    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
    [June 29, 1999]
    [Pages 1109-1116]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Interview With Rick Dunham of BusinessWeek
    June 29, 1999

    National Economy

        Mr. Dunham. I was wondering if I can sort of start broadly and lead
    into it. I mean, the new economy, with the increase in productivity
    that's tied to technology and globalism, has really led the United
    States to sustained economic expansion that's been amazing in the decade
    and growth beyond just about anyone's predictions.
        I was just wondering if you're a believer in this new economy
    scenario. And then the second part was, why, if there is such a booming
    economy, do you think it hasn't trickled all the way down to some of
    these distressed inner cities and the rural areas?
        The President. First, I do believe in the new economy. I think that
    technology is rifling through every sector of economic activity, in ways
    that have given us dramatic increases in productivity and potential for
    growth without inflation that I think most models have not accurately
    measured.
        And I think that, therefore, the most important thing for Government
    policy is to be fiscally responsible, to create the conditions in which
    people can prosper, and then to try to do things which will accelerate
    the trends that are already underway. I think that that's what we're
    trying to do with Internet II, for example, and what we're trying to do
    with having heavy investments in biomedical research.
        Now, why hasn't it trickled down to everybody? I think there are--
    I'd like to make three points. First of all, there has been a remarkable
    amount of trickling down. We have the lowest minority unemployment rate,
    among African-Americans and Hispanics, recorded in the nearly three
    decades we've been doing racially separate unemployment statistics. And
    many cities--Detroit, for example, has an unemployment rate that's
    roughly half what it was in '93.
        On the other hand, I think there are two reasons why it hasn't. One
    is, there are enormous premiums in this new economy for education and
    skills, so that people who don't have an education are both more likely
    to remain unemployed and, even more significantly, more likely to remain
    underemployed or relatively undercompensated, which I think explains the
    lion's share of why you've had increasing inequality for over 20 years,
    which began to abate about the last 2 or 3 years.
        Mr. Dunham. In the last couple of years.
        The President. You've begun to see comparable and, in some cases,
    relatively larger income gains in the lower 40 percent.
        I also think the wage inequality is also reinforced by the fact that
    people at lower income levels are less able to buy stocks, and an
    enormous amount of increased wealth has come from ownership as opposed
    to just salaried employment. So you see a lot of the companies, for
    example, that offer their employees, even their lowest wage employees,
    stock options, something that Wal-Mart, for example, has done for a long
    time. Those companies will have a better record of increasing equality
    because their workers can afford wealth. And I think that that's
    important. The other thing is, of course, what you're here to talk to me
    about.
        The third point is that I think there are still disincentives to
    invest in the neighborhoods and communities or people which still need
    to be brought in. They're either real disincentives or they're imagined
    ones. There are, you know--we have these--I think there are accumulated
    preconceptions about where market opportunities exist and don't exist.

    [[Page 1110]]

        And what I'm trying to do with--what I've been trying to do from the
    beginning of my administration with the empowerment zones and enterprise
    communities, with a vigorous Community Reinvestment Act--over $18.5
    billion was loaned under the CRA in 1997, for example; that's the last
    year I have numbers for--with community development financial
    institutions, with the microenterprise lending, with all these
    initiatives, we've tried to remove the institutional barriers and create
    mechanisms which would allow capital to flow to people and to
    neighborhoods where they miss. We had the tax credits for hiring people
    off welfare or for hiring people that were in the empowerment zones or
    the enterprise communities. Those are things that have already had an
    impact.
        But what we're trying to do, what I'm trying to do now is to deal
    with what I think are both of the problems that have kept some of our
    inner-city neighborhoods and poorest communities from fully
    participating. That is, we have this new markets initiative, which is
    basically designed to put together a package of loan guarantees and tax
    credits to induce new investment in these areas at more attractive
    rates--and also the psychological barriers. We're going to take--we've
    got Sandy Weill and Hugh McColl and Dick Huber
    joining Republican and Democratic elected officials, and Jesse
    Jackson and Al From and,
    you know, all these people, to shine the light on the opportunity.
        You know, you've got a purchasing power gap over actual sales,
    retail sales, that averages 25 percent in urban areas throughout the
    country. It's 35 percent in Los Angeles and 40 percent in East St.
    Louis, two places we're going.
        Dick Huber actually made a kind of an
    interesting comment, only in jest, when we went to Atlanta to kind of
    kick off this program. He said, ``You know,'' he said, ``I may be the
    only guy that's kind of sorry you're doing this, because we figured out
    there's a huge opportunity out there and now all our competitors are
    going to know.'' [Laughter]

    New Markets Initiative

        Mr. Dunham. Well, that's one of the things that I was curious about.
    I mean, some of these corporations and executives--Citicorp, Aetna,
    NationsBank--have realized this. But at the same time, it seems to be
    uneven in the corporate community----
        The President. Very.
        Mr. Dunham. ----where others are sitting on their corporate hands. I
    was wondering what you can do as President or what could be done through
    legislation to try to encourage more companies to go into these areas?
        The President. Well, I think there are two things we can do, and I
    hope to do both on this tour. The first is to actually make sure that
    all the people in positions to make investment decisions understand that
    there are very gifted, very hard-working, very creative people out there
    in these communities and that there are enormous opportunities there,
    just to shine the light on what's going on and what's out there,
    including the infrastructure we've worked hard to put in place in the
    last 6\1/2\ years.
        And secondly, I hope to build bipartisan support for passing the new
    markets initiative which will, in effect, make it more attractive for
    people to invest in these areas by giving them a tax credit of up to 25
    percent and making them eligible, making certain investments eligible
    for loan guarantees of up to two-thirds of the amount of the total
    investment. I mean, if you have Government-guaranteed loans on two-
    thirds of an investment, you get 25 percent tax credit on what you put
    up, that cuts the risk considerably, in ways that I think are important.
    So I hope to achieve that.
        And if I could back up, I asked the people to think about this in
    another way. I think there is a moral logic here, which is that we don't
    want to go into the 21st century, at an all-time high in prosperity,
    leaving so many people behind. That's not right. There's also a very
    compelling economic argument. You know, we've got all the debates now
    about what's the Fed going to do and do they need to raise interest
    rates and all that. I don't want to get into that. I think Mr.
    Greenspan and the Fed do a perfectly good
    job, and we've had a good partnership by recognizing each other's
    appropriate roles.
        But let me--no one believes, I don't think, that we have completely
    repealed the laws of economics, traditional laws of economics, that
    we've completely repealed any tendency for inflation in our economy, or
    that we've completely repealed the tendency to have some business cycle.
    But we've dramatically improved it through this technological revolution
    that's going on.
        So if you ask yourself--you put yourself in my position, and you ask
    yourself: Okay, you've

    [[Page 1111]]

    got 4.2 percent unemployment; you've got the longest peacetime expansion
    in history; the country may be able to have the longest expansion in
    history, including wartime, in the next several months. Now, how can you
    keep this going? How can you keep growth going with low inflation? And
    that involves, is there a noninflationary way to add more workers? Is
    there a noninflationary way to raise wages? And the answer to that, it
    seems to me, is--there are only basically three answers.
        One is, we can sell more of our goods and services around the world,
    which is why I strongly favor new trade initiatives and not seeing
    America go back to protectionism. And that's a subject for another day,
    but you know I'm hoping we can continue to push that forward.
        Then, secondly, you can look at discrete populations in America
    which are underemployed. There are basically only two now: people on
    welfare--we cut the welfare rolls in half, but we know that there are
    still people on welfare who could work, but they're harder to place--and
    the disabled. We're about to take a huge step in that direction, with
    almost unanimous votes from Congress, by allowing disabled people who
    get Medicaid health insurance to keep their Medicaid while they go into
    the work force, and that will bring a lot of extra people into the work
    force at competitive wage rates.
        The third big opportunity--and I'm convinced the biggest one,
    because it's a two-fer, you get more workers and more customers--is
    going to the neighborhoods and the communities that have basically not
    participated in this recovery.
        So it seems to me that, quite apart from our moral obligation to do
    this--if in fact, there are business opportunities there, which are
    there right now, in the tens of billions of dollars, and if there are
    ways to make those opportunities even more attractive by the passage of
    this legislation--that this is a major, major opportunity for our
    country to keep our economy going and to keep it going with low
    inflation. So to me, it may be finally something whose time has come.
        I also think we've learned something in the last 6 years about what
    works, and of course, there were models out there before the last 6
    years. In the 1960's there was this great effort, through the Great
    Society programs, to build up the poor urban and rural areas. And we
    found that, actually, they did a lot of good, in terms of providing
    nutrition for people, in terms of providing health care, in terms of
    providing educational opportunities. But the Government alone could not
    build a sustaining economy. You couldn't build an economic
    infrastructure with Government alone.
        In the 1980's, we learned that the stock market could grow, and we
    could create record numbers of new millionaires and billionaires, but
    the private sector alone could not do this, and that more and more
    people would fall further and further behind.
        So what we've tried to do is to apply our Third Way philosophy, that
    we should have a partnership between Government and the private sector
    that would literally empower people to change the dynamics of their
    lives in these poor neighborhoods. That's what the whole empowerment
    zone, enterprise community initiative, that the Vice President has so ably run, is designed to do. That's what
    these CDFI's are designed to do. That's what the--you know, that's why
    we've been so vigorous in pursuit of the Community Reinvestment Act. As
    I'm sure you know, over 90 percent of all the loans made under the CRA,
    even though it's been on the books for over 20 years, have been made
    during the life of this administration.
        So this is the next logical step. The problem with all that is it's
    sort of uneven, and it--the CRA--applies nationwide where there's
    available capital. But the CDFI's and the empowerment zones, the
    enterprise communities, they only apply where they are, and there are
    125 of them, but they don't cover every place. And even in the places
    where they exist, they don't cover all the areas of need within the
    cities where they exist.
        So if we can dramatically increase the awareness in the business
    community of the investment opportunities, through the use of the bully
    pulpit with the tour we're about to take with the business leaders and
    others, and if we can pass the new markets initiative, it is literally--
    it's a nationwide initiative. It would apply everywhere where there's an
    economically distressed area.
        So I'm very, very excited about this.
        Mr. Dunham. I've been talking to Sandy Weill, and he's a big backer
    of new markets initiative. He was saying that if the U.S. Government can
    create programs that help American corporations, protect them from some
    of the risks around the world, that it makes sense that something
    similar would be offered too, more

    [[Page 1112]]

    incentives in the United States. I was wondering how much of this may be
    modeled on some of the OPIC or other programs that have been successful
    around the world, and if you've had any of the same kinds of thoughts in
    trying to model this?
        The President. Yes. We actually--what we tried to do is to create at
    least the same, if not greater, incentives for American business to
    invest in America, that we give them to invest in developing economies
    overseas.
        I've been a vigorous supporter of OPIC and the Ex-Im Bank. I think
    that they're incredibly important to our interests and to the welfare of
    the people of developing countries around the world, and I would--and I
    have strongly opposed attempts to cut back on them in the last 6 years.
        But I think that it is--I woke up one day and basically realized--we
    started debating what we could do--that American businesses could get
    lower risk to invest in developing economies overseas than they could in
    the developing economy right here in America. And I think that's wrong.
        So there is a--the American private investment companies that we set
    up, which would be eligible for the loan guarantees--$2 in loan
    guarantee for every $1 of unguaranteed investment put up by the private
    sector--it directly came out of our attempts to parallel the incentives
    for investing overseas with incentives to invest here.

    Minorities in Corporate America

        Mr. Dunham. You've mentioned both Al From and Jesse Jackson. I'm
    curious what you think of the efforts that Jesse Jackson has made,
    working with corporate America--Wall Street, now in Silicon Valley--to
    try to encourage corporate America to hire more minorities, to invest
    more in minority areas, and to help underwrite minority businesses. I
    was wondering both what your sense is of what he's done and how it may
    have helped shape what you're doing here?
        The President. Well, I strongly support it, and I think that--you
    know, I've spoken to his Wall Street
    conference in each of the last 2 years. And I think he deserves a lot of
    credit. He's been out there trying to get this done for a long time.
        And it also influenced my thinking because Dick Grasso--who, you know, sponsors this with him every
    year--and the others who help have--they really persuaded me that there
    was a lot more we could do, even within existing law. And I'm hoping
    that I can support his efforts, that there will be--that these things
    will be entirely complementary.
        You know, maybe this is just the moment at which years and years of
    accumulated effort by a lot of people will be bearing fruit. I've been
    interested in this whole issue, and Hillary has, for a long, long time, every since we first
    learned about the efforts of the South Shore Development Bank in
    Chicago, and we brought a development bank like that to Arkansas, with a
    microenterprise loan program. And I realized that AID was helping people
    like Muhammad Yunus, who's founded the
    Grameen Bank at Bangladesh, you know, to do this kind of thing around
    the world. And I thought we ought to be doing it at home.
        And we had some good success in Arkansas. And in the mid-eighties, I
    headed, along with the Governors of Louisiana and Mississippi, the Delta
    Development Commission--the Lower Mississippi Delta Development
    Commission. And we looked at how to do these kinds of things in the
    Mississippi Delta, which is the poorest part of America.
        And so, as I said, there are--lots of people have been out there
    working on this, trying to get this done for a long time. And it seems
    to me that we now have enough evidence that what we have done works but
    that we still have these two big barriers. One is, the business
    community is not fully aware of what opportunities they actually have to
    make money now, and the second is that there are, frankly, still some
    greater risks in these areas that we ought to try to overcome by putting
    in place a framework where there's much more incentive to invest and at
    least as much as we give to invest overseas.

    President's Upcoming Travel To Promote New Markets Initiative

        Mr. Dunham. You've mentioned your upcoming trip that leaves July 5th
    and will go everywhere from Appalachia to Los Angeles. I was wondering
    if there are any kind of specific proposals that you see there, that
    will bring improvement to the communities you're going to visit? If
    you're--I know that the idea is to leave rays of hope in each of the
    places, but I didn't know if there were any specifics that you're
    looking to leave.

    [[Page 1113]]

        The President. We're going to do--we will try to do three things.
    One, we will try to highlight initiatives that are working now, things
    that we--like, we'll have places that have benefited from the community
    development financial institutions, for example.
        Two, we will try to highlight how the impact of the new markets
    initiative, if the Congress were to pass it, would take these benefits
    and immeasurably increase them and do it on a national basis, wherever
    there's need.
        And the third thing we will do is to have a whole series of
    announcements by business leaders about things they are going to do on
    their own, because they would be profitable, and by the way, they'll
    create businesses; they'll create jobs; they'll create opportunities in
    these areas.
        So we will have a heavy emphasis on that third area, because I don't
    think that, as I said, for a minute that this is primarily a Government
    initiative. This is a partnership initiative. But there are lots of
    opportunities right now, here, that people are genuinely unaware of. And
    I think most Americans understand how much prosperity we have and that
    no one could have imagined that the stock market would more than triple
    and that we would have now almost 19 million new jobs in the last 6\1/2\
    years and that all these things would happen and yet there would still
    be these pockets left behind. So I think there's a longing to see all of
    our fellow citizens caught up in this prosperity, everyone who's willing
    to work.
        And I think that, you know, when people actually know the facts,
    that there's a lot of money to be made out there--just on the retail--if
    you think about the retail issue alone, the fact that there's a
    purchasing power gap of 25 percent in these urban inner cities, that's a
    stunning statistic; and it's a bigger market than virtually all of our
    foreign markets; and that's just on retail; never mind the factories you
    could put in; never mind the other kinds of nonretail, small business
    services you could have. It's amazing.

    Status of New Markets Legislation

        Mr. Dunham. What is the status of the legislation? Republicans on
    the Hill say that they're still waiting for precise wording. It's pretty
    well known in general what will be in it. I was wondering if you have
    both timetable and game plan for going ahead and trying to get something
    done.
        The President. Well, what I want to do, I wanted to do this tour
    first, and get--I know there will be--a lot of Republican legislators, I
    believe, will participate in this because this really is something that
    Republicans should like. It's a completely--it's free enterprise. It's
    using the tax system to prove that the enterprise system can work in
    every community in America, which is what they believe.
        And so what I'm hoping will happen and what I intend to do is,
    during the tour and then immediately after, I want to consult with the
    leaders of Congress in both parties, see if there is the kind of
    bipartisan support for this concept that I think there should be, and
    then we will quickly move to get the legislation up there, because we've
    got it all budgeted, and it's well within the budget.
        And it also would be well within the budget potential of many
    Republican initiatives. I mean, the interesting thing is, if you do loan
    guarantees and tax credits, they don't cost that much money for the
    enormous benefit that they bring.
        Mr. Durham. I guess most of the Republican--the Republican approach
    where it differs is--zero capital gains, they're talking about, or some
    further regulatory relief. That is sort of separate from these kinds of
    incentives, and I don't know if there's any room for that in the final
    package or----
        The President. But that wouldn't do anything. You know, we had a
    capital gains reduction in the Balanced Budget Act. But that wouldn't do
    anything to specifically increase the likelihood of money going here.
    Because what we propose to do is to increase the relative attractiveness
    of these investments, recognizing that the relative risk is still
    slightly greater for a lot of the things that we'd like to see done.
        So I think that those conversations ought to occur in the context of
    our larger budget negotiations. But on this, I think that we still
    should do this. Whatever we come up with, in the end, with a tax bill,
    this should be done on its own merits. We need to increase the relative
    attractiveness during this period, just like we're increasing the
    relative ability to hire people who are disabled because they can carry
    their Medicaid health insurance with them into the work force.

    [[Page 1114]]

    National Economy

        Mr. Dunham. Do you--you were talking about growth, and perhaps the
    new economy and the changes of the recent decade would change the models
    of growth. Do you see, down the road, where you could have growth more
    than 2 percent, where it could be 3.5 percent or more per year?
        The President. Without inflation?
        Mr. Dunham.  Without inflation.
        The President. Oh sure, well, that's what we've had for the last 6
    years.
        Mr. Dunham. Yes, exactly.
        The President. I do. But I think if we're going to do it, you have
    to find ways to find new customers and add to the work force in areas
    where there is an opportunity for growth without inflation. For example,
    I think--suppose we did all this, and we got down to a 3.5 percent
    unemployment rate. It's not inconceivable to me that we could do that,
    if we target these population groups and these neighborhoods and these
    places, without a substantial increase in inflation.
        Then the next big step is, I still believe, is that we and the other
    wealthy countries of the world are going to have to really work in a
    disciplined fashion with well-run nations, developing nations, and
    maximize the use of technology. I think a lot of these poor countries,
    if they're well-run, could skip a whole generation of economic
    development because of technology. With the advent of the Internet, I
    think you could--first of all, you could revolutionize all their
    schools. When I was in Africa, in these little villages in Uganda, which
    is the country in Africa that's done the most to cut its AIDS rate--so
    it has--it's a country with capacity and a sophisticated government, and
    I went into the little villages that had outdated maps that still had
    the Soviet Union there and all that.
        And I thought to myself, if we wired all these schools, if we hooked
    them up to the Internet, they could also have printers, and they
    wouldn't have to buy new maps; they could print out new maps. And the
    government could cover the operating costs of the computers in the
    schools. They could just be printing--you know, you just hook them up
    with a printer. They could print their educational materials. They could
    print their maps.
        There are things we could do, and I believe--let me just say one
    other thing. I also think these countries can skip a generation of
    development in the sense that they do not have to, even in their initial
    stages, worsen their environment the way people did through the
    industrial revolution if they do it in a clever way.
        So I think the opportunities for new jobs, new growth without
    inflation, because of technology and because of what we know in these
    areas, are stunning. But in order to do it over the long run, over a
    sustained basis--for 10 years, let's say--we're going to have to have
    much more sophisticated trading links, which means that we are going to
    have to deal with the things I talked about in Geneva--both times, in my
    two trade talks there--and the things I talked about at the University
    of Chicago. We've got to somehow build a consensus on trade that makes
    the American working people feel that we are preserving the social
    contract, if you will, here at home, and that we're doing it in a way
    that advances the lives of ordinary people around the world.
        I think, if we can do that, if we can sort of adapt the world
    trading system--on the theory of leaving no one behind and making
    maximum use of new technologies and what we know about economic
    potential--I think that this thing can go on for an indefinite period.
        But if we don't, if we don't do that, if we don't deal with the
    populations and the neighborhoods here at home, if we don't do these
    things, then at some point, you'll reach a floor in unemployment, and
    wage demands will occur and there will be some shortage or another
    around the world in some thing or another people need, and inflation
    will resume.
        Mr. Dunham. Right.
        The President. But I do think that the world is in a different place
    now. I think we--whatever happens, about things we don't know about--you
    know, no economist has an accurate model of how this has all changed the
    business cycle or what productivity has really done to growth.
        But what we know is that if we are fiscally responsible and we
    continue to pursue this course that you and I discussed here today, that
    we will perform far better than we otherwise would, that we'll be better
    citizens in terms of our relationships with one another in America, and
    we'll be better citizens of the world. We know that, regardless, we'll
    get better performance and we'll be a better society. So I hope that we
    can keep pushing all of this.

    [[Page 1115]]

    Federal Budget Surplus

        Mr. Dunham. I wouldn't be a good BusinessWeek reporter if I didn't
    ask about the trillion-dollar windfall, as it were, and if you see this
    as on opening to a possible agreement that would cover everything from
    Medicare, with the prescription drug benefit that you talked about today
    to, on the Republican side, perhaps tax cuts that would be larger than
    what you had spelled out in the State of the Union?
        The President. I think it--obviously, when you have more money than
    you thought you were going to, it should make it easier to have an
    omnibus agreement. And I hope it will.
        From my point of view, I want to caution, however, that--all of
    this, what we have this year, we will actually have, everything else
    we're projecting--that what will make the projections turn out to be
    facts is very disciplined, responsible management of the economy and the
    clear signal to the markets that we're managing our long-term problems.
        So this should make it easier to make an agreement on Social
    Security and Medicare and paying down the debt and still have more funds
    for education, medical research, tax cuts, you name it. But we have to
    have our priorities in order. We still don't want to go off and have a
    big tax cut and ignore the Medicare liabilities, the Social Security
    liabilities, or what I consider to be the enormous opportunity we have
    to pay off the debt of the country over the next 15 years.
        When I became President, we had a $290 billion deficit, and it was
    projected to increase forever. And now we project that next year we'll
    have a $142 billion surplus, and we could actually be out of debt in 15
    years.
        Now, I think it's important to note why that is. Again, in a global
    economy with global financial markets, I think that's quite a desirable
    thing, because it means lower interest rates for everything from
    business investment to car payments to home mortgages to college loans
    to credit cards. It means, therefore, more money for jobs, for growth,
    for wages; and it means we are relatively less dependent on global
    markets in times of turmoil, like we had in Asia.
        It also means that our trading partners--again, we want them to
    grow; they need to do well, these developing countries--it means they
    will be able to access capital, that they will have to get from beyond
    their borders, at lower interest rates than would otherwise be the case,
    because we won't be--the Government, at least--won't be in these
    markets.
        So I think the idea of the United States and, hopefully, other
    wealthy countries in the world being free of public debt, at least long-
    term, structural public debt--you know, maybe if a country wants to
    undertake to rebuild all its airports and float bonds to do it, that's
    one thing. But you know what I mean; I mean long-term, structural public
    debt--I think is a very appealing prospect for the world over the next
    15 to 20 years, because then we could take a lot of this investment
    capital that would normally go to governments in the United States and
    put it into these developing economies, where it is desperately needed,
    in a way that would benefit them and benefit us.
        So I hope that--again, this should have appeal to the Republicans as
    well as the Democrats, the idea of making America debt-free.
        Mr. Dunham. Right.
        The President. And we can have a tax cut. But we ought to do Social
    Security and Medicare, and I still believe a big portion of these taxes
    ought to be--tax cuts ought to be directed toward helping more people
    save for their retirement. That's another thing.
        You know, most people will not have enough in their private pensions
    and Social Security and in their present 401(k) accounts to sustain
    their lifestyles when they retire. So I do think that my proposal there
    deserves some consideration from the Republican majority, just because I
    think it's good social policy, and it's a good way to give a tax cut to
    increase savings.
        We've got--our savings rate in America has gone up in the last 6
    years solely because of the decline in Government deficits, and now the
    surplus. There has been no increase in savings by individuals. Now, that
    is somewhat misleading, because it doesn't count record-high
    homeownership. But still, I think, I hope we can get all this done. The
    new economic news should increase the chances of an omnibus agreement.
    But we still have to keep first things first here.

    Federal Reserve Board Chairman

        Mr. Dunham. My Sam Donaldson question is, what about Alan Greenspan?
        The President. Well, you know, he's
    established a pretty good record, and he's been right a lot more often
    than he's been wrong over

    [[Page 1116]]

    the last several years. And as I said, the relationship we've had has
    been one of mutual respect and independence, and I respect his--he knows
    what we're doing. He knows that we're determined to be fiscally
    responsible, and he knows--actually, we haven't talked about some of the
    things that are in this article, but I'm sure he'll read it, and he'll
    get a feel for what my theory is for how we can achieve long-term growth
    without inflation.
        But he also knows there are these
    underlying things that he monitors every week for the Fed, and he'll
    make the best judgment he can. And whatever he does is his decision to
    make.
        Mr. Dunham. Do you think he might for 5 more years?
        The President. Oh, I don't even know if he wants to do it. I haven't talked to him. I don't even
    know if he's interested.
        Mr. Dunham. Well, thank you very much.
        The President. Thank you.

    Note: The interview began at 4:25 p.m. in the Oval Office at the White
    House on June 29 but was embargoed for release until 10 p.m. on July 1.
    In his remarks, the President referred to Sanford I. Weill, chairman and
    chief executive officer, The Travelers Group, Inc.; Hugh L. McColl, Jr.,
    chairman and chief executive officer, Bank of America; Richard L. Huber,
    chairman and chief executive officer, Aetna, Inc.; civil rights leader
    Jesse Jackson; Al From, president, Democratic Leadership Council;
    Richard Grasso, chairman and chief executive officer, New York Stock
    Exchange; former Gov. Charles (Buddy) Roemer of Louisiana; and former
    Gov. Ray Mabus of Mississippi. A tape was not available for verification
    of the content of this interview.