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Writings & Speeches

REMARKS
Treasury Department Reunion
April 25, 2020
Revised March 2021

by Gene Rotberg

When Don Allison asked me to make some remarks at this reunion dinner, I was ambivalent. For several reasons:

I was concerned that I would sound like one of those out-of-it old-timers who pretended that we were smarter, wiser, more innovative, bolder, worked harder, than those who followed us, that things were better in the good old days. Such nonsense. I was reminded of the story about the customer, who upon entering a restaurant, asked to be seated. The maître d’ politely explained that there were no empty tables and that the customer had no reservation. The customer insisted on a table. The maître d’ again politely explained it was not possible. They were overbooked. The customer persisted. "Don’t you know who I am?" The maître d’ replied, “No, who were you.”

I was also ambivalent about this whole business of reunions. As Byron put it more eloquently:

“When we too parted
In silence and tears
Half broken-hearted
To sever for years. . .
If I should meet thee
After long years
How should I greet thee?
With silence and tears.”

And, I was concerned that you would notice my cane, my walker, my slowness of speech and the quivering in my left hand. You would whisper among yourselves, “He’s changed.” I remembered that 10 years ago, when I was 80, I bragged to my doctor that I saw no evidence of dementia, I had no short-term memory loss, my deductive skills were just fine and I could still figure present value calculations in my head. He simply replied, “Just wait until you’re 90.”

Soon I realized that my ambivalence about speaking to you reflected my overwhelming need to be loved and respected without any qualification by all of you – that I was the same as 50 years ago. But, as Iris put it, You are 90 years old. Get over it. So, here I am.

But one thing I will not get over is what you have done.

You and your successors simply raised $900 billion and invested those funds pending their disbursement to poor countries. To what end? Life expectancy went way up. Fewer children died before the age of five. Hundreds of millions of boys and girls for the first time went to school. Safe water and electric power became available. Far fewer lived in absolute poverty. Far less starvation. Less heartache over dead children. Hundreds of millions more could read and write. Fewer little girls work knee-deep in mud in rice fields. Far less infant and maternal deaths at childbirth. There is more democracy. There is more civil discourse. Hundreds of millions now have hope because of you.

Let me be more specific. In the 1980s two billion people on our planet lived in extreme poverty earning less than $2 a day. Today, 500 million. In China, GDP per capita went from $90 in 1960 to $10,000 today. In 1970, 280 million children under the age of five were underweight. Now 80 million. Life expectancy in India went from 41 years in 1958 to 65 years today. In Bangladesh 21% were literate in 1960, 65% today can read and write. In China, in 1960, 37% were literate; now over 90%. Child mortality worldwide in 1960 was 22%. It is now 4%.

To what end? There would have been little direct foreign investment or commercial bank loans had you not first provided the resources needed for infrastructure, roads, airports, rail, ports, schools, hospitals, health centers, inoculations, agricultural finance, dams, disease control, power grids, safe water supply, policies encouraging export. But, you will not get the credit - your name will not be recognized - because immortality is mostly reserved for writers and poets, for artists and composers and sculptors who leave behind the evidence of their work, with their names attached, and whose works are seen and heard over and over, generation after generation. Verdi's "Va Pensiero" and Mahler's "Adagios" will bring chills forever.

Ovid, the Roman poet, 2,000 years ago, put it this way at the end of his great poem, “Metamorpheses:”

“I shall have mention on mens lips forever,
And if the propheses of bards have any truth,
Throughout all the ages I shall live in fame
Vivam.”

But, you will have no such legacy. Your name will not be attached, even though without you the enormous changes for a better world would not have happened. Children simply would not have been born. That little kid flying a kite in Afghanistan, that little girl bent over washing clothes in a stream in Peru, owe their lives to you. One day they will work together, at Mayo Clinic or Geneva and find a cure for cancer. That is your immortality. It is of a different kind - silent, unknown. No medals, no chills.

Second, you shared your wisdom and expertise with the poorest in the world. And with your successors: You trained hundreds who went back to their home countries with your expertise in raising resources and investing wisely. The result: Some of the poorest countries in the world, in their own names, have raised $250 billion in capital markets throughout the world - to alleviate the corrosive effects of poverty - violence, lethargy, heartache. Ghana, Bulgaria, Columbia, Ivory Coast, Dominion Republic, Egypt, Equador, Fiji, Indonesia, Morrocco, Pakistan, Peru, Vietnam – even IDA.

Third, there is another development that reflects on what you did – rarely acknowledged. You showed the world how even the poorest country could intermediate another country’s savings to purchase goods and services from a third country to be used to facilitate the economy of all countries. You provided the indispensable finance to facilitate trade among nations, to integrate the economies and the peoples of the world. You were, are the linchpin – the “sine qua non” of globalization. Irreversible.

A DIGRESSION

But suppose I am wrong and it is all reversible. Giles Harvey in The New York Times recently quoted Kazuo Ishiguru’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature: “I woke up recently to the realization I have been living some years in a bubble. I realize that my world—a civilized place filled with ironic liberal-minded people—was in fact much smaller than I ever imagined. ... the most unstoppable advance of liberal humanitarian values I’d taken for granted since childhood may have been an illusion.”

I share Ishiguru’s angst. I fear that our liberalism has been checkmated by “America First”—the slogan used by the German American Bund supporting Hitler in the 1930s. We all have seen political movements to the right throughout the world, not just in North Korea or Iran or Yemen or Syria, but in Greece,The Philippines, Poland, the Stans, Cambodia,Venezuela. Beggar thy neighbor. Do it alone. Isolate. Brexit. Punishing tariffs. We close borders to people, goods, and services. We elect conspiracy theorists and Satanists, whose explicit goals are to destroy, not just the separation of powers, but the existence of an independent legislature and judiciary and the very underpinnings of democracy—the right to vote.

You will argue that these are merely temporary aberrations that do not in any way threaten the basic lessons of morality of Moses, Christ, or Plato and that society has not rejected the teaching of 2500 years ago, burnished over the last several centuries by John Stuart Mill and Thomas Jefferson. They taught that society will reward the just, the wise, and the fair, that human beings are rational and liberal animals. We celebrated the Age of Enlightenment. We rejected Thomas Hobbes and Machiavelli. We advanced.

Indeed, each structural change arising out of the French and American revolutions in the late eighteenth century, through the social revolutions of 1848, even through the assassinations of royalty in the late nineteenth century to the dissolution of monarchies at the end of World War 1, through the rebalancing of the social structure in the United States in the 1930s, through the Civil Rights Act of the 1960s, each society became fairer, more liberal, and more sharing. We rejected the concept of winner take all. It was with pride and no sense of embarrassment that we could quote John Donne:

“Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind;
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.”

Now, I fear that the body politic would rather respond to and identify with the words of Carl Sandburg:

“Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders ...
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding.”

JUST ONE MORE RIOT

I fear that if there had been just one more riot in a large city, with looting, accompanied by a takeover of government buildings and TV constantly showing smashed plate glass windows, with hardly a squeak of condemnation from US liberals—just one more riot—the recent election in the United States would have gone the other way. As it was, 74 million of our neighbors registered their protest.

But, is not our response to refugee camps throughout the world evidence of the ascendancy of liberalism and humanitarianism? I would ask whether, to the contrary, it is simply the proof of the ascendancy of those who caused the problem in the first place. And when we tear down statues or rename buildings because of the lack of perfection of those we celebrated, does that not prove our commitment to liberalism and its ascendancy? And when we create safe spaces so as not to threaten readers of Dr. Seuss, Huckleberry Finn, or The Merchant of Venice, have we not also proven the vitality of liberalism. Or, has the evidence of liberalism, in effect, provided the proof of Aristotle’s argument that every form of government, including democracy, has in it the seeds of its own destruction.

One thing for sure, those who have authority had best not quote from Robert Herrick, born in 1591:

“Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.

“Next, when I cast mine eyes, and see
That brave vibration each way free,
O how that glittering taketh me!”

Best to forget about John Wilmot’s “The Imperfect Enjoyment.” or Ovid’s, “The Art of Love.”

The question haunts whether my 20 years of classics seminars at St. Johns College have already been vanquished. The great debate, I fear, will be which policies will win out: Beggar thy neighbor or share with thy neighbor, forgiveness or punishment, admit to mistakes or failure, or just lie and cheat over and over. I suspect that our grandchildren will probably find out which will be the winner.

Let me conclude with some personal remarks. When I came to the Bank, I hardly knew a stock from a bond. You protected me from foolishness. You let me take credit for what you developed. You covered up my mistakes. You let me introduce innovative ways to evaluate risk and raise resources as if they were my ideas.

When I left the Bank, you were still working on that magic zero coupon bond with a perpetual maturity. And your successors are still trying. You let me pretend, because I was the public face of the Treasury Department, that I understood the cash flow of swaps. You permitted me to ignore administrative and management matters. Indispensable stuff for which I was quite unequipped and disinterested in handling. In short, you permitted me to love going to work every day for two decades. All of that goes way beyond thank you. When I left the Bank over thirty- three years ago, in a letter to all of you, I quoted from a poem by the English poet, Robert Bridges:

“I will not let thee go
I hold thee by too many bands Thou sayest farewell and lo,
I have thee by the hands And will not let thee go.”

It still applies to all of you.

Finally, a word about those who informed all of us. And whose names mostly have already beenforgotten. Those whose names will never appear in the history books. Those whose names soon, perhaps in a generation, will never be spoken again out loud publicly except for this one last time.

Burke Knapp, Bernie Bell, Shahid Hussein, Munir Benjenk, Dennis Ricket, Bill Diamond, Mohamed Shoab, Siem Alderweld, Peter Cargill, Raymond Cope, Joe Uhrig, Jocelyn Radifera, Ray Deely, Del Harris, William Clarke, Bill Van Sagsveldt, Hugh Scott, Ronnie Broches, Ray Goodman, David Hopper, Monte Yudleman, John Adler, Ben Prinz, Jean de Boeck, Aritoshi Soejima, Lester Nurick, Y.L. Chang, Victor Chang, Frances Poole, Bob Cavanaugh, Maboub Al Haq, Roger Chaufournier, George Gabriel, Ibrahim Shihata, Warren Baum, Hans Hittmair, Ernie, Kessie.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

© 2012-2024 Gene Rotberg