turkey dropped its year long objection. adding finland and sweden to nato is consequential. i still think that president putin thinks not going to do that. the question now facing nato leaders, should they welcome ukraine next even as russia wages war on that country. also ahead, historic flooding, vermont s capital surrounded by water. take a look at this. there is still danger this flooding could get even worse in the coming hours. and later details of the grand juries being seated today in georgia that could decide whether donald trump will be indicted over 2020 election interference in that state. so a lot to talk about. let s begin with the historic nato summit unfolding across the atlantic. next hour we are expecting a bilateral meeting with president biden and turkish president erdogan there in lithuania. this will be an important one to watch. after turkey dropped its objections allowing sweden to join this alliance. sweden s leader, part of this big group p
alliance, and it s good for sweden and turkey and all of nato and the baltic region. but the big topic of discussion at this high stakes summit is the war in ukraine. ukraine wants a path to nato membership, but the u.s. and other countries are reluctant to do so while the war is still raging. looking at this is josh letterman, and also joining us, jim townsend, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for nato. and a former deputy assistant second of defense. how did this happen? well, josé, according to the countries that are involved in this, nato and the u.s., and of course, turkey, they were able to move past long-standing concerns that turkey had about arms exports and terrorism within sweden and finland, the country that joined nato back in april. but behind the scenes there was a lot of wrangling by the turkish government trying to extract concessions on key issues, including trying to get the u.s. to sell f-16s to turkey, and we started to hear from presiden
plunging and credit cards are sky rocketing, the economic numbers are striking along the retail and manufacturing front. i m not so sure jay powell is listening. neil: it s interesting. you mentioned retail sales are down .6%. a big sign that there s less activity on the part of the con consumer. may they exhausted their funds. that s always been a worry. you ve been citing higher debt levels. that s putting a punch on americans. that s like a self-feeding beast, is it not? yeah, look, there s no real worst scenario as when i post charts of savings rates down to the bone and record credit card usage. it tells you that consumers are spents up. when the consumer is 70% of the economy, it speaks volumes. again, the real worry is i just don t think jay powell is listening. i still worry that there s too
the plug on consumer operations. it s going to concentrate on selling services to business and its top-natch security software. they hope this will turn around the company. some of the analysts are skeptical. as blackberry continues to go down the road, who knows what their business will look like in a year or so. the iphone, even though everyone is back and forth with them not overinnovating it, the sales could be on fire. is that right? absolutely. there s a few things helping these new iphone sales. the 5s, and the 5c, getting great sales. in ja upon, another operator. and these could be higher than the 5 million sold in the weekend we got the iphone, as well. looks like they have enough handsets to go around. you can get your handset in october, at the latest, even for