Presidential contender speaks with NBC's Brian Williams

 

Brian Williams: What was your message at Wall Street today?

 

Barack Obama: I think the core of the message is that we're all in this together. And that for a lot of years now, the way we thought about our economy that Wall Street is somehow separate from Main Street.

People here have been doing extraordinarily well. We've seen hedge funds, private equity funds and investment bankers make extraordinary profits. And out in the hinterlands, people are struggling to fill up the gas tank or save for their child's college education or pay for their own retirement.

Now, with the sub prime lending crisis, I think Wall Street's jittery. But you also have 2.5 million people who may lose their homes. And there are some structural issues that I think we have to deal with, to make sure that everybody is seeing a growing economy but also, everybody is prospering at the same time.

 

Brian Williams: Is Gordon Gecko dead or alive, Michael Douglas' famous character in Wall Street who said "Greed is good"?

 

Barack Obama: You know, my sense is that you don't have the same sorts of over the top statements that you saw during that period. But the underlying economic factors that produced a very small number of extraordinary winners and there's been enormous waste, stagnation for ordinary workers, which is why we've got the greatest income inequality since any time since the gilded age.

Now, I think that most Americans don't resent people for getting rich. They want to get rich themselves. And they believe in the free market system. But they worry that the system may be rigged. And that given the combination of technology and globalization, that more and more people are not able to compete and potentially over the long term, that their children may be a little bit worse off than they were.

 

Brian Williams: I asked this at the last democratic debate. Are hedge funds good or bad for America? Is it right for these hedge funds making billions and billions of dollars along with the hedge fund managers?

 

Barack Obama: Well, I don't think that hedge funds are bad per se. I think they're just one more financial tool. And in that sense, they're useful. But I think that what we've seen are a number of rules that skew in the favor of folks on Wall Street. Private equity funds and hedge fund managers who are paying a lower tax rate than their secretaries.

There are some failures in the regulatory regimes that have been set up. For example, I talked today that there may be an incestuous relationship between ratings agencies that are determining the quality of investments and the people that they're rating.

So, what we need is stronger market transparency and accountability. That's good for everybody and the marketplace. We have to think about how are we investing to make sure that everybody can compete in this global economy? And that means investing in education and it means investing in things like energy independence. And we've got to rebuild our social safety net, particularly on health care and retirement security, where a lot of ordinary Americans are seeing that security slip away. When that security slips away, they are more likely to turn to things like protectionism that, over time, may constrict economic growth overall.

 

Brian Williams: Who or what do you think is to blame for this current mortgage and credit crisis? Who do we see about that?

 

Barack Obama: Well, I think there are a lot of folks who ought to take some responsibility. The original idea was a good one, which was that let's see if we can distribute this more broadly and make it easier to provide loans to people who otherwise might be not be able to get a mortgage loan.

Over time, what ended up happening was that the appraisers started loosening their standards. The mortgage brokers started playing around with their standards. Then, the people who were buying these securities weren't really checking very carefully to see whether the underlying mortgage could support the loans that were made.

And so, over time, you had everybody I think conspiring to just do what felt good and what was making a lot of money. The problem was that a lot of homeowners were induced to take out loans that they could afford only if home prices continued to go up.

 

Brian Williams: Let's talk about the campaign which I understand you've been spending some of your free time doing. To what's the surprise? What is it, seven months into it?

 

Barack Obama: You know, I am number one surprised by the extraordinary interest of the American people. I think even early on, I mean, we were getting crowds of twenty thousand people in Austin, Texas, twenty thousand people in Atlanta even back in March and April.

There is a hunger for change in the country. And there's a recognition that we've got a series of decisions that we've got to make. Not just on the war, but I think about health care, energy, education, that we can't put off any longer.

So, that I think is a pleasant surprise. Obviously, the intensity of the campaign for so long makes you worry that at a certain point, people will just say, enough already. And you still have uncertainty at the calendar which surprises me, because you'd think that four or five months out, we'd know which states are going when.

 

Joseph Brodsky, The Art of Poetry No. 28