Bill Clinton: “I think what the administration should do is focus on the economic fundamentals at home and focus on fixing what appears…”

“I think what the administration should do is focus on the economic fundamentals at home and focus on fixing what appears to be, in my judgment, the biggest remaining obstacle to continued growth around the world on which our growth depends. I think that the savings rate, the aggregate savings rate of the country is very important for the long-term economic health of America. I don't think there's any question that the savings rate dropping to zero or negative in the last quarter of last year is in part due to the fact that people feel that they have more wealth. Now, that is not a bad thing that they have more wealth. One of the things that I'm really pleased about is that through retirement funds and other things, there is a more broad sharing of the wealth in America. But I would like to just say the two things I think I should be working on, and this is something I ask all of you to watch as we debate the specific proposals on Social Security and the specific proposals on Medicare. Because, keep in mind, I carefully made the Social Security and Medicare proposals I made so that we could fund them and pay down the debt, because if we pay down the debt we increase savings, aggregate savings, in America. And when we do that, we assure the long-term stability of our economy. Lower interest rates means higher investment, more jobs, more businesses, lower mortgage rates, lower home loan rates--excuse me, lower car loan rates, lower college loan rates, lower credit card rates, the whole 9 yards. I think that is very, very important. At a time when we have such a low personal savings rate, it is very important that we get the Government debt down. Secondly, it will help us to do what we have to do in the rest of the world. If you look at Asia, they have--their situation in a lot of those Asian countries is more like what we went through in the 1930's; that is, they have a collapse of demand. They need more liquidity. They need more funds. They need more investment. They need more activity. If we are not taking money out of the international system but instead paying down our own debt, then there will be more funds that will be able to flow into that part of the world to get the economy going, into Latin America to keep the economy there from sinking under the weight of the Asian problems. So this is very important. The second thing I'd like to say is, I'm doing my dead-level-best to build on the work we've been doing for the last 2 or 3 years to try to fix some of the problems in the international financial system. Keep in mind that one of the things that caused such great burden in the Asian financial crisis is, these countries didn't get in trouble the way we were used to countries getting in trouble. We were used to countries getting in trouble where they had great big deficits and enormous inflation and everything got out of control. What happened in these countries were, there were problems with the financial institutions, problems with the rules and the transparency in making loans and making investments. And we're trying to make some changes that we'll try to ratify this summer when we meet in Germany that I think could go a long way toward ensuring that this sort of thing will not happen again in the future. Now, the markets will determine what happened to the markets. What I think I have to do is give the American people good, sound fundamentals, pay this debt down, and try to get the financial architecture of the 21st century straightened out. Mark [Mark Knoller, CBS Radio]. Independent Counsel Statute”