First, Secretary Yellen, thank you for inviting me back to the Treasury Department for this very important milestone and for letting my memory wander back over the years.
I actually, I just have to say this, I was thrilled when you became Treasury Secretary. And I remember so many of the meetings we had when you were a member of, and then the chairman, of the Council of Economic Advisors. And I wouldn’t pass much muster today in the current political environment because I liked it when I had people working for me who disagreed with me. I liked being advised by people who knew more than I did about everything. And you were one. And you’ve been one great Treasury Secretary, and I thank you for it.
I am, I don’t want to get into an analysis of the current political situation, but I will say this, it’s very interesting, and it must be frustrating to some of you knowing that you played a role in what will clearly be the largest number of jobs created in any four-year period in the history of our republic, and you may wonder why people aren’t happy with you. And the answer is, no matter how many jobs you created, if you’d created 50 million new jobs in four years, inflation would affect more people than the new jobs would. And what we really need to think about is how are things out of whack in America, how can we create a rolling prosperity where people are all treated equally? And that’s how I think of this 30th anniversary of the Community Development Financial Institutions.
In 1983, when I was a young governor and we were meeting, we were having our Annual Governors Association meeting in Washington. One of Hillary’s friends from college, Dan Piercy, who many of you know, I’m sure, said, “I want you guys to meet Mohammad Yunus.” And he and his fellow Bangladeshi had created two of the biggest microcredit banks in the world. And both became good friends of mine. Based on a morning breakfast, that basically made all the sense in the world to me. I mean, I had wondered how we were going to create enough jobs in rural places like Arkansas, which already were beginning to face an economic downturn. And I knew when the Cold War finished, we would really see a significant alteration of jobs.
You know, my hometown in Arkansas had like 37,000 people when I went to high school. We had factories downtown with everything else. And it was a national park – we had all kinds of stuff going on. But there was no place for these little people to go when the big public funds ran out. And that morning I was sitting with Mohammad Yunus, drinking coffee, carried away then – how long ago was that? 40 some years ago – as I am now, by the incredible enthusiasm of this guy. He was always thinking about how we could democratize finance and how we couldn’t build shared prosperity, no matter how hard people worked, unless they had access to functioning capital.
So, when I went to meet Yunus that morning, the only thing I knew was Dan Piercy was over here and told me about what the South Shore Bank in Chicago was doing. And how following this model they had funded Croatian electricians and black farmers, I mean, black carpenters, to save the Southside. And I knew it would work in the rural south. So, I backed into this.
But I just finished a little turn through rural America, in the current, in the last election season. And it reminded me all over again that intelligence and the ability to work and the commitments to family and community, they’re pretty well evenly distributed throughout the whole world. But financing and opportunity are not. So, the great thing that you have to deal with a Treasury, which is a fascinating problem, is how do you maximize the availability of things that otherwise would not be available without overdoing it and contributing to whatever inflationary trends have to be in the economy? And I have enormous empathy for you because nobody’s had to deal with inflation in 40 years in America, which should explain why it was so jolting for people. And the CDFI Fund, I believe, has helped everybody from abandoned urban neighborhoods to rural communities to Native American communities. And I still think the model is really important now.
We’re fixing to see an enormous boost again in America’s economic prospects as we go from 60 to 100,000 infrastructure projects across America. As we see what’s happened with the CHIPS Act, the Syracuse community in upstate New York is gonna generate through Micron about 60,000 new jobs alone. This thing is gonna change the future of face of America. And what we do, the lessons we learn and whether every American has a fair chance to be part of this prosperity will depend in part on what those of you who are career employees do and those of you who are political employees, what your success is and interest in, with the CDFI Fund. Because it is designed basically to equalize opportunity through otherwise unavailable access to investment capital that, as you heard the Secretary said, has about an eight-to-one return on investment. There aren’t very many handy investments that you have – otherwise you’d all be rich working somewhere else – that can give you an eight-to-one return.
So, I believe that we have to be thinking about now 30 years after the creation of this fund. We have a model that clearly works. We’re moving beyond the inflationary problems. Fuel is already down if we don’t make it worse by getting rid of solar and wind, and start having inflation and fuel prices again, we’ll be okay on that point. And then we’re beginning to get a hold of the housing problem if we don’t walk away from the obvious responses. And I want to say that one of the things that I am personally grateful for, I would be remised if I didn’t, is that the fund has worked in all American communities, including Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands, and other territories. And that means a lot with me. My foundation was, has been heavily involved, especially since the hurricane seasons of 2017 in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. You don’t have to have a new appropriation; you don't have to do anything. You just have to put the money in places, in places where people can put it to work. And I, so I think the main point I want to make is that by any standard, this is a great success. It is a great success. And during the pandemic, the COVID pandemic, President Trump’s administration supported increasing investments in CDFI. And we should do it again. This ought to be something we can finally put beyond partisan politics. And if you look at what the Biden Administration has done with investments and funds for infrastructure, and the CHIPS Act, with more new investments going into politically red areas and blue ones, we need to have that kind of principle: Where, where is the need? Where is the capacity? Where the capacity meets the need, the tax dollars should go.
And I just want to say to every one of you, I am very grateful for your service. And I know that there’s been so much change churning through America's social, political, and economic life. It has been disorienting. And I told a friend of mine the other night, who’s not quite as old as I am, nobody is, it seems anymore. But I said, you know, I always loved change because I had found it fascinating, but I realized I had the equipment to sustain it. Not a lot of personal wealth, I was the least wealthy new president since Harry Truman. But through believing that thinking and working and innovating was a way we could all live. Most people don’t feel they have that option. And if they’re living with a lot of change, it’s a burden after a few years and it’s a burden a significant number of American just want to lay down. And some of them may not understand that the price of laying down your burden of dealing with uncertainty, may be the loss of liberty. The loss of options, the loss of prosperity.
The CDFI is one place that Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, have met now for all these decades to give ordinary citizens, not pie in the sky, but practical power to make something of their life. For all of you that have anything to do with it, I’m very grateful. And I hope that you will use this 30th anniversary year to acquaint more people with it. Because the only way we’re gonna get the price of the housing down is to have more affordable housing. And the only way it’s gonna work is that somebody is able to actually afford what we say is affordable. This is all very practical real-world stuff, but it will have an enormous amount to do with calming this country down and freeing people; thinking they’ve done right by their families, they’ve done right by their kids, they’ve done right so that they are now free to make the most of their workdays. That’s how I want you to see what you have done here.
It is a great gift to America these last 30 years, but we are now in a position to do much, much more of it at the same time because we have places that are growing like crazy, but behind the growth, there are all these people that still can’t get conventional bank notes. That all these needs can’t be met. So, go out there and celebrate this and say, here’s something Democrats and Republicans have supported. Here’s something that’s people centered, that’s life centered, that’s about tomorrow not about yesterday. Here’s something we don’t have to fight about. We are empowered to work together on. I’ll always be grateful that she got me to have coffee with Mohammed Yunus that day, 42 years ago. I’m thrilled that he’s even older than I am and he’s in the saddle finally in Bangladesh. A battle that I helped him fight from time-to-time over the last decades. You just have to keep going.
And Madame Secretary, I thank you for all the innovations, all the good ideas, but especially I thank you for this, because we have a chance to give people the power every day to change their children’s futures, and to minimize the amount of insecurity they had to live with and uncertainty. And I thank all of you for proving the service in this national government is a noble and good thing if you show up every day with your head on straight, and your heart pointed in the right direction. Thank you.
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