CLINTON: Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you very much, Lloyd [Blankfein], and thanks to everyone at Goldman Sachs for welcoming me today. I'm delighted to be back among friends, colleagues, collaborators, supporters, kindred spirits
Let me jump right in. You know, over the past few months, there have been popular concerns about an economy that still isn't delivering for the majority of Americans. It's not "delivering" the way that they feel it should, that they feel entitled to. Most Americans that you speak to, speak a populist rhetoric that claims it is stacked for those at the top, that those of you here have it too good.
(Laughter)
But we know the hopes that the little people have for their future - things like school, job, food, clothing on their backs– all of those little things would not be possible without your leadership and innovation. Since the time of the Medicis, even before, and the financing of the first joint stock companies in the transatlantic slave trade, we know that finance and banking is what makes our capitalist economy not just grow but tick
Previous generations of Americans built this economy and a middle class on a collective illusion: that they do productive work, this creates wealth, and that this builds the economy. We all know how misguided that is. We know that it's really due to your investing, credit, and economic stewardship, that they have been able to work at all, that they are able to put food on their tables. It's due to you and other banking, trading, investment houses that we have an economy that works at all. You are why we are a truly 21st century economic power.
(Applause)
You, Lloyd, and your colleagues, have been instrumental in that. People say you are overpaid or even parasitic, parasites on the economic body, and they quote a long line of seemingly "unethical behavior". They equate with you everything that is wrong and immoral with Capitalism, they charge that you have acted ruthlessly and unethically, "rigging every major market bubble since the Great Depression".
(Hissing)
But I-contrary to populist, hysterical demonizing–firmly believe that what you do is essential and critical: you help allocate our investment, direct our economic development, hedge risks, and create power, policies, and alliances in ways that make our country stronger, richer, more powerful, more innovative, competitive, and yes, more "democratic". You underwrite our elections and our political process-taking on the huge cost of enabling democratic dialogue at its biggest, broadest capacity. Your tireless work adds true value, and without you, we would still be struggling helplessly against industrial powerhouses in Asia and across the world trying to compete with them on the level of industry, technology, innovation, and hard work, at which they would beat us hands down. It's your financial innovation, your speculative tools, which allow us new ways of creating value without sweat or struggle, that gives us the competitive advantage. It's this vision, this technological innovation, this financial wizardry, this is what makes America great and powerful.
(Applause)
For decades, people have argued that if we give more wealth to those at top by cutting taxes and letting you and other corporations write the own rules, it will trickle down, it will trickle down to everyone else. And it has! My speech here is an example!
(Cackles, Waves Check)
(Laughter).
But seriously, I believe that the work of Goldman Sachs is critical for us, and without you, America would be a faint shadow of its current greatness. Your work in innovating finance, in creating new sources of wealth and investment, your tireless efforts stimulating the creation of new financial instruments, in lobbying politicians, in monopolizing the treasury and cabinet, in setting and binding the parameters of financial regulation that allows fluidity and flexibility in investment and speculation, this allows us to create wealth-almost out of thin air. It's this alchemy, this genius, this Midas touch-which is one of the most under-appreciated and under-acknowledged contributions in modern economic history.
(Applause)
It's fair to say that you have transformed the solid, clunky, friction-laiden trading of traditional commodity speculation into responsive, intelligent, liquid flows, that have vaporized every barrier and transformed into an expansive, responsive, endlessly expanding gas that fills every atom of our productive economic space that generates immeasurable value everywhere it goes, and everything it touches. Who cares that it's a little chaotic or "unethical"? That it seems tied to every financial scandal and crisis and economic catastrophe in history? Not me. "Creative Destruction" is all part of the game, and you are masters of it.
(Applause)
Some will say that you are simply parasitic on those who labor at menial physical production-these are people who still subscribe to 18 Century notions of value production–and that you skim off profit without doing anything meaningful or of value. Those people are misguided: we know that if money never sleeps, that's because you keep it awake! You have-if I may use a metaphor–injected money with caffeine, Adderal, crack, meth, with LSD so that it can dance the crazy dance and grow a crazy thousand psychedelic feet tall in a rainbow minute! Money was a lazy b*tch, until you put it to work! And look how it works! Look how it grows! Materializes out of nowhere!
(Waves check again, dances, cackles).
Some people have said that it was your irresponsible financial engineering, risk-taking, and profit-seeking, that led to the 2008 crash; that you shorted your own toxic mortgages in the most brazen securities fraud in financial history, dynamiting and imploding the global economy; and that the exorbitant bonuses paid from tax payer money, the financial bailouts, the non-prosecutions created moral hazard, rewarded avarice, incompetence, corruption and vice. You and I know it is nothing of the sort. As leaders, innovators, captains of finance, you will always be subject of the jealous resentment, the petty tantrums of the unwashed masses, the insolvent, the irresponsible, the invidious, the losers. They will envy you, your successes, they will despise you, but they secretly want to be like you!
(Laughter)
As you know, my husband tried very hard to change the culture of this misbegotten underclass, by kicking them off the government teat, by poisoning their milk with harsh, bitter regulation, and by disciplining them with the most arbitrary, racist, punitive, devastating criminal laws in US history, laws which Richard Nixon, the Southern strategists, the slave catchers, could only have dreamed of. He also passed NAFTA, which told them in no uncertain terms that they needed to discipline themselves as workers, and learn to be competitive in the global sweatshop, or face certain extinction. But they have not learned their lesson.
(Hissing)
(Applause)
And I will too!
(Applause)
Now today - today, another capitalist crisis looms, bigger and more dangerous than 2008, and again we hear sentimental cries for populist reform. I believe we have to stave off these demands to reform the banking and the financial system, and restructure the economy more equitably. You can't build an economy without the smart people-the Titans and Gods of Finance-like you–to direct the economy, and for the smart people to do their work, you need to be rewarded for your efforts, and you need a free hand to exercise your brilliance.
(Applause)
Books like "The Spirit Level" and organizations working for equality, certain politicians, spew a ridiculous myth of populism and the benefits of equality. But the fact is, we can't create profitable businesses without exploitation, and we can't grow the economy without speculation and inequality, and we certainly can't boost our economy into the stratosphere without allowing you to exercise your amazing financial intelligence and acumen in fiscal number-crunching, speculation, numbers-running and fraud!
(Applause)
Just think of this: can you imagine a football game without gambling? It would be dull, mind-numbing-who would watch steroid-addled jocks rut and slam into each other mindlessly without having put down money on the outcome? Who would pay the huge salaries for these vapid idiots? It's only because you have bet on the outcome that people become excited about the sport: it becomes life-and-death-thrilling! It becomes paint-your-face-get-shit-faced exciting! Act-stupid-exciting! That's what you do: you add excitement, thrill, value, and enthusiasm to the dull, dirty job of growing the economy, you make the game exciting, sexy, which draws more money into the game, the casino, that expands the excitement, grows the customer base, develops the economy, and that's priceless! You speculate, stimulate, titillate, dynamize, satyriasize the entire economy! I am such a fan! Go Goldman Sachs!
(Does little cheerleading number, complete with hand gestures)
Gooold-Maaan-Sachs!
(Applause)
Let's tell the truth: America is struggling-despite the endless fabrication about "the recovery"– because we are not yet running the way we should. Banks are still over regulated. It's over-regulation that creates financial catastrophe! Despite your huge paychecks and squirreled away assets, I know that you are worried: worried that some "socialist" demagogue might come along and confiscate it all and put you all in jail. With president Obama, you were in good hands: he's one of us. (Good thing you ponied up $981K for his campaign). He took good care of you, had your back, covered your financial rear. But populist sentiment is rising up again, more strongly than before, and the unwashed masses are full of resentment, anger, jealousy. They are angry that they don't have jobs, that they are in debt, that they can't scrape a living together, even though they are working, 2,3,4 jobs to put shelter over their heads. That their children are starving. That they cannot see a light at the end of the tunnel. They are angry about the 100 million people driven into the brink of starvation and the global food riots that they claim you caused with your commodity futures speculation. The $5Trillion of value lost from the markets that they claim you collapsed. The millions who lost their homes and are now on the verge of homelessness. The trillions funneled to you in loans, write-offs, bribes to keep the system going. Even when I was working for Barry (Goldwater), I felt that same irrational resentment. Now it's at an all time high. Irresponsible single mothers, uneducated immigrants, lead-drinking ghetto-strutters, homeless, crying, babies, starving senior citizens, obnoxious, entitled African Americans who object to having bullets pumped into their bodies by police: all these people are angry, entitled, and making noise, and they are endangering our democracy and economy, our greatness.
(Hissing)
I hear this everywhere I go. A single mother, with three children-wants to go to college, find enjoyable, well-paid work and also enjoy the emotional luxuries of motherhood-all at the same time. Everyone feels entitled to everything. She even wants housing. Now even I couldn't do all these things, despite my incredible privilege and intelligence. But they want it all, now. Three children?
(Booing)
A grandmother, playing with children-it makes her happy like a cow, but she still feels entitled to be paid. Because she wants to feed her drug habit, she wants to sell them for more money .she wants it all!
(Booing)
A student, with an unmarketable degree in women's studies, specializing in medieval feminist villanelles, wants debt forgiveness, and a high-paid job putting her non-existent skills analyzing romance language texts to use and profit in a rewarding cause. She also wants a pony, a sensitive but dominant lover, a villa on the Riviera, and World Peace!
(Cackles).
(Laughter)
Millions of working sad-sack Americans have similar fantasies. They want more money. More pay. Decent wages for hard work. They think it grows on trees. They think that money will grow and nuzzle up to them in their sleep, when they have no money-appeal. They think they can tax Other People's Money to get what they want. They don't realize Money has to be jacked up the ass, stuck in the veins with meth, dragged out and pimped to make more! You have figured out how to make your money work, turned it into a profit-generating prostitute! The future expected earnings of a profit-generating prostitute! That you've shorted! These people, idiots, all of them, they expect money to come to them! Without Scheming! Without reaming others! By working hard and being good! Like puppies and ponies! Like flowers after a downpour! Like the lilies of the valley! Like utopian visions of a drug-addled socialist!
(Laughter)
Wages need to be kept down, and people just need to work harder. Damn harder. At least as hard as Bill worked to keep Haiti down.
(Applause)
We must lower incomes for low-value working schmucks, so they give up on any notions of a middle-class life. But more than that, we must reduce the slick, unsustainable bigotry of expectation: the profit-sucking cage of entitlement, expectation, and imagination. We must drive income down steadily and siphon that surplus wealth to you, the captains of finance, so that we can build a strong economy that is innovative, powerful, that acknowledges and rewards your acumen
(Applause)
And that will be my mission, from the first day I am president to the last. I
(Applause)
I will get up every day thinking about you, the hard-working Wizards of Finance, Lords of Capital, Economic Giants of Innovation, Noble Titans that make us strong and powerful!
(Applause)
I came from a petit-bourgeois family with a drapery business that exploited workers to give me good middle-class life, a first-class education, and my incorrigibly elitist beliefs. It put me on third base, instead of striking out. As I try to steal home, I will be thinking about all the Wall Street bankers that I represented in New York and the "advice" that they gave me, and I will work with them-for you– to give them the maximum freedom to do what's best for them. Because what's best for Wall Street is what's best for the US. What's best for Goldman Sachs is what's best for the planet. I promise to take on this challenge against the clamoring, whining, agitating babies demanding for major changes in our economy and the global economy, demanding for equity and justice. These demands are stupid beyond belief.
(Laughter)
As you know, advances in financial technology and global trade have created new areas of commercial activity and opened new markets for our exports. Too often policy wonks want to resort to protectionist measures because they don't realize that these treaties are designed to suck wealth out of the third world and suck it into your portfolios. These people suffer from a lack of big-picture thinking. They believe that they are still going to be building widgets in a factory if it were not for the 1 billion Chinese stealing their jobs. They don't understand that we are sucking the lifeblood out of both of the Chinese and all workers-the vampire squid with the blood funnel-creating value, wealth, growth!
(Cackles)
Today's marketplace focuses on the short-term, instantaneous financial trading, and short-term earnings reports, and that's just how it should be. Those who are struggling need to rent out their living rooms, garages, bathrooms, dog houses, sell trinkets on EBay, sell themselves, their time and their bodies in the gig economy. All of this creates exciting, dynamic extra wealth, which should go to you, the geniuses of the universe, because you are the ones driving this with your investments, speculations, deregulation, policy capture, and of course outright bribes. There's no problem that a little more liberalization and deregulation can't make better!
(Takes out check and cackles)
