This is Mises Weekends with your host Jeff Deist. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. Once again, it is time for Mises Weekends. I'm joined today by an old friend, a guy I've known a long time, Scott Horton. I'm sure most of you are familiar with him from his work, the Scott Horton show, which has appeared on Pacific Radio and other outlets. His long time writing for antiwar.com, his new involvement with the Libertarian Institute and Organization of Website he runs. And most importantly, for today's purposes, he's the author of a brand new book entitled, Fool's Erin, Time to End the War in Afghanistan. This book is making a huge splash in Libertarian circles, but it's our job to make sure it makes a splash beyond just Libertarian circles. So Scott, with all that said, welcome. Good morning and thank you. Thank you very much, Jeff. Happy to be here. Well, so I want to say something right away rather than open with a question, Scott, but I'd like you to comment. This is not a Scott Horton opinion book. Everyone who knows you knows you're strongly antiwar, strongly anti-interventionism, a hardcore anarcho-capitalist in your personal worldview or ideology. But this is a journalistic effort. This is a book about facts, about history, about factions, about events. This isn't just Scott Horton bloviating. I mean, you really wrote a book about the details, the sordid details of this endless war in Afghanistan. Well, thank you for saying so. I really did try. I mean, the fact is, when I started writing, it was actually supposed to just be a chapter. Me and Tom Woods had a deal, and we're going to write more or less debunking the whole terror war for dummies with one chapter on each of the wars. But then I just got bogged down in the Afghan quagmire and the thing got drawn out and drawn out. And at some point I said, well, I guess it is going to be its own book. And, but that's how I am. I'm a very detail-oriented guy. If it was online, the whole book would be blue with footnotes. Well, did you consciously have an audience in mind as you were writing it? Were you saying, hey, if someone happens to be on the left, I want this book to resonate with them? Did you try to write it in a way that it wasn't, it didn't feel like Scott Horton libertarianism on every page? Well, I mean, honestly, I really, even on the show, my focus is not really on libertarianism very much. I mean, if we're just debunking the Iranian smoking laptop or whatever, you can hardly tell if I'm a libertarian or a progressive or a conservative or anything. Most of the time anyway, I hope. It's all pretty much, you know, nonpartisan. I'm trying to appeal to the broadest base as possible, always, anyway, or most of the time anyway. But so this, I did start out with a little bit more of a right-leaning audience in mind in the sense that I was really thinking of Tom Wood's radio audience and he's a little bit right-leaning of a libertarian and his audience is too. But then again, you know, I think people are mostly used to hearing anti-war stuff stated by leftists and liberal types anyway. So, and I just don't talk like that, right? You won't ever hear me say this Navy money should be spent on public schools instead of it, because that's not what I think anyway, right? So I don't say we need more democracy or whatever, how liberals talk. So I think it should be a little bit more accessible to right-wingers and capitalists and libertarians in that I don't have any of those kind of buzzword terms that would turn them off right away. I mean, I am attacking the entire premise of American foreign policy here. So they got to be man enough to deal with that. But when it comes to, and actually when it comes to the audience, I kind of lost sight of what I was doing. On one hand, I was trying to write for really every man. So if somebody could knock out an Iraq or an Afghan chapter, sit down and read it and be done in 15 minutes and pretty much learn what I really needed them to know. But then once I started writing it, and this goes to what you say about the journalistic aspect of it. And there's 1,100 footnotes and probably 1,500 citations in the thing.  And I kept thinking of him as my audience and that he was gonna read this thing. And was I really proving my case solidly enough? And so for whatever reason, he just, you know, my uncle became kind of my muse here.   Well, I think you accomplished it. I'm halfway through, I'll admit, I'm not completely through. In the introduction, there's a paragraph that I'd like you to explain and defend. I think it really sets the tone for the book. And I'm quoting from your intro here. Where you say, the truth is America's Afghan war is an irredeemable disaster. I think we all agree on that. It was meant to be a trap in the first place. America is not only failing to defeat its enemies, but is destroying itself. Just as Osama bin Laden al-Qaeda always intended. So give us the big picture on that, on those sentences. Okay, so after Vietnam, the American people came down with what was called the Vietnam syndrome. That was what the government called it, the reluctance to continue on this kind of foreign interventionism. And so, as John Mueller talks about in his great book, Overblown, they gave up on containment and they decided, you know what, instead, let's bait the Soviet Union into overexpansion. And Robert Gates are the former CIA chief and former secretary of defense and Zbidny Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, bragged now that, well, Brzezinski's now dead. But anyway, they've since bragged that it was their idea in the first place to bait the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan. So Jimmy Carter signed a finding that's an order to the CIA on July 3rd, 1979, to start supporting the Mujahideen, who then started or I guess increased their attacks on the sock puppet Soviet government in Kabul, the communist government in Kabul. That did succeed in provoking the Soviet invasion by Christmas, 1979. And when that happened, Brzezinski wrote a memo to Carter saying, we now have our opportunity to give them their own Vietnam.  So it worked. And through the 1980s, Ronald Reagan continued that Carter policy of backing the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. They did bleed the Soviet Union to bankruptcy, which it was going out of style anyway, but it sure helped. And the Reagan Republican certainly bragged that they're the ones who brought down the Soviet Union with nuclear brinksmanship and the war in Afghanistan as two major pieces of that. Well, the Mujahideen believed that too, that they had brought down the Soviet Union, that they saw America's Vietnam trap for the Soviet Union as their own Afghanistan trap. And Bin Laden said throughout the 1990s, quite openly that this was exactly what they were trying to accomplish by attacking the United States. They'd be happy if America would just pick up stakes and come home from the Middle East. But since that was obviously not in the cards, the plan was to bait America. Just as America helped the Mujahideen bait the Soviet Union, they would bait the United States into overexpansion. And I try to say carefully in the book that you and I are supposed to be the ones who are fooled, but our government, they're not fools. What Bin Laden was doing really was giving them an opportunity, something to exploit, which is what he knew they would do. And I quote Bin Laden's son as saying how badly he wanted America to invade Afghanistan and how happy he was that George W. Bush came out in top after Florida in the year 2000 because this is a perfect mark.  He's gonna go completely crazy and that is going to accomplish Al-Qaeda's goals in the long term. Whether it takes 10 years, 20 years or 30 years, at some point the empire will not, the North American empire will not be able to rule Eurasia forever. And they're simply trying to hasten the day where the economic reality demands that America come home. That's it. It's the Vietnam trap. We did it to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Bin Laden did it to us. We're doing it to ourselves in Afghanistan again right now. Well, obviously Afghanistan has an amazing history. You know, I just wonder we've had these two superpowers over many, many decades basically using the literal ground in Afghanistan as a pawn, the Afghani people as pawns in these geopolitical battles. I mean, what do you think this has done to the psyche of that country to know that year after year after year, they're being used for Soviet and Western political purposes to, you know, little kids are having their legs blown off. We don't understand this as Americans. We don't understand the kind of hatred that this can engender. Well, you know, I think that's such a great question. I mean, really the answer is Americans paranoid fantasies about what's all about to happen to them any day now at the hands of whichever enemy that government or their peer groups or whatever tell them to fantasize about. This is the reality of the people of Afghanistan. It sounds like they say about the Russians, right? Russia's been invaded so many times that they're just, they're basically crazy, you know? And the same kind of thing with Afghanistan where, you know, the majority, the vast majority of the population of Afghanistan has never even heard of September 11th, which they didn't even do. It wasn't even their government, much less the people of Afghanistan who did that. It was a few Saudis and Egyptians, just a few score foreigners hiding out in their country who were behind the attack. And they've been suffering for 16 years. And then as you say, you know, going back to the Jimmy Carter years, my whole lifetime almost, America has been messing with those people. So if it wasn't us, would it be the Iranians or the Indians or the Pakistanis or whoever? God knows, I don't know. But the fact that it's the American's fault is intolerable.  I mean, you know, there's a new movie that just came out called National Bird by Sonia Kenenbeck. And it's about the drone war.  I forget if they do Yemen and Somalia. Anyway, but she interviews this Afghan man and his son and their whole family was slaughtered in his drone strike, like 25 of them, they were on a caravan from one town to the other. And the Americans just lit them up and just slaughtered them on the side of the road.  And the father is trying to explain what it's like to be in such pain, emotional pain, having lost his entire family like this. And he's describing his heart being torn in half and this kind of, and you know, these are the people who we hear all the time, what barbarians and what savages they are and this kind of thing. But you look at him, this could be your next door neighbor. There's nothing uncivilized about him. We're the barbarians, flying our high tech reaper drones, tearing his family's lives literally to shreds. Yeah, it's really, it's heartbreaking, but you know, you have a whole chapter about the history and the background and the factions behind all this. It seems to me in reading that chapter that this book is really a cautionary tale against interventionism generally because Americans are really bad at following. They're really bad at going along with facts and they tend to suffer from presentism saying, well, I don't really care about what happened 30 or 40 years ago that set the stage for this. They're harboring bin Laden. So talk a little bit about how Afghanistan is a cautionary tale that ought to put us off invading and attempting to meddle in countries across the world. Yeah, well, you know, it's that libertarian insight, right? Hayek and the information problem that even if they were really great entrepreneurs, they wouldn't know what the heck to do over there. You would need millions of them to finally figure it out in little pieces at a time.  I like to make the analogy to Iraq. I think it's, I hope it's simple enough for people to follow. And when George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 for Iraq War II, that basically he was taking the side of the super majority population of the country, the least the political leadership of the factions of the Shiite Arabs now who had been ruled under a 20% Sunni Arab minority dictatorship for generations.  And then they said, thanks a lot for the help. Now get out. But anyway, they were able to defeat the Sunnis, drive them all out of Baghdad and create this new Iraqi Shia stand from Baghdad over to Iran down to Kuwait, right? Okay, in Afghanistan, there's nothing like that. In Afghanistan, we're trying to foist a coalition of small minority groups, the Tajiks, the Uzbeks, the Hazaras. I don't know if the Sikhs really participate in this, but they're up there. The Turkmen and these small minority groups together make up 60% and America is more or less, and this is slightly oversimplified because there are some Pashtun representation in the government, but not to any real effect. And we're trying to force this minority coalition government onto the plurality. It's not the majority, but it is by far the plurality Pashtun population of the country, 40-something percent. And that's that dominate in the entire south and east of the country. And so it just can't work. It can never work. In fact, the army is almost entirely Tajiks and with some Uzbeks, the leaders are all Tajiks, the leaders of the intelligence services are all Tajiks. And you can see, like if you watch the HBO documentary about the invasion of Marja, or really any documentary about American operations, especially during the surge down there in the south. And they have the Afghan army guys and the American Marines and soldiers are telling the Afghan army guys, all right, tell this guy, this, this and that. And then, but they're embedded Afghan army guys say, I don't speak the same language as him. I only speak Urdu. He speaks Pashtun. I don't know what, this is like trying to build up an army from Mexico and force it onto the people of the United States of America. It's just not gonna happen. There's too many people to conquer and not enough power to do it with. And in fact, when you look at the ratios, they had two soldiers to one civilian for a while there in Marja. When it's supposed to be like one soldier per 10 civilians should be enough for your counter insurgency doctrine. We had two soldiers per one civilian still lost. The Pashtun population of Afghanistan can not be pacified, period. You could call an H bomb strikes if you wanna just complete the genocide. Otherwise, what you're going to have at best is some kind of autonomy and separation, if not a complete separation of the Afghan state. Well, Scott, one thing I really get from this book is just the sheer futility of all of it. Here we are 16, 17 years on. And as we mentioned earlier, Americans are bad at following the bouncing ball and maybe that's a good thing from the government's perspective. But in terms of shifting goalposts, the changing rationales for this war, I wanna do another quote from your chapter on how long will we stay there. This is from Colonel Bacevich. Am I pronouncing that correctly? He observed this about the war in Afghanistan and the broader war on terrorism trademark, capitalized war on terrorism. We've done counter insurgency. We've done counter terrorism. We've done advice and assist. We've done targeted assassination. We've done nation building. So we have these shifting goals. Remember when it first started out, it was get the guys who did 9-11 who are harboring bin Laden, bin Laden's in a cave. There's a lot of talk about caves for a while there. Isn't this astonishing how asleep at the wheel we are and that we allow the foreign policy establishment to keep changing the goal or the purported goal? Right, well, I mean, their thing is always, and there are a ton of quotes like this in the book from beginning to end, it's just not enough. It's never enough. If you're in the State Department, the CIA, the Army or the Marine Corps, you know what? If only we'd had a few more infantry and a little bit more money. If only the local State Department flunkies had had a little bit more money to pass out to bribe. You know, there was this one warlord. I'm sure we could have bribed him if we'd only had one million more dollars. Whatever excuses they can come up with, it's endless. And so when this or that strategy or set of tactics doesn't work, then they say, well, we have to try the other one. Right, there's no withdrawal. It's just not an option. I mean, Ron Paul ran for president in 2008. That was your withdrawal option. The rest of the options are different kinds of staying, basically, and so, but then as Bacevich says, none of them work. In fact, Michael Flynn, who was Donald Trump's first national security advisor, the Turkish foreign agent there, well, he was Stanley McChrystal's right-hand man in the insurgency. And he had written this report criticizing the quality of intelligence in the Afghan war.  He was saying what we're doing, he ridiculed the policy as anti-insurgency as opposed to counter-insurgency. And he said anti-insurgency is worthless or even counterproductive. All you're doing is creating more enemies. That was Stanley McChrystal's own numbers, insurgent math for every one guy you kill, you create 10 more. For every two guys you kill, you create 20 more. That's a great way to lose a war by killing your enemy and multiplying them in that way, like making Mouse in Fantasia with the broomsticks there. You just keep making it worse and worse and worse and worse and worse. And in fact, as Flynn said, the Soviet Union found this out. When they left in 1989, they had more enemies than when they invaded in the first place. And then of course, his argument was, that's why we need this full surge so that we can have really good on-the-ground intelligence so we'll know who to kill and then that will give us the edge. Now, of course, that didn't work either. That was a giant catastrophe too. But there's no denying the wisdom in what he's saying there that we're flying blind, where it reminds me we'll be on the dark side of Mars right now trying to figure out who is who and who we're supposed to be killing over there.  And even when they say, yeah, no, we're killing the bad guys, look at our body count. Yeah, so what? Look at how much of the country the Taliban controls right now, more than at any point since the turn of the century, since the start of the war. And they wanna say, this is because Obama drew numbers down. Well, but didn't they promise that they were gonna win back in 2009, 10 and 11, that the surge was gonna work and that he would be able to draw down? That was Petraeus' promise that the war would be over no doubt by 2014, sir. Yes, sir. But that didn't happen. They lost. Well, it almost sounds like an alcoholic or a gambler negotiating with themselves, right? You talk about the surge, there's this idea of if we just stay one more year, if we just pass the appropriations bill for some more money for Afghanistan, if we just increase the number of Marines, you know, one more year, whatever. It, you know, there's an analogy, Scott, to economics, the sunk cost fallacy. We spent 16, 17 years, trillions of dollars. The debt was about six trillion. September 11th, it's now 20. There's enormous human costs and dead bodies and maimed bodies and, you know, including U.S. soldiers. But there's this idea we can never finish the job. What's the mindset here? Is it just the military industrial folks doing what they do, which is perpetuate their existence? Or is there actually some kind of mania that makes us think this is winnable? No, I mean, yeah, winnable. No, I don't think so. I mean, the recent special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan was recently fired by Trump and she said, meh, just as well.  They tried to make a scandal out of it. The Democrats did. She was like, meh, you know, it's not like there's much to get done over there. And she said, she doesn't think that any serious expert thinks this war can be won. And that was what she said. All right, she said, in any reasonable time horizon that would be acceptable to America. In other words, less than 50 years or 100 years or some kind of thing. So now I don't think there's really much of a mania. I think what it is, is what you said in the first place there, the sunk costs and just the economics of bureaucracy that the army and the Marine Corps and each and every individual general and Colonel too, have an interest in getting their ticket punched and moving up one step and getting a new star on their shirt and a little bit more money when they retire and go to sit on a board of directors of some firm and they all have their own interests. The CIA and the State Department guys have their own interests. We're talking billions of dollars of heroin money. So God knows what American government employees are involved in that mix and laundering money and in the transport of that heroin and whatever I'm sure we'll find out in 20 years. I mean, we know that the government of Afghanistan is up to their eyeballs in it, no question, but the real nitty gritty details about the American role, I don't know yet, but I'm sure we're gonna find it. And anyway, yeah, it's a self-licking ice cream cone. That's what they say. And look at what's the opposite.  Can you imagine Mattis and McChrystal who both lost this war personally? The National Security Advisor and the Secretary of Defense saying, well, you know what? Our army and our Marine Corps just aren't up to the task. They can't do it. We failed, we lost. Oh, well, I guess we got to come home now. And they can't do it.  Otherwise, the Taliban can keep fighting and the Americans can keep fighting until the dollar breaks. And as long as we're talking about economics, this is one that I actually cut out of the book because non-libertarians said, I don't get it, but I'll tell it to you because I like it. There's a whole business cycle theory going on here too. And it's all, of course, ultimately backed by inflationary money here in the United States, but you can look at the US soldiers themselves. The soldiers and the Marines are basically inflated dollars in a sense. And they help to prop up the power and influence of people in Afghanistan, whoever they make deals with, and drive up the value of those people's authority in whatever places. But once that inflation stops and once those bad loans start being called in and the army troops gotta come home, your surge is over and the easy credit times are over and the soldiers come home, well, then it all collapses because it was an artificial demand. It was this excess inflated demand for the power of this or that group that propped them up so highly in power. So then the correction has to come. And that means that when America does end the war, let's say you and I convinced America and America demands that Donald Trump end this war this week, it's going to be a disaster. Again, unlike Iraq where we're fighting for the super majority population who, let's face it, once they win, they're basically solidified in power in the capital city at least, even if they don't rule the whole West, but here everything is so distorted. When we leave, it's going to be a disaster. When we leave, the place is going to fall apart. There may be a whole new civil war for control over the capital city. The Taliban may be content to hold on to Pashtunistan or they may go ahead and march on Kabul. You know, I don't know that the Indians could really step up their support for the government in Kabul, which would then provoke the Pakistanis into upping their support for the Afghan Taliban and on and on and on. It's going to be a wreck. I'm not promising things will be better for Afghanistan once America leaves, only that it won't be our fault anymore. And I don't argue in the book even that we should negotiate with the Taliban and find the most peaceful conclusion that we can and go because I don't believe the Americans will ever do that. I don't think that they're willing to negotiate with the Taliban in a way that's going to leave the Taliban with control over 40 or 50 or 60% of the country. They're just not going to do it. So I think that it's kind of a mini fool's errand to even ask them to try or to take that angle that we should negotiate. The Americans should just come home. They should just call this off and say whatever's going to happen there. It's all Bush and Obama's fault. Trump's missed his first opportunity to do this, but I think it's still not too late. He could do it. He better hurry, but he could just say, look, the Pashtun tribesmen aren't our enemies. They didn't do 9-11 and they're not trying to kill us now. They're only fighting because we're on their front lawn and the government in Kabul, that's the Bush Obama government in Kabul. I don't care about that. It's not my responsibility. It's no longer the American people's responsibility. They're son's responsibility to prop up and power there. We're done. I think he could do it, but he needs the demand outside. He's not going to do it himself, obviously. What do you think would happen if we did that? If we just picked up and we literally brought, you know, flew those planes back here, brought all those troops, left those bases empty, pulled up all of our miniature cities and just left Afghanistan in whatever reasonable timeframe that would take as a practical matter. What would happen in the immediate vacuum? Well, I think the Taliban would certainly consolidate control over the entire South and East. I assume they would just go ahead and march into Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province and Kandahar city and Kandahar and all the way up to the East and maybe Jalalabad and the places where they're predominant, they would go ahead and take over those cities. Now, whether they would go ahead back to the 1990s and fight a full civil war in order to take control of the capital city and to try to take control of the entire country, I don't know. I mean, it would be a bloody disaster if they did. It seems like what they ought to do in that situation would be settle for good enough, settle for their own sovereignty, their own independence over their own territory, but I don't know why they would necessarily if they don't have to. And then when it comes to the factions in the North, I think they are only held together by the threat of the Taliban and American money and military power. And I think that probably the coalition government and Kabul would fall apart and maybe turn completely to fighting amongst each other for control or maybe they would end up separating off into their own provinces. I have a quote from an old politician in Kabul in the book where he names all these warlords and he said, well, this guy's gonna run off with Kandahar and this guy's gonna run off with Nangahar and this guy's gonna run off with coast and basically saying that the country's gonna split up not necessarily have a giant war over control over the whole thing. So I really don't know, but I guess it does sound sort of irresponsible to say, look, it's gonna be really bad when we go, but that's kind of what I'm getting at with the business cycle theory there, that it's the distortions in the market for power in Afghanistan created by American intervention that have set things up this way. It's sorta like I asked Bob Murphy when the market crashed in 2008, I says to Bob, yeah, but Bob, maybe we should have a soft landing. Maybe they should inflate enough money to prevent the crash from being so bad that it creates a deflationary spiral and brings the whole economy. The economy could crater if they don't bail it out. And Bob said, yeah, but the thing is they can't do it. What they'll do is they'll do it wrong and they'll make things worse and they'll put off the consequences and then the do will come do anyway and that's what we're talking about here. It's the exact same thing. You can't, there is no set of planners in the State Department who can figure out which politicians in Afghanistan should control which fiefdoms with however much amount of power and basically set the table just right to leave, right? It just can't be. We have to let matters take their own course and severely regret it and curse George W. Bush and Barack Obama and their generals for what they've done here. Well, you describe all the factions, all the warlords, this super shaky coalition government, the Taliban itself. It makes the Vietnam War with the NVA look simple in comparison. Do you think we owe it to Afghans, much like we did after Vietnam to allow a bunch of them to come to the U.S. and become citizens because of the horrific conditions we've created there or the horrific conditions that might arise if we leave? Yeah, I think that's fair, especially those who, I mean, this sounds kind of unfair but I guess especially those who've been collaborators with the Americans are likely to be punished for that. But yeah, I think they all ought to go to Arizona. They ought to get Scottsdale, Arizona and they ought to get the very best part of Chicago, Illinois and these are the John McCain and I guess give them Crawford, Texas too. Just give them the whole damn town. And yes, I mean, the Americans absolutely at the very least owe these people a massive apology. I mean, there's no point, again, there's no point in giving them any money because only the worst people would get the money anyway. But boy do we owe them sorry. And then yes, some kind of system of asylum for people who desperately need it and who are fleeing the Taliban and what have you who are fleeing the consequences of America's war there. I think that's fair.   Well, it's one thing to have real refugees it's another to create them. So Scott, I wanna wrap up on a question that's gonna be a little tough and I wanna ask it in the right spirit. Doug Casey talks about nature versus nurture and are some people just sort of wired to be libertarians and sometimes we beat our head against the wall and say, why don't more people in the general population see things the way we do? And I think you can say that about interventionism and foreign policy. There are people like Max Boote. There are people like Bill Kristol who see this very, very differently from us.  Is there a psychology to this adivistic need to control the world and blow up the world? Is it psychological? Is there a nature versus nurture component? What do you think disposes people to wanna rule the world?  I look at Richard Pearl or any of these guys William Kristol is another perfect example. None of these guys was on the baseball team. None of these guys had a hot date to the prom. Not one of them. I mean, the neocons are some Freudian psychiatrist dream come true. I mean, you could do a lifetime of study about that kind of insanity. I think the average American likes fighting. I think, well, look, the average male likes fighting at least up to a certain age if they think they can win anyway.  And that's what's about to happen to you, pal. And that's a pretty universal kind of an attitude. And that's why I spend so much time in the book trying to just beat everyone over the head and get them to understand that this is all George Bush senior and Bill Clinton's fault. They started it. The terrorists didn't start it. The USA started it. That doesn't mean the terrorists are good guys or right guys, but that just means they're acting in defense too. And really it's more accurately defense on their side.  So I don't mean to say that, but I just mean it was Bill Clinton murdering their people is what made them come to kill us. That's the fact.  Just like in the power of nightmares.  He needs Paul Wolfowitz and he needs them bad and vice versa, right? These kooks need each other to create the crises to make themselves look indispensable, to make themselves look like the ones who know what needs to be done and that kind of thing. And so, you know, it's the exercise of power. I think probably that is, you know, how basically all people are and it takes a refined philosophy that understands that peaceful cooperation is at least ultimately what leads to the greatest benefits for all. That it's even opposed to our own tribe going over the hill and stealing everything from the other tribe, that we're better off trading with them instead of taking everything for free. You know, it takes understanding and, you know, a lot of people would rather ignore that. I mean, seriously, if you got paid to be, not you, Jeff, but if one were to be paid and inordinate some to lobby for Lockheed, I mean, why in the world would they wanna see it any other way? Why would they see it any other way?  You know, it's in the nature of probably men and then especially government agents, right? Because of the economics of politics. They don't have the incentive structure to ever make them stop, only to keep doing worse and to keep moving on. Well, I'm sure you're right. I'm sure there is something in the human psyche that makes us warlike, but the problem is that in modern America, the war machine has become so technologically advanced and scary. You know, Scott, thanks so much for your time. This is the book, ladies and gentlemen, on Amazon, Fool's Air and Time to End the War in Afghanistan. I know it was a hard piece of work to write. It's unbelievably annotated. It's unbelievably informative and I really recommend it. Scott, it's great talking to you. Ladies and gentlemen, have a great weekend. Subscribe to Mises Weekends via iTunes U, Stitcher and SoundCloud, or listen on Mises.org and YouTube.


Getting VIP off the dunk spot. I came to get this money.   Yeah Corn Okay It's the morning cuz I'm on Australian servers and what that usually means is every three minutes the game freezes for one minute No one knows why we're still trying to figure it out man. It's active. It's parked after dark ladies and gentlemen Come over. I don't know. Everything's dark my guy right word is I see these speakers. You think about play my mix tape through here Oh It was all a dream I used to reword up Like those those elementary school dances where everybody would just sit on the wall and the parents would just awkwardly watch the children the whole time You know what I'm talking about Hold on. Hold on.  What's this back here?  Getting VIP off the dunk spot Imagine Oh, yo, this is double xp Hey, what's game? What's game? I think it's best of a yes I think it's first to three or first to two.  Oh Trash-ass player. Oh, hey, buddy. Comment down wrap it up Where we landed boys We Okay, 24 seconds, how do you play this green light? Let's get it.  I got a green light. Why would I lie about that? Green light. Let's get it. Okay 40 already. Hey, my first was 34.  I can't believe it. Oh, no Pass me extra seconds when you get the ships. Okay interesting. What that's crazy. Boom. Why'd I get no extra time for that shit? Yeah, hey, that's what I do baby Phantom. That's how I I got 186 ladies and gentlemen. That's what I do. This is what I was built for yo They call me agent cuz I'm an agent. Yeah, I'm like a IRS agent Okay, I came to get this money. Okay.    I'm all day every day. I'm getting his moola. Yeah I got the ice around my neck. I call it the jeweler. Okay. I don't keep the heater. I keep the cooler Something something something What's the topic microphones Oh Listen, I'm on the way home with the microphone got a shorty on the phone She don't even know she ain't a lot. Oh came through with a big old bump. Oh, I'm about to give it back Hey, hey, I'm about to make it go up and then yeah. All right, man. Can we finally play a game or? We had enough fun. Yeah, Davis is not a high school dropout He didn't drop out in seventh grade. He did tell me that one time To he get home school though. Nah, he can't drop out in February. It's different. Hey, yo, hold on. Hold on. Can I get it? Let's do this man. Come on.  Here we go. I can't see nothing and I'm with the camera back to Chico. I really can't see an agent I can't see rhythm shot your angle. I'm a little bit delayed. Damn. I'm delayed by two seconds, bro Low-key. That's what I'm saying, bro. It's Why is agent always Oh with the latency Oh, bro, I've been pressed triangle like Pressing now it ain't gonna work All right, listen in my defense, I couldn't even see you so Shoot it. Oh, you should have pulled that Yo, it's not fair I don't know how long I know All right, I think a fly went in my mouth in my mouth, bro. Ew, bro. What green being that's dropping that was Like that Corn Man No, that's a break. Oh, he missed We just got finesse bro I'm joining right now. Okay, triple guy, bro. Why you in my way Chico come on All the way all the way all the way yeah, okay, okay, okay easy dub right here, bro Man one more tool, man I know he not he taking that Agent stop Okay Oh No, you come on here. I'm here No But I was a What is your own my career is killing me slowly and mascot in a few days


Today I'm gonna be taking a quick first look at the recently released elementary OS 6.1 which is codenamed Yolnir. Now I took a look at the previous version, 6.0 codenamed Odin, when it was released about four months ago. And I gotta be honest, I was a little disappointed in the Odin release because I'm a big fan of elementary OS. Big proponent, I'm one of their Patreon supporters, and I've installed elementary OS on many machines, friends and family machines, you know, they bring me their computers, I put elementary on those machines, and they always love it, and I never hear any negatives about it. And I really think that elementary OS as a project is doing interesting things, they're doing different things, and they're really advancing Linux on the desktop. They're one of the projects that I think has a real opportunity to actually bring desktop Linux to the masses. And that's why I was a little disappointed in the 6.0 release because I thought it took a little bit of a step back, wasn't nearly as polished and well refined, and I'm hoping that the 6.1 release will address some of those issues I had with the previous version. So let me switch over to my desktop, where I've installed elementary OS inside of virtual machine. The installation process is very simple, you click OK three or four times, and you're done in about 10 minutes. If you've seen one Linux installation, you've seen them all Linux for the most part desktop Linux distributions are very quick and easy to install. Now my biggest complaint with the previous version of elementary OS, not just my biggest complaint, but I think most people's biggest complaint was the app center. So the app center didn't have any apps in it. Last time I took a look at it, you click on the home page, and the last time I took a look at this thing, it was like there was nothing here, there were no apps. And looking at this one, it's taking a minute for some of the images to load. You know, not necessarily the app center's fault, it's probably an internet situation. I wonder if I closed it and relaunched it, because I'm sure downloading all of this from the internet, right, is essentially probably like a web front end. Yeah, and now it looks just fine. Yeah, just a little glitch that first time I took a look at it. But now there's at least some applications here, not many. There's a curated list of a little over 90 applications. And the reason it's such a small curated list is just the way elementary does things. Elementary goes their own way. They have their own desktop environment, what we're looking at here, this Pantheon desktop environment. And, you know, because elementary is kind of almost Mac-like as far as it's a walled garden, they're very stingy. For example, on what goes in this app center, you know, they just won't list everything that's available in the Ubuntu repositories, the Debian repositories, elementary, by the way, is based off of Ubuntu. But they don't list everything that is available, for example, at the terminal, at the command line with a sudo apt install, right? They're just showing you what they want to show you. And one of the things is, if I search for really popular free and open source programs like GIMP, you know, no app found, right? Libre Office, again, won't be found. A lot of the standard stuff you expect to be available for installation is not here, at least in the app center, which because of the people that elementary OS is geared for probably new users. That's typically who I put on elementary OS. I install this on people that really are not technically savvy, right? I give them elementary OS because it's so darn easy to use. But if these kinds of people actually don't need to have an empty software because they're not going to go to the command line to find software, they're also not going to side load a flat pack, which is what it tells us to do. When I search for GIMP, it says, try changing the search terms, or you could also side load flat pack apps from FlatHub. Now, if you're putting this on elderly parents or grandparents machines, they're not going to know what any of that meant, right? They have side load, flat pack, FlatHub. What do those terms even mean? Well, at least they link to FlatHub. So if I clicked on it and this is good that they do this, it actually searches for GIMP on FlatHub for you. And then if you click on GIMP and there is a install button here. So I won't say this is impossible for a brand new user to figure out. You click install. Now, once you click install, this is where it gets a little weird. OK, now what? Because it doesn't actually install the program. It downloaded the flat pack ref file. But if I click on it, install untrusted app, then you get a dialog box that is actually telling us, hey, do you want to install this? It's going to tell you that there's some risk. I understand install anyway. And then it installs GIMP as a flatback. Now, the great thing about this is after you do this one time in the app center, then what it does is it actually adds the FlatHub repository to the app center. So now no longer you're only going to have 90 apps in the app center. Now, everything that's available on FlatHub will also be in the app center. My problem with this is why isn't FlatHub just linked to the app center out of the box? It just should be, because it looks like elementary OS is a big proponent of flatback. They think flatback is the future as far as Linux packaging formats, which is fine. But if that is your stance, then just have all the flatpacks in the app center out of the box. It's just, I find this tedious, not tedious for somebody like me, but for a newer to Linux user. And again, if we're actually trying to convert the masses to desktop Linux, they're going to find that was a little tedious. So let me close out the epiphany browser. Now, if I go to installed, let me see if I search for GIMP. Well, I can't search the installed list. Can I just search through the list? Yeah. So GIMP is here, clicked on the wrong thing. Yeah, yep. And we could uninstall it now. And you can see it's non curated, non curated means it's a flatback. So let's close that out. I'm going to hit the super key. The super key just brings up the shortcuts. If I hold the super key, I thought it would bring up the menu. I guess I'm sure there's a hot key to bring up the menu. I just don't remember it off the top of my head, but there is GIMP. Yep, 2.10 and the flatback looks like it's going to open just fine. Yeah, and close that out. I do like the animations, the opening and closing animations for things. So if I opened my task list here, so I created a couple of tasks here. You guys, can you see the animations now?  The animations would be much, much smoother, but I do think they're very slick. I think they're really nice. By the way, the task manager, I added a few lists. For example, my shopping list later today, I need to go pick up beer, food, toilet paper, and then I made a note in order of importance. That is due tomorrow at 2,200 hours. If I wanted to save changes, if I click on that. Yeah, it basically sets that as done my Christmas list. What's on my Christmas list? Razor, socks, underwear, save changes. And that's due on December 25th at 1,200 hours. Close out the task manager and I go back to this app center one more time. Now that we've actually got the flat hub situation straight. Now, if I go into games, for example, where there actually be games here, yeah, we have the paid apps, which are curated apps. But these are asking for payment here. We have free apps. Again, these are the curated apps from elementary. So they only had four games here, but now because we have the flat hub we've got a million more games available for us. For example, if I wanted zero AD, we could install zero AD. I'm not going to install zero AD, though, on camera here because it's a rather large download is a rather big game. I do like what they've done now, though. There's a lot more information when you click on an app. Now you get more information as far as they give you information, whether it's a flat pack or not non curated, tells us the game has some violence in it, this multiplayer online interaction, yada, yada, yada.  We get the licensing information and the homepage for zero AD, et cetera. So that is actually a nice touch. One of my other complaints with the recent versions of elementary is the light mode and the dark mode is sometimes when you set them, you know, many applications just don't respect it. You'll have this weird mix of applications that are using a dark theme and some using a light theme and that's never a good look. I go to applications. You can see there's our default applications. Let me go to desktop here, go to appearance. And let's go ahead and enable the dark mode. And we could also adjust the accent color. Right now the accent color is blueberry, but we could, you know, adjust the accent color to whatever we wanted. I'll just pick one of these other colors here, the green color. And now when I click on the applications menu, you can see we got the green highlighting with the dark theme. Let me go ahead and open up the file manager and the file manager. Let me go ahead and change the view. I like the list view better. I do notice in their release announcements, they mentioned that they did some work on the file manager. Now, one of the things they added were your bookmarks here and your file manager. So bookmarks are basically just bookmarks to specific directories, directories you use all the time. Now, when you hover over a bookmark such as this downloads directory here and I do control click with the mouse, it opens the downloads directory in a new tab. You see, there's the home directory. There's the downloads directory that is really, really neat. Control click on videos opens the videos directory in a new tab. Yeah, I like that. I could see myself using that all the time. As a matter of fact, I think that's such a neat feature. I wish it was available like in the file manager itself, you know, the listing of the directories and files and the actual main pane of the file manager. Now, that's not available because control click actually does something else in file managers.  That's typically what control click does. But yeah, I would love, you know, a quick hotkey that just automatically you hit a hotkey and it opens that in a new tab. Yeah, that really is nice because it's kind of tedious because I'm constantly opening up directories in new tabs. And when you have to right click on it and then open in new tab, you know, it takes a minute, right? That's just quicker if you could just do it all in one motion. One other cool thing they did here. Let me go ahead and do the control click. I'm just going to, once again, pick three directories here. And now when I right click on these, we now have an invert selection, meaning I selected three files, but really I wanted everything, but the three files I selected. So we do an invert select, selects the opposite. That is a really nice feature too, because sometimes, especially in large directories, you know, you want to select everything, but you know, just a couple of files and it's would be much quicker to do an inverse selection rather than your standard selection. Let me go ahead and close the file manager. Actually, before I close it, I'm going to right click on files down here in the doc, keeping doc. It's kind of strange because there's so few applications installed by default on elementary and one of the most important applications is going to be the file manager, but oddly enough, they don't include the file manager as one of the default applications in the doc. I'm going to go ahead and put it down there in the center of the panel. I click on it. Of course, we get our calendar. And of course, you can see December 25th has a dot under it. So this is our task list. If I click on it, you can see there's my Christmas list from the task manager. If I go back into the task manager, you see my Christmas list, my wish list, I guess, for Santa looking at some of the elementary apps web, which is the epiphany web browser. We have a new version of epiphany. This is epiphany 41, which corresponds with, of course, the GNOME applications. They went from version 3.38 now to version 41. And my goodness is this empty tab distracting. Let me find a dark website to go to. Let's go to distro.tube because I know that that has a dark theme. It's a little easier on the eyes. Now, epiphany is interesting because it's not a normal web browser, right? It's not your standard Chromium browser. It's not your standard Firefox or Brave or anything. And epiphany is nobody really uses it other than the elementary guys. And I would venture to say probably most people that install elementary OS are going to install another web browser, probably Firefox or Chromium. So it's kind of weird they ship with epiphany. I'm not going to say it's horrible or that it's unusable, but it's definitely not the greatest web browser out there. Now, one application I do love is the mail client, which is Geary. Geary, I think, is one of the best free and open source email clients out there as far as desktop email has a very clean, modern look. I can't connect to an email account here. Just for privacy reasons, I wouldn't want to show you any of my email accounts. But it has like a three columned layout, very modern looking. It's almost outlook like as far as the layout. You know, you guys have seen the like the three column look of outlook or those of you that use the mail spring email client. Geary has that same kind of look. It's very polished, very clean looking, very easy to configure. And Geary is just a fantastic email client. And that's the task list, which we've already seen a couple of times. The calendar is just instead of the pop-up calendar, this is the actual application. If I click on December 25th, and you know, I don't have the task in this. If I go to manage calendars here on this computer, personal, personal. So I've got personal ticked on. I would assume that would include my task list, but it doesn't look like it does. You know, this really strange that the calendar up here in the panel has that information, but the main calendar application. At least I don't think there's any way it says your upcoming events will be displayed here when you select a date with events. Well, I know the 25th has an event scheduled. Yeah, I'm not sure what's going on with that. Moving on to the music application. This is just your standard audio player. It's very iTunes like, you know, as far as the look. Let's get that iTunes kind of look and feel. I don't have any music here to play. I really couldn't play any music on video anyway, unless it was a Creative Commons track just for YouTube is very picky. As far as any time you play audio that you don't own. The video app, I just clicked on it. You see the wheel is spinning. Why is the video application not launching? And then the wheel quit spinning videos never launched. I'm going to open a terminal. Now, this is again, most new users, you know, the kind of people that would typically install elementary, they're not going to have any idea of what to do here. Like this video application, I don't even know what the proper name of it is. I'm assuming because mostly elementary apps are installed as a flat pack that it's going to be a flat pack. So if I do flat pack list, there is videos. And the program name is io.elementary.videos and it's installed. I try to run that tab complete work. Tab complete worked until I got to the videos part. That's weird. It's almost like it's it's installed, but it's not installed. Right. Yeah. Command not found. Yeah, that is maybe I could do a flat pack install. Maybe it just needs to be reinstalled. And what I'll do is I'm going to select io.elementary.videos. I'm going to do a control shift C to copy control shift V to paste. And now hit enter. And then it remotes with refs similar to io.elementary.videos. So it's going to add app center system or app center user. I would assume app center user. And which one do you want the daily or stable? Yeah, we'll go with stable. Let's install videos. And now let me up arrow to get io.elementary.videos. It's still still not installed. Command not found. Yeah, that's really weird. So the video player, I mean, I could jump through some hoops and gets that thing working. Of course, probably what I would suggest doing is just go get another video player, go get VLC. VLC is probably available as a flat pack. So flat pack, install VLC. And yeah, so what you want to do is number 11 app slash org dot video land dot VLC. And again, you know, if this was your mother's computer, your grandmother's computer, you know, they're not going to jump through these kinds of hoops to get basic applications installed. So I'm really hoping that these last couple of versions of elementary, the problems with, you know, the application availability, especially in the app center, I'm hoping a lot of this stuff gets sorted out soon. VLC wouldn't launch just by typing VLC is because it's a flat pack. So the actual name for it is going to be. Org dot video land dot VLC command not found. Let's go to the applications menu as VLC actually here. Yeah, there it is. There's VLC. Yeah, that worked. And maybe if I launched the actual videos program. No, that's still not working, but VLC at least works. And of course, we've get the little Christmas time logo. That's really nice. How VLC does that every year around the holidays. Some of the other custom applications include the photos application. So it's just your standard photos manager, very similar to the audio players for the look and feel. One of the great things about elementary as far as their suite of applications is their uniformity, right? They all do look and function very similar. Some of the applications that are not in the dock of the code editor. So this is just your plain text editor, and it does not respect the dark theme. And the reason it doesn't is because it actually doesn't use the standard light and dark theme. It actually comes with solarized light or solarized dark. I'm going to choose solarized dark and let's open a file. So let's go and show hidden files. And let's go into home and I'll pick the bash our C file just so we can see something in action with solarize. So it does respect the light and dark theme. It's just solarized light and solarized dark affect the actual code area itself. But the outside column here and the top bar here do actually respect the dark theme. Well, at least when I chose solarized dark, when I choose solarized light, yeah, it goes back to a light theme. Yeah, it's a little weird. But not horrible. I could get used to that. Let me close out the code text editor. We didn't talk about the calculator app when the calculator app actually was in the release announcement because now when you bring up the calculator, your input prompt is actually in the text field. I guess it wasn't by default before. So now when you actually launch the calculator, you can actually begin typing now and actually make calculations right away were before it wasn't focused on that text field by default. Let me right click on the desktop. Let's go ahead and change the wallpapers. The wallpaper pack is the same wallpaper pack from the previous version. I really like the default dark wallpaper. But if you wanted something else, actually really like this mountain scene as well. And so nice wintry scene. There's a couple of time appropriate wallpapers there. Yeah, that one's nice, especially against a dark theme, you know, your dark windows would look great against that, that light wallpaper in the top panel, the translucent bar here. One neat thing is your sys tray. You have the volume control, which now respects when you do a scroll wheel, because I guess that was not the case before. And also the music application also respects the scroll wheel. So some some new stuff there. And then we have our notifications here is letting us know there is an update available for us. One last thing I want to do, let me go ahead and open a terminal and let's dive a little deeper under the hood just very briefly. Let's do a U name dash R for the kernel version. We're on five dot 11. If I did an apt list space dash, dash installed, let's see how many Debian packages are actually installed. So not the flat packs. So that lists out everything line by line. Let's do apt list dash, dash installed. And then let's pipe that into WC dash L. So we have one thousand five hundred and fifty four div packages installed. So those were packages installed through the apt package manager. Of course, the flat pack list is available for you with flat pack space list. And if you wanted to count on those once again, pipe that through WC, which is the word count program space dash L for the line count, 19 flat packs are installed. If I run H top, let's see what we're doing with system resources here, a very low CPU usage, which is what you would expect. I'm not doing anything really right now. As far as RAM usage, we're using about one point two gigabytes of RAM of the six gigabytes of RAM I gave this VM. Now that is probably a little high because we've opened a lot of programs here in the last couple of minutes, but that's kind of standard as far as one gigabyte of RAM is kind of the norm for some of the heavier desktop environments out there. So things like, you know, GNOME and Cinnamon and Budgie. And in this case, the Pantheon desktop, it's not unusual for them to to be about a one gig of RAM usage on a cold boot. So that was just a very cursory first look at elementary OS six point one codenamed Yolnir. And I will say that it's definitely improved here in the last four months. You know, from the previous version, I will say the theming looks a lot better, the dark theming, it looks like most of the applications respected it with the exception of maybe the text editor code, which is a little weird the way it switches from a light GTK theme to a dark GTK theme, depending on whether you choose solarized light or solarized dark for the actual code syntax highlighting. That's again, that's a minor gripe, but I will say the app center, I like the fact that it now has some apps in it. I still think that you're asking new users way too much if they have to go to FlatHub and install one flat pack to have FlatHub actually be a part of the app center. FlatHub should just be built into the app center. I I don't know why they haven't done that yet. It has been two releases now that we've had this problem with that app center. And if if you don't have apps in your app center, you know, new users are not going to know that they can go and install stuff with the app package manager at the command line or go to FlatHub and grab some flat packs or, you know, go grab some app images or some snaps or build it from source, right? You know, power users know that. I know I can get anything I want installed on elementary with a little effort. A new user, all they're going to know is this is the software center. There's nothing in it, right? And then they're going to be put off immediately, not just put off from elementary. They may just be put off from Linux in general. If this is their first experience. So the elementary guys, again, I think it's a great release. I just they got to get that app center straight. Now, before I go, I want to thank a few special people. I want to thank the producers of this episode. Devon Gabe James, Matt, Michael, Mitchell, Paul, Scott, Wes, Akami, Alan, Lance, Ninja, Chuck, Commander, angry, Kurt, Diokai, David, Dylan, Gregory, Heiko, Kaska, Lee, Max, and Mike, Nitrix, Erion, Alexander, Bees, Arjun, Fodor, Polytech, Red Profit, Steven and Willie. These guys, they're my high-steer patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick first look at elementary 6.1 wouldn't have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen, all these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm just sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and you want to see more great videos on free and open source software, support DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys, peace and Merry Christmas.


So it's a great pleasure to be here. Thanks a lot for coming and looking forward to the discussion. But before I would like to sketch the German Council's proposal on how to enhance stability in your area. So some years ago we've developed a proposal that was called Mastery 2.0 when I was going to talk about that in a couple of minutes. As you know, Europe at the moment is in a very fragile situation. So we have plans coming from many sides. We have the slowdown of the world economy. Monetary policy becomes increasingly ineffective with the danger of Brexit. And we also have a shift of political parties. So we are moving more towards parties with opposing reforms and consolidation. There is a political polarization in many countries. And of course we have the refugee crisis which is one of the big challenges. So we have to ask how should we move forward in Europe? Do we need more integration or do we need a strengthening of the existing framework? And so we believe that any proposal that you can have should respect the principle of the unity of liability and control. So those who take the decisions should also take the responsibility of the costs. And if you agree to that then there are basically only two fundamental options. So either you transfer fiscal and economic sovereignty to the European level and then I was willing to assume joint liability. And this of course would mean that there would be a central decision making of authority at the European level which would be able to enforce tax increases, spending cuts and also structural reforms. Or alternatively you leave economic and fiscal sovereignty at the national level but then you cannot have joint liability for government debt. So this is the no bailout clause as everybody did in the last week's treaty. And so we've been discussing this issue a lot and we came to the conclusion that currently it's very unlikely that there's going to be a transfer of fiscal and economic sovereignty to the European level because many European countries are actually unwilling to give up their budgetary autonomy. And if that is the case then we'll start with the second option. And that then means that we have to make sure that the no bailout clause is actually credible. And there are two ways to achieve that. You can achieve it ex ante by having fiscal rules such as disability growth pact which implies that the euro area countries never get in a situation where they would have to be bailed out. Or if it happens you would need to allow for a sovereign default. Exposed. The reality of course looks a bit different so we know that fiscal rules were not enforced and are still not being enforced. In the crisis sovereign default was largely avoided and of course the reason was that there was to be a contagion. And the sovereign exposures are still considered as risk-free in regulation which of course is slightly inconsistent with the idea of the no bailout clause. So if we look at the evolution of the spreads of government bonds so we can see that with the introduction of the euro the spreads actually converged more or less to zero which meant that any euro area country could borrow at more or less the same rate. Which given that fundamentals were still quite different already seems to suggest that at that time the no bailout clause was not very credible. And the fear is that if you have such a situation that there is no market discipline which means that there are reduced incentives for consolidation and structural reform. Then of course we had the euro area crisis which can be seen as something like a wake up call so investors suddenly discovered that not all euro area countries are the same. And then we even got into this kind of self-fulfilling dynamics and I think it's fair to say that we can be happy that the ECB at that point was able to calm down the situation by announcing OMT. Of course we have a lot of legacies from the crisis. So we've seen this large increase in public debt which was partly due to the bank rescues and Ireland of course is a very good example of a country that had relatively low debt levels before the crisis and now is relatively high debt levels. In addition what we see is that consolidation has actually come to a halt in the euro area in the recent years and we also see that there is an increasing interlinkage between sovereigns and banks in quite a few countries banks took the cheap liquidity from the European central banks and invested the money in domestic sovereign bonds which means that one of the goals of all these reforms was to mitigate the links between sovereigns and banks. Here there is an instance where this actually was not achieved because banks are now holding many more sovereign bonds in the balance sheet than they did before the crisis. So the German Council's proposal that was developed a couple of years ago has three pillars. So the first is fiscal policy, the second is the crisis mechanism and the third is the financial framework or the regulatory framework and as you can see the fiscal policy is still a national responsibility whereas the financial framework is a European responsibility and many of these things actually have been implemented similar to what we've visited. So one important component of the fiscal policy pillar is the low bailout or the strength market discipline and then of course there are all these fiscal rules the stability growth pact, the fiscal compact combined with the national debt breaks. As to the crisis mechanism, we of course now have the ESM, European Stability Mechanism and in the financial framework we now have the European Banking Union and I think it's important to say that all these are very important steps forward in order to stabilize the euro area. However, there are two components in our view which are still missing. One refers to the crisis mechanism, the second refers to financial regulation. Regarding the crisis mechanism, we still lack an insurance mechanism for sovereigns and I'm going to talk a bit about that and regarding banking regulation one of the big shortcomings is as I mentioned already that sovereign exporters are still privileged in financial regulation. So let me talk about the two things in terms. So what is the goal of a sovereign insolvency regime? The goal is to allow for an orderly restructuring of sovereign debt with loss sharing by private creditors but at the same time without destabilizing the entire euro area. So that's the clear idea. So it's very similar in a sense to the bail-in mechanism that we also have for banks. So the idea is that you would like to reestablish market discipline but you would like to avoid things that happen in Greece where you basically had to do all this in an ad hoc fashion which certainly was not very optional and introduced a lot of uncertainty. Importantly, the restructuring of debt should always be combined with the macroeconomic restructuring program. So the idea would be that if a country asks for an ESM program there should also be immediately an analysis of the debt sustainability and depending on the outcome of that analysis there would be an automatic lengthening of maturities and if debt proves not to be sustainable potentially a nominal debt reduction. However, a debt restructuring of course is difficult if banks are holding a lot of sovereign debt on their balance sheets because then there's a problem that the debt restructuring would immediately also threaten the solvency of the banking sector and therefore maybe then the restructuring would again never happen and therefore we believe that if we represent for the implementation of a sovereign and solvency regime it's actually that we've also removed the privileges for sovereign exposures in banking regulation. So the goal would be to mitigate the snacks between the sovereigns and the banks and in particular it would mean that you would want to reduce the concentration risks in the banks' balance sheet you would want to raise banks' absorption capacity and you would want to reduce price distortions. As you know there are a couple of privileges in current regulation so the large exposure limits don't apply to the sovereign exposures there are no capital requirements according to risk and there's also a privileged treatment in the new liquidity regulation. So if you look at the concentration risk in bank balance sheet and this is data of the last EBA stress test so Ireland is the second right that's very small so actually Ireland doesn't have a currency where the huge problem there Belgium has an exposure of more than 300% of the bank's equity to sovereign counterparties. And what you can also see is that there's a strong homebites and also these investments in sovereign bonds is a domestic sovereign bond this is especially true for the southern periphery countries in Germany. If you look at the right hand side this shows you what this actually implies in terms of risk and of course it makes a difference whether you have a high concentration in German government bonds or let's say in Portuguese government bonds that makes of course a difference and the risks coming from that could be very different. So our proposal regarding the removal of privileges of sovereign expositors has two components. The first is a risk adjusted large exposure limit where the limit would depend on the country's creditworthiness and the second is risk rated capital requirements where we would rely on the basic risk rates for sovereigns and this table here shows you the numbers so the first column is actually the base of risk rates for sovereigns so these risk rates exist they're not just not being applied at the moment. You can see if you compare them with the third column you can see these risk rates are much lower than for corporations and you also see that for quite a few countries in the euro area actually the base of risk rate would still be zero and in Ireland it would be 20% so these would be the risk rates and the next column shows the large exposure limit so this would mean that any bank in the euro area could hold only 25% of their equity in Greek bonds but they would be allowed to hold 100% of their equity in addition to everything else they're holding in let's say German government bonds there would be a higher limit for sovereign bonds from a country with a higher rate. What would this imply? Of course it would be large portfolio allocations and this would especially apply to Germany, Spain and Italy of course because these are very big countries all this would amount to 578 billion euros but this is the data from the stress test so this only includes the significant banks we should keep that in mind does not include the non-significant banks because we don't have any data for them regarding the additional capital requirements the number is actually pretty small so the additional capital requirements amount to only 35 billion euros which is 3% of own funds we see there's a lot of heterogeneity across countries so this would mostly affect Italy and Spain in relative terms so compared to old funds also Portugal but still the number is relatively small and this also means that the additional loss absorption capacity that you get by having this report is relatively small so the really important measure is the large exposure limit this matters a lot the capital requirements are of secondary importance it's important when you implement something like this that you need provisions against prosyclicality we know that many regulations that we had before the crisis proved to be strongly prosyclical and the proposal that we have here is that one should use average values for the calculation of the large exposure limits and the old funds in order to reduce this prosyclicality and also of course you would need a long transition phase in order to smoothen the transition to the new regime let me say a few words about common deposit insurance so in the beautiful German council there are two important arguments why now may not be the time to introduce common deposit insurance so first of all there are still these very close links between the sovereigns and the banks which means that national policies may actually shift risks from the national to the European level and second we have this high legacy debt in the banking sector and especially this large amount of non-performing loans so in a sense before we can actually think about introducing common deposit insurance we need to take additional measures and two of them would be that we should remove the privileges for the sovereign exporters and the second is that we would have to solve the legacy debt problem in the banking sector so let me say a few words also about the low interest rate environment which of course is one of the topics of the week given that we're going to hear some news on Thursday about what's going on in monetary policy so this graph shows you the euro area yield curves and what we see is that what happened over the past years the first manner that were taken they mostly reduced the short run yield but the more recent measures also reduced the long term yield which means that now the margin between long term rates and short term rates has been compressed quite substantially and that of course puts pressure on base earnings who are earning money from doing maturity transformation and it seems that German banks are going to be hit quite substantially by this over the coming years so at the moment we don't see so much yet because the German bank could be grant loans at fixed rates so it takes some time until you really see it in the balance sheet but there's a recent study by the German supervisor in Deutsche Bundesbank who shows that the profits of the smaller German banks are going to fall by between 25 and 75% in the upcoming 5 years which is quite substantial in addition, German life insurance will be hit very hard by the low interest rate environment you probably know that in Germany it's very common to have these long term guarantee products and at the moment the average guarantee rates on the France and Belgium are around 3% and you may imagine that it's not easy to earn that in the market and so there will be substantial problems also in the German life insurance sector so there's a fear that the drop in profit margins is going to set incentives for excessive risk or search for money and in a sense this is exactly what is intended by monetary policy the problem of course is that even if you take higher risk at the moment the return that you get is relatively small so let's say you do a lot of maturity transformation with relatively flat yield curve then you take high interest rate risk but the return you get is actually very small and the same if you go into high yield bonds or whatever a second issue is that there may be a surprise bounce so over the past years we've seen sharp increases in stock prices in many countries there's also been a correction recently but what we've shown in our recent report is that this increase in stock prices over the past years can largely be explained by the low interest rates so in that sense by a fundamental factor but at the same time what we see is and especially when interest rates are very low the sensitivity of stock prices to changes in interest rates is very very high and of course monetary policy itself introduces high volatility so there's a picture of the 3rd of December 2015 so this is what happens when at the December meeting of the Government Council of the ECB there could also be asset price bubbles in housing of course which is an issue also in Ireland we see that the evolution of house price has been very heterogeneous across the euro area that we certainly see price pressure in certain regions and in certain segments and at the same time the credit expansion remains moderate where you could say that maybe the problem is not as severe we know very little about commercial real estate the data that we have is on residential real estate and the ECB for example argues that pressures are building up in the commercial real estate market but it's still unclear how severe the pledge really is so if you ask me are we is there a threat of a new financial crisis and I would say that if we have this long phase of low interest rates it certainly threatens the business models of banks, insurance companies and so on and there certainly at some point will be the market asset of some institutions but maybe the scenario of a financial crisis would rather be one where the interest rates go up again so imagine, I mean nobody can imagine that at the moment but in a couple of years maybe the interest rates are going to go up again maybe they go up faster than expected and then many financial institutions actually will be in deep trouble and remember that historically most banking crisis took place in an environment rising interest rates and not of low interest rates and so I think that this would actually be the most threatening scenario having a sharp interest rate increase after a long period of low rates so one of the challenges for regulation what we as soon as need is the more comprehensive capital integration of the interest rate risk in pillar one of the Basel Accord we need the limitation of lending by credit or credit of specific macro financial instruments and of course I have described advance in that respect in Germany such instruments at the moment don't even exist there is always danger of business being shifted to the less regulated sector to the shadow banking sector and I personally skeptical that we will ever be able to fully regulate this and therefore I do not think that financial stability in the end can be guaranteed by macro potential supervision alone and at the moment the ECB argues that financial stability should not be tackled by monetary policy but only by macro potential supervision however we also see that this can lead to inconsistency if at the one hand the monetary policy tries to increase risk taking if the economy on the other hand then macro potential policy is supposed to contain that risk take and therefore I think that the ECB cannot ignore the consequences of its behavior on financial stability and if it were taking these risks for financial stability into account I think it would be clear that monetary policy should not be loosened any further so if you come to the conclusion as I said at the beginning Europe is in a very fragile situation and this makes it all the more important to strengthen the architecture of the euro area I believe at the moment it's unwise to push for further integration that would be very difficult but rather we should try to strengthen the existing structures in order to prevent a break up in the next crisis and I think a lot has been done and we should continue on the path that we've taken after the crisis which would mean that we should continue fiscal consolidation and improve the enforcement of fiscal rules we should further improve the crisis mechanism especially by introducing an insolvency mechanism for sovereigns we should further strengthen the banking union especially by removing the privileges for sovereign exposures but of course all this will be difficult if we don't return to economic growth but the return of economic growth will largely depend on the implementation of structural reforms which would be able to increase investor and consumer confidence and we should ask too much from monetary policy in that respect so thank you very much for your attention


Hello, and welcome back to the videos in this lesson. We're now going to move into bootstrapping and how we can use bootstrapping to develop more samples that we can then use to develop confidence intervals because in the previous lecture, we had four samples. And while we can use that to develop confidence intervals, we really want a lot more data in order to really ensure that our results are the most statistically sound that they can be. And that's where bootstrapping comes in. But before we get into bootstrapping, I wanted to briefly introduce for loops, because that's how we actually conduct the bootstrapping is through leveraging for loops. So this video will just cover how we implement for loops in Python. So we are back in Google Colab. We've got our libraries here that we're going to use throughout the bootstrapping lectures. But in this case, we're simply going to talk about for loops. And so there are a few keywords that we need to be aware of when working with for loops. The word for starts the loop. The word in tells Python how many iterations to complete. And the colon tells Python that everything that comes after this is included in the loop. So to give a very simple example, we can say for I in range 0 to 10 colon. And so everything after this will be executed in the loop. The I here is a placeholder that is just counting up the iterations for us. So it's saying I is what is counting up from zero to nine. And again, remember that Python does that weird thing where it excludes the last number so we're really doing zero to 10 minus one. The key thing is to make sure that whatever you list in this opening statement of the loop is also considered in the body of the loop. So here we want to print I. So if we were to print J, it wouldn't work. You can see that we've got this red line underneath telling us that there is no variable J. And that's because we messed up our counter. We need to define I, which is defined up here. We can also do operations. So we can print I equal to two or I plus print I print I plus two. And then we can keep going. And as long as we maintain the same indent level will execute everything. When we're done with the loop, we can backspace. I like to write a comment to let me know that I'm done with the loop. And then we can continue on with whatever we were doing. And so if we run this, we can see that it's printing I zero and it's printing I plus two, two, but then it goes back and now it prints I now I is equal to one. I plus two. Now I is equal to two print and so forth until it ends and says this is the end of the loop. And so within these loops, once we get into bootstrapping will do a lot more intensive loops, but the basic structure will always remain the same. The next style of loop that I wanted to demonstrate was how we can nest loops. So this is where we add for loop inside of a for loop. It starts off with the same style will say zero before this time, which is actually three. And we'll say that we want to print. And then print I so here we're mixing text and a value. And then for each iteration of I, we want to also complete a series of values for J. We'll say zero to three. And then we can see that when I enter down. I'm another indent here so this is our first loop. And now this is our second loop. So we can print J equals. So we are printing with J is equal to J. In order to make sure that our loops are organized, we can go back one space and add a comment. And now if we wanted to do anything outside of the inner loop but still in the outer loop. We can add stuff there so we can say this is the end of the inner loop. And then if we backspace again comment and we can also print. So if we run this. We can see that it is it started where I equals zero, and then it gives J one through two, it iterates through all of J during the first iteration of I, and then it does our print. Increases I by one and re iterates through all of J. And so forth until we reach the end. And so the purpose of these nested loops is when you have multiple things that you're iterating over and you need to do them sort of in sequence. So we use primarily this single version of the loop throughout the bootstrapping lectures but just know that you can also do a lot of what we're doing with nested loops as well.


Hi everyone, Joe for Jaspy's case breaks.com with a fun one here 2023 tops Star Wars signature series 20 bucks random character break number two I mean if you if you watch the stream for any length of time, you know how much of a Star Wars fan I am so hopefully we'll pull some nice stuff out of here. It's a 33 spot break Everyone gets four characters from this massive checklist Right here. I think I know like 95% of these these characters But we'll see we'll see what I can give you during this break one spot. We'll get any and all dual autographs or Triple autographs. Yeah, all dual triple multi-autographs go to this spot right there Any that should be it should be any and all multi autographs. I'll train that for the next break Also, we're giving away three spots. So we're only so we only sold 30 spots outright And we're gonna randomize those names and top three will get extra spots A little buy one get one opportunity top three after ten four and a six ten times one two three four five six seven eight nine and ten All right, so top three congrats to Aaron Dale and Matthew Do All right, we'll put little rooftops next your name so you know, they're from those are your winner spots now Let's take all of your names here and let's multiply it by four. So there's one already. There's two There's three and There's four so total of 132 on each list now Let's gather all your names Put them into one list and let's gather all the characters And put them in the other list And then we'll roll it and randomize it and we'll put the results in that first tab Let's roll and randomize it two and a one three times for names and characters one two and three All right, so after three we got Stephen Kay down to Jared and Then two and a one three times for the characters one two and three After three we got Fennec Shan the assassin down to Finn. Come on Lakers All right, and Not gonna I gotta preserve my voice here. I can't read off all these names here, but I'm gonna show you the list right here as is and Then we'll alphabetize by your first names So you'll you can see all of your characters grouped together with you with your first names. Oh Nice Ken with the any and all multi-auto spot and there's the rest right there And we will pause the video when I alphabetize by your first name So if you want to keep track of your characters again, we can definitely definitely do that. All right Sorting by your first name. So Aaron, there's your group right there Adam Brandon Dale Daniel David Ed Eddie James Jared Jim Way Ken Kevin Matthew Robert Roman Russell Ryan and last but not least Stephen country There you go. We're gonna gonna pause the video when we come back. We're gonna see if there's any we can trade characters We're gonna see if there's any trades and and then we'll have the break stick around BRB All right. Welcome back everybody. No deals were done so that list remains the same. We've got a case right here Star Wars six series Thanks for patience everybody had to finish off that Lakers game that should not have gone to over time. I blame LeBron Winds of wind. I'll take it All right one in case autograph for box all Star Wars Love the Star Wars being on the West Coast Mandalorian Mandalorian episodes at midnight Pretty nice. We're gonna watch that one. I get home tonight All right. All right first one looks like a one-of-one printing plate And it's it's Tim Rose. That's our trap Tim Rose Tim Rose is not on the list, but he's Admiral Ackbar Yeah, he was he was Admiral Ackbar.  It's a trap Dale with Admiral Ackbar. Nice and All aboard the big hit express All right next one well with how close the standings are Tony every wind every wind has placement has a placement meaning We got Evan appeal Evan peel goes to Matthew Slade Next up is I don't know this Four alum. I'm not familiar with this character. I don't know them all Matthew Slade but the droids I think I feel like most of the characters I know but Sometimes those droids are a little bit harder too. He's originally a protocol droid But logic glitches allowed him to escape his crime become a bounty hunter. That's right He was part of that bounty hunter scene with Boba Fett. What was the lion see it's even cave bounty hunters All right. Next up is Is Pamesh narrow good It's crystal Clark as Pamesh. What's she in I need a I need to bring up wookiepedia Well, she was in oh, this this is the the latest stuff right Force Awakens era. Okay. Yeah I think so resistance dispatch officer.  Yeah, not numbered and we've got Stefan Venick Joseph at Alton as Venick. I think he was in maybe the and or TV series No, he was in rises skywalk pilot for the resistance. Oh, what is this? Got a different back here We've got we've got the bartender Nice Allen graph as just bartender classic His Allen is Allen graph still with us Allen graph is still with us 73 year olds. He was in Friday night lights too and any given sunday. I think he was the bartender in book of Boba Fett Got another one here. We've got this one's numbered We've got Rala keely to Clint Howard as Rala keely nine out of 50 Rala keely Yeah, he ran the droid fighting pits On the lodge in vandorb and uh, if you're wondering If um This is the actor. Uh, this is out of 50 Clint Howard if you're thinking is that The Clint Howard In uh in solo Yeah, that's that Clint Howard's Ron Howard's, uh, Ron Howard's, uh brother Bryce Dallas Howard's uncle Here's the night wind is assassin 19 out of 25 Oh, by the way, Rala keely First off bartender goes to adam I don't think I called that out Rala keely is for roman And ryan has the night wind assassin. All right. We got we got a droid To b1. Do you know this series? I have not I need to catch up on That's the um That star wars resistance the animated series Aaron billings that gets out and that's that that's where you um, they had a studio do more like Sort of japanese anime anime cartoon style style animation Gotta check that out Who's the what's the otani of star wars? I don't know probably a harrison fort autograph han solo Carrie fischer any of those principles We've got Garfa la qua That's very low in That's dale. We're halfway through the star wars case if we could see You know, it'd be a good break if we see at least one of those old school Characters or maybe it's the stars from some of the newer movies I don't think so mike. I think we got a got a little ways to go We've got this is a fun character rio rio durent No relation to kevin. Who has rio? Dale has rio durant rio durant was he voiced by He was in the solo movie. I think he's voiced by john favaro Yeah, he's voiced by john favaro, but performed by by katie cartwheel All right, so rio durant going to dale with the extra spot that he won Next up is nice. Amy sideris as peli mato 11 out of 50. We know her in the mandalorian series She's she's quite a character um I didn't realize her name was I just call her amy sideris whenever I see her Character's name is amy to me russell with the peli mato amy sideris All right. Next one is carcin tava It's also in the mandalorian Oh, yeah, it says right there Carson tava goes to jim way Are we doing what are we doing here? Are we doing basketball? Uh We're doing basketball here basketball star wars We got rick ollie from the fan of menace Ralph brown. It's rick ollie I don't realize they had the The titles of the show up there. I'm glad they're doing that this year ryan gamsby with that one luka skywalker. Do they do star wars nights at basketball? I know they do in baseball Dodgers have a star wars night basketball must have a star one luka skywalker cp3 p.o The admiral akbar. I like that surge to baka. I like I like what I'm seeing there. We've got corn trawler From the mandalorian corn trawler goes to kevin Is which character called toby? Sorry micah miss that all right next is Next is lovey By lily coal Ghost of dale She was in the last jedi. I guess lily coal is a uk model all right Kobe won konobi good Oliver you can you can run a star wars night get some uh bobble heads with those with those characters out there All right, we have all over four davies as governor cio bibel from the fan of menace He was uh on that boo I want to say I don't know. Maybe he's got to work on the whole autograph thing Obi-Wan toppen nice. There you go Good one dave And then we got a bead these were the uh the broadcasters In the fan of menace broadcasting the uh the pot race Oh, sorry, uh the governor Goes to daniel and bead Goes to ken You know what they might call them toby mic tower To v one. All right. No, no stadium club chrome pre-orders Not yet Oh, this is nice. This is taylor gray as Ezra bridger If you have not seen star wars rebels uh I would recommend watching that a it's a good animated series b I think the more the live action series, especially the asoka series I think it's going to start leaning into more of that more of the uh that ezra Storyline or that rebel storyline In fact, if you saw last week's episode of the mandalorian You saw zeb in that episode. All right, so ezra bridger Goes to dale Great show. I've done a couple rewatches of that. I'll probably do another rewatch going into Going into uh, the asoka series. All right final one Hey, no worries dave and we've got caroline blockestan as mon mothma from return of the jedi Where she uh, she let us know that many bothans died to bring us this information mon mothma a rebel Goes to erin billingsley with mon mothma classic classic character there There you go gang. That's a fun break. I'm joe for jaspercasebriggs.com We got another case in the store and hopefully you can break another one with me And uh, this break brought to you by disney plus watch the mandalorian till we can talk about it tomorrow I'm joe for jaspercasebriggs.com. I'll see you next time for the next star wars break. Bye. Bye