He helped me understand the tragedy that happened in the judicial process and theres no way anyone can give a through understanding of what has happened. But they were explaining thhey s with the stock market and i thought, what a story. So became a book in any magazine piece. But the real thing was this young man who is part of this entire Financial System. Host we have jim frystem. Host we have jim from dubuque, iowa. Caller thank you so much for bringing this to our attention. Theres an obvious manipulation of the gold and silver market where they are following this on behalf of possibly the government. This is certainly a local market system. Guest first responses i have no idea, but the second response is theres an observation, as one who has been watching the commodities market and the Foreign Exchange market over the last five or six years, and that is that it is amazing how much manipulative activity has been going on or accusations of it. And it raises the question. Has this always been going on we didnt know about it in a horribly in the great age of manipulation or not the center of the market in the stock market or through one of those markets. And so i dont know the answer to that. But i havent addition to probably what has happened is the technology, Information Technology has greatly reduced the necessary role of wall street. Standing between buyers and sellers is not needed anymore and for the actors have been forced to wind other outlet in one of those outlets is creating complicated things and another may be mucking around the markets in ways that you shouldnt be mucking around. But i do not know the answer to those questions. Host after all the research, what is your understanding of the market . You think you understand it fully . Guest no. I understand it well enough to comp ran the story. I understand that it is held by the main character of the book. But it is complicated. And there are 150 basic different order types that can be used to submit their stock market order, a most are designed to move the price around and not to trade. And i dont know all of them, but i know it of them. I think one of them is allowed and is incredible and i could not give you an authoritative account of all the types. But i can give you a broad description of what they do and a few examples. And i can tell you that i know enough about the stock market and it needs to be simplified and clarified. It needs to be understandable and it shouldnt be a secret and it doesnt need to be the comp located. Host are you in the market . Guest yes, absolutely. My first impression, i would just take some of my money out completely just so that if this calamity happens, i dont feel like a fool for to having people telling me to watch out for it. And what i dont do is actually bother to pick stocks. I think that is a fools game and certainly for me. I just dont have it. So i try not to lose my money and im in my market two ways. Index funds and another version of this. So i buy shares of Berkshire Hathaway and i figure whatever happens, he will be positioned to explore it and he will be able to defend it. So what i really want to do is not think about it. I want to think about writing stories. So that is how i am in the market. Host bill from tucson, arizona. Please go ahead. Caller hello, my question is regarding stocks having been lifted from the new York Exchange and other exchanges. What the reaction is and the feeling that their stock prices are being manipulated by these highfrequency traders. Guest that is a great question. You look at the parties here and theres actually a dance between this as framed in the book and investors in the market. People buying and selling stock for more than a millisecond. And the predator being a highfrequency trader. But theres another part of the transaction that you never hear from and probably should hear from and the purpose of the stock market is to channel Investment Capital to people who can put it to productive uses. All of this has nothing to do that. Its a lot of financial regulation. And so how do some corporations feel . We are not always happy about the ipo. And i know i have talked to people about that kind of thing where the glitches were so obvious that they say how can it be like this. But i think that that is a constituency that needs to start to speak up and say, okay. This mucking around the market, depending on how many dollars these guys are taking up, we need this market to be stable and we need our stock rises to feel like theyre acting something. So this a long way of saying that i never actually went and interviewed Corporate Executives and my guess is that in most cases they dont know about it. And they are not that aware of it. Its not high on their list of concerns for their business. But wait it out and they will get interested. Host john in alabama. Caller i appreciate hearing what you have to say today. As well as your book. The question i have is the Federal Reserve and the u. S. Treasury, i am trying not to be political, like you said and i agree with you about that. But with all of the things and the money that is being put in by her government, how is that impacting it and then is this making it more unstable . Stimulus creates instability in the financial markets. And its trying to lower longterm Interest Rates to stimulate economic activity. And theres a panel that disagree with each other and you can see its a no one knows. And what is clearly true is that the stock market is a huge beneficiary of easy money and for some time now the Federal Reserve, in my view, it has been too much time worrying about levels of the stock market and i feel like Government Policies restrict onto the stock market level of is that its actually a goal rather than something that should just happen and it should go where it goes kind of thing. And so there is a contributing to instability and it doesnt play into it, but i would say no and i would also add that the problems that they face, ben bernanke, and when the Financial System collapsed in 2008, the decisions that they made to deal with the problem was, i think, whether it was ultimately right or wrong, i think it is a great decision and i think its probably right given the government was paralyzed and anything that happens after that is a secondary concern. I actually think ben bernanke than American Hero and i think that what that mandate is incredible and hes taking all kinds of grief and he didnt see the subprime crisis coming. But given the hand that he was dealt to play, he did what he could and i think a lot of people wouldve done the same thing. Host do you foresee a Class Action Lawsuit given what youve written . Guest thats like zero some bickering between political parties. You want people to fix the problem. Gimme a solution. Heres the problem. Lets just do this and not worry about wanting people or the names of highfrequency traders who did all this. Dont think people on national tv. Its just not necessary. The more that there is there is a less likely solution because the people who have perpetrated upon feel like they are exposed. And so lets just fix it. Host the thing that we can start looking at this problem . Guest yes, i do. The money is funneled into the process with these advantages on these exchanges are the overwhelming debate. And we will see this fog machine in ngress and what dat dave dont mean veryh or is false or whatever but there would be the argument against doing anything but my hunch is that now the problem is exposed and the way that its exposed the problems can be dealt with. The regulatory process can do the things it needs to do which isnt necessarily to introduce one new regulation. We see what happens when they introduced the wrong. The two things to people in congress who are concerned with this issue and regulators should always keep in mind is that everything should be in the direction of increasing transparency, genuine transparency not radical transparency but people will actuallthat people willactuallyg rather than if they dig through the documents. So the actual transparency being very sensitive to the incentive system because people are responding to incentives. Like answering the call of the incentives and the behavior is bad so you arent going to change the behavior unless you change the incentive. Host i was a little confused by the last chapter. Is the last chapter are you previewing your next book or a bigger better faster . Guest so its great to take a long time to finish. Riding along the fiber optic cable in chicago and new jersey to cut off the travel costs 300 million no one knows. No one was around that purpose. Its like a beast underground. I went riding along on the bike and see wireline rating on the bike there is a newly constructed chain of towers on the hills in pennsylvania over the line and the microwave towers are there because they are able to move a signal faster then the line that was put in three years ago and the mystery is who did that so i write over to the tower and see the number on the tower and i say they will figure it out created there is an interesting story about who did this and why. Its not my book but at the bottom of the story is the question do people want to know enough to go and find out how the markets work and its a challenge to the reader. Go on the internet and you can find whats going on. Host blaise is the name of the book. Up next on booktv been ma recounts the life in the 1860s that the relationship he forged with other writers known as the bohemians. This program is from the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco and its about 45 minutes. I think we are ready to start. I would like to welcome you all to city lights. We are delighted to have with us ben tarnoff. This is a densely layered highly nuanced portrait of the literary scene of the late 18 hundreds. We follow the lives of mark twain, Charles Warren stoddard is the new wave of literature that would leave a permanent mark on the American Literary canon. Then the portrait beautifully captures the complexity of the relationship between the writers and it offers a valuable look at the postcivil war west coast and provides the kind of perfect medium for the development of bohemia. The bohemians is a rich history that really kind of unwind is many different threads. Both of the writers and of the city that helped to host. Ben is the author of another book to counterfeiters. Nice by Penguin Press and writing also appeared in the San Francisco chronicle and he worked at the court early. Its a delight and a pleasure to have him with us. Welcome ben tarnoff. [applause] thank you for the introduction and overview for coming ouall of you forcoming o. I should tell you i have a little bit of a flu so if i get four or more my voice gets foggy youll have to forgive me. Mark twain when he was here in the 1860s in San Francisco wrote a very funny sketch how to cure a cold in one of the recommended keywords was to rub mustard all over your chest so if things get to that point i might send someone out for mustard. [laughter] this is my book the bohemians and a told a story of the writers in San Francisco in the 1860s. They were mark twain, Charles Warren stoddard. Mark twain is at the center of the story and one of the things i love about the project is that it gave me access to kind of an unknown part of his life. I think when we think of mark twain we think of the man in the white suit chomping on a cigar with a white hair facade. That is the last decade with his best work behind him in his 60s and 70s. My story is in his 20s and 30s when he hasnt really learned to conceal his extreme emotions under that grandfatherly facade. He is ambitious, vindictive, angry, competitive, filled with anxiety about money and fear for the future and he is convinced he is going to end up in the poorhouse and he is surrounded by these other young writers in San Francisco who formed him and pulled him into literary maturity. San francisco was a great place to be a writer in the 1860s and there are a few reasons why. The civil war is tearing apart the rest of the country in San Francisco there is no fighting that reaches the coast into the draft is never applied west of iowa and kansas. Its also a very rich city. Its the Industrial Financial and commercial center of the west and that prosperity has a range of print publications that sustain the class of professional writers. Its also a very urban city with more than 100,000 people and he is there which makes it the biggest city west of st. Louis and its cosmopolitan. You have chinese coming europeans from different countries, some americans, mexicans, australians. The last reason San Francisco is conducive to the literary scene is its isolation. Its hard to reach San Francisco from the eastern United States and that gives a buffer to the culture but its the city to and give it its own antiu. S. Democratic ultra low spirit of it guides plane and the rest of the bohemians. So i thought i would read a little bit of the introduction and then introduce you to the four characters. The civil war began with an outburst of patriotic feeling on both sides and the belief a few battles would result in a swift victory. It ended with the death of 750,000 soldiers in the nation shaken to its core. The wise men of the early era found themselves on crisis and the great political military leaders in the past like john clinton ten and genital Winfield Scott in the previous century and into a forced retirement while the more modern minds like Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant rose to the challenge. The civil war destroyed old assumptions and reworded radical new thinking and triggered the upheaval comparable to the one a century later by the vietnam war and the National Trauma that made an older generation suddenly obsolete and demanded a novelty, innovation, experimentation. The 1860s was bloody, bewildering and if you managed to survive a magnificent time to be a young american. America belongs to the young in thandthe future was in the yount place of america the far west. The pioneers were overwhelmingly young and untethered from Traditional Society they built the World Without the benefit of their parents council. If the encampments were had postadolescent access the opera opportunities unlike any that might be found in the colleges and counting houses of the east. Please children at higher layers, the vanguard of the democracy. When with men looked west he didnt see a place he saw an idea in the mystical tradition as the country itself. Thomas jefferson had been the founder to be at he end of the disciples believed that American Civilization would march towards the pacific and the continents supply of the land would be settled by human farmers who embodied the nations egalitarian spirit. Of course the reality was more complicated. The region contained land that resisted the cultivation and indians that resisted extermination but as the line of the settlement moved forward past the alleghenies and the mississippi than the rockies the jeffersonian dream of the westport empire of liberty began to look like a prophecy. Even henry david when departing for his walk felt drawn in a westerly direction. The future that lies that way to me into the earth seems more unexhausted and rich on that side. Mark twain was born in 1835 and reached his young adult hood at the best possible time as the country embarked on the most extraordinary period of change in its history. He was western by birth and raised on the missouri frontier. The outbreak first hi firsthandr west as he fled the fighting in the state for the region beyond the rockies. There he found another front here anfrontierand in a social t unlike any in the country. In 1848 of the discovery of gold in california triggered a swift people from all corners of the world. As the gateway to the gold rush San Francisco went from the drowsy backwaters of the booming global seaport mostly they were young single men and had come to stay but to get rich and get up. They had attempts and makeshift structures that made candling for the frequent fires. They built gambling saloons and brothels and they lived among the cultures of the continent often convinced them into the space of a single street. By the time he he got their San Francisco still the lord. It was urban yet unmistakably western isolated and cosmopolitan, crude yet cultured. The city create a spectacle whether on th stages or the pageantry of the streets. Its open atmosphere to the young and to anyone seeking refuge from the over civilized east. It had a sense of its history and the appetite for the ritual even as the gold rush and the miners became banks and restaurants the city slowed to a subtle rhythm and finance to the opening of the frontiers in nevada, idaho and elsewhere and went from one to the next. Citizens spend lavishly on the furnishings. They drank seven bottles of champagne for everyone in boston. After the gold rush and they got the frontier spirit of the city alive. They also sustained a thriving publishing culture. California was always crawling with scribblers. The first generation wrote the story of the gold rush themselves in letters and diaries and in the pages as soon as they arrived. The Printing Press cranked out pamphlets, periodicals and books relieving the loneliness and boredom of the frontier. By the 1860s the city spawned an extraordinary literary scene abandoned outsiders call to the bohemians. Plane joined them and shape to the entire current of his life. For the first