This is 45 minutes. Gentlemen, please welcome politicos chief economic correspondent, ben white. [applause] i am the chief economic reporter for politico. Author of the Morning Money column. On my note, it says it is a must read for anyone who cares about wall street. I do not know if it is a must read, but we hope you read. We are honored to have the director of the Consumer Financial protection bureau. A few housekeeping notes. If you have cell phones, we would be happy to have you tweet the event. Just turn them on vibrate. I have a tab to get twitter questions if you have those for me. I would like to thank the foundation for their partnership. We are appreciative of their efforts. Here to say a few words is michael peterson, the president and chief operating officer. [applause] good morning. Welcome today. The nonpartisan mission is to increase awareness and accelerate action on americas longterm fiscal challenges. We just made it through a government shutdown. We just have a coup
On facebook, we asked what issue do you want president obama and congress to address this year . President upon is expected to announce plans for federal contractors to pay employees at least 10. 10 an hour. House speaker john potter was asked about the issue when he spoke with reporters today. Heres a look. What do you think about these actions by congress . Do you have any support . The president has the authority to raise the minimum wage for the federal contracts. That understands the game. This affects not one current contract. It only affects future contracts with the federal government. I think the the question is how many people of this executive action actually help . I suspect the answer is somewhere close to zero. When it comes to the federal minimum wage, when you raise the cost of something, you get less of it. We know from increases in minimum wage in the past that hundreds of thousands of lowincome americans have lost their jobs. And so, the very people the president pur
Reviews were done in an adversarial basis and therefore had to be changed somewhat. If thats true you dont agree with it, why did you agree to stop sending enforcement lawyers . There was a certain message from that practice that was not the message that was intended. Weve been working hard to integrate our supervision and our enforcement elements of the bureau. Were a little different animal certainly a different animal from my experience. I had Enforcement Authority but i didnt have any sort of Examination Authority or supervisery authority. Its something i had to learn about when i came to the bureau. Most of our enforcement attorneys are in the same boat. They need to understand how the examination function works and how it is getting to a similar result. They have to understand how enforcement works when its an appropriate tool and when its not. In attempting to integrate this is one of the early judgment wes made two years early on. It seemed to me that this cost were outweighing
And then if you stop paying attention to the crawl, you to back to that guy for a minute, you go back to the crawl and you catch the end of something. Madonnas left foot. What about madonnas left foot, what happened . Youre waiting for it to come back around again. It goes to commercial. Are you sad, do you get stressed . [audience applause]. Kristin chenoweth heres one of my favorites, an adorable clip of ellen as dory the lovable little fish in the immortal finding nemo. [ellens voice as dory]. Dory now, lets ask somebody for directions. Marlin oh, fine, who do you want to ask the spec . Theres nobody here dory well there has to be someone its the ocean silly, were not the only two in here. Lets see. Okay, no one there. Ah, nope. Nada. Ha, theres somebody, hey excuse. Marlin dory, dory ok, now its my turn. Im thinking of something dark and mysterious. Its a fish we dont know and if we ask it directions it could ingest us and spit out our bones dory what is it with men and asking for
This is one area that we have done really well in. For the last seven years i have hosted an Energy Summit in las vegas. Governments and president and all kinds of cabinet officers there that is a bipartisan event. One of the things that we do better is recognize some of the smartest and most creative inventors in the world to show their latest discoveries. We learned about an American Company that is developing hightech batteries that has great potential. We want to store solar powered. And it looks like the cost of about a small plane. At the california border just about 2 miles from las vegas, there is a myriad of things going on out there. They have hundreds of thousands of solar panels and three very tall towers that look like skyscrapers. And it is so terrific. Once the sun goes down, it is not producing anymore, but this will no longer be the case because of the system in place. During debate heats up and at night it still produces energy after the sun goes down. And that is 90