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Effect of Ebola Spread on World Travel Analyzed; Microsoft CEO Makes Controversial Statement about Women in Workplace; Professional Video Game Player Profiled; World's Richest Man Predicts Three-Day Work Week
Aired October 11, 2014 - 14:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN HOST: Ebola arrived in America by plane. Can authorities stop it from happening again without crippling the global travel industry? I'm Christine Romans. This is "CNN MONEY."
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ROMANS: Stopping Ebola at the gate -- more aggressive screening coming to five U.S. airports.
JOSH EARNEST, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: We're able to target these measures specifically to individuals who are traveling from these three countries.
ROMANS: But as the first case diagnosed on U.S. soil becomes America's first Ebola death, more calls to ban flights from diseased- ravaged African nations.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We stop travel to the United States.
ROMANS: America's public health machines insist lockdown is not the answer.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That isolates the countries to the point where it makes it very difficult for them to control the epidemic.
ROMANS: But European airlines are canceling flights to West African countries. The U.S. government says it is protecting the flying public, but there are no guarantees.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Whatever we do can't get the risk to zero here.
ROMANS: Ebola fears are growing. Could they ground global travel?
(END VIDEOTAPE)
ROMANS: Mary Schiavo is CNN's aviation analyst, a former inspector general for the U.S. Department of Transportation. Mary, so nice to see you today. Five airports now implementing new screening measures for passengers arriving from West Africa. They are taking their temperature. They're asking more questions. Is that enough, or does the U.S. need to start banning flights? MARY SCHIAVO, CNN AVIATION ANALYST: Well, it's not going to be enough
in the long run. For now there are about 150 people a day coming to the United States from those three countries, and this is with free, you know, an open travel. But, remember, there are about 1 billion passengers in the United States a year, almost 1 billion, not quite. So this is a very small percentage.
But we've seen from two crises in the past the affect the concern has, not a travel ban, the worry about it. And it can because developing with the worry about Ebola. Remember September 11, 2001, crippled the economy because people would not travel, and then the SARS crisis, they say it was a $40 billion loss. And it's very difficult for the airlines because they are now in their 15th consecutive quarter of profitable work.
ROMANS: Right.
SCHIAVO: And this will have an effect whether or not they do this. So the screening will help. They will have a lot of false positives which will increase the fear, which is why simply banning these 150 travelers per day might make more sense.
ROMANS: Mary, in New York 200 workers at LaGuardia walked off the job. They say they are not getting enough equipment. They are not getting enough training. Airline and airport workers, are they getting what they need?
SCHIAVO: No, they're not, and I'm very concerned for them because a couple weeks ago the CDC issued guidelines for how the plane should be cleaned if you have a suspected Ebola passenger, and it included moon suits, double gloving, masks, boots, et cetera. But the FAA took no actions to require the airlines to do that. It's not just the costs of the moon suits and the cleaning, but it's the time to clean an Ebola plane could take hours, and it involves cleaning every seat and tray table. As we know, they don't do that. And so if you have to do a turn in 30 minutes you simply can't do it under those circumstances.
ROMANS: All right, Mary Schiavo, thank you so much, our transportation analyst. Thank you.
Joining me now is CNN aviation correspondent Richard Quest, host of "QUEST MEANS BUSINESS," and a man who is a guru of all things travel and economy. Richard, we say European travels stocks hit this week, U.S. airline shares have been sliding for weeks now. How badly is Ebola going to hurt the travel industry?
QUEST: I think we just don't know at this moment, and that is the unknown. You see it's the same issue for the travel industry that it is for the general economy. You have a worst case scenario, the World Bank put the worst case scenario losses globally at $32 billion in the immediate future. And you have a lower -- a smaller, narrow case scenario where it's $9 billion. And it's the same for the travel industry.
ROMANS: You talked about the World Bank. The World Bank talked about aversion behavior, meaning closing the borders, ending business contracts, stopping travelers from getting on airplanes stopping air routes. All of that makes it worse and makes it very hard on Africa.
QUEST: Oh, yes. And that's exactly the point that they keep saying at the World Bank and the IMF and indeed the UNWTO, the World Tourism Organization. They keep telling people at the airlines, don't cancel routes. They tell countries, don't close borders. They tell people, keep traveling. The chances of you catching this are infinitesimally small.
The biggest fear is that somebody who contracts Ebola decides their best hope is to get as far away from West Africa as possible. Get on a plane, go to Europe, come to the United States for treatment. In that scenario you do see airlines being ultra-cautious. You see a slowdown in economies. And long term, Christine, when the World Bank president says Africa's facing a catastrophe you have to take him seriously.
ROMANS: Yes, indeed. You certainly do. Richard Quest, thank you so much. Thank you so much for your expertise on this, Richard.
All right, if you check your 401(k) every day, you might be feeling a little queasy. A sleepy summer has given way to a volatile fall in the stock market. What's going on and what you should do about it, next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
ROMANS: Volatility anyone? We haven't seen swings this wild in the stock market for two-and-a-half years. That leads our CNN MONEY top four this week. Our CNN MONEY panel is here, Paul La Monica, Cristina Alesci, and Samuel Burke. Guys, so much for complacency. A few months ago the Federal Reserve was worried investors were so calm they might be taking on too much risk. And then suddenly that calm, tranquil, steady stock market giving everyone whiplash. Raise your hand, raise your hand if you think this market is due for a 10 percent correction?
CRISTINA ALESCI, CNN MONEY BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: Totally.
ROMANS: I know. And here's what's crazy to me is that so many people are surprised by it. I mean, Paul, there's a lot of reasons why the stock market should fall.
PAUL R. LA MONICA, CNN MONEY DIGITAL CORRESPONDENT: We haven't had a correction in three years. That is an abnormally long amount of time to go without at 10 percent pullback. And even with where stock are right now we're only about four percent off the highs. And these are all-time highs, not 52-week highs. This is the best that stocks have ever been at. People really shouldn't be freaking out. Remember how great things were last year? A four percent pullback and people are crying and running for the hills, come on.
ROMANS: Let's talk about the macro reasons why it's pulling back. I mean, there are not exactly surprises. Europe is slowing. China is not doing so great. You know?
ALESCI: That's exactly it. You have got all of these elements that have been kind of been out there for a while now. But now what is getting a lot of attention, is China the next financial bubble, right? That's because the Chinese -- the Chinese economy is a great contributor to global economic growth.
ROMANS: Right.
ALESCI: And they've been pumping trillions of dollars to support that growth. Now people are asking, how long can that continue?
SAMUEL BURKE, TECH BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: And if it's not China, it's Europe. And let's look at the numbers in Germany and the IMF saying Germany needs to spend more, do what Obama did, public investment. So no matter what Obama did here, it's companies that are exposed to those other worries where the real fear is in Europe.
ROMANS: All right, women underrepresented in tech. They are paid less in virtually every industry. They shouldn't ask for a raise. They should just wait for karma to kick in.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SATYA NADELLA, MICROSOFT CORPORATION CEO: It's not really about asking for the raise but knowing and having faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along. And that I think might be one of the additional superpowers that quite frankly women who don't ask for a raise have, because that's good karma. It will come back.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ROMANS: Those unbelievable comments this week from Microsoft's new CEO at a women's tech conference. OK, so he walked it back. He later tweeted he was inarticulate and that tech needs to close the gender pay gap. He is going to be on the top 10 list of dumb things to say about women in business for a very long time until nine other people say dumber things. Cristina, can he walk it back?
ALESCI: This is not about poor word choice. You do not say that women shouldn't ask for a raise and they should just trust the system. If you truly don't believe that you wouldn't have said something like that. And I haven't seen anything from him to indicate that there's a real clear explanation that he fumbled in some sort of way.
BURKE: This is not just dumb advice for women, it's wrong advice for women and for men. Nobody in business thinks you should just sit back and let it happen to you. Everybody knows you have to lean in no matter what your gender is.
ALESCI: When a boss tells you to trust the system that is the last thing you should be doing.
ROMANS: People around him are saying he trusts that he trusts this other manager, the short term human resources were inefficient. In the long term they are efficient. But for women it doesn't matter because women step back or step aside for child rearing and they go sideways on the jungle gym and not up the ladder. And so that doesn't work. The philosophy doesn't work.
LA MONICA: It would be one thing if he said it about all Microsoft employees. But he said it explicitly about women, and it just seem implicit there is perpetuating the stereotype of women being aggressive are bossy. Men being aggressive are applauded for being go-getters. And that's just insane.
ROMANS: You have to ask for a raise. And what I think, sometimes they blame the victim, saying women who ask for a raise in the wrong way. They should do it in a different way than men do. Wait a minute, why is it that I have to speak differently because I'm a woman asking the same person for a raise?
ALESCI: Remember, this is a tech CEO. The tech industry has faced so much heat for the fact that it does not treat women equally. This couldn't have been a worse person to say this kind of thing, right, because Wall Street has even adjusted its practices in the way it treats women, and tech is taking on a lot of the heat. Now you have a tech CEO basically affirming everybody's fear.
ROMANS: Can you imagine, the people who were trying to roll him out to public, the new CEO of a company that was led by, you know, legendary Steve Ballmer, and then on his first big appearance he makes this gaffe.
LA MONICA: It's really I think just -- people are going to be looking fondly back at Ballmer and --
ROMANS: I know.
(CROSSTALK)
LA MONICA: He wasn't offending half of America's population he was just crazy.
ROMANS: The people close to him are saying, look, he's a guy that does not see gender differences at the very top. But I think what we're talking about is not the very top, not the rarefied air where if you didn't ask the raise the whole time, by the time you get to Marissa Myers level -- but that's not fair because she made a lot of money on the way, too.
BURKE: You don't think that he's negotiating his own salary? You have comedians like Sarah Silverman calling it the "vagina tax." But this shows it's not about the tax. It's about the mentality that we have, the sociology behind all these differences between men and women.
ROMANS: Karma will not close the gap. Women, ask for a raise. Men, ask for a raise, too. But women need some more help with the raise because 77 cents to the dollar is not fair.
All right, speaking of asking for a raise, talk about not being shy. A Wells Fargo employee, he reportedly e-mailed the bank CEO to ask for a raise and he copied 200,000 fellow workers. He says Wells Fargo should use its profit and give everyone a $10,000 raise to show big corporations have a heart. That's leaning in, Paul.
LA MONICA: Yes, without question.
ROMANS: And cc'ing the whole company.
LA MONICA: And it's a very ballsy move if I may say that, and he think his job is going to be safe. And good for him because he is pointing out what everyone I think that is a middle-class American knows is that there is this income inequality out there. How much is John Stump making compared to everyone else?
BURKE: It's 473 times the median salary at that bank, at Wells Fargo.
ALESCI: I think this guy realizes he doesn't have that much to lose.
LA MONICA: Good point.
ALESCI: I mean, that's where people are right now that they feel comfortable making this kind of bold move. And you don't want people not invested in the system.
LA MONICA: If he got fired we would be talking about him next week on the show.
ROMANS: I hope his job is safe.
BURKE: He says he feels his supervisors have said that his job is safe.
ROMANS: And I hope that they take a really good, hard look at that, because there's also a public relations angle to having great profits, stock buybacks, right, but workers who say they can't live on what they are making.
No self-driving car from Tesla yet. CEO Elon Musk unveiled his Model- D Thursday night. His mysterious tweet, remember we talked about it last week. It raised the speculation about whether "D" stood for driverless. It doesn't. But Tesla-D has all-wheel drive. It's so fast it has an insane mode. And it does have some self-driving features like automatic lane changing. It's pretty cool technology.
BURKE: No, it's not actually. At least the ones that I tried, Christine, I went into a car that wasn't completely autopilot but had features. It was the scariest thing I have ever done in my entire life.
ROMANS: Because you could not control it?
BURKE: No, because we almost hit a car in front of us. Behind us the cameraman from CNN behind me, it was not a Tesla and I have not test- driven this one, nor will I test drive any others for a very long time because it was that scary.
ROMANS: Thanks, guys.
Coming up, this champion makes six figures a year. He doesn't play basketball. He doesn't play football, not baseball. plays video games. The growing industry of e-sports, next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
ROMANS: Video games have moved from the couch to the stadium. The e- sports industry is growing, and gamers have sponsors, devoted fans, and they've got big paydays. Laurie Segall reports.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
LAURIE SEGALL, CNN TECHNOLOGY CORRESPONDENT: Meet Polt. Stardom, photo shoots, and sponsors. He makes at least six figures a year doing what many kids would dream of. He's South Korean but has a U.S. visa for professional athletes. His sport? StarCraft II. Polt is a professional video game player.
CHOI "POLT" SEONG-HUN: You look more muscular in the photo.
SEGALL: This weekend he's competing in the Red Bull battlegrounds in Washington, D.C., eight gamers fighting for a top prize of $20,000. Polt is a champion in the growing world of e-sports. He practices six to eight hours a day for competitions like this one.
SEONG-HUN: It's really glorious for players to play on the stage because not many players can have that chance.
SEGALL: As the video game industry explodes, live video game tournaments are selling out theaters, even stadiums. The number of live tournaments has increased from 9,000 just three years ago to more than 47,000 this year. And a small group with Polt's following gets paid annual salaries to practice and compete in tournaments with big prize money. We're talking millions.
StarCraft II is a real-time strategy game. Players react to each other's rising armies. None of the superstars in this game are American, but Polt lives in the States.
SEONG-HUN: I've been called Captain Wrecker. Captain Wrecker is my favorite hero.
SEGALL: When played in front of thousands of live fans, not to mention millions watching online, the game is almost performance art. Lights on, cameras rolling, and Polt's army suffers a defeat, but he rallies to win his next match and comes in third.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Congratulations to Polt for another top three finish this year.
SEGALL: He walks away with $6,000 into a line of devoted fans waiting for autographs.
Laurie Segall, CNN MONEY, Washington D.C.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
ROMANS: I guess that's just another day at the office for them, right?
Coming up, the world's richest man thinks you are working too much. Why Telecom tycoon Carlos Slim says a three-day workweek is coming.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
ROMANS: Some of the world's richest men think you are working too hard. Google CEO Larry Page has praised the idea of a shorter workweek. Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, he lets his employees take time off whenever they want. And then there's Mexican telecom titan Carlos Slim. The richest man in the world thinks you should have a four-day weekend every week. And he just told me it's a matter of time.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
CARLOS SLIM, PRESIDENT, GRUPO CARSO: I'm sure it will happen.
ROMANS: You think so?
SLIM: Yes, I am. I think it will happen. I don't know when. But I believe that people shall work like it has been during the development of technology. The increase of productivity, there's another way. I think we should work, the people should work three days.
ROMANS: Three days?
SLIM: Maybe 11 hours, but not 60 or 65. You retire at 75. I think machines will work 24 hours, will work as much as possible. Everything should work more. But you should have more time for you during all your life, not when you are 65 and you retire, but since you are in the market force you will have more time for entertainment, for family, for quality of your life, and also to train to find a better job. And if not, you will have a lot of possibilities for that. And you will make stronger, the economy stronger, the markets stronger, everything.
ROMANS: Are you worried about valuations in markets, tech in particular?
SLIM: Well, the interest rate is so low.
ROMANS: I know.
SLIM: And they moved from not having negative reviews to other investments, and sometimes they make the prices to be beyond what they should be.
ROMANS: Does it feel like that now?
SLIM: Well, always when you have low interest rates the prices of the other assets --
ROMANS: The money goes somewhere.
SLIM: Somewhere. And that's what is happening. But what is clear is that this low interest rate is a big opportunity
for investment. But the issue is that this money shall go for real economy, not to the financial economy. And it is going mainly to the financial economy. But it will take part of it to the real economy and developing it investing in other business.
ROMANS: Infrastructure.
SLIM: We will have construction and employment, and better salaries.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
ROMANS: Carlos Slim is also calling on businesses to hire more disabled workers. He and philanthropist Anthony Shriver touting the "I'm into Hire" campaign. It was started by Shriver's non-profit organization called Best Buddies. Both men say hiring people with disabilities helps companies. Look, these are loyal workers, low turnover, people who could be trained for entry level jobs and could help your bottom line. It's also the right thing to do. You can track their profess on social media with the hash-tag "I'm into Hire."
Tomorrow marks the beginning of a remarkable journey never seen before on CNN. And 13 of our networks hosts and anchors including me took an emotional trip across several continents to discover our family histories. Be sure to check out "Roots, Our Journey Home." It's happening all next week. Here's a quick preview.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: CNN all next week, they travel the world to chase the story, but not just anyone's story -- their own.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's going to be a journey of surprises.
(MUSIC)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The story of how they came to be.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I had a great, great, great grandfather come over to Paraguay around the 1850s.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: My grandparents died here.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The story of their ancestors.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is where my great grandmother was given up for adoption.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: My dad's report card going back to 1944.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Their history.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: These records go back 40 generations.
(MUSIC)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: When we found out that there's people here related to us, that's when it felt real to me.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And now they share those stories with you.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's like going back in time.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: My colonial ancestors were on the wrong side.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's like going home.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Join the familiar faces of CNN as they trace their roots all next week starting Sunday on CNN.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ROMANS: Turning the cameras on ourselves for once. Thanks for watching CNN MONEY. We're here every Saturday at 2:30 p.m. Eastern, so set your DVR. Have a great weekend, everybody.
