it s actually quite stunning. that s why this is an important discussion. while we re a little distance away from it it sounds so hard to comprehend and it s tough to explain to people who don t deal with derivatives on a daily basis. you re going to be back with us. and we ll have more of a discussion about why there are specifics in this legislation people should be concerned about or not. christine and i are cohost of your $$$$$ you can see saturdays at 1:00 p.m. eastern and sunday at 1:00 p.m. eastern where we get into these topics more deeply than we do here. let me give you a check of the headlines. first time jobless claims have fallen for the first time in three weeks. those are the first time people lose their jobs and first go claim unemployment. still the fum bersz are hinumbe. 456,000 people going to claim unemployment for the first time. down 24,000 from the week before. the drop is not as big as economists were expecting. it s important to know the weekly claim numb
folks and i think one of the things we haven t addressed are some of the heroic actions of the boat crews the other night. because 115 people were brought home yesterday basically based on the efforts of the other boats that were out there. coast guard got to help with medevacs but 115 people were picked by fellow offshore boats as well and that s a pretty heroic act as well. what s your prepareness for this type of issue? because as you said we haven t seen this combination of things. i m sure you ve been called to deal with things and accidents near rigs, but this is unusual. you re firefighting and looking to rescue people. what s the preparedness of the coast guard on this front? kinds of goes to the multimission, multiagency, maritime, we kind of do it all. and what s unique for us on this each element has its own expertise as well. we have search-and-rescue capabilities and the people doing that are focusing specifically on that. like i mentioned, the national strike norse ha
reporter: that s what i think the president was trying to do more than anything today was to try to find the balance, so while people do here feel like they ve been beat up upon and the president has called some folks on wall street fat cats over the bonuses and whatnot, today he was not using that rhetoric. that was significant about today, because the president realizes, number one, he needs to find a balance here in what you re saying, and secondly, and when i talk to senior white house people, they say, look, they think they re this close to a big victory on this reform, so there s no point in sort of picking on people. it s better to try and bring folks together and say, look, you may think this is going a little far, but there should be some kind of new rules for the road. it won t be perfect. some people on the left thinks it s watered down, but there needs to be new rules on the road. this fall will be two years since lehman melted down, the whole meltdown, and washington has
even as we produce a proposal that by all accounts is a common sense, reasonable, nonideological approach to target the root problems that led to the turmoil in our financial sector and ultimately in our entire economy. so we ve seen business as usual in washington. but i believe we can and must put this kind of cynical politics aside. the president s priorities in this bill are these. allow big institutions that get into trouble to fail without bringing down the whole economy. force trading in these so-called derivatives out of the shadows. i m going to talk about that a little bit more. spent a lot of time yesterday talking about derivatives and we ll touch on them again in an hour. don t miss my analogy of the punk teenager who totals his truck. the white house also wants a consumer financial protection agency, and it wants to give investors more say in the
let me take you in another direction. if you have a city with a high murder rate, murder was already against the law. put more policemen on the beat and walking around, it has the affect in many cases of reducing the murder rate. i use that analogy, couldn t we just enforce more and keep some of the same laws? that s a good question. one of the issues that people who are against too stringent wall street reform will say derivatives weren t the problem. as michael bloomberg said yesterday, that s the downstream effect. the problem was mortgages that were being written that were all of the normal rules of the road were ignored for mortgages that were written the so don t just blame derivatives. there was a failure of regulation all the way up and down the line. the president says there was a failure of washington and wall street, he said that in his speech. there are so many moving parts to what went wrong, ali. i mean, think about it. think of how many different things all collided to