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Is top of mind for the thousands of business and political leaders and elite who have gathered in switzerland this week for the annual world economic forum. that group also includes my clee colleague, one of the world s powerful and elite i would say, ali velshi live for us from davos, switzerland, running shoulders with the elite. reporter: now you re going to get people to angry tweet me. let me tell you something about this, the economic growth issue. we often say after a natural disaster or a hurricane that the gdp that you lost because people weren t working is more than made up from on the other side because you re building new houses and new buildings and repairing stuff. that s not the case in a shutdown. for all these government workers and contractors who aren t spending, they re not suddenly going to get their check and replace all the spending they were doing. it s obvious to the rest of us that this was going to happen. larry kudlow said something silly the other day, he ....
Russia and were russia has menaced them in many ways. absolutely strengthening nato is standing up to vladimir putin. one of nato s biggest problems is it s a military alliance, it has to fight. nato can barely transport any tanks, weapons or personnel any length of distance, and a great distance. we have to do it almost all for them. this is a function of spending. they will spend on some military, they will spend on salaries but when it comes to actual nuts and bolts functioning of how does a military deployed and then actually dig in and fight? nato fall short and it falls short because nations aren t spending. so if you want nato to be a serious military determined to aggressors, you have to spend more. very frustrating for americans to see that we spent 3.5% of our gdp on national defense. we do bite the bullet and pay for it but the european nations, as ian said, will say their economies are too weak, they can t. they want to be in nato but please just don t make a spend what we ....
Allies pay not enough, but nobody has been able to get them to actually fork over the money. i ve sat in a lot of the meetings, the summit meetings between president bush and european leaders were he cajoled them in private to increase their spending and the reaction almost all the time was the same, you get this sense of gravitas, you get the sense of we very much would like to do that and then they explain why they can t, why the domestic pressures on them and the other needs to spend money are more important than reaching at 2% target, or you get some futuristic target that ten years from now they will make an increase from one quarter of one percentage in their spending on defense and i don t even follow up on that. so i m very much a supporter of the nato alliance. it is essential to our security and to europe s security, but think of how much stronger that alliance would be if each of the 28 nations instead of just born did indeed what they said they would do and spent 2% of th ....
Debate. before we go, i want to give you a quick check on the market. trading has just begun. look at this, we already see the day is starting 30 points down. now, what s interesting is we haven t seen this in a few days. with all the geopolitical risks, the news about north korea, about the filipino leader coming to the u.s. that hasn t spooked the market. but auto sales slowing, that is negative. this idea that the u.s. with the cleanest of the dirty shirt, money is flocking here. if money is slowing down and people aren t spending, that booming u.s. america first economy, will it really happen? can i get some help. watch his head. i m so happy. ....
And that does not include on-line purchases. paula faris reports what s in store in this final retail rush. reporter: with two-thirds of us finished or nearly finished with our holiday shopping, retailers who expected a blizzard of business over the weekend got a lump of coal instead. despite the biggest discounts ever and stores like macy s and kmart open around the clock, there were fewer holiday shoppers. there s retail panic across the country from california to the carolinas. shoppers still aren t spending. it s a race against time. on saturday and sunday, 7% less foot traffic in stores. according to moody s investor service, consumers are willing to wait as long as possible, even if that means doing shopping after christmas. not feeling the heat audio equipment. headphone sales up 14%, and sound bars staggering 80%. if you re hitting the mall these are lovely but more than i want to pay. reporter: use your voice. with hidden cameras our retail ....