September 24, 2024 • 39 mins
Newt talks with Wilbur Ross, former U.S. Secretary of Commerce and renowned investment banker, he shares insights from his new book, "Risks and Returns: Creating Success in Business and Life." Ross recounts his journey from humble beginnings in New Jersey to his education at Yale and Harvard, and his 55-year career on Wall Street, where he restructured over $400 billion in assets. He discusses his tenure as Secretary of Commerce under President Trump, his approach to distressed securities, and his role in renegotiating NAFTA. Ross also reflects on his early life lessons, his transition from Democrat to Republican, and his unique experiences with Donald Trump.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
On this episode of Newts World. Wilbur Ross rose to
prominence as the King of Bankruptcy and then served as
US Secretary of Commerce, but few people know his story
and the lessons we can all learn from it. In
his new book, Risks and Returns, Creating Success in Business
and Life, Ross chronicles his life from his humble beginnings
(00:27):
in New Jersey, to his time at Yale and Harvard
Business School, to his storied fifty five year career on
Wall Street, where he helped to restructure more than four
hundred billion dollars in assets, and finally to his four
years a Secretary of Commerce under former President Donald Trump.
He's a great friend for Kostin Million, We're always delighted
(00:48):
to see Wilbur and Hillary, so I am really pleased
to welcome my guest, Wilburt Ross. He did serve as
Secretary of Commerce and Trump administration. His experience for fifty
five years in investment, banking, and private equity is remarkable,
and in this capacity he advised Donald Trump the Businessman
on commercial and economic affairs and helped American entrepreneurs and
(01:12):
businesses create jobs and economic opportunity. In twenty eleven, Bloomberg
Markets named him one of the fifty most influential people
in global finance. It is great to have you join us.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Oh, thank you, mister speaker.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
And I'm delighted to report that Risk and Returns made
the USA Today bestseller list this week. So congratulations.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Well, thank you very much.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
You have led a really fascinating life, and I thought
maybe we could start with your early years in some
of the lessons that your parents taught you about the
importance of hard work and dedication. What was it like
growing up in New Jersey?
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Well, North Bergen was barely a middle class town, and
my dad was part of a little two man law
firm until he died at a fairly early age. And
my mom was a third grade school teacher until she
was forced to retire at seventy one by the union rules.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Obviously she must have loved teaching.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Yes, And they sent me to a Jesuit military school
or high school because it was felt then and it
was probably still true now, that I needed more discipline.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
Did it'll work?
Speaker 2 (02:46):
Well, I made it through life, so I guess it were.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
So. You would recommend a family that has a challenged
child that something like a Jesuit military school would be
a reasonable step towards salvation.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
Well, it is, and it was very good. In terms
of the educational program. They required you to take two languages,
in my case, Latin and German, and on the college boards,
I did well enough in German that Yale exempted me
from its two year language requirement. So that shows what
(03:25):
good teachers they were.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
That's great. And your dad, as Zigner said, actually has
spent a lot of his legal career helping immigrants who
were here legally go through the process of becoming Americans.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
That is true, and that taught me a lesson which
I really picked up on again when I was in
government in that once in a while I would get
to swear in newly naturalized citizens and it was heartwarming.
First of all, they know more about our history, our
(04:01):
constitution and all that than most college students do today.
And that's a different problem, but it's a serious one.
And they were so proud to become Americans. There would
be tears in their eyes as I swore them in
happy tears. It was a very heartwarming experience.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
Did you get you go to some of those with
your dad?
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Oh? Yeah, I did them, particularly in Florida and a
lot of them were Latin American people, but the important
message to me was that unlike many of our youths
today who had no idea of American history. Many of
them were asked by Midwestern University a couple of questions,
(04:49):
one of which was who was Andrew Jackson? You know what?
The most popular answer was, what Michael's brother?
Speaker 1 (05:00):
The power of modern culture? You were growing up during
World War Two? How did that great conflict affect you?
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Well, it affected me in a couple of boys. My
father was an air raid warden, so he would put
on a little tin hat at night when there was
an air raid warning and go out in our neighborhood
and tell people turn their lights off, because it was
believed that if you let lights on and there was
(05:30):
a bombing attack, it would make you a bed, an
easy target. So he did that. The other strange thing
it did it was my first exposure to China in
that my mom would stand online for getting bananas. Bananas
went short supply because of the war, and I didn't
(05:52):
like bananas, so she kept saying to me, eat your bananas,
think about the poor starving children in China. And I
could never figure out how my eating bananas was going
to help the poor starving children in China. Still can't forget.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
That my parents use the same thing. I'm with you.
I sit there thinking, I mean, if I don't eat this,
it's not going to get to China. But apparently for
our generation, it was apparently a universal thing for parents
to tell their kids, you have to eat this because
there's some starving kids somewhere.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
Right.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Do you have one, I think interesting story about going
through an air raid drill and being asked, you know,
why does everyone have to sit against the wall?
Speaker 2 (06:36):
Oh? Yeah, I was in kindergarten at the time, and
about every week they would have an air raid drill
and they would march us all down to the basement
of the school building and have us sit against the wall.
And at one point teacher asked, does anybody know why
(06:56):
we're having you sit against the wall? What came into
my mind, not trying to be a wise guy, but
just popped in, was well, I said, maybe it's to
make it easier to count the bodies. That maybe the
teacher furious and some of the other students hysterical.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
And you just reached that conclusion as an act of
logic when you do get to Yale, You're not immediately
on a business track. We're your career and up in fact,
you that a very different initial sense of what you
might do with your life. Can you describe your early
career goals at Yale?
Speaker 2 (07:38):
Surely I wanted to be a writer, and so you
could say that now sixty odd years later that dream
has been fulfilled. But what happened at the time was
in the second year they had a course called Daily Themes,
and you had to put into a little slot a
(07:59):
thousand were of fiction every day. Well, by the end
of the second week, I was out of material, so
I quit the course and gave up creative writing. And
then a faculty member who was our advisor at my
fraternity but was also part of the Yale investment team,
(08:22):
which was very high grad of a turn team, called
me and said he was leaving the university to go
to Wall Street and that I shouldn't waste my summer
parking cars, which I had done the prior summer. I
should instead accompany him as his clerk to Wall Street.
(08:45):
And I did, and once I was there, they never
wanted to leave.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
But now the summer before you parked cars at the
Monmouth Park Club. What did you learn from that experience?
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Learned a couple of things, all of which were very
strange lessons. The very first day, the lot boss wrote
all of us kids who were car parkers together and
he said, no, you've got to understand what the rules
are here. He said. There will inevitably be accidents, headlights broken,
(09:21):
things like that, especially in the rush to get cars
out at the end of the day. He said, But
if the patron leaves the track without complaining, then the
track won't have to pay to fix the damage and
you won't get set down for a week. But if
the patron notices the damage, track will pay and you'll
(09:43):
get set down for a week. He said. But there's
a solution. Distrack the customer. And the way he explained
to us to distract him was, if it were a convertible,
put the top up as you're going to pick him up.
Would then say what are you doing putting the top up,
and he wouldn't notice that his right front headlight was
(10:07):
smashed out. He said, if it wasn't a convertible, turn
the radio on real loud and turn the windshield wipers on.
The patron again will say what are you doing. It's
a sunny day, Why are you putting the windshield wipers?
Why are you're putting the radios so loud? But he
wouldn't notice the damage. So here was an executive member
(10:32):
of management teaching young kids how to fleece the customers
that kept the place going. In retrospect, a very bizarre experience.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Did you decide that that wasn't the way you wanted
to run your business.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
No, that's absolutely true.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
But you also talk about the fact that having watched
casinos and racetracks, you really have a very different attitude
about investing in that you don't gamble, You do research well.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
People think I gamble every day dealing in distress securities,
but those are rational gambles. Gambling in a casino or
a racetrack is a loser's game because the odds are
set to return only seventy five percent of the money.
(11:28):
So whatever gets wagered twenty five percent of it's going
to get eaten up by the establishment. That's not very
good odds.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
When you look at, say, distressed assets, are you calculating that,
over say one hundred activities, a certain number will in
fact fail, but that the aggregate will make money.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
Well yeah, but we go in after they have failed,
so that absorbs a lot of the risk. I would
argue that a properly selected bond that's been defaulted and
is trading at twenty five cents on the dollar is
probably a safer investment than most bonds trading at par
(12:13):
because you have much less downside and at least in theory,
quite a little bit of upside. But what you have
to do is to change the management attitude. Companies that
have been under stressed for quite a while develop what
I call loser's mentality, bless and what's wrong with your company?
(12:35):
And they'll always say something extraneous. It's the union, or
it's the class action litigants, or it's the government, or
it's the Chinese. They never mention anything that's within their
own control. So usually just by bringing in someone who
knows the industry and who doesn't start with the preconception
(13:00):
that he can't do anything that changes the dynamics in
and of itself.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
What was the difference in your mind between your approach
and Michael Milkin's approach.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
Oh, well, milkn in a sense made my career in
that I was running investment banking in the US for
the Rothschild family at the point when he was developing
jump bonds, namely issuing high yielding securities that would deliberately
(13:32):
low quality. And I knew the Rothschilds would never want
to underwrite securities like that, but that meant that there
would be more defaults because, for example, Federated Department Stores,
a fellow named Robert Campo, a developer in Canada, made
a hostile bid. He paid six billion dollars with a
(13:56):
bid for it. Ninety seven percent of it was debt financed,
so he had thirty million dollars in a six billion
dollar buyout. Eighteen months later, it went bus because there
was a recession. So we helped restructure Federated, We helped
(14:17):
restructure Texico, PanAm TWA, a whole bunch of different companies,
the steel industry, the coal industry, but the most momentous
one was the Trump taj Mahal. And that's actually how
I met Donald Trump.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
From a business side. Tell us about that.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
Well, Trump was building a startup casino on the board
wall in Atlantic City, and he got Merrilynch and bear
Stearns to a one hundred ete eight hundred million dollars
of mortgage bonds for a venture capital type casino. Only
problem was they never made one interest payment. They defaulted
(15:18):
before the first coupon came due, so the bondholders were
actually a little cross with that, and they hired me
to try to get their money back. So they hired
me on the Thursday before Labor Day weekend of nineteen
ninety and as soon as Trump heard the news, he
called me. He said, you have to come down to
(15:40):
Atlantic City tomorrow. The last place I wanted to be
for Labor Day weekend was in Atlantic City with a
bunch of people playing slot machines. But anyhow, I went
to the haeliport and there was his chopper, unmistakable in
that in red ny all Polish type, bright red letters
(16:03):
Trump on the side of the plane. So I got
in it. Thirty odd minutes later, we're landing in Atlantic
City and he's there waiting to meet me in a
big stretch limo. And as I got into it, I
noticed there were two flags on the front bumper, a
(16:24):
US flag and a Trump flag, and the Trump flag
appeared to be slightly larger than the US flag. So
it was my first dose of seeing his pension for
attracting attention and very successfully doing so. So we go
(16:45):
through this mob scene with Gwynny Casino. People are having
him sign their beanie hats right on their shirt. One
woman had a bare back dress and she had him
sign her back. Now what she was going to do
with Donald J. Trump in black magic marker pencil on
her back, I'll never know, But anyhow, I think it
(17:08):
was all part of the build up because he knew
the bondholders were furious about the default, and he correctly
figured they might want to get rid of him. So
this was all designed to impress me and show me
how important he was to the operation. Then we went
upstairs to start negotiating, and he never called it a negotiation.
(17:34):
He always called it a discussion. But he began by saying,
your bonds are trading a twenty cents on the dollar,
and your clients will be lucky to get twenty cents
at the end, So why don't we just do this.
I'll personally guarantee them the twenty cents and we don't
have to have any more discussion. I said, well, Donald,
(17:57):
one problem is they've hired me to get them par
plus a crude interest plus one hundred percent of the
equity in your casinos. So we have a little gap
that we have to try somehow to close. Well, we
went back and forth for a couple hours and it
finally got nowhere. He was stuck at the twenty cents,
(18:20):
so I ultimately said, well, Donald, is that it. That's
as far as you were prepared to go at least today.
He said, yes, twenty cents. So I said, well, then
I'm not going to waste my time arguing with you.
I'll call you next week. And I walked out on him,
and he tells the story to this day because that
(18:41):
was the kind of tactic he was used to using
on the other people in negotiation, and he was a
little shocked to have it used on him. We then
argued for several months publicly, quite publicly, and eventually we're
getting very close to our target, but there was still
(19:02):
little gap. So one morning I went over to his
office and said, this is our best and final offer.
He turned it down. What it was was part plus
the crude plus fifty one percent of the stock, and
I had figured his breaking point probably would be that
(19:23):
he didn't want to give up majority ownership, so he
rejected it and said, well then don and we're going
to see you in court. And we parted. I went
back to my office, put out a press release Trump
taj Mahal bondholders holding a very important press conference at
the Marriotte Marquis Hotel, and we picked the marry out
(19:47):
because it wasn't one of his properties. So as soon
as that was on the news where he called me.
He said, what the hell is this? What are you
going to say to the people at the press countrience
and said, well, Donald, well I told you we would
see you in court. We're going to announce that we're
filing an involuntary bankruptcy petition against the taj Mahal and
(20:10):
by nine o'clock tomorrow morning, it's going to be in bankruptcy.
He said, well, let me get with my advisors, not
with his advisers, and me back down a little bit
of forty nine with him having fifty one percent, worked
a few more technical details, and then we had a deal.
(20:31):
He then said, but one more thing, And I had
spent enough time with him to know the one more
thing was usually a zinger. Well, in this case, the
one more thing was he said, you must move the
press conference to the Plaza Hotel because that was one
of his properties. So we did. We had this big
(20:54):
glove fest with the media, and you can imagine this
is a pretty stressful day for me. So I'm getting
in the car to be driven home and the phone rings.
This is your mother, say said, in just about that
angrier tone. I said, well him, Mom, everything okay? She said, no,
(21:15):
everything's not okay. I've been playing Marjon with my lady
friends while we were watching that disgraceful TV show that
you did just now the press conference with Trump, and
we all agreed that after all those mean things he
said about you, you should not make a deal with them. Yes, a,
(21:36):
but Mom, that's what I do. That's my job. I
was hired to do that. She said, well, if you
had only become a lawyer like I always wanted you to,
you won't have to hang around with people like that,
and she hung up. She hung up on me. She
later forgave me for the Trump part, but she never
(21:57):
did forgive me for not being a lawyer.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
Spirical given that tough negotiation, were you surprised to end
up in the cabinet with Trump? Well?
Speaker 2 (22:08):
In between what happened was this after the bonds collapsed
Carly Khan, who as you know, is a good friend
of mine and a good client, he became the biggest bondholder.
So we were both on the opposite side from Trump,
but we both became early endorsers of Trump when he
(22:30):
was running in twenty sixteen. And the reason was when
you were adversarial to someone in that kind of circumstance,
you get to learn what they're made of, and we
both concluded he was made of pretty good stuff. So
it changed our whole attitude toward him. And then what
(22:53):
happened early before the primaries. I was on squawk Box
and at the end of the discussion about the market,
they asked me, if Trump were the Republican nominee, would
you vote for him? And I said yes, absolutely, and
they were shocked because at that time Republicans were mostly
(23:15):
not going for Trump, and a lot of them, in fact,
were Democrats. So I then explained why, and it said,
he's the only one who understands that the plight of
middle class in lower middle class America has become so
severe that they're going to make a change. They're going
(23:38):
to vote for someone who's going to do something about
the fact they've been losing purchasing power for all these years,
and Trump's the only one who recognizes it. So I
think he's not only going to be the nominee. I
think he's going to be the president. Turned out it
was an accurate guess, so naturally we became pretty friendly,
(24:04):
and as you know, I wrote a lot of editorials
during the campaign, debated a lot of left wing think
tank people, and Lo and Behold ended up in the cabinet.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
I did a great job at Cours before that. When
you were in business, you earned the title King of Bankruptcy.
Now is that a good thing?
Speaker 2 (24:26):
Well? Fortune magazine gave me that title, and they meant
it to be approvingly. A lot of people have thought
it was meant to be a derisive title. I didn't
invent the titles, so I didn't care about it one
way or another. But it was Fortune's way of expressing
(24:49):
that we had built up a very big market share
in acting on behalf of the victims. I didn't act
on behalf of companies that had default. I always represented
the bondholders or the equity.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
So your interest was trying to minimize the loss to
the people who had provided resources correct.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
And the stranger's part is that even though Drexel doing
all those bonds really made my life because I'd spent
a lot of time straightening them out, strangers thing is
I did Drexel's bankruptcy. Drexel went from being the most
profitable firm on Wall Street, earning five hundred million dollars
(25:39):
after taxes, to bust in eighteen months because of the
collapse of the junk bond market. So it was very strange.
Here the firm that helped me make a fortune, I'm
now representing their unsecured creditors.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
I did not know this background, but your mother was
for fifty years a Democratic county committeewoman. Your dad was
a local elected official. So you went away and of
course in Jersey City, where Mayor Frank k ran the
place for years as a Democrat, your natural background was
as a Democrat.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Yes, And so when I first came to New York,
I got involved with Democratic politics, and it turned out
I was pretty good at fundraising. So at age twenty nine,
I was made the treasurer of the Democratic State Committee
in New York. As I got more exposure to Democrats
(26:57):
and as they changed from being the party of people
who worked to being the party of people who don't
want to work. I'd gradually migrated to the Republican Party,
but I didn't make the change until long after my
mother was dead, because she had enough trouble getting over
(27:20):
me not being a lawyer. Not being a lawyer and
being a Republican probably would have killed her prematurely.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
One of the great turning points in New York was
the race between Dinkins and Julianni. Where were you at
that point?
Speaker 2 (27:37):
Well, at that point I was in transition, but I
was also involved with a lot of the cultural institutions
in New York. So Punch Seltzberger, who then was running
The New York Times, myself, and a man called Marty Siegel,
who was a big pension consultant, we formed a group
(28:01):
that was designed to be a public private partnership where
the board of the institution would contribute half, the city
and the state each a quarter, and they would fund
incremental programmatic activity. And to try to get the political
(28:21):
sector behind that, we banded together all the boardheads of
the cultural institutions, not just the big ones, but even
the little ones, and we had a session in the
New York Times Auditorium, where each of the two candidates
at that point it was Dinkins and Juliani made their presentations. Well,
(28:46):
they had never presented anything about culture before, so it
came time you had to brief them what we thought
was the program they should do. And nobody wanted to
to brief Giuliani. So I said, well, I don't think
that's fair. At the time, I didn't care for him.
(29:07):
I don't think that's fair. I'll go brief him. So
I spent two hours with him, at the end of
which I said, mister Giuliani, as you probably know, the
cultural community is much to the left of your view,
so to try to get it off to a good start,
(29:28):
we'll give you a softball question as the number one thing,
so that you get off to a good start. What
would you like for a softball question? He said, Well,
let them ask me anything about the opera A very
surprising answer. I said anything. He said, yes, I've really
(29:50):
known the opera. So I reported that back, and some
young left winger from I think the Metropolitan Opera asked
him a very technical question about some obscure opera, and
he hit it right out of the ballpark, and that
changed my impression of him quite a bit. And then subsequently,
(30:15):
since we had developed a bit of relationship, he hired
me as an outsider to be his privatization advisor and
we sold off the TV station the city owned. We
did a lot of things, so I got quite involved
with his administration.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
One of the most important things you did when you
were secretary is renegotiating NAFTA at the time, and I
want to confess upfront, I voted for NAFTA and it
turned out not to work. I mean, most of Trump's
critique of NAFTA was right, But what was it like
to negotiate with the Mexican government. I mean, you clearly,
(30:53):
both with the Canadians and the Mexicans, you were very
tough and you got a very good agreement from the
American perspective.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Right. Well, Bob Leinheuser was quite involved in the discussions
leading to the USMCA as well, and both he and
I felt there is no such thing as free trade.
It's a lovely concept. I wish it were the reality,
but like so many economic concepts, it just doesn't work
(31:24):
in real life. And the reason it doesn't is that
every country wants to outgrow what its own natural attributes
let it be, so they all become protectionists, and it
was a big mistake on our government's part, particularly letting
(31:46):
China into the WTO, which is not enough TO, but
to the WTO without proper enforcement mechanisms. Clinton's theory was
that if they were in WTO, they'd abide by the rules,
but he didn't have any enforcement, so they didn't and
(32:07):
LAFTA was a much more complicated thing. Both Canada and
Mexico are very dependent on the US, and in fact,
despite big trade balance positive with the US, Mexico runs
an overall trade deficit. We felt that there were a
(32:31):
number of things that could be helpful to the US.
For one thing, we decided it was better if we
had to import from somewhere, let's import from Canada or Mexico,
our neighbors, rather than from China or someone who could
become an adversary. So that was one idea we had.
(32:55):
But there were also a lot of things in the
old NAT that were foolish. For example, in automotive, which
is a huge export business for Mexico, what they did
was they specified particular individual parts that had to be
(33:17):
made in Mexico for the car to come in duty free. Well,
the problem is when you do that, you're ignoring technological change.
So by the time we came into the picture, most
of those parts weren't even used in cars anymore, but
a lot of semiconductors came in and other things. So
(33:40):
we changed that. We made it a rule that a
majority of the actual content of the car had to
be US produced, and that helped us a lot, and
we made similar changes with other things. Now, the problem
is Mexico has not been very good at living up
(34:01):
to the agreement and it comes up for renewal pretty soon.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Now would you be tougher about insisting on enforcement?
Speaker 2 (34:09):
Well, they changed the system. We insisted that the courts
be the ultimate resolution of disputes, but now they've decided
to make the courts be elected by the public, So
that made the courts totally political, and the probability of
(34:31):
an American complainant prevailing against a Mexican company under those
circumstances is pretty much zero. The other thing, they promised
to open up their hydrocarbon sector to American and other
natural gas and oil producers, and they've reneg done that.
(34:54):
There are a lot of problems, whether it's Trump or
it's whoever running the country, we really need a lot
of change, even from the USMCA.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
Do you find the Mexicans difficult to negotiate with.
Speaker 2 (35:10):
They're lovely people, and the problem is that it's such
a highly politicized society and of late, highly left wing society,
so they're intellectual and geopolitical point of view couldn't be
(35:31):
more different from ours. So there is a fundamental disconnect
between them and US. But one of the things that
Trump did in the negotiations he called in one day
the ambassador from Mexico because he was wanting twenty five
thousand troops on the border to help US hold down
(35:55):
illegal immigration. And I was there and the said, well,
I've relayed that request to the President of Mexico, but
he doesn't want to do it. And Trump said, well,
if he doesn't do it by noon today, we're going
to impose huge tariffs on everything that comes in from Mexico.
(36:21):
The ambassador has taking him back, and with me sitting
there and agreeing, he knew that was very likely to
be what we would try. So he said, well, let
me call the president. So he called the president of Mexico,
and Trump said, remember has to be by noontime because
(36:42):
I have a very important lunch date and you've got
to solve this before. Then he came back and they
gave us the twenty five thousand troops, which was a
great help, as you know, in holding down the illegal
immigration because it was keeping a lot of them over there.
(37:02):
And what he didn't know was it was a very
important lunch and who it was with was Melania. Trump
had been so busy he hadn't been able to have
lunch with Melanna for a couple of weeks.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
And I suspect you would agree, and certainly I would
that there are moments when our wives become very important lunches.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
Yes, absolutely, he wasn't kidding.
Speaker 1 (37:27):
That's right, that's great. I want to thank you. You
have great friend, and I always enjoy being with you.
And you've had a remarkable career so far, and I
suspect there are more adventures ahead. Your new book, Risks
and Returns Creating Success in Business in Life, it's terrific.
It's available now on Amazon bookstores everyone. As I said,
(37:47):
it's now a bestseller. I really appreciate Wilberg, you're taking
the time to be with me.
Speaker 2 (37:53):
Well, thank you very much. Thanks, it's good to be
on with you. Thank you for giving me so much time.
Speaker 1 (38:02):
Thank you to my guest, Wilbur Ross. You can get
a link to buy his new book, Risks and Returns,
Creating Success in Business and Life on our show page
at newsworld dot com. Newtworld is produced by Ginglish three
sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsey Sloan and
our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show
(38:25):
was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team
at Gingwishtree sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope
you'll go to Apple Podcasts and both rate us with
five stars and give us a review so others can
learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of Newtsworld
can sign up for my three freeweekly columns at Gingrishtree
(38:47):
sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm newt Gingrich. This is Newtsworld.
On this episode of Newts World. Wilbur Ross rose to
prominence as the King of Bankruptcy and then served as
US Secretary of Commerce, but few people know his story
and the lessons we can all learn from it. In
his new book, Risks and Returns, Creating Success in Business
and Life, Ross chronicles his life from his humble beginnings
(00:27):
in New Jersey, to his time at Yale and Harvard
Business School, to his storied fifty five year career on
Wall Street, where he helped to restructure more than four
hundred billion dollars in assets, and finally to his four
years a Secretary of Commerce under former President Donald Trump.
He's a great friend for Kostin Million, We're always delighted
(00:48):
to see Wilbur and Hillary, so I am really pleased
to welcome my guest, Wilburt Ross. He did serve as
Secretary of Commerce and Trump administration. His experience for fifty
five years in investment, banking, and private equity is remarkable,
and in this capacity he advised Donald Trump the Businessman
on commercial and economic affairs and helped American entrepreneurs and
(01:12):
businesses create jobs and economic opportunity. In twenty eleven, Bloomberg
Markets named him one of the fifty most influential people
in global finance. It is great to have you join us.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Oh, thank you, mister speaker.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
And I'm delighted to report that Risk and Returns made
the USA Today bestseller list this week. So congratulations.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Well, thank you very much.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
You have led a really fascinating life, and I thought
maybe we could start with your early years in some
of the lessons that your parents taught you about the
importance of hard work and dedication. What was it like
growing up in New Jersey?
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Well, North Bergen was barely a middle class town, and
my dad was part of a little two man law
firm until he died at a fairly early age. And
my mom was a third grade school teacher until she
was forced to retire at seventy one by the union rules.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Obviously she must have loved teaching.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Yes, And they sent me to a Jesuit military school
or high school because it was felt then and it
was probably still true now, that I needed more discipline.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
Did it'll work?
Speaker 2 (02:46):
Well, I made it through life, so I guess it were.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
So. You would recommend a family that has a challenged
child that something like a Jesuit military school would be
a reasonable step towards salvation.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
Well, it is, and it was very good. In terms
of the educational program. They required you to take two languages,
in my case, Latin and German, and on the college boards,
I did well enough in German that Yale exempted me
from its two year language requirement. So that shows what
(03:25):
good teachers they were.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
That's great. And your dad, as Zigner said, actually has
spent a lot of his legal career helping immigrants who
were here legally go through the process of becoming Americans.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
That is true, and that taught me a lesson which
I really picked up on again when I was in
government in that once in a while I would get
to swear in newly naturalized citizens and it was heartwarming.
First of all, they know more about our history, our
(04:01):
constitution and all that than most college students do today.
And that's a different problem, but it's a serious one.
And they were so proud to become Americans. There would
be tears in their eyes as I swore them in
happy tears. It was a very heartwarming experience.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
Did you get you go to some of those with
your dad?
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Oh? Yeah, I did them, particularly in Florida and a
lot of them were Latin American people, but the important
message to me was that unlike many of our youths
today who had no idea of American history. Many of
them were asked by Midwestern University a couple of questions,
(04:49):
one of which was who was Andrew Jackson? You know what?
The most popular answer was, what Michael's brother?
Speaker 1 (05:00):
The power of modern culture? You were growing up during
World War Two? How did that great conflict affect you?
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Well, it affected me in a couple of boys. My
father was an air raid warden, so he would put
on a little tin hat at night when there was
an air raid warning and go out in our neighborhood
and tell people turn their lights off, because it was
believed that if you let lights on and there was
(05:30):
a bombing attack, it would make you a bed, an
easy target. So he did that. The other strange thing
it did it was my first exposure to China in
that my mom would stand online for getting bananas. Bananas
went short supply because of the war, and I didn't
(05:52):
like bananas, so she kept saying to me, eat your bananas,
think about the poor starving children in China. And I
could never figure out how my eating bananas was going
to help the poor starving children in China. Still can't forget.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
That my parents use the same thing. I'm with you.
I sit there thinking, I mean, if I don't eat this,
it's not going to get to China. But apparently for
our generation, it was apparently a universal thing for parents
to tell their kids, you have to eat this because
there's some starving kids somewhere.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
Right.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Do you have one, I think interesting story about going
through an air raid drill and being asked, you know,
why does everyone have to sit against the wall?
Speaker 2 (06:36):
Oh? Yeah, I was in kindergarten at the time, and
about every week they would have an air raid drill
and they would march us all down to the basement
of the school building and have us sit against the wall.
And at one point teacher asked, does anybody know why
(06:56):
we're having you sit against the wall? What came into
my mind, not trying to be a wise guy, but
just popped in, was well, I said, maybe it's to
make it easier to count the bodies. That maybe the
teacher furious and some of the other students hysterical.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
And you just reached that conclusion as an act of
logic when you do get to Yale, You're not immediately
on a business track. We're your career and up in fact,
you that a very different initial sense of what you
might do with your life. Can you describe your early
career goals at Yale?
Speaker 2 (07:38):
Surely I wanted to be a writer, and so you
could say that now sixty odd years later that dream
has been fulfilled. But what happened at the time was
in the second year they had a course called Daily Themes,
and you had to put into a little slot a
(07:59):
thousand were of fiction every day. Well, by the end
of the second week, I was out of material, so
I quit the course and gave up creative writing. And
then a faculty member who was our advisor at my
fraternity but was also part of the Yale investment team,
(08:22):
which was very high grad of a turn team, called
me and said he was leaving the university to go
to Wall Street and that I shouldn't waste my summer
parking cars, which I had done the prior summer. I
should instead accompany him as his clerk to Wall Street.
(08:45):
And I did, and once I was there, they never
wanted to leave.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
But now the summer before you parked cars at the
Monmouth Park Club. What did you learn from that experience?
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Learned a couple of things, all of which were very
strange lessons. The very first day, the lot boss wrote
all of us kids who were car parkers together and
he said, no, you've got to understand what the rules
are here. He said. There will inevitably be accidents, headlights broken,
(09:21):
things like that, especially in the rush to get cars
out at the end of the day. He said, But
if the patron leaves the track without complaining, then the
track won't have to pay to fix the damage and
you won't get set down for a week. But if
the patron notices the damage, track will pay and you'll
(09:43):
get set down for a week. He said. But there's
a solution. Distrack the customer. And the way he explained
to us to distract him was, if it were a convertible,
put the top up as you're going to pick him up.
Would then say what are you doing putting the top up,
and he wouldn't notice that his right front headlight was
(10:07):
smashed out. He said, if it wasn't a convertible, turn
the radio on real loud and turn the windshield wipers on.
The patron again will say what are you doing. It's
a sunny day, Why are you putting the windshield wipers?
Why are you're putting the radios so loud? But he
wouldn't notice the damage. So here was an executive member
(10:32):
of management teaching young kids how to fleece the customers
that kept the place going. In retrospect, a very bizarre experience.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Did you decide that that wasn't the way you wanted
to run your business.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
No, that's absolutely true.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
But you also talk about the fact that having watched
casinos and racetracks, you really have a very different attitude
about investing in that you don't gamble, You do research well.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
People think I gamble every day dealing in distress securities,
but those are rational gambles. Gambling in a casino or
a racetrack is a loser's game because the odds are
set to return only seventy five percent of the money.
(11:28):
So whatever gets wagered twenty five percent of it's going
to get eaten up by the establishment. That's not very
good odds.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
When you look at, say, distressed assets, are you calculating that,
over say one hundred activities, a certain number will in
fact fail, but that the aggregate will make money.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
Well yeah, but we go in after they have failed,
so that absorbs a lot of the risk. I would
argue that a properly selected bond that's been defaulted and
is trading at twenty five cents on the dollar is
probably a safer investment than most bonds trading at par
(12:13):
because you have much less downside and at least in theory,
quite a little bit of upside. But what you have
to do is to change the management attitude. Companies that
have been under stressed for quite a while develop what
I call loser's mentality, bless and what's wrong with your company?
(12:35):
And they'll always say something extraneous. It's the union, or
it's the class action litigants, or it's the government, or
it's the Chinese. They never mention anything that's within their
own control. So usually just by bringing in someone who
knows the industry and who doesn't start with the preconception
(13:00):
that he can't do anything that changes the dynamics in
and of itself.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
What was the difference in your mind between your approach
and Michael Milkin's approach.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
Oh, well, milkn in a sense made my career in
that I was running investment banking in the US for
the Rothschild family at the point when he was developing
jump bonds, namely issuing high yielding securities that would deliberately
(13:32):
low quality. And I knew the Rothschilds would never want
to underwrite securities like that, but that meant that there
would be more defaults because, for example, Federated Department Stores,
a fellow named Robert Campo, a developer in Canada, made
a hostile bid. He paid six billion dollars with a
(13:56):
bid for it. Ninety seven percent of it was debt financed,
so he had thirty million dollars in a six billion
dollar buyout. Eighteen months later, it went bus because there
was a recession. So we helped restructure Federated, We helped
(14:17):
restructure Texico, PanAm TWA, a whole bunch of different companies,
the steel industry, the coal industry, but the most momentous
one was the Trump taj Mahal. And that's actually how
I met Donald Trump.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
From a business side. Tell us about that.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
Well, Trump was building a startup casino on the board
wall in Atlantic City, and he got Merrilynch and bear
Stearns to a one hundred ete eight hundred million dollars
of mortgage bonds for a venture capital type casino. Only
problem was they never made one interest payment. They defaulted
(15:18):
before the first coupon came due, so the bondholders were
actually a little cross with that, and they hired me
to try to get their money back. So they hired
me on the Thursday before Labor Day weekend of nineteen
ninety and as soon as Trump heard the news, he
called me. He said, you have to come down to
(15:40):
Atlantic City tomorrow. The last place I wanted to be
for Labor Day weekend was in Atlantic City with a
bunch of people playing slot machines. But anyhow, I went
to the haeliport and there was his chopper, unmistakable in
that in red ny all Polish type, bright red letters
(16:03):
Trump on the side of the plane. So I got
in it. Thirty odd minutes later, we're landing in Atlantic
City and he's there waiting to meet me in a
big stretch limo. And as I got into it, I
noticed there were two flags on the front bumper, a
(16:24):
US flag and a Trump flag, and the Trump flag
appeared to be slightly larger than the US flag. So
it was my first dose of seeing his pension for
attracting attention and very successfully doing so. So we go
(16:45):
through this mob scene with Gwynny Casino. People are having
him sign their beanie hats right on their shirt. One
woman had a bare back dress and she had him
sign her back. Now what she was going to do
with Donald J. Trump in black magic marker pencil on
her back, I'll never know, But anyhow, I think it
(17:08):
was all part of the build up because he knew
the bondholders were furious about the default, and he correctly
figured they might want to get rid of him. So
this was all designed to impress me and show me
how important he was to the operation. Then we went
upstairs to start negotiating, and he never called it a negotiation.
(17:34):
He always called it a discussion. But he began by saying,
your bonds are trading a twenty cents on the dollar,
and your clients will be lucky to get twenty cents
at the end, So why don't we just do this.
I'll personally guarantee them the twenty cents and we don't
have to have any more discussion. I said, well, Donald,
(17:57):
one problem is they've hired me to get them par
plus a crude interest plus one hundred percent of the
equity in your casinos. So we have a little gap
that we have to try somehow to close. Well, we
went back and forth for a couple hours and it
finally got nowhere. He was stuck at the twenty cents,
(18:20):
so I ultimately said, well, Donald, is that it. That's
as far as you were prepared to go at least today.
He said, yes, twenty cents. So I said, well, then
I'm not going to waste my time arguing with you.
I'll call you next week. And I walked out on him,
and he tells the story to this day because that
(18:41):
was the kind of tactic he was used to using
on the other people in negotiation, and he was a
little shocked to have it used on him. We then
argued for several months publicly, quite publicly, and eventually we're
getting very close to our target, but there was still
(19:02):
little gap. So one morning I went over to his
office and said, this is our best and final offer.
He turned it down. What it was was part plus
the crude plus fifty one percent of the stock, and
I had figured his breaking point probably would be that
(19:23):
he didn't want to give up majority ownership, so he
rejected it and said, well then don and we're going
to see you in court. And we parted. I went
back to my office, put out a press release Trump
taj Mahal bondholders holding a very important press conference at
the Marriotte Marquis Hotel, and we picked the marry out
(19:47):
because it wasn't one of his properties. So as soon
as that was on the news where he called me.
He said, what the hell is this? What are you
going to say to the people at the press countrience
and said, well, Donald, well I told you we would
see you in court. We're going to announce that we're
filing an involuntary bankruptcy petition against the taj Mahal and
(20:10):
by nine o'clock tomorrow morning, it's going to be in bankruptcy.
He said, well, let me get with my advisors, not
with his advisers, and me back down a little bit
of forty nine with him having fifty one percent, worked
a few more technical details, and then we had a deal.
(20:31):
He then said, but one more thing, And I had
spent enough time with him to know the one more
thing was usually a zinger. Well, in this case, the
one more thing was he said, you must move the
press conference to the Plaza Hotel because that was one
of his properties. So we did. We had this big
(20:54):
glove fest with the media, and you can imagine this
is a pretty stressful day for me. So I'm getting
in the car to be driven home and the phone rings.
This is your mother, say said, in just about that
angrier tone. I said, well him, Mom, everything okay? She said, no,
(21:15):
everything's not okay. I've been playing Marjon with my lady
friends while we were watching that disgraceful TV show that
you did just now the press conference with Trump, and
we all agreed that after all those mean things he
said about you, you should not make a deal with them. Yes, a,
(21:36):
but Mom, that's what I do. That's my job. I
was hired to do that. She said, well, if you
had only become a lawyer like I always wanted you to,
you won't have to hang around with people like that,
and she hung up. She hung up on me. She
later forgave me for the Trump part, but she never
(21:57):
did forgive me for not being a lawyer.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
Spirical given that tough negotiation, were you surprised to end
up in the cabinet with Trump? Well?
Speaker 2 (22:08):
In between what happened was this after the bonds collapsed
Carly Khan, who as you know, is a good friend
of mine and a good client, he became the biggest bondholder.
So we were both on the opposite side from Trump,
but we both became early endorsers of Trump when he
(22:30):
was running in twenty sixteen. And the reason was when
you were adversarial to someone in that kind of circumstance,
you get to learn what they're made of, and we
both concluded he was made of pretty good stuff. So
it changed our whole attitude toward him. And then what
(22:53):
happened early before the primaries. I was on squawk Box
and at the end of the discussion about the market,
they asked me, if Trump were the Republican nominee, would
you vote for him? And I said yes, absolutely, and
they were shocked because at that time Republicans were mostly
(23:15):
not going for Trump, and a lot of them, in fact,
were Democrats. So I then explained why, and it said,
he's the only one who understands that the plight of
middle class in lower middle class America has become so
severe that they're going to make a change. They're going
(23:38):
to vote for someone who's going to do something about
the fact they've been losing purchasing power for all these years,
and Trump's the only one who recognizes it. So I
think he's not only going to be the nominee. I
think he's going to be the president. Turned out it
was an accurate guess, so naturally we became pretty friendly,
(24:04):
and as you know, I wrote a lot of editorials
during the campaign, debated a lot of left wing think
tank people, and Lo and Behold ended up in the cabinet.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
I did a great job at Cours before that. When
you were in business, you earned the title King of Bankruptcy.
Now is that a good thing?
Speaker 2 (24:26):
Well? Fortune magazine gave me that title, and they meant
it to be approvingly. A lot of people have thought
it was meant to be a derisive title. I didn't
invent the titles, so I didn't care about it one
way or another. But it was Fortune's way of expressing
(24:49):
that we had built up a very big market share
in acting on behalf of the victims. I didn't act
on behalf of companies that had default. I always represented
the bondholders or the equity.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
So your interest was trying to minimize the loss to
the people who had provided resources correct.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
And the stranger's part is that even though Drexel doing
all those bonds really made my life because I'd spent
a lot of time straightening them out, strangers thing is
I did Drexel's bankruptcy. Drexel went from being the most
profitable firm on Wall Street, earning five hundred million dollars
(25:39):
after taxes, to bust in eighteen months because of the
collapse of the junk bond market. So it was very strange.
Here the firm that helped me make a fortune, I'm
now representing their unsecured creditors.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
I did not know this background, but your mother was
for fifty years a Democratic county committeewoman. Your dad was
a local elected official. So you went away and of
course in Jersey City, where Mayor Frank k ran the
place for years as a Democrat, your natural background was
as a Democrat.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Yes, And so when I first came to New York,
I got involved with Democratic politics, and it turned out
I was pretty good at fundraising. So at age twenty nine,
I was made the treasurer of the Democratic State Committee
in New York. As I got more exposure to Democrats
(26:57):
and as they changed from being the party of people
who worked to being the party of people who don't
want to work. I'd gradually migrated to the Republican Party,
but I didn't make the change until long after my
mother was dead, because she had enough trouble getting over
(27:20):
me not being a lawyer. Not being a lawyer and
being a Republican probably would have killed her prematurely.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
One of the great turning points in New York was
the race between Dinkins and Julianni. Where were you at
that point?
Speaker 2 (27:37):
Well, at that point I was in transition, but I
was also involved with a lot of the cultural institutions
in New York. So Punch Seltzberger, who then was running
The New York Times, myself, and a man called Marty Siegel,
who was a big pension consultant, we formed a group
(28:01):
that was designed to be a public private partnership where
the board of the institution would contribute half, the city
and the state each a quarter, and they would fund
incremental programmatic activity. And to try to get the political
(28:21):
sector behind that, we banded together all the boardheads of
the cultural institutions, not just the big ones, but even
the little ones, and we had a session in the
New York Times Auditorium, where each of the two candidates
at that point it was Dinkins and Juliani made their presentations. Well,
(28:46):
they had never presented anything about culture before, so it
came time you had to brief them what we thought
was the program they should do. And nobody wanted to
to brief Giuliani. So I said, well, I don't think
that's fair. At the time, I didn't care for him.
(29:07):
I don't think that's fair. I'll go brief him. So
I spent two hours with him, at the end of
which I said, mister Giuliani, as you probably know, the
cultural community is much to the left of your view,
so to try to get it off to a good start,
(29:28):
we'll give you a softball question as the number one thing,
so that you get off to a good start. What
would you like for a softball question? He said, Well,
let them ask me anything about the opera A very
surprising answer. I said anything. He said, yes, I've really
(29:50):
known the opera. So I reported that back, and some
young left winger from I think the Metropolitan Opera asked
him a very technical question about some obscure opera, and
he hit it right out of the ballpark, and that
changed my impression of him quite a bit. And then subsequently,
(30:15):
since we had developed a bit of relationship, he hired
me as an outsider to be his privatization advisor and
we sold off the TV station the city owned. We
did a lot of things, so I got quite involved
with his administration.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
One of the most important things you did when you
were secretary is renegotiating NAFTA at the time, and I
want to confess upfront, I voted for NAFTA and it
turned out not to work. I mean, most of Trump's
critique of NAFTA was right, But what was it like
to negotiate with the Mexican government. I mean, you clearly,
(30:53):
both with the Canadians and the Mexicans, you were very
tough and you got a very good agreement from the
American perspective.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Right. Well, Bob Leinheuser was quite involved in the discussions
leading to the USMCA as well, and both he and
I felt there is no such thing as free trade.
It's a lovely concept. I wish it were the reality,
but like so many economic concepts, it just doesn't work
(31:24):
in real life. And the reason it doesn't is that
every country wants to outgrow what its own natural attributes
let it be, so they all become protectionists, and it
was a big mistake on our government's part, particularly letting
(31:46):
China into the WTO, which is not enough TO, but
to the WTO without proper enforcement mechanisms. Clinton's theory was
that if they were in WTO, they'd abide by the rules,
but he didn't have any enforcement, so they didn't and
(32:07):
LAFTA was a much more complicated thing. Both Canada and
Mexico are very dependent on the US, and in fact,
despite big trade balance positive with the US, Mexico runs
an overall trade deficit. We felt that there were a
(32:31):
number of things that could be helpful to the US.
For one thing, we decided it was better if we
had to import from somewhere, let's import from Canada or Mexico,
our neighbors, rather than from China or someone who could
become an adversary. So that was one idea we had.
(32:55):
But there were also a lot of things in the
old NAT that were foolish. For example, in automotive, which
is a huge export business for Mexico, what they did
was they specified particular individual parts that had to be
(33:17):
made in Mexico for the car to come in duty free. Well,
the problem is when you do that, you're ignoring technological change.
So by the time we came into the picture, most
of those parts weren't even used in cars anymore, but
a lot of semiconductors came in and other things. So
(33:40):
we changed that. We made it a rule that a
majority of the actual content of the car had to
be US produced, and that helped us a lot, and
we made similar changes with other things. Now, the problem
is Mexico has not been very good at living up
(34:01):
to the agreement and it comes up for renewal pretty soon.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Now would you be tougher about insisting on enforcement?
Speaker 2 (34:09):
Well, they changed the system. We insisted that the courts
be the ultimate resolution of disputes, but now they've decided
to make the courts be elected by the public, So
that made the courts totally political, and the probability of
(34:31):
an American complainant prevailing against a Mexican company under those
circumstances is pretty much zero. The other thing, they promised
to open up their hydrocarbon sector to American and other
natural gas and oil producers, and they've reneg done that.
(34:54):
There are a lot of problems, whether it's Trump or
it's whoever running the country, we really need a lot
of change, even from the USMCA.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
Do you find the Mexicans difficult to negotiate with.
Speaker 2 (35:10):
They're lovely people, and the problem is that it's such
a highly politicized society and of late, highly left wing society,
so they're intellectual and geopolitical point of view couldn't be
(35:31):
more different from ours. So there is a fundamental disconnect
between them and US. But one of the things that
Trump did in the negotiations he called in one day
the ambassador from Mexico because he was wanting twenty five
thousand troops on the border to help US hold down
(35:55):
illegal immigration. And I was there and the said, well,
I've relayed that request to the President of Mexico, but
he doesn't want to do it. And Trump said, well,
if he doesn't do it by noon today, we're going
to impose huge tariffs on everything that comes in from Mexico.
(36:21):
The ambassador has taking him back, and with me sitting
there and agreeing, he knew that was very likely to
be what we would try. So he said, well, let
me call the president. So he called the president of Mexico,
and Trump said, remember has to be by noontime because
(36:42):
I have a very important lunch date and you've got
to solve this before. Then he came back and they
gave us the twenty five thousand troops, which was a
great help, as you know, in holding down the illegal
immigration because it was keeping a lot of them over there.
(37:02):
And what he didn't know was it was a very
important lunch and who it was with was Melania. Trump
had been so busy he hadn't been able to have
lunch with Melanna for a couple of weeks.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
And I suspect you would agree, and certainly I would
that there are moments when our wives become very important lunches.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
Yes, absolutely, he wasn't kidding.
Speaker 1 (37:27):
That's right, that's great. I want to thank you. You
have great friend, and I always enjoy being with you.
And you've had a remarkable career so far, and I
suspect there are more adventures ahead. Your new book, Risks
and Returns Creating Success in Business in Life, it's terrific.
It's available now on Amazon bookstores everyone. As I said,
(37:47):
it's now a bestseller. I really appreciate Wilberg, you're taking
the time to be with me.
Speaker 2 (37:53):
Well, thank you very much. Thanks, it's good to be
on with you. Thank you for giving me so much time.
Speaker 1 (38:02):
Thank you to my guest, Wilbur Ross. You can get
a link to buy his new book, Risks and Returns,
Creating Success in Business and Life on our show page
at newsworld dot com. Newtworld is produced by Ginglish three
sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsey Sloan and
our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show
(38:25):
was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team
at Gingwishtree sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope
you'll go to Apple Podcasts and both rate us with
five stars and give us a review so others can
learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of Newtsworld
can sign up for my three freeweekly columns at Gingrishtree
(38:47):
sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm newt Gingrich. This is Newtsworld.
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