welcome back. we re back with our panel. john hilsenrath, ed rollins. steven ratner, chairman of willett advisers, former counselor to the u.s. secretary of the treasury. steve, thanks for joining the conversation. thanks for having me. i want to ask you about the economy where we are. tim geithner just out with his book stress test. it s been seven years since the dark days or six years since the dark days. how would you characterize things? actually, i m in the middle of reading tim geithner s book, and it gives you nightmares. it just brings back all of the fear and how close we really came to the abyss. and i think tim is a real american hero for what he did. and we re a long way back. we re not all the way back. we re in a slow growth economy for a whole bunch of reasons. and i don t really see that improving a lot. but at least we re growing. you know, part of the real stimulus and the boost to this economy, john, as you know, has been the federal reserve. right. an
when they ended qe-1 and qe-2, stocks fell because the economy wasn t in a self-sustaining recovery. every data point will get that scrutiny between now and the end of the year. i m going to ask both of you the question. stephen moore, what letter grade to you give the economy right now? you know, i would give it about a b-minus, but i m optimistic about the future. when you take into account the fact that corporate balance sheets still look beautiful, american companies are lean mean fighting machines, low interest rates, the housing recovery, i m optimistic we may see the b-minus turn into a p-plus. okay, jeff, your turn. i m right there, too. a b-minus. the economy has held up well. one thing i would point out that maybe i graded on a curve, the government sector is fading. remember, government job growth is fading. government is a drag on gdp. minus one percent was the fact,
the dinosaur, it makes you a little nervous. so please calm us down. well, you should be very calm about this asteroid, a 1998 qe-2. we are the first humans as far as i know that can do something about an asteroid that had our name on it. like we like to say, we live in a cosmic shooting gallery. if you look at the surface of the moon, there are a lot of craters. if you look carefully to the surface of the earth, there are a lot of craters. so we don t ever want to get hit by unof these things, it would be a nice thing if the ung or nasa got very motivated about this, we worked with our colleagues around the world to develop a system. this would be some sort of spacecraft that could deflect an asteroid, but the first step in all this is detecting tell. you see how even with our best instruments, this image is still
murdered last week. the 25-year-old was killed and police are treating this as a terrorist attack. he was a member of the troop horse artillery that fires gun salutes during royal state ceremonies. intense rain leads to widespread flooding in parts of southern china. floodwaters raged in spots trapping locals. these bikers almost got away. fallen branches and debris blocked trains and made flooding in some areas worse. an asteroid nearly two miles wide will pass by planet earth today, which is where we live, and at the closest point the asteroid 1998 qe-2 will be 2 trillion mile ace way from earth just before 5:00 p.m., so brace yourself. i love this story. the next one. we are getting our first look at an image this morning that could provide clues into one of the most captivating
space? joining us tom jones, a planetary scientist and a former nasa astronaut. tom, you ve been working on such a plan talking about it with the united nations. tell us about it. well, at the united nations, jon, there is an effort to have international collaboration among the space agencies to share the resources and share information about the detection and warnings of asteroids in the future. with that warning information, the space agencies could collaborate on a deflection mission to ward off a future catastrophic impact. jon: this one we re talking about is called, qe-2. this is not a cruise ship though. this is a flying mountain, basically, 1.7, almost two miles across? nine times bigger than the actual cruise ship, qe-2. that is the name astronomers gave it when it was found 15 years ago. if it struck with great velocity and mass and wipe out human civil uhgs wages