Word: rubins
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...estate and industrial development. "In general," said Summers, 44, as he sat in the Frankfurt airport last fall recovering from a hectic trip to Moscow, "we start with the idea that you can't repeal the laws of economics. Even if they are inconvenient." Over dinner recently someone congratulated Rubin on the booming U.S. economy and pointed out that one international magazine had been uniformly wrong in its predictions of a complete global collapse. The Secretary wasn't biting: "Everything is probabilistic," he said. The battle continues...
...initial downturn didn't surprise the Fed or the Treasury too much. For the better part of two years, Greenspan and Rubin had been quietly fretting about the narrowing "spread"--the difference in interest rates--between U.S. bonds and emerging-market bonds. By 1996 banks were lending money to countries such as Malaysia at interest rates just a few percentage points above what the U.S. Treasuries commanded. The implication: Malaysia was not a much riskier bet than the U.S. This was nonsense, and the committee knew some correction was in order...
...three men trying to cope with these mid-ether collisions of dollars and expectations are an unlikely team. Greenspan, the data-loving analyst with government roots sunk back into the financial and moral chaos of the Nixon Administration, and a shaman-like power over global markets. Rubin, the Goldman Sachs wonder boy who ran the firm's complex and dangerous arbitrage operations and then led it to rocket-ship international growth. And Summers, the Harvard-trained academic who is invariably called the Kissinger of economics: a total pragmatist whose ambition sometimes grates but whose intellect never fails to dazzle...
...Reagan Administration economic policymaking was guided not by analysis but by conclusions--specifically a belief in so-called supply-side economics. No matter what the data showed, the results among Reagan-era economists like Arthur Laffer were always the same: tax cuts and less regulation were the solution. Rubin, Greenspan and Summers have outgrown ideology. Their faith is in the markets and in their own ability to analyze them. "It's unusual," Greenspan says. "In Washington usually you come to the table, and everyone meets, and no one changes their mind. But with us, you have something else...
...operate effectively in this new world, Rubin has remade the Treasury into an organization that is "more like an investment bank," says Tim Geithner, the 37-year-old Under Secretary for International Affairs. Unlike past Secretaries, who wanted decisions presented as thumbs-up, thumbs-down recommendations, Rubin wants debate. "He is a master at eliciting opinions," says David Lipton, a former Treasury official. The emblematic Treasury encounter is what Rubin calls a "rolling meeting," which cruises from one corner of the globe to the other as aides sprint in and out of the room. Says Lipton: "Often in meetings Rubin...