about property bubbles is when the cranes stop going higher, when the buildings stop being built, and when they stop putting foundations in the holes in the ground, you know that the bubble is over. It happened in Miami, it happened in Dubai, it will happen here.
CHARLIE ROSE: OK, then give me the timeline that you see.
JAMES CHANOS: Ah, that’s the trouble, the timeline.
(LAUGHTER)
If I do that, I’d be a rich guy. The timeline -- I think that it’s getting to the point now -- We’re starting to see some of the signs of silly excess. The new Broadway development, the malls -- giant malls empty, whole cities empty. My guess is this is probably at some point it begins to run its course in late 2010, 2011.
CHARLIE ROSE: And then what happens?
JAMES CHANOS: I don’t know. That’s a good question. It depends how the -- the government clearly -- everyone’s looking to the government. And I think the most cogent argument against our case is not that there isn’t a property bubble or bull market going on, it’s that the government will handle it.
CHARLIE ROSE: Exactly.
JAMES CHANOS: And that will be the interesting question to see how it does handle it and how it handles foreign investment money that will be clamoring to get out, how it will handle people clamoring to be bailed out just like we were, whether the government will penalize western speculators more than Chinese speculators.
Will it penalize speculators at all? We don’t know. Will it simply inflate the currency to bail out everybody else? It has a closed system, so it could be handled in a lot of ways.
CHARLIE ROSE: But on the other hand, it has a group of leaders who have recognized it had problems before. They understand the need to build up domestic demand --
JAMES CHANOS: Yes.
CHARLIE ROSE: -- to fuel their economy.
JAMES CHANOS: Right.
CHARLIE ROSE: They understand that well. It’s one of the reasons they have the attitude they do about their currency.
JAMES CHANOS: Right.
CHARLIE ROSE: They understand and need to stimulate their economy. They put $500 plus billion in a stimulus program. They understand the need to --
JAMES CHANOS: A lot of which went into real estate, by the way.
CHARLIE ROSE: Well, yes. They understand the need to find alternative sources of energy.
JAMES CHANOS: Yes.
CHARLIE ROSE: They understand and deal with their future in remarkably smart ways. Why won’t they be smart about this?
JAMES CHANOS: Well, because the previous times they’ve had troubles it’s been much smaller relative not only to their own economy but to the impact on the global economy, number one.
Number two, the problem I have philosophically with that argument is that when you talk to western investors, who were absolutely abhorrent about government in the U.S. getting more involved in our health care
sector -- the free market does it better, accurate pricing reflects supply and demand, why should government mettle? -- have no problem with nine guys in a room, the central committee of the politburo, the Chinese Communist
Party, determining economic policy, and determining when they make mistakes how to get out of those mistakes.
And the fact of the matter is this one is going to be bigger than those nine guys.
CHARLIE ROSE: That’s your argument, this is bigger than anything they’ve seen before, and therefore it’s in question as to whether they have the ability and the commitment to stop it?
JAMES CHANOS: And the skill.
CHARLIE ROSE: And the skill, ability and skill.
All right, Ken Rogoff, who’s been on this show, who is a pretty smart economist, said "In my work on the history of financial crises with Carmen Reinhart," his partner in this, "we find that debt-fueled real estate price explosions are a frequent precursor to financial crisis."
What do you expect the ramifications to be when this Chinese bubble bursts? What happens if nothing is done?
JAMES CHANOS: Well, it will run its own course no matter what because you, of course, now have people trying to develop any piece of property they can get their hands on to sell it to real estate speculators. So supply will equal demand at some point. It always does.
And then there’s this precarious tipping point where suddenly you can’t sell a project. And then it’s just as if everyone from the port side of the cruise ship goes to the starboard side of the cruise ship all at once. You get a tipping point, you get this sort of light bulb moment "I’ve got to get owl while I can," and the buyers dry up. It’s as old as markets itself.
CHARLIE ROSE: OK, but this is not Dubai World. This is the People’s Republic of China. What are the global implications?
JAMES CHANOS: Well, that’s an interesting question.
We’re all looking at -- one of the most obvious, obvious trades of the world right now is that the RMB, the Yuan is undervalued. Mr. Geithner I think is in Beijing tonight talking ant whether or not China is a currency manipulator. Everyone is assuming China needs to peg its currency higher to avoid the export deflation going on.
Well, Chinese exports aren’t the problem here. And what if it turns out that by having to nationalize lots and lots of real estate, bad debts, the RMB is devalued? That’s something --
CHARLIE ROSE: The other way.
JAMES CHANOS: Exactly. That’s something nobody’s expecting because -- particularly all the hot money that’s going into China. Keep in mind a lot of money going into China is Chinese nationals outside the country in
London, Singapore, Vancouver, San Francisco, who are trying to get in on the bubble, too.
CHARLIE ROSE: But it’s just -- there’s a lot of global capital that flows to where it think there’s opportunity.
JAMES CHANOS: Yes.
CHARLIE ROSE: And the opportunity in the last, what, five years has been China and India.
JAMES CHANOS: Right.
CHARLIE ROSE: Emerging nations.
JAMES CHANOS: Right.
CHARLIE ROSE: Especially Asia.
JAMES CHANOS: Yes.
CHARLIE ROSE: So if there is a collapse, tell me what the collapse looks like and is does the impact, say, for the United States?
JAMES CHANOS: Well, one proviso I’ll give you is that the history of western investors making a lot of money in China is not a great one.
CHARLIE ROSE: Yes.
JAMES CHANOS: There’s been a couple wonderful books, including one called "Mr. China" about two investment bankers who set up shop right after Tiananmen Square. They spoke Mandarin, they were connected. They hired the kids of the high party officials.
And they couldn’t have gotten it more right from a big-picture point of view. And they wrote this book a number of years later on how they were lucky to get out with their skin. They were completely bankrupted by
China.
CHARLIE ROSE: Suppose you’re right. What does it mean for the rest of us?
JAMES CHANOS: I don’t know. These things shake out in different ways. Does it bring on a -- if they devalue the RMB, does it bring on a trade war? I don’t know. Certainly we’re all assuming the currency will be revalued upward. What if it doesn’t? Does China sacrifice its middle-class, burgeoning middle-class who are becoming real estate speculators? Does it fry them in the --
CHARLIE ROSE: Politically it can’t afford to do that.
JAMES CHANOS: I don’t think so either. So what does it do? Does it sacrifice the western investors? Can it politically afford to do that? They’re going to be facing difficult choices.
CHARLIE ROSE: And what might they do with all those dollars it holds.
JAMES CHANOS: Well, they’re going to need those dollars to in effect sterilize the banking system. And that was what we needed our currency reserves, by the way, in 1929, our pounds and gold reserves and what Japan
needed in 1989.
CHARLIE ROSE: So if the bubble bursts they’ll need the dollars.
JAMES CHANOS: Absolutely.
CHARLIE ROSE: So that’s good they have all those dollars.
JAMES CHANOS: I think it’s the one asset they have.
CHARLIE ROSE: Transparency. Is that a big issue?
JAMES CHANOS: It is. We by and large --
CHARLIE ROSE: The absence of transparency.
JAMES CHANOS: Yes, absence of transparency.
We’re using Chinese figures for our reports and our conclusions. But I take them with somewhat of a large grain of salt. I think they’re much more optimistic than need be.
And I think that, for example, China does not produce any statistics in its government series of depreciation of fixed assets. For an economy where construction is 50 percent to 60 percent of your economy, if you
don’t give analysts or economists any data on how you’re depreciating those airports and bridges and -- you know, things could be a little misleading, particularly in an economy where they seem to replace this stuff every four
or five years. So that’s a problem.
And then I’m more concerned even philosophically about the whole idea -- as we say, it’s all about the number. So in the west our economic growth is a result of decisions that you make and I make and that the
market reflects via pricing, and at the end of the day we calculate all activity, and that’s our economic growth.
In China it starts with, "We are going to grow nine percent next year. Now, how do we get there?" It’s the start of the equation and the activity is the residual. And that’s ultimately philosophically the problem.
CHARLIE ROSE: The problem is they need to grow nine percent a year and so therefore they’re not going to take steps that might engager that nine percent to fix something they’re not sure is broken?
JAMES CHANOS: Exactly, because we don’t want to lose face and because it’s all-important to my advancement in the Communist Party and my local party to make that number.
CHARLIE ROSE: So when you saw Enron and figured out Enron was in trouble --
JAMES CHANOS: Enron was about making the number, by the way.
CHARLIE ROSE: Yes, and you say they were in trouble. And there was publicity and reporters wrote about what you were thinking. It put you on the map, first of all, when it turned out right. What did you do? You
went out and shorted the stock?
JAMES CHANOS: We did some work based on a piece that a great "Bloomberg" writer John Wyle wrote in the Texas "Wall Street Journal." He put a piece out that was lost in the shuffle about firms like Enron that had just gotten the SEC to agree to their new mark-to-model accounting that allowed them to take in up front all the profits they expected on a derivative sale immediately.
We had seen this before in the insurance business when I started my career, and annuity companies used to do that until they all blew up. So we started looking at Enron in the fall of 2000 on the basis of that
article, and immediately as we started looking at the SEC filings things caught our eye, the disclosures about these offshore entities doing business with Enron --
CHARLIE ROSE: It all became a giant confirmation for you.
JAMES CHANOS: As we did more and more work, everything fell right into place of something very, very wrong -- heavy insider stock sales, heavy executive departures, odd disclosures, and a lot of gobbledygook in
the financial statements.
And so everything we did began to confirm fairly easily the perception that this was a company that was aggressive. Even we didn’t think it was a fraud until basically Jeff Skilling resigned, and that’s when I knew there
was something -- it wasn’t just a gray area, it was in the black.
CHARLIE ROSE: What if you’d been wrong? What would have been the consequences for you?
JAMES CHANOS: We would have lost money. I mean, it would have -- we’re wrong on things all the time.
CHARLIE ROSE: Would it have threatened the firm?
JAMES CHANOS: No, no.
CHARLIE ROSE: Just a small investment --
JAMES CHANOS: No one position is ever more than five percent of our capital.
CHARLIE ROSE: OK, so what if you’re wrong on China? You just take a loss?
JAMES CHANOS: Yes, sure.
CHARLIE ROSE: That’s it.
JAMES CHANOS: Of course.
CHARLIE ROSE: But if you’re right on China it has implications for everybody?
JAMES CHANOS: Well, I think it has implications for more than just my investors, yes.
CHARLIE ROSE: So if you’re right you have to back up your idea with your money.
JAMES CHANOS: Yes.
CHARLIE ROSE: So what will you do? Where will you short? Construction companies? Other people that are building things in China?
JAMES CHANOS: By and large those are Chinese companies. But there are some Chinese land development countries that trade in Hong Kong. Increasingly there are ways to play Chinese companies outside of the China market in either Hong Kong or New York.
But probably more importantly from an investment point of view those this has implications for the people selling stuff to China, commodity, people -- anything that are selling things to people who put up high-rise
buildings, cement, glass, copper. That’s where you’re going to see probably a step function down in demand -- steel, because right now it’s all going into China.
CHARLIE ROSE: Those are the companies you will short and are shortening now I assume?
JAMES CHANOS: Yes, sure.
CHARLIE ROSE: Short selling generally. What do you think the reputation of short sellers is?
(LAUGHTER)
JAMES CHANOS: Well, after Enron I thought it was getting better. But with the financial crisis of ‘08 when, thanks to some of my friends in the banking industry, we started sprouting two horns and a tail again.
CHARLIE ROSE: It’s more than that. Your friends in the banking community who run some of the biggest banks we know thought that you were part of the problem.
JAMES CHANOS: Yes.
CHARLIE ROSE: And they asked Paulson and others to stop them.
JAMES CHANOS: Absolutely.
CHARLIE ROSE: Otherwise they are aggregating -- they are causing the problem.
JAMES CHANOS: Yes, and without a shred of evidence. And yet every banker went down to Washington in April of ‘08 and went on till Lehman collapsed.
And we joked, the two things they asked Congress and the SEC was not to accept their apologies for screwing up or to get some capital forbearance for a while so they could be get house in order. The two things they asked for was liberalize the accounting again on mark-to-market and stop short-selling. So that ought to tell you something.
Now, what I have pointed out to people in the government, and I’m hoping somebody asks somebody under oath, is that our view was that the largest short sellers in purchasers of credit default swaps in the banking
industry in ‘08 were the other banks, and for a good fiduciary sound reason. They were counterparties with each other. They were all interrelated.
And the only two ways to hedge your exposure on anything that you can’t sell -- I have a promise from Charlie Rose, Inc., to make good on some payments down the road -- is to short Charlie Rose Inc.’s shares or to buy credit default swaps in Charlie Rose Inc.’s Debt.
And banks acting in a fiduciary sound manner are trying to hedge off the exposure to Lehman or Bear Stearns can in and of itself have a destabilizing effect broadly speaking on the market. And Bill Akman and others have pointed this out as well.
And I would love to see the trading records of the proprietary trading desks of the big banks during 2008. I would like to see if they were shorting each other and buying credit default swap protection in each other.
CHARLIE ROSE: Are you suggesting to people like Barney Frank that that might be an appropriate subject for investigation by the financial services commit?
JAMES CHANOS: Absolutely, or the financial inquiry commission. We need to find out, because so much of this narrative was hedge funds and short sellers being vilified and being pointed to as the cause or additive to the problem. And, in fact, people like me were covering our financial shorts in 2008. We had put them on in 2005 and 2006.
CHARLIE ROSE: Do you think the financial services committee the financial inquiry committee will do this?
JAMES CHANOS: I hope so, because I think it’s important to understand who were the villains, who were the guys wearing the white hats, who were wearing the black hats, who was calling out warnings correctly, who was
asleep at the switch. We need to find this out.
CHARLIE ROSE: What have we learned from the recent disclosures from the Lehman investigation?
JAMES CHANOS: Well it wasn’t short sellers.
(LAUGHTER)
I mean, look, when Lehman went under --
CHARLIE ROSE: That’s part of your mantra now. But when you look at what happened to Lehman it wasn’t short sellers. It was executive action.
JAMES CHANOS: It was Lehman. It was Lehman. When Lehman went under their debt -- the credit default swaps on their debt settled out at nine cents on the dollar in October, one month after they went bankrupt.
We publicly pointed out the time that that was on the basis of $150 billion of Lehman’s debt. So the debt was impaired by 90 percent, roughly, or $135 billion. Couple that with the $20 billion of equity that was wiped
out, we confidently said in October of ‘08 that the hole at Lehman brothers was $150 billion give or take.
The hole at Enron, Charlie, when the bust settled was about $65 billion. Lehman was twice Enron. We haven’t even gotten to AIG yet.
So the magnitude o of the holes in these balance sheets -- and Secretary Paulson eluded to it in his account when he said the banks look at Legman’s books in the last fateful weekend, they realized that the stuff
was overvalued by 100 percent still.
So as I pointed out, you can be --
CHARLIE ROSE: That’s why they couldn’t get anybody to buy it.
JAMES CHANOS: Exactly. You can be off by a billion here and a billion there, maybe. But when you’re off by a $150 billion on a $600 billion balance sheet, there’s fraud involved. There’s fraud.
And someone knowingly signed those financial statements, which is a violation under Sarbanes-Oxley, and signed financial statements they knew not to be fair and accurate.
CHARLIE ROSE: So you think there ought to be more criminal indictments?
JAMES CHANOS: I think there ought to be a lot of criminal indictments in what we saw, because you have to understand that the -- what John Kenneth Galbraith called the nub of the crime -- was simply taking
aggressive marks on illiquid derivatives and hard-to-value securities, calling it profit, and paying yourself 50 cents on the dollar a bonus. You were stealing from your shareholders.
CHARLIE ROSE: You went to Yale. You didn’t intend to go into business.
JAMES CHANOS: I was pre-med for about three weeks.
CHARLIE ROSE: And then what happened?
JAMES CHANOS: I didn’t want to walk up Science Hill.
(LAUGHTER)
CHARLIE ROSE: So you started looking towards business.
JAMES CHANOS: Yes.
CHARLIE ROSE: What brings you to short-selling?
JAMES CHANOS: It was completely an accident. One of the very first companies when I left investment banking and went to work for a retail brokerage firm in Chicago in ‘82, one of the first companies I was asked to look at was a high flying insurance company gobbling up all kinds of other S&H green stamp and MGIC insurance. It was called Baldwin United, the old Baldwin piano company, and it transformed itself into a financial services
juggernaut.
And it just was completely all smoke and mirrors. And so as we did some work and began to pull on strings and the strings pulled back, and we documented all our work with documents from state insurance departments and a variety of other things, they were selling annuities to Wall Street firms and booking all the profits, a la Enron, up front.
And I put out a couple of sell and sell short reports on Baldwin. The stock promptly doubled, which was my first real introduction to the short side. We were ridiculed and threatened with lawsuits. All the sort of
stuff short sellers live with, as I learned very quickly.
And then the company was -- insurance companies were seized on Christmas Eve 1982 and the company was rendered insolvent almost overnight.
CHARLIE ROSE: So what we should be looking to over the next six months is what in China?
JAMES CHANOS: I think evidence that the government efforts to jawbone this thing actually turn into much more strict policy where you see actual restriction on loans or they cut back -- let’s face it. The governments
control the largest banks there and if they want to stop this funding they can.
I think right now because there’s so much world attention being focused on China in this property bubble that they’re trying to take steps to reassure investors that they’re on it, they’re on the case.
But we’re still seeing big property rise numbers month to month in March and February, the big cities, and it seems to me that all systems are still go for speculation. So I’m not quite sure yet that the actions are matching the words. And that’s something to look for.
CHARLIE ROSE: But you don’t think they will take the necessary measures not because they don’t recognize the problem, but because they have these other issues, which is expected annual rate of growth?
JAMES CHANOS: They can’t afford to. As I said, they’re on a treadmill to hell. They can’t afford to get off this heroine of property development. It is the only thing keeping the economic growth numbers going.
CHARLIE ROSE: And that’s the question, isn’t it?
JAMES CHANOS: How do you go cold turkey? I don’t know.
CHARLIE ROSE: Thank you.
JAMES CHANOS: My pleasure.
CHARLIE ROSE: James Chanos.
Back in a moment. Stay with us.
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/12132
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