welcome back. the panel is here. democratic pollster cornell belcher, peggy noonan, nbc news national political reporter carol lee and republican strategist al cardenas. welcome, all. like everything in the trump era, carol lee, there s always a government uncertainty and then scandal uncertainty. i want to start with this fbi story because on one hand it seems gigantic and on the other hand i found it interesting, senator ted cruz did not exactly dismiss the story. i do think it has landed with a level of concern in washington. yeah, it was interesting he said, you know, i don t know the details. we ll need to learn a little bit more about this. i m going to look into it. i think what we ve seen, and we saw this a little bit with the michael cohen developments several weeks ago, that the republicans are getting a little bit more nervous. the big questions coming out of this new york times report is whether this counterintelligence investigation involving the president, what the
coffee shop down the street, that s not competition for me. believe it or not, if someone can t find something here, i tell them to go to the jewelry store down the block. i want it to stay in town. why shouldn t they be able to find it in another shop in town? 2013 was a tumultuous year for many small business owners. they had to deal with government uncertainty confusion over the new health care law. as we look forward, there does seem to be hope. the national federation of independent business optimism index was up in november 9/10 of a point. they provided a seasonal adjusted increase in november. could this be a trend for 2014? we have the founder and ceo of the advocacy group, the small business majority. daniel pink was an aide to rice and a proclaimed business thinker and best selling author. his latest is to sell is human.
i ll have a conversation later with alan greenspan about this, but one of the things he s been saying is is this government uncertainty has made business act differently. now, republicans want to say, oh, it s all health care. democrats want to say it s but the fact of the matter is this collective dysfunction has had an impact on the economy simply by being dysfunctional. forget any policy they ve done. no question. we ve still got the corporations, for example, sitting on a mountain of cash that they have been reluctant to spend. because they don t know how to forecast. they ll pay higher rates or do whatever it is. they just want to know what it is. i think there s another element of this, too, though. imagine in a private business if you were trying to plan for the next month or year or five years you have no idea what your budget would be, no idea if you would have a budget, that s what government managers have had to deal with. and for all of the areas that affect the eco
attorney general in concert with this larger federal committee suing bear stearns through jpmorgan for mortgage back securities fraud. how do you sit and get together on housing with the government when so many state attorneys general and the federal government are so intent on suing you? i ll tell you, that is one very significant issue that we wish would have been corrected with dodd/frank and some of these other things, the notion that there are now 50 states in the mix, so you have a situation, for example, the big banks are regulated by the federal government, but the non-bank mortgage companies are actually regulated by 50 states and the federal government with a patchwork of regulations and a lot of uncertainty. by the way, all that government uncertainty right now, while rates are very low, they actually could be lower. lower? they could be lower. rates are .25% higher over treasuries than they ve ever been really because of fear and