Bill Clinton: “Well, I've talked to Mr. Rubin this morning at some length, and he's obviously been making calls around the country. I'd…”

“Well, I've talked to Mr. Rubin this morning at some length, and he's obviously been making calls around the country. I'd just like to make two observations. One is that we have conducted, since the stock market began to fall, another exhaustive review of all the evidence we have and the opinions of everybody we can talk to around the country. No one believes that there is any serious reason to doubt, that there is any inflation in this economy, or that we won't have good growth this year. In other words, there is no underlying economic justification for any cause of concern or any increase in long- term interest rates. There are a lot of people who have believed for some time--and it's been in the press a lot--that the stock market had a very rapid runup last year. It might have been a little bit too high, and maybe a lot of this is people just kind of working that out. But again, I say, I think it's very important that the American people remain confident that there's no inflation in the economy, that there's no reason that the economy shouldn't grow, that there's no reason we shouldn't have 2 million more jobs. The stock market, like any kind of market, is subject to movements which may sometimes be a little more than is warranted by the economic circumstances one way or the other. We saw that often in the 1980's, when the stock market tripled in years when unemployment went up, when wages were stagnant, when the underlying economy didn't seem to justify it. So we've had a very good market; I'm very grateful for it. I hope that we'll rebound quickly, but the underlying economy is in good shape. And no one should make decisions based on a worry about some inflation factor they don't know about or some impending problem in some sector of the economy. Things, according to every single report I have, are still very solid for a solid economic growth.”