Peter G. Peterson obit

Peter G. Peterson, financier who warned of rising national debt, dies at 91

He was not on the list.

Peter G. Peterson, a self-made billionaire financier who was briefly commerce secretary under President Richard M. Nixon and was a longtime fiscal Paul Revere, spending much of his fortune to sound the alarm about the perils of the burgeoning national debt, died March 20 at his home in Manhattan. He was 91.

The death was confirmed by his wife, Joan Ganz Cooney. The cause was not disclosed.

Since the late 1970s, “Pete” Peterson was among the most prominent public figures warning that runaway spending on Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programs — for an increasingly long-living population — had lit the fuse on a budgetary time bomb. He criticized the politicians who he said were focused “not on the next generation but on the next election” and were too craven to rein in deficit spending.

“We are at a make-or-break point in American history,” Mr. Peterson said. “The entitlement monster is unfunded.”

He spoke those words in 2008, shortly before launching the New York City-based Peter G. Peterson Foundation to warn about the country’s economic challenges. Mr. Peterson poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the nonpartisan organization, which has contributed to think tanks as politically varied as the Brookings Institution, the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Another recipient of Peterson Foundation money was the Concord Coalition, which promotes fiscal responsibility and which Mr. Peterson founded in 1992 with former Sens. Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.) and Paul E. Tsongas (D-Mass.).

The term “national debt” is not as simple as it may sound. The Treasury Department cites “debt held by the public,” the total outstanding funds borrowed by the government to finance its deficits, as the most meaningful definition. (The most recent figure stands at almost $21 trillion.)

Some of Mr. Peterson’s proposals — cutting Social Security benefits for the wealthy, for instance, or eliminating the mortgage-interest deduction long cherished by middle-class homeowners — have been seen as political “third rails.” But he was credited with daring to say what others in positions of influence would not.

“He has been a prophetic advocate for addressing the country’s risk-laden and dangerous fiscal prospects that our political system simply will not face,” Robert E. Rubin, a former Goldman Sachs executive who was treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, said in 2016 at an event honoring Mr. Peterson’s 90th birthday. Rubin praised Mr. Peterson as “that rare figure in contemporary America, a true public citizen with serious impact in many areas.”

Mr. Peterson, a son of Greek immigrants, attended elite universities and first became known as a business wunderkind. In the early 1950s, he was an advertising executive in Chicago, rising to director of marketing services at McCann Erickson, an advertising agency with global reach, before he was 30. Seven years later, he was chief executive of the Bell and Howell electronics company.

In 1971, Nixon named him assistant for international economic affairs. A year later, he became commerce secretary. He also led Nixon’s National Commission on Productivity and served as the U.S. chairman of the U.S.-Soviet Commercial Commission.

But Mr. Peterson was never a White House insider. Nixon loyalists distrusted him because he was comfortable with Democrats, and Nixon once needled him about his “friends in the Georgetown cocktail set,” Mr. Peterson wrote in his 2009 autobiography, “The Education of an American Dreamer.”