OUR REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT:

BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK: The stock market has tripled. Profits are very high. And yet you still have this label of being an anti-business figure. How do you look at that?

OBAMA: Well, first of all, toward the end of my second term, I think among the business community, there's maybe a greater acknowledgment, a less grudging acknowledgment, that we steered through the worst financial and economic crisis in our lifetimes successfully--certainly more successfully than many of our peers. We're now 10 percent above the GDP pre-crisis. In Europe, for example, they're just now getting back to even.

As you mentioned, the stock market, obviously, has come roaring back. But I think more relevant for ordinary folks, we've cut the unemployment rate in half. We've been able to have the longest [stretch of] consecutive months of private-sector job growth in our history. Biggest job growth since the '90s in manufacturing. The auto industry has come roaring back and is selling more cars than ever. We've doubled the production of clean energy. Our production of traditional fossil fuels has exceeded all expectations. We've been able to grow the economy, reduce unemployment, and cut the deficit by around three-quarters, measured as a percent of GDP. So it's hard to argue with the facts.

I think where the business community has traditionally voiced complaints about my administration is in the regulatory sector. And yet, if you look at the results--Dodd-Frank being a good example--it is indisputable that our banking system and our financial sector are safer and more stable than when I came into office. [....]

One of the reasons people are feeling left behind is free trade. Have you not done a good job of selling the benefits of trade to people who feel that this is something that's taking their jobs, taking away their future?

A couple of interesting things about trade. No. 1, the majority of Americans, surveys show, still favor free trade. It's just that those who are opposed feel it much more intensely. No. 2, there is no doubt that some of the trade deals of the past, and the way in which globalization occurred over the course of the last 40 years, has not always been to the U.S.'s advantage.

So you take the example of China's accession to the WTO [World Trade Organization]. From a geopolitical perspective, it was absolutely the right thing to do. And in fairness, nobody anticipated that China suddenly was going to be the engine of world manufacturing that rapidly. But there probably were some safeguards that could have been built to make sure that they weren't devaluing their currency unfairly, that they weren't engaged in the same state-owned enterprise subsidies and dumping that they were. Hopefully we've learned lessons from what happened there.

My argument with my friends in the union movement, for example--and I'm a strong union supporter--is if you're fighting that battle, you're fighting the last war. That you have to recognize that globalization is here to stay. That to keep one of the auto plants that have reopened and grown here in the United States operating at full capacity--they're relying on parts from all over the world, and trying to disentangle that is all but impossible. And our goal, then, should be to try to shape trade deals that raise standards everywhere. And that's what we've done with the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

I just came back from Vietnam. They're introducing measures in their constitution to recognize worker organizations that are independent from the government for the first time. The only reason they're doing that is because they wanted to be part of TPP.

If we simply pretend that trade will go away or that we can block it off, then China will set the rules for trade for the next 20, 30, 50 years. It sure won't be good for U.S. businesses. It won't be good for U.S. workers, and ultimately it won't be as good for workers in Vietnam or the people of Malaysia or other countries we're working with.

The last point I'd make on this is that the challenge from a perceptions point of view is that the benefits of globalization we take for granted. The costs are highly visible. You know, you can argue that one of the reasons inflation has been so low over the last two decades is because we're able to get a lot of stuff cheap from all around the world.

We take for granted that we can get a flatscreen TV really cheap, or that we get clothes that fit better and last longer than when I was a kid. You walk into J.Crew or the Gap, and it's a great improvement. I try to tell my kids, "You guys look a lot sharper than I did when I was your age, because we went to Sears, and it wasn't working the same way."

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