Bill Clinton: “If I might, let me just say, first of all, on the economic issues, Asia is the fastest growing part of the world. Latin…”

“If I might, let me just say, first of all, on the economic issues, Asia is the fastest growing part of the world. Latin America is the second fastest growing now. About 40 percent of our exports are now going to Asia. And more and more of our trade-related jobs are tied there. It is a very important thing that we are not only hosting this economic conference, that--and the Prime Minister has been too modest. He played a major role in convincing all these countries that their leaders should come to Seattle to be a part of this. But the fact that all these leaders are going to come here and we're going to have a chance to sit one-on-one and in groups with no sort of bureaucratic apparatus, no preset agenda, nothing to weigh us down, and talk through a whole range of economic and political issues, is an enormous opportunity for me to follow up on what we did at the G-7, where we reestablished clearly and publicly the dynamics of our relationship with Japan which we're working on now, our security obligations in Korea. Now we'll have a chance I'm not sure a United States President has ever had before, to talk to the leaders of all these countries at one time and to try to map out an agenda. But I don't want to prewrite what's going to happen there because it might get a little better as we go along.”