answered, send an e-mail to cnnhelpdesk@cnn.com. hello, everyone. let s start this hour with our reporter roulette. trying to stop gunfire on new year s eve. also we ll get a look at your weather for tomorrow night. and some good economic news. let s start with iran. flexing its military muscle. it s conducting naval exercises in the persian gulf. apparently to show the west what it s capable of if the west imposes new sanctions on iran s oil exports. let s bring in barbara starr, pentagon correspondent. she joins us now. barbara, you ve been following developments. what can you tell us about these exercises? isha, let s start with a photo, a picture that the iranians say they took of a u.s. aircraft carriers in north arabian sea. the only u.s. aircraft carrier out there is the uss john stennis. this film apparently taken from iranian aircraft. part of those naval exercises going on right now in the north arabian sea. it could be a tense weekend out in that region off i
four hours or so. morgan stanley come out with a global note cutting its global growth forecast and saying the u.s., the world is dangerously close to recession quite frankly and naming a couple of different reasons why they think that global growth will not be as strong as they thought. among them, europe s debt problems and also mentioning what they call policy mistakes in the u.s. and also the drama about the debt ceiling. they say, overall, consumer confidence, business confidence, almost this negative feedback loop we are on the verge of people being so worried and not able to break out of that. lowering their global growth forecasts and enough to shake a shaky market which bank stocks in europe are down and real concerns about the debt crisis in europe. still even after france s aaa rating was reaffirmed. an icky situation here this morning. the dax and ftse is down and cac is down also. bracing for a big sell-off this morning. saw new data from the united states. joble
points. that continues to fluctuate. coming up in a couple of minutes. i ll speak live with the man who ran the government s bank bailout a couple of years ago. by the way, he agrees with the downgrading of the u.s. credit rating. don t miss that conversation with him here. i do want to begin with this. the commander in chief of the u.s. armed forces is at dover air force base in delaware right now. president obama is attending the dignified transfer, right there, that s what the military calls the movement of war fatalities from the place they died back to american soil. those who arrive today are the 30 u.s. and eight afghan troops who died early saturday in the worst single-day loss for american forces in ten years of fighting in afghanistan. i want to talk about what is happening there today at dover air force base. what we re seeing and also what we re not seeing. barbara starr is live at the pentagon for us. barbara, i know it is a very solemn day for the president, f
a meaningful handle on the deficits and the debt. now comes of course the federal reserve. we have ben bernanke here, which has used every tool in its box to keep credit flowing and interest rates low in the wake of the great recession. at 2:15 eastern, a little over an hour from now, the fed will tell us what if anything it plans to do in the wake of the downgrade, the debt snafu, the european debt snafu and the global stock freak-outs. in the meantime, i want to bring in richard quest, just outside the new york stock exchange, and christine romans in our new york studios. i would like to start with you. we just mentioned that the fed is going to speak here or at least issue a statement at about 2:15 today. what if anything can the fed do to help the situation that we re in right now? that s what we all want to know. the fed has kept interest rates at basically 0% since december 2008. the fed twice has embarked on big huge stimulus measures, buying back bonds, buying asset
bank, their equivalent of ben bernanke gave a speech had morning and they said their economic growth is slowing, and traders took it as a note to say things are more serious than we thought. you combine that with the fact that the japanese central bank intervened to prop the yen up, and there s a fear that everybody is doing badly and nobody is there to pick up the slack. basically is that what is happening. money is coming out of the stocks. when you see that happening, it comes out of commodities or gold. people are taking their money out of the stock market and gold, and oil, and this is the jitters of people taking their money out and putting it in their mattresses. and let s bring in the assistant editor of a financial magazine. a drop in two weeks, and why is the fear taking hold right now? i think a lot of it today is what ali said, the turmoil in europe that is suddenly worse than we thought. there was a feeling the ecb was going to rescue things and that went up