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Alas, we no long have our copy of Michael Crichton's 1970 non-fiction book Five Patients. What we particularly recall from it was a scene at the hospital - Massachusetts General no doubt. During the course of rounds, an intern who is studying the paperwork is chastised by an attending physician with the comment, "Look at the patient; the chart's not sick."
And that, in impressive detail, is what both Ms. Dempsey and Mr. Murphy did. They looked at the patient, at just how American businesses use Ex-Im, how America's competitors use their export credit agencies - there are 79 of them according to the OECD - and what non-reauthorization of Ex-Im would mean for American competitiveness. The two business association leaders used different words at times, but their conclusions were the same.
Responding to a question from Senator Heitkamp, Ms. Dempsey talked about the consequences of letting Ex-Im Bank's charter expire. "This will cost U.S. exports - make no mistake-and the jobs that they support," she said. It is happening already:
"One of the things we see is foreign competitors to our companies here in the United States using the fact that the Export-Import Bank may shut down at the end of this month to tell foreign customers, 'Hey, you can't trust the Americans. You can't necessarily guarantee that they are going to come through on this sale.'"
Mr. Murphy addressed various criticisms of Ex-Im throughout his testimony and in response to questions. He spoke to one of the most persistence criticisms - that Ex-Im picks winners and losers - in the closing paragraph of his opening statement. "Ex-Im doesn't pick winners and losers," he said, "but refusing to reauthorize Ex-Im is picking foreign companies as winners and U.S. exporters as losers."
We strongly commend both the Chamber and NAM testimonies to anyone interested getting an intellectual grip on the role of the Export-Import Bank in American trade. We'll take note here of just two examples.
Nuclear Power. This is an industry where American firms are strong, Mr. Murphy explained, but the business is largely overseas. Only five nuclear power plants are under construction in the United States. There currently 61 such projects in the rest of the world. The catch is that "Export credit agency support is almost always a bidding requirement for international nuclear power plant tenders," Mr. Murphy said. In other orders, without Ex-Im, the U.S. will be largely out of the nuclear power plant business.
Small Business and the Commercial Bank Option. As both Ms. Dempsey and Mr. Murphy explained, private banks cannot provide the help small exporting businesses need because they - America's banks - are not able to accept foreign receivables as collateral. Ex-Im has a solution to that problem. Commercial banks don't.
Finally, on the subject of small business, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D MA) was pointedly critical of Ex-Im Bank for not doing enough for small business and sharply questioned Mr. Murphy and Ms. Dempsey as to why they were not equally critical.
From the responses she got, one could be excused for concluding that this is more a Congressional issue than a business one. For example, there does not appear to be any anti-Ex-Im cry of neglect coming from America's small businesses. They are bewildered, though, by the possibility that Congress might simply let the bank die.
To return to where we started, the Kirk-Heitkamp bill would require Ex-Im to increase the percentage of its support that goes to small business, moving it from the current 20 percent to 25 percent. At the same time, Senator Heitkamp's comments yesterday suggest she is acutely aware of the definitional confusion that the small business issue can generate.
"It's always easy to talk about Boeing," she said - Boeing being the largest user of the Bank - "but behind Boeing is a supply chain, where very small manufacturers, very small businesses are also benefitted, ... and those folks are deeply concerned about what is happening right now with the Ex-Im Bank."
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Given what Ms. Dempsey and Mr. Murphy had to say about the ability-or rather the inability-of commercial banks to finance small business exports, clearly small businesses do often face challenges that are different from those that confront Fortune 500 firms. Where Ex-Im can help with those, as it can and does, it should continue to do so.
For us, however, it is the web of relationships between small and large firms that is critical. If Ex-Im can boost the output and competitiveness of the U.S. economy, that should be enough. We think it does. And we think Ms. Dempsey and Mr. Murphy persuasively made that case in their appearance yesterday (June 2) before the Senate Banking Committee.
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