    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1999, Book I)]
    [January 15, 1999]
    [Pages 48-53]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the Wall Street Project Conference in New York City
    January 15, 1999

        The President. Thank you. I'm not sure I know what to say.
    [Laughter] First I was thinking, here I have to go follow Jesse again. [Laughter] You know the story about the guy that
    went to heaven, and St. Peter said, ``Well, we've got a lot of new
    entrants today, and we want everybody to stand up and tell them what the
    best thing they ever did in their life was. How would you like to
    participate?'' The guy said, ``I'd like to do that. I did a great thing
    once.'' He said, ``Well, what did you do?'' He said, ``I saved a bunch
    of people in a flood.'' He said, ``Fine, you go on right after Noah.''
    [Laughter]
        I will say one thing, Reverend. This
    marriage of Jesse Jackson and Wall Street, so full of promise, has
    already produced one incredibly vivid, concrete result: It has done
    wonders for your wardrobe. [Laughter] I see your sons out there
    thinking, ``No, we did that.'' [Laughter]
        I want to say, first of all, to all of you who are here, I'm
    grateful for the wonderful reception. To the previous speakers--I had
    actually no idea that they were going to say what they did, and I was
    very moved, and I thank you for that. That's the sort of thing you
    normally hear--or you normally don't hear because it's said--
    [laughter]--that's the sort of thing people

    [[Page 49]]

    say for your funeral--[laughter]--and I don't think we're there yet.
    [Laughter]
        What you're here to do and what you said about what I tried to do is
    what I'd like to ask you to think about just for a few minutes. Just
    about everybody in our administration who's here has been introduced;
    they do come from all over, from all walks of life and all backgrounds.
    I'm proud of them. I'm proud of the work that Congressman Rangel and Congressman Bishop and Congressman Meeks and
    Congressman Jackson and others have
    done to help us. I'm proud that you have people like Jack Kemp and some Republican business leaders who are here. I'm
    proud of the fact that you have John Sweeney
    and Percy Sutton and my friend Ron
    Burkle and others here. I'm proud of the fact
    that you have tried to reach across all the lines that divide.
        I'm very, very proud especially, Reverend,
    that you have made this initiative to Appalachia. You know, 20 years ago
    this year, I became the youngest Governor in America. And when I became
    Governor of my home State, 5 of the 25 poorest counties in America were
    in Arkansas: 2 were in the Mississippi Delta; 3 were in the Arkansas
    Ozarks, our Appalachia. Twenty years ago, that was a very sobering thing
    to me. It's all the more sobering that it hasn't changed all that much
    in a lot of rural America.
        Fifteen years ago this year, I worked with other Governors to
    establish the Lower Mississippi Delta Development Commission. It went
    from the mouth of the Mississippi up through the Mississippi Delta, all
    the way up into all-white areas of east Tennessee and southern Illinois,
    who had--by the time I ran for President in 1992, in southern Illinois
    there were still counties with 20 percent unemployment.
        Twenty-five years ago, when I came home wet behind the ears from law
    school, among my first clients were old coalminers whose lungs were
    rotted out with black lung disease and whose families barely had enough
    to live on. I have never understood, from the time I was a child in my
    grandfather's store--he had a sixth grade education and an African-
    American clientele--why in the wide world people with common needs,
    common dreams, and common capacities would spend their time fighting
    over a shrinking pie instead of building a bigger one. And this is a
    good thing for America.
        Previous speakers have talked about the economy. I am proud of this
    visionary effort to build a bridge between Wall Street and our greatest
    untapped markets. And because the economy is so good, now is the time to
    build that bridge. If we can't do it now, when in the wide world will we
    ever get around to it? If there was ever a time when none of us have an
    excuse, this is that time. But the world changes very fast, and we have
    to seize the moment.
        You know, Tuesday night when I give the State of the Union Address,
    I want to talk about the great long-term, still-unmet challenges of the
    21st century: the aging America, the fact that we have the largest and
    most diverse population of children in our schools in history. But a big
    part of it is the need to build strong, economically successful
    communities in the places where prosperity has not reached, in the inner
    cities, in rural America, and don't forget, on our Native-American
    reservations, as well.
        Jesse Jackson came to Wall Street--the
    same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks: That's where the money is.
    [Laughter] And I don't mean that in a pejorative way. How could any
    American of any station in life not be proud of the financial markets we
    have built and, as Mr. Grasso said, of the
    fact that now 200 million of our 260 million people actually benefit
    from it? We are beginning to share the wealth. We need to do more of
    that, and I'll have some more to say about that later. But that's why
    Jack Kemp is here and why I always liked him.
    [Laughter]
        Mr. Kemp. I like you, too, Mr. President.
    [Laughter]
        The President. Although, when Reverend Jackson said he was the
    ultimate Republican, I thought, would that it were so. [Laughter] I
    probably just destroyed his future prospects. [Laughter] I'll be glad to
    renounce that anytime you want. [Laughter]
        But I ask you to think about this. Wall Street has done a great
    thing in spreading the wealth across America because now 200 million
    people directly or indirectly benefit from the stock market, because a
    lot of the stock market are pension funds, retirement funds, now mutual
    funds, things that get all kinds of people into the stock market. It is
    only natural that not only is this where the money is, but they have
    found ways to involve large numbers of people. And yet we know there are
    still pockets that are relatively untouched.

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        Now, some of them are just down the street. Treasurer McCall over there, he manages New York's money. He'd have
    more to manage if the unemployment rate in New York weren't twice the
    national average. He'd have more money to rebuild these old schools,
    more money to give all these kids in troubled neighborhoods after-school
    programs and summer school programs and opportunities they need to
    develop their full abilities.
        You know, I always say, one of Clinton's 10 rules of politics is,
    whenever somebody tells you, looks you straight in the eye and says,
    ``This is not a money problem,'' you can bet everything you've got
    they're talking about somebody else's problem, not theirs. [Laughter] It
    is partly a money problem.
        Now, before we--so we have to find ways for you to do this. I think
    the Government has a role to play here. I think we have to do our part.
    And I thank the Members of Congress who are here. The first thing we
    have to do is to stay with the strategy that's gotten us this far. You
    know, this year--there are a lot of things that I wish I could be
    announcing more investment in, in the State of the Union. But we've got
    to keep the budget balanced to keep the interest rates low and the
    confidence high. We've got to keep investing in our people and target
    the money we do have to education, to training, to technology, to things
    that will develop their abilities. And we've got to show leadership and
    continue to expand trade and deal with this financial crisis around the
    world, because the global economy is either going to work for us or
    against us. Thirty percent of our growth has come from our relationships
    with other countries.
        The second thing we have to do is to keep working to do what we can
    to revitalize communities, not by ignoring them or by trying to impose
    kind of one-size-fits-all programs, but by doing what we've been trying
    to do: being a partner with people who live in each community and being
    a catalyst to bring the spark of private enterprise. These partnerships
    work in interesting ways.
        We put 100,000 police out there in the crime bill, and we've got the
    lowest crime rate in 25 years, the lowest murder rate in 30 years. And
    we don't tell people who they must hire or how to train them or where to
    deploy them. But it makes a difference. In 1993, when I took office, the
    crime rate-- the violent crime rate had tripled in 30 years, and the
    number of police had only gone up 10 percent. It wasn't rocket science;
    people needed help. Local governments--the economy was down--they didn't
    have the money to hire the police and train them and deploy them
    properly.
        When we offered tax cuts to clean up brownfields, all kinds of
    inner-city neighborhoods were able to be revitalized. We've got cities
    now that hadn't had a new factory in a month of Sundays getting actually
    new manufacturing facilities in their backyard and providing good jobs.
    That's what we try to do with the empowerment zones and the community
    development banks--just to give people tools to do what they want to do.
        And I appreciated what Weldon said
    about affirmative action. I hope we can end it some day. But if you see
    what's happened in the examples where people have cut it out altogether,
    it seems to me the rest of us are disadvantaged. My daughter is in
    college. I want her to go to college with a bunch of students that look
    like Americans, because that's the America she's going to live in. So I
    ask you to think about that.
        I want to thank Secretary Slater, who's
    here. The Department of Transportation will issue its new rules on
    disadvantaged business enterprises in the next few days and extend more
    opportunity to more people.
        In the past 5 years--I'd like to say one thing about the banking
    community that I think is important--we've worked very hard to both
    streamline and strengthen the Community Reinvestment Act. It was also
    under fire, has been under fire, still is under fire by some. That
    Community Reinvestment Act has been on the books for more than 20 years,
    but 95 percent of all the financial commitments made under the law in
    the last 20 years have been made in the last 5 years. That's more than
    $1 trillion in long-term commitments to invest in people.
        And I might say, our banks are more profitable than they were 10
    years ago. This is not bad for business; this is good for business. I
    guess the presence of the business leaders and the Wall Street people
    here among the previous speakers ought to make that general point. This
    is not a welfare program; it is not a charity program. We are not asking
    anybody to do anything we do not think they will make money out of. And
    if they can't make money out of it, we can't ask them to do it. What
    we're trying

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    to do is to create an environment and create the conditions in which it
    is more likely that more people will take a chance. We believe they will
    be rewarded by the chances they take.
        Now, again I say, we know that we've got this booming economy, but
    we also know the overwhelming majority of the capital is bypassing our
    underserved areas. We know that in boardrooms all across America today,
    people are laying plans for new investments in emerging markets, and not
    all of them are in trouble today. We know that venture capitalists are
    planning new ventures, from Silicon Valley to the suburbs of Washington,
    DC. But especially with--especially with the problems in Asia and the
    uncertainties abroad, we need to ask ourselves, how are we going to keep
    growing the economy, keep the unemployment rate low, with inflation
    down? How are we going to do that? The answer is, we've got to find more
    places to invest and more customers. And the largest pool of untapped
    investment opportunities and new customers are not beyond our shores;
    they're in our backyard.
        They're up the street in Harlem or the Bronx or across the river in
    Brooklyn or in any other countless number of cities around the country
    where, every morning, huge numbers of working mothers and fathers have
    to get up and find some way to get transportation--sometimes in cities
    that don't have public transportation--get all the way out to the
    suburbs to get a job, and then come home at night dead tired, leave
    their kids an hour, sometimes an hour and a half earlier, and lower
    their income dramatically by the cost of transportation. Why? Because no
    one is investing.
        And there's a lot of other people that are still looking for work. I
    told you--you think about the fact that we have a 4.3 percent
    unemployment rate. It's the lowest peacetime rate in 41 years, and still
    within this city there are several neighborhoods where the unemployment
    rate is in double digits. Now, anybody who has ever spent time on the
    streets, who has ever had to struggle to get by, knows that most people
    there are not stupid. It takes some amount of skill to survive in the
    environment a lot of Americans have to survive in today. So to me, this
    is a self-evident case. The question is, how are we going to do it?
        Recently--let's listen to this--recently, a Harvard business school
    professor found that families living in our most distressed communities
    still control more than $85 billion a year in purchasing power, more
    than the entire retail market in Mexico--just the people in the most
    distressed communities. Still, more than 25 percent of that market is
    going unmet. In Harlem, the number is more like 60 percent. How many
    places are there in America where a kid has to walk for blocks and
    blocks past abandoned storefronts just to buy a book for school or milk
    for the family? Now, that is what we're talking about.
        And businesses that have recognized this potential have been
    rewarded. Two of Pathmark's most productive grocery stores are in Bed-
    Stuy and Newark Central Ward. These two stores do double the business of
    a typical grocery store. Of Rite-Aid's 148 stores in New York City, the
    Harlem branch ranks second in the number of prescriptions filled. People
    appreciate it if you make it easy for them to spend their money when
    they need it.
        In a meeting with the Vice President this summer--by the way, both
    these companies announced that they would expand their investment in
    these areas. And that is good. But we've got a lot more to do. And we
    need help from the people that are here, from Congressman Rangel and the other Members of Congress here, from
    Maxine Waters and others who are trying to
    bring together stakeholders for capital formation for new growth in
    their areas. For all the people from the rural communities, from the
    Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, we
    need help from everybody. We need help from Republicans and Democrats.
    This ought to be an American issue. We all have an interest in this.
        I want to thank again Reverend Jackson and
    Sandy Weill, who couldn't be here this
    afternoon, and all of you who have been part of the Wall Street Project.
    And what I'd like to do today--and I worked hard on this so I'm not
    going to do what Jim Harmon said I did before--I'm actually going to
    read some of this talk. Because I have been working with development
    experts, with business people, with the Members of Congress I mentioned,
    and others, to try to say, okay, if our role is to be a catalyst, if our
    role is to be a partner, what else can the Federal Government do to help
    get this jump-started, to provide a vehicle through which we can channel
    and attract more money? And here are the things that I want to announce:

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        First, in the balanced budget this year, we'll support a new market
    venture capital program to bring capital and technical assistance to
    small businesses in distressed areas. Thousands of entrepreneurs who
    only need a little capital and expert guidance to expand their
    businesses and create new jobs--these funds will give it to them.
        Second, we'll expand our investment in the community development
    banks that provide inner-city and rural residents small amounts of
    credit to transform good business ideas into reality. And Emma has been great on this, and I thank you for your support
    of this.
        When I was Governor, I heard about this guy named Muhammad
    Yunus in Bangladesh--Bangladesh, one of the
    poorest countries in the world--who had set up these banks to make very
    small loans to rural village women to start small businesses. At the
    time I met him in the mid-eighties, they'd made 400,000 loans at market
    interest rates to groups of people. You had to get a group together;
    everybody got a loan, but the second person couldn't get the loan until
    the first person started to pay back and so forth. They had a higher
    repayment rate than the commercial banks did at commercial interest
    rates. Now the Grameen Bank has made about 2 million loans, and the same
    thing is true.
        Last year your United States Government, under our administration,
    funded 2 million of those loans in poor countries, from Africa to Asia
    to Latin America. Our community development banks are designed to do the
    same thing at an American scale, with American financial costs, for
    people who need it. And I thank the Members of Congress who are
    supporting it. We are now establishing them all over America; we have to
    expand them.
        Next, our SBA--Aida's SBA--[laughter]--has helped to transform
    companies such as America Online from small startups to household names.
    That's right, AOL started with an SBA loan. Last summer the Vice
    President challenged the SBA to do the same
    for businesses in underserved areas. In response, the SBA will
    strengthen its outreach efforts; offer new financing terms, such as
    delayed payment of interest on loans; and waive regulatory requirements
    to promote investments in targeted communities.
        We're also going to expand the tax incentives for the SBA-licensed
    specialized small business investment companies. Their job is to channel
    capital to small businesses owned by economically disadvantaged
    citizens. So we're going to give people more tax incentives to invest in
    them. I want to say a special word of thanks to Congressman Bill
    Jefferson from Louisiana, who first
    brought this to my attention. This wouldn't have happened without him
    because I wouldn't have known about it, and I thank him.
        Fourth, in the next balanced budget I will ask Congress to support
    the creation of new--this is when you can get some of these big guys to
    give you some money, so listen to this--[laughter]--American private
    investment companies to encourage even bigger businesses to enter these
    underserved markets. For years we've supported in America the Overseas
    Private Investment Corporation, OPIC. What it does is provide financing
    to promote growth abroad. We ought to have an ``APIC'', an ``American
    Private Investment Company,'' to support private investment at home.
        Now, here's how it will work: ``APIC'' will be administered jointly
    by HUD and the Small Business Administration. It will offer loan
    guarantees to investors who help businesses expand or relocate in inner
    cities and rural areas. If one group of private investors puts up at
    least $100 million, then the Government will guarantee another $200
    million in loans. Now, if five groups of investors do the same thing,
    that's $1.5 billion in equity for investment in underserved America.
        Finally, to encourage as many individuals and companies to put
    together more funds to invest in underserved areas, we will propose new
    tax credits worth 25 percent of the amount of equity placed in
    investment funds, community development banks, and a host of other
    investment vehicles targeted for these untapped markets.
        Now, this is a good beginning. This will provide incentives and a
    vehicle. But we can't do this alone. And Congressman Rangel and the other Members of Congress here, the CBC,
    the HBC, the groups in Congress who will care about this, they need your
    help. We cannot pass this without bipartisan support and people who see
    that this is bringing free enterprise to places that haven't felt it in
    ways that will help the whole American economy.
        Now, you think about it. If our exports drop this year because of
    continuing low growth in Latin America, in Asia, in other places, how
    are we going to keep the American economy growing? How's everybody else
    going to get a

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    pay raise? How are we going to do this? We should do this not just for
    those folks but because they can help us build a better America and
    better lives for everybody.
        And so I say to you, we've got to pass these laws. And we have to
    make it an American issue. It can't be a Democratic issue or a
    Republican issue. It shouldn't be the Black Caucus, the Hispanic Caucus,
    or Bill Clinton's idea. I don't care--I would gladly put any label on
    this you want if I thought it would pass it. I would be glad to call it
    the ``Herbert Hoover-Warren Harding-Calvin Coolidge Economic Development
    Act.'' I will do anything to pass it. [Laughter] There is plenty of
    credit to go around. And I ask you to do everything you can to try to
    make this an American issue.
        And I ask all my friends in the business community to go down to
    Washington, call your Members in Congress, without regard to party, and
    say, ``Hey, you know, the President made a pretty good point there. If
    our markets are going to keep dropping next year, we've got problems. We
    need some new markets. We need someplace to put the money that has been
    made so it can make some more money.'' So I implore you to do that.
        Let me just say one final thing. I don't want to make another point
    and make a whole other speech, but don't ever forget that we're not
    going to be able to get business to go into or to stay in areas where
    people don't have the education and skills to do the jobs that are
    needed. And we need the business community to keep supporting our
    schools, to help people who need help with adult literacy or to go back
    and finish high school, to mentor those kids in middle school so they'll
    go on to college. We can't forget that, because if we do, there will be
    a limit to how successful we can be.
        Now, a lot of things have been said about Dr. King today. And nearly
    everybody has committed some portion of his ``I Have A Dream'' speech to
    memory. But I found a sentence in there that applies uniquely to us
    here, that I don't ever hear anybody quote, but it's very important. He
    said in 1963, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, that he challenged
    America, quote, ``to refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds
    in the great vaults of opportunity in this Nation.'' Now today, those
    vaults of opportunity are richer and fuller than they ever have been.
    Wall Street has helped to make that so. Now what we need to do is to
    open those vaults up so they'll fill up even more for all of you.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 2:15 p.m. at Windows on the World
    Restaurant in the World Trade Center. In his remarks, he referred to
    Jesse Jackson, founder and president, Rainbow/PUSH Coalition; former HUD
    Secretary and 1996 Vice Presidential candidate Jack Kemp; John J.
    Sweeney, president, AFL-CIO; Percy Sutton, founder, Inner City
    Broadcasting; Ron Burkle, owner, Yucaipa Cos., Los Angeles, CA; Richard
    Grasso, chairman and chief executive officer, New York Stock Exchange;
    H. Carl McCall, State comptroller; Weldon Latham, Jr., partner, Pittman,
    Potts, and Trobridge; Sanford I. Weill, chairman and co-chief executive
    officer, Citigroup; Emma Chappell, founder and chief executive officer,
    United Bank of Philadelphia; and development economist Muhammad Yunus,
    managing director, Grameen Bank, Bangladesh. A portion of these remarks
    could not be verified because the tape was incomplete.