[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 3 (Monday, January 25, 1999)]
[Pages 64-70]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
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

[[Page 65]]

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 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: two 
were in the Mississippi Delta; three 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

[[Page 66]]

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.
    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

[[Page 67]]

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 
one trillion dollars 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 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 board rooms 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.

[[Page 68]]

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:
    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 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 cost 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 start ups 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 license, 
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.

[[Page 69]]

    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 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

[[Page 70]]

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 
civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson; 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; 
and development economist Muhammad Yunus, managing director, Grameen 
Bank, Bangladesh. A portion of these remarks could not be verified 
because the tape was incomplete. This item was not received in time for 
publication in the appropriate issue.