Robert Rubin

And I think this is going to be, we're going to take it from abstract to a real-time learning experience in financial literacy.

So I don't like to make every episode about liberal media bias and anti-Trump bias, but if Barack Obama created Obama accounts and gave every kid in America with parents who couldn't afford it a thousand bucks and an app, and his treasury secretary, I don't know, Bob Rubin or whatever, went in and asked him, Malley, will you concede that this would get a lot more coverage if it were done by a Democratic president? Would you concede that?

Probably, and look, I'll say something that some of my progressive friends might be angry with.

But look, of all the issues I have with the Trump tax bill, it is not the Trump accounts.

It is one of my favorite topics.

And for our viewers watching today, I want you to look up Robert Rubin's book called An Uncertain World, I believe it is.

Uh, written about 30 years ago.

Robert Rubin was a, a, a Wall Street, uh, titan, if you will.

He was, uh, Clinton's Treasury Secretary for a while, and he wrote extensively about not if something will happen, but what are the odds that something will happen.

And he showed the, the remunerative effect of this in his work, and how if I knew something w- was a high probability, this is how I would go about dealing with it or mitigating it versus something low probability.

She, she, uh, tried very hard.

There was a climactic meeting at the end of July 1996, where she and Bob Rubin and Henry Cisneros and Bob Reisch and, and, uh, uh, the, the three political advisors that I mentioned, and the vice president and, and others were in the room.

All, all made what argument? Did they just, were there? Did Bob Rubin oppose it? Did-

Yes, Bob Rubin opposed it

... did the vice president oppose it?

No, the Bob, vice president urged him to sign the bill.

Yeah.

That's so important.

It was just spectacular.

I thought Robert Rubin was particularly eloquent, and Al Hunt stole the show, uh, driving all of Bloomberg News in Washington for years in the Wall Street Journal.

Al Hunt just absolutely-

Yep, yep

Economic Council, that it was created by President Bill Clinton.

And my good friend, I'm sure friends, a lot of people in the room, Bob Rubin, was the first person to have that job.

And without naming names, I think that President Clinton thought that once you send the cabinet people out to run their cabinet agencies, that some of them might have agendas of their own that disagree with what President Clinton's agenda was.

I'm not naming names, but I think I can hear names being thought.

And so he brought Bob Rubin in to make sure that the president's objectives are being pursued by the cabinet agencies and to pick up the phone every day and say, what are you doing? What are you doing? What are you doing? And so it's an interesting thing.

One little trivia is that sometimes people call me chairman of the National Economic Council, but I'm not the chairman.

I'm the director.

I recant House of Representative interviews.

President Clinton, Bob Rubin, all beating the drum for Chinese integration under the theory that they were gonna open their one point three billion person market, their consumer market, to the United States and other Western countries.

It didn't happen.

Moreover, when they were rising, we allowed them to have the protected status of an emerging economy.

Mr. Froman, folks, is definitive across the arc of the modern age of our trade and international, uh, relations.

It is an earned ability as chief of staff ages ago to Robert Rubin, and far before that with all of his work at Council on Foreign Relations and Foreign Affairs Magazine.

You know, I am, full, full disclosure, folks, I'm a member.

Paul, have I paid my dues? I can't remember.