Hey everyone this is Jonathan Kapart. Welcome to K-Bup. This week's guest Fred

Hawkbird Chairman of the Export Import Bank. It's a little

known federal bank that helps American businesses compete on the world stage, but there

been some issues. First, Congress stalled the bank's reauthorization.

We were actually lapsed for five months and four days, not that I was counting every single

day. Then Congress found another obstacle to gum up the works. So we do not have a quorum today.

Find out why that's a huge deal.

Then you'll want to hear how Hawkberg, one of the highest ranking openly gay members of the Obama

administration, uses his travels to talk to LGBT groups at home and abroad.

Oh, did you know his late mother is the catalog Queen Lillian Vernon?

You can find out the advice she gave him growing up right now.

Fred, thanks so much for being on the podcast today. Thanks for coming in. I'm

happy to be here. Okay, so you're the chairman of the Export Import Bank.

What on earth is that? The Export

Import Bank is the Trade Bank in the United States. Many countries have them.

They're about 85 of these around the world. Germany, France, China, Korea. Some countries

like China have two or three of them in fact. What we do is we finance U.S. exports to support U.S. jobs or all about U.S. jobs when either one of two conditions

are present. One, credit isn't available. I was recently in Sri Lanka, Burma, Myanmar, Bangladesh, India, countries where frequently it's not easy

to get a bank loan to do a major project or to sell small business goods.

So in those markets where it's very difficult to get financing, we can step in and

provide a government guarantee so that financing comes forward. That's one. Two.

Frequently we have US companies and US workers competing against foreign companies and their workers.

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