At the 2017 Museum of American Finance Gala on February 1, the Museum honored Joe Ricketts with the Charles Schwab Financial Innovation Award and Lawrence H. Summers with the Whitehead Award for Distinguished Public Service and Financial Leadership. Excerpts from the remarks delivered that evening are published below in the order in which they were presented.

CHARLES SCHWAB Founder and Chairman of the Board Charles Schwab Corporation

I have to say one piece of advertising: this Museum is incredible. In many ways it may be the only way the flame of entrepreneurship is really being kept alive. It’ s pretty incredible; you need to take your kids, your grandkids or anybody who will want to listen to you. This will give you a little history of how we achieved what we have in America. It’ s pretty spectacular, and we’ ve got to keep that flame alive. The Museum is trying to do that.

Last year I was recognized by the Museum [ with the Financial Innovation Award ], and I really loved receiving that award. It really meant a lot to me, frankly, and I think our industry that I grew up in hasn’ t had quite the recognition for the transformation that we are providing to the American finance scene to investors and so forth. Look out, investment bankers, you are going to be put aside.

When [ the Museum ] approached me last year to add my name to the award I thought it was important to do. At first I was like,“ Are you kidding me? Put my name on this award?” Then I thought about how important it was to the world of finance, and how incredibly important it is to bring millions and millions of investors into the prospect of participating.

Looking back in history, financial innovation has certainly been a part of our country’ s heritage, really since the earliest days of Alexander Hamilton. I saw his things in the Museum. I saw his writings. He was the first Secretary of the Treasury in 1789. American credit at the time was completely void; it was something that we— as a country coming out of the Revolution— simply couldn’ t address. Our country at the time, of course, was not honoring its debt, but then Secretary Hamilton wrote a long and persuasive memorandum to Congress. He wanted the Congress to honor all the states’ debts together as one nation. There was one cement, and that was recognition of our debt— that we would pay it off so we would become of course the world’ s best place to do investing. Hamilton summed up in his view what it really meant. He said it simply was“ the price of liberty.”

Think about it. I think it is a pretty profound way [ to indicate ] the importance of finance. And we have become the place to invest, to say the least. So throughout our nation’ s history, financial innovation has been obviously very key. I mean, in 200 years there are so many different things we could recognize for sure, and we will keep on going. It is really crucially important. That combination of innovation, coupled with profit making, coupled with entrepreneurship— is crucial.

So tonight I get to honor another entrepreneur in my field who really was a very tough competitor, and a very creative competitor. There are so many things I wished I had done that Joe did along the way. My good friend is now Joe Ricketts, [ but ] in the past we were really fierce competitors. We fought tooth and nail— you do this thing and we will do that thing, and so on. It was really a lot of fun, actually, through our formative years. Our careers have crossed paths more recently, and we have gotten to become really good friends.

We started collectively the low cost transaction business. We developed together— I mean not together( we were not in concert but were competing for it)— 24 / 7 service. You could do business on Saturday and Sunday with us, so that was pretty interesting. Even before the Internet we had one-stop investing, convenient trading like online and mobile( which we have done more recently). We also have a pretty important thing going on right now; we were able to decouple

12 FINANCIAL HISTORY | Winter 2017 | www. MoAF. org