"[May] twelfth was a day I had hoped would never come; Bob Rubin was returning to private life. I believed he had been the best and most important Treasury secretary since Alexander Hamilton in the early days of our Republic. Bob had also been the first head of the National Economic Council. In both positions he had played a decisive role in our efforts to restore economic growth and spread its benefits to more Americans, to prevent and contain financial crisis abroad, and to modernize the international financial system to deal with a global economy in which more than one trillion dollars crossed national borders every day."