 I'm going to go straight on to Bruce Katz, the director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings, and furthermore, one of that rarefied select group of Americans who has a passport and has for some time, and particularly has worked on comparisons between American and European cities. So it couldn't be better placed to give us a perspective from Washington. OK, it's a pleasure to be here. And I think at Brookings, we like to talk about going from the macro to the metro. So thank you to Ricky and Wolfgang for getting Kamala and myself in the same city. We're going to try to do the tricky part now and shift the presentations, since we're now connecting my laptop to another laptop. Let's see if that works. While they're putting that together, what I'm going to try to talk about is a discussion of the Great Recession from the perspective of place. And obviously, this Great Recession has been precipitated by reckless lending and a housing bubble in the United States, which has dramatically disrupted the lives of literally hundreds of millions of people across this globe through lost jobs and foreclosed homes and diminished incomes and banished wealth. At some point, the presentation will come up and I'll sort of catch up with myself. But what we've tried to do at Brookings is offer a simple but somewhat radical proposition from the United States, since we've had a long history as an anti-urban country. What we've basically said is that the ability of our country to grow and prosper is at risk, unless our metropolitan areas are healthy and vital. And what we're trying to do in the United States is literally change the mental map of our country from a union of 50 states or a network of small towns to a network of 363 highly connected hyperlink and economically integrated metropolitan areas. The tagline of our proposition is that the US is a metro nation and it's high time to start acting like one. So I'm going to begin with an initial frame. The shape of the US economy, the next US economy in our future prosperity is slowly coming into view. It appears likely that the next US economy is going to be low carbon. It will be innovation fueled. It will be less driven by domestic consumption. It will be more export oriented. Now that economy offers the kind of productive, inclusive, and sustainable growth that has eluded the United States for the past several decades. It may be ironic to be saying that in the midst of the worst economic downturn in 70 years, we may actually have a go here or perhaps not. Oh, I think we're trying to reconcile Max PCs and something else. In the last year, what we've seen is the US employment rate basically moved from about 4% to close to 10%. The rate is much higher for African-Americans and Hispanics, not surprisingly given the racial and ethnic, oh, here we go, we're about to do this. I'm going to catch up real quick so we stay on time. This is my country, the United States. Small country. This is how I see the United States, again as a network of metropolitan areas. Again, the radical proposition, here we go. I think we're catching up. Perfect. As I said before, the proposition is we're moving to a low-carbon, innovation-fueled, export-oriented economy. Again, last year, we've seen dramatic growth in unemployment, much worse for Hispanics and African-Americans, and frankly, these figures don't really state the full problem. There are now nearly 15 million unemployed people in the United States. That's the highest number since records started being kept in 1948. Our housing sector is battered because values have fallen nationwide for closures of rich and sharply due, first to that wave of toxic subprime, now the ravages of unemployment and the loss of income. Good's production has taken a dramatic hit. We've lost half the workers in auto manufacturing in the United States since 2000, with 330,000 workers lost in the past year alone. As a consequence, we now predict that about 41 million people will be below the poverty line in the U.S., compared to about 31.5 million in 2000. Poverty will hit about 13.2% in our country. We won't go down to 27 levels probably for another decade. Now, we're a big country, we're a diverse country. The recession has varied considerably. The housing collapse has been felt very much in the sun-drenched bubble real estate economies of Vegas and Riverside and Tampa, Florida. The auto collapse has devastated the motor metros, Detroit, Grand Rapids, and Dayton, and by contrast, places like Washington, D.C., Austin, and other areas have fared fairly well, buoyed by health and education. The real issue for us, and probably for everyone in this room, is what comes next. With a specter of global warming, we're making that slow, and in our country, painful transition to a low and less carbon economy. But with that comes opportunity. This transition is gonna demand a step change in innovation, in renewable energy technology, solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, ocean wave, biomass, in state-of-the-art infrastructure, smart grid, high-speed rail, finally, rapid bus, electric vehicles, clean coal, in green building technology and practice, sustainable design, sustainable construction, energy-efficient appliances, approaches, water-efficient appliances, approaches, all of that is gonna create new markets in the United States for private investment and ultimately drive job creation. Now, alongside of that, and this is really critical, is going to be a rebalancing of our economy, Larry Summers said, so it must be right, the rebuilt American economy must be more export-oriented and less consumption-oriented, and he is being polite. As everyone in this room knows, the last decade saw a frenzy of consumption in the United States, driven by non-sustainable speculative increases in housing values and reckless engineering of new loan products and secondary market vehicles. The US economy went off course. Consumer spending stood at 75% of GDP in 19, in 2007, up from 67% in 1980. Our trade deficit soared, financial services went from 10% of S&P 500 earnings to 45% today. The next economy in the United States must return to sanity, to a semblance of balance, to making things as well as providing services. Now, here's the second proposition, which is still radical in the United States, is that the next economy will be metropolitan and led. The world may be flat, as Tom Friedman obviously has taught us, but the spatial reality of modern economies here as well as where is their intense concentration in a relatively small number of places. These are the top 100 metros in the United States. They've kept growing and growing, where they now constitute two thirds of our population and they concentrate the workers and firms that fuel our economy. This is obviously the agglomeration effect. Why is this happening? Because these places gather and strengthen those assets that drive prosperity. Whether it's innovation, the new products, the processes, the business models that drive economic productivity and sustainable solutions, whether it's human capital, the education and skills that then further innovation and are the ticket to the middle class here and elsewhere, whether it's infrastructure, state of the art, transportation, telecommunication, energy distribution to help us move people, goods and ideas quickly and efficiently and whether it's quality of place. That special mix of distinctive community, quality design, responsible growth that is ultimately competitively wise, physically responsible and environmentally sustainable. Those assets are the assets that matter, innovation, human capital, infrastructure and quality place and they come to ground disproportionately in our country and elsewhere. Top 100 metros only sit on 12% of the land mass. This is the energy efficiency issue. They house two thirds of our population. They generate three quarters of our growth and more importantly, they gather all these assets in an outsized way, whether it's indicators of innovation like patents or venture capital, indicators of human capital like graduate degrees, indicators of infrastructure like air cargo. These are our seaports or freight hubs or indicators of quality place like public transit. This is very similar to some of the slides Ricky put up around metros around the world. The cumulative impact of this is outstanding. Seattle, 51% of the population of the state of Washington, 69% of the economic output of that state. Chicago, where we'll be next year, 67% of the residents, 78% of the economic output. These places punch above their economic weight. We now have in the United States metro areas generating the majority of gross domestic product in 44 of our 50 states, including rural states like Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska and Arkansas. The United States is a metro nation. The real question again is whether we begin to act like one and organize and invest in our assets to achieve productive, inclusive and sustainable growth. So here's the final proposition, to realize the potential of the next economy because it's not inevitable. Metros can't go it alone. The forces that affect metros, movement of talent, drift of carbon emissions, obviously take place at the global scale and they have impacts that transcend parochial borders. We need a national government and in the United States as a republic we need state governments that serve as strategic, flexible and accountable partners so that metros can be all they can be. Now, where is Barack Obama? The question probably for some in this room. The good news is that President Obama gets this vision and most importantly because policy is derivative of paradigm, he gets it at the paradigmatic level. This is the White House website but you can go to many speeches that the president has given. He is talking about cities and metropolitan areas in a modern way. He is the first metropolitan president in the United States. I'm not counting Grover Cleveland, the former mayor of Buffalo. The White House website says bluntly that America's cities and metros are vital engines for economic growth. The federal policy must change to reflect that reality. That is a sharp departure from traditional federal rhetoric which for decades treated cities as reservations of poverty and centers of hopeless decline. Now beyond that conceptual frame, the federal government is beginning to put its money and its rules where its mouth is and make the kind of metro friendly investments and reform. We know that in February, Congress enacted the president's 800 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. This act, while imperfect, is just beginning to make the kind of game changing, market shaping investments in the next economy that has been long deferred. Tens of billions for advanced research and development on bio, on clean energy. Tens of billions for investments in education innovation in ways that leverage state and local reforms, particularly in troubled urban districts. Tens of billions for infrastructure investments, high speed rail, smart grid, healthcare information technology, water systems. Tens of billions in spending and tax incentives for energy retrofit, finally. Intercity business development, community development transit in our major metros, brownfield remediation. The Recovery Act is just the beginning. Since February, the president has put forward a series of initiatives to catalyze multi-dimensional, multi-jurisdictional solutions. To lead a step change in clean energy, he is proposing network of energy innovation hubs to turn advanced research and development into commercially deployable materials and systems to help remake the sprawling American landscape, the Euston's of the world, the Phoenix's of the world. He has proposed a sustainable communities initiative to develop integrated regional plans that link housing, transport jobs and land use and create more compact and transit rich communities. To help metros grow more inclusively, the president has proposed a choice neighborhoods initiative to couple the transformation of distressed public housing, which is still very centrally located in the United States as opposed to other parts of Europe and here, with systemic interventions on early childhood education and school reform. So housing not as a sole intervention, but coupled with these other issues. Now these are very early steps. The Obama administration comes in and inherits a legacy government. It is a shell of its former self. It is diminished in capacity. It is ill-focused and ill-informed. It is literally a fat free zone at times in Washington. Change in a government that is that large and complex takes time. But that makes it even more important that as the Obama administration goes forward, it becomes more globally fluent and it thinks not just outside the box but outside the nation, hard for America. China is building the most sophisticated network of ports and freight hubs in the world by trying to replicate the U.S. network of advanced research institutions and universities. Their stimulus plan on high-speed rail dwarfs what we're doing in the United States. Germany is strengthening rail and telecommunication connections between their major metros. Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Munich and the rest of their country. Spain, though devastated by this recession, has really become a hot house of alternative energy solutions. Wind, solar, spawning new specializations in finance, investment, legal fields. U.S. prosperity in short depends more than ever on us ceasing to be an insular nation but one that truly embraces, is aware of, translates, replicates the innovative brilliance of our trading partners. So let me end where I began. The U.S. enters this century and as far as I'm concerned, this century started 2009 with a new geography and a new phase. We are not Thomas Jefferson's network of rural hamlets in small towns but we still like to think of ourselves like that. The U.S. challenge is literally cultural. It's to get comfortable in our metropolitan skin, alter the way we govern so that metropolitan communities can achieve their fullest potential in our country as the engines of national prosperity. The federal government at a time of economic crisis, social challenge, unprecedented environmental pressure has to catalyze this move towards metropolitan governance and in so way pave the way for decades of growth and development that is literally smart and sustainable. We are, we urge a Metro policy for a Metro nation. Thank you very much.