When President JOE BIDEN decided to speak Monday morning about the Silicon Valley Bank failure, he scheduled his remarks for 9 a.m. ET — an unusually early start to the day for the president. Biden kept it to just five minutes, wrapping up his remarks by design 20 minutes before the U.S. stock market opened. He didn’t ad lib. And he didn’t take any shouted questions from reporters as he exited the Roosevelt Room. Giving a presidential address in a fast-moving financial crisis is tricky business, said MICHELE DAVIS, who was a senior member of the Treasury Department’s communications team during the 2008 financial crisis. (She was played by CYNTHIA NIXON in the 2011 HBO movie about that meltdown, “Too Big to Fail.”) “Almost no one speaks off the cuff during a time like this. Everything is pretty well scripted,” Davis said. “It’s really hard to correct something that’s been misinterpreted.” Investors and financial markets parse every word that the president utters, looking for clues. Every carefully-planned decision the White House makes — from the timing of the speech to the length and setting of the address — is strategic. In 2007 and 2008, President GEORGE W. BUSH’s staffers read speeches out loud to each other and debated the worst possible way that the market could interpret the remarks. There were a lot of revisions and sleepless nights. “You have to get every one of those words right,” said another Bush administration official, who asked not to use their name because their current employer did not authorize them to speak. “You have this situation where the president is on CNBC, futures are open, you could see a live reaction.” While Biden addressed “the American people” in his remarks, Davis said that these types of speeches are fundamentally aimed at calming easily-spooked investors and restoring confidence in the banking system. But while it’s critical for the president to reassure the public during shaky financial moments, it's equally important for him to know when to turn it over to officials from the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and other bank regulators who are viewed as less political and more authoritative. Bush’s speechwriters would try to work in mentions of Treasury Secretary HANK PAULSON and give him credit on financial policy. Biden relied on a similar playbook on Monday, crediting Treasury Secretary JANET YELLEN for taking “immediate action.” “If everyone takes confidence in what the president was saying, we might not hear from him again,” Davis said. “When there’s a fast moving financial situation, the general approach is that the president speaks sparingly and uses the Treasury to respond from moment to moment.” Communicating in a crisis like this one can feel like balancing on a knife’s edge. The policy solutions matter, but so does communicating them clearly, concisely and memorably. The right words can end a crisis in one fell swoop. Famously, MARIO DRAGHI, then the head of the European Central Bank, declared in 2012 that he would do “whatever it takes” to end the European sovereign debt crisis. Those three words marked the beginning of the effort that saved the euro. On the other side of the coin, then-President DONALD TRUMP contributed to a steep stock market decline when he failed to clearly communicate his policy response to the Covid pandemic in a March, 11 2020, primetime speech that rattled investors. (Trump said that the U.S. was “suspending all travel from Europe,” only for his administration to later clarify that American citizens and permanent legal residents were exempt from the restriction.) “There’s no second chance sometimes. Markets move so fast,” said Davis. MESSAGE US — Are you former Treasury Secretary TIMOTHY GEITHNER? We want to hear from you. And we’ll keep you anonymous! Email us at westwingtips@politico.com. Did someone forward this email to you? Subscribe here!
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