A New Interview with Fred Smith of Fedex

Fred Smith, founder and CEO of Fedex, is a famous campus entrepreneur — having come up with the original idea for the company for a paper while an undergrad at Yale (our first interview post from May 2007  here).

Fred is a supporter of McCain, but more importantly is a brilliant guy. He is the featured weekend interview in the WSJ and it is well worth reading. Here are a few snippets from the piece by Stephen Moore:

Oh, the country is going to get through this and the financial markets will stabilize,” he assures me, but only after we go through a period of “trauma and readjustment.”

I ask him just what he means by “trauma.” He attributes the financial crisis to “the intersection of four long-term developments.” Reckless mortgage lending policies; high energy prices; mark-to-market accounting rules; and national policies that favor what he calls “the financial sector over the industrial sector.”

Later,

Mr. Smith ends our interview with a little sermon about what the U.S. must do to retain its global economic superpower status. “Many of our current policies are not conducive to continued economic leadership. We restrict immigration when we have thousands of highly educated people that want to come to the United States, and some of our greatest corporations [are] crying out that we don’t have the scientific talent that we need to develop the next generation of innovations and inventions . . .

“That’s where all wealth comes from . . . It’s not from the government. It’s from invention and entrepreneurship and innovation. And our policies promote a legal and regulatory system which impedes our ability to grow entrepreneurship. Lastly, if we want to make [America's workers] wealthier we have to quit demonizing quote, big corporations.”

The entire article is worth reading as Smith clearly explains his views on economic growth, the role of government, and the tensions that currently exist in our economy and between various sectors if it.