I’m Governor John Corzine, Governor of great State of New Jersey.
I think there’s no avoiding that the major issue that is going to impact everyone’s life in America is the economy. We have to get that stabilized. We have to get it out of free fall into a position where it begins to recover and so all decisions, I think, in the short run have to be focused on trying to get our economy going so that our people, our citizens can restore their confidence in the direction of the country. We can never walk away from our responsibility in the international arena. We have two wars under the 60,000 in harm’s way as we sit here at this moment in time, so it take his eye off of our international responsibilities and in fact it links back to our economy because if we were able to thoughtfully and carefully bring some of our troops home and have a less investment in some of the things that we’re doing in our overseas operations, it would help our economy at home. So I think he has to give that great effort and then I think in the overall issue with regard to our energy independence in protecting the globe from the build up of carbon. All of those issues come together.
I think we have to get focused on the real economy on the basic elements of housing markets, financing markets in general so that credit begins to flow. First thing I probably doing is ask the president to make sure that we change our bankruptcy laws so that there could be renegotiation of mortgages between the lender and borrower in an organized and some straight forward way. Second thing, I’d be pushing to make sure that we were finding the way to put money into keeping people in their homes, either direct loans to the individuals so they’d continue to make payments or a restructuring of the loans themselves. The fact is we won’t stabilize the wholesale financing markets. The toxic products that have been created on leverage, CDO’s, the kinds of things that people have talked about in the mortgage back, security market that are causing banks so much problem unless we actually stabilize the underlying housing market and the mortgage market that is a part of that.
First thing you have to do anytime you have a tough situation is talk openly and frequently with the audience that is going to be the receiver of the changes that you have to take or make to address the problem. You need to make sure that you’re fully in communication about what the nature of the problem is and what it is that you believe you need to be doing and that needs to be very clear and you need to be repeating that over and over again as far and broadly as you can so that people understand what is impacting their lives. I think actually communication is a lot of it but also not avoiding the problem. You just have to go at it and the tougher it gets, the more you have to be direct in addressing the problem because if you don’t there’s a cumulative momentum to the sort of negative patterns that develop whether it’s in business or whether it’s in government and economics.
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