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CNBC: I'm interested on your perspective on the economy.
WILBUR ROSS: There are a lot of people very worried about the economy right now, and in fact I don't think the economy is in very good shape. I think what really happened was we went through a period when no lender was afraid of anything. That didn't work so well. Now we're in a reverse time period where every lender is everything. This is a result of a very severe contraction of credit. You may remember a year ago, everybody was saying you don't have to worry; there is all this excess liquidity that will take care of everything. However liquidity is not a physical phenomenon and is not just a lot of cash sloshing around. Liquidity is more of a state of mind. It's the willingness to take cash and put it all over the place. That is what has changed. There is no less money floating around in the world. What's not there anymore is people's willingness to commit it. And that's what has really changed the landscape. And I think it's going to take quite a while to get through the excesses that had occurred.
CNBC: In a business like yours, where you don't believe in being heavily leveraged, you're not that affected.
WILBUR ROSS: No, it doesn't bother us that much. However, it is creating some of the problems and therefore from our point of view, creating some of the opportunities.
CNBC: What opportunities are you seeing in the current problems?
WILBUR ROSS: In our current environment we've been doing both a number of manufacturing businesses. What we have been most identified with recently is financial service businesses. In manufacturing we've most importantly been building up very big auto-parts suppliers. We have created a company called International Auto Components, which now has some 25,000 employees, we're in 17 countries, we're doing almost $6 billion a year in revenues, and we have no net debt on the company at all, after all the acquisitions that it made. So it's in very good shape, even though this year is going to be a very tough year in Detroit. If anything it will be a year during which we add some things to the holdings. Now if we had a lot of debt, we would be more likely to become a target than an acquirer. That's one demonstration of how the philosophy works. At quite a different level we have made a very big commitment to Assured Guarantee, which is one of the few monoline insurers that has remained a solid Triple A rating. It is the first time in my life that I've come across a distressed company that was Triple A rated. Assured Guarantee is not really a distressed company. Its stock is distressed because of the problems some of the others in the industry are facing. So we provided it with up to $1 billion of capital, to take advantage of the rationalization of that independent, which we believe will occur. Our capital is not going to fill up holes, it's to help them either take over on a reinsurance basis business from some of the less well-situated companies, or perhaps acquire them altogether.
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