뉴스 뉴욕타임지 경제면 Published: January 30, 2009

[뮤즈신]

아래는 오늘자 뉴욕타임지 경제면.. 토픽입니다..

첫번째 보도는 국민세금이 월가임원의 보너스가 아니라는 위기원인을 대통령이 강조합니다..

It’s Not the Bonus Money. It’s the Principle.

Jim Young/Reuters

President Obama, with Timothy F. Geithner on Thursday, called lavish bonuses at banks receiving bailout money “the height of irresponsibility.. 

Published: January 30, 2009

How else to describe what President Obama did on Thursday, his ninth day in office? Angered by news that Wall Street was doling out $18.4 billion in bonuses for 2008 — “the sixth-largest haul on record,” according to a front-page article in The New York Times, despite billions upon billions in losses — the president called reporters in and looked sternly into the cameras. Then he unloaded on Wall Street executives, just as President John F. Kennedy on-ce unloaded on the country’s steel barons.

“That is the height of irresponsibility,” Mr. Obama said sharply, referring to the bonuses. “It is shameful.” Wall Street, he said, was coming to the government for badly needed help — which taxpayers were providing because otherwise “the entire system could come down on top of our heads” — and the government had a right to expect in return that Wall Street would “show some restraint and show some discipline and show some sense of responsibility.” After going on in this vein for a while, he slapped around Citigroup for agreeing to take that new $50 million corporate jet after agreeing to a huge bailout in November. The government’s demand that the plane be canceled should have been unnecessary “because they should know better,” he scolded.

Mr. Obama didn’t take a shot at John Thain, the former chief executive of Merrill Lynch, who was pushed out last week by his new boss, Ken Lewis, at Bank of America, after Merrill reported a $15.3 billion loss in the fourth quarter. But then, he didn’t have to. The revelation that Mr. Thain had spent $1.2 million remodeling his office shortly after joining Merrill in 2007 — and more recently allotted big bonuses to Merrill’s troops even as the firm’s red ink was forcing Bank of America to seek more government help — has transformed Mr. Thain into the new Richard Fuld. He’s the person Americans would most like to punch in the nose.

This week, American companies announced somewhere around 65,000 layoffs. Caterpillar, Kodak, Home Depot, I.B.M., even mighty Microsoft: they are all cutting jobs. Everywhere in the United States, people are feeling the pain of this deepening recession. Even those with jobs worry about their futures. Their 401(k) plans have been decimated. They are frightened and angry.

Which is why Wall Street should not be surprised that oversize bonuses and $50 million jets generate outrage — and tough rejoinders from the president. “It suggests the selfishness of people on Wall Street,” said Charles Elson, a corporate governance expert at the University of Delaware, who sounded pretty outraged himself. “Wall Street has yet to learn the lesson of what happened.” What happened, put simply, is that the people who thought of themselves as the smartest guys in the room — and were paid accordingly — weren’t so smart after all. They brought down the financial system. They lost so much money that on-ly the government can save them. The scolding they got from the president this week suggests that they’re going to be paying a price — richly deserved, I might add — for a good long time.

•

When you get right down to it, the purchase of a new plane or an office renovation is pretty meaningless for companies as large as Citigroup or Bank of America. It’s not unheard of for executives to spend $1 million or more on remodeling when they get the corner office. It’s pocket change. And companies can usually make a halfway decent business case to justify a new airplane. (It goes longer distances than older planes, can take more executives to meetings, allows the top brass to be more efficient and productive, etc., etc.) The question of whether bailout money was used to pay for these perks — as alleged by The New York Post, which broke the Citi airplane story — is, at best, ambiguous. Indeed, breaking the airplane contract and sending the jet back to the manufacturer will probably cost the bank more than keeping the plane.

None of that matters. You could make the same argument about the auto executives who flew on corporate jets when they came to Washington to ask Congress for help: surely, it was a better use of their time to fly rather than drive from Detroit, as they did the second time around, after being spanked for taking the jets. That didn’t matter either. What matters is the symbolism. At a time when the country is in such trouble — and executives are asking for bailouts — anything that smacks of plutocracy is going to arouse justifiable populist anger.

“This has been building for 20 years,” said Richard C. Ferlauto, director of corporate governance for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. “Regular working people haven’t gotten ahead in the economy. They understand that tremendous wealth has been created, and they say, ‘Where’s mine?’ ” He continued: “These guys seem to be living in another universe. So the symbolism of the umbrella stand and the private jet is powerful.” The umbrella stand, of course, was a reference to the $15,000 umbrella stand that the former Tyco chief executive Dennis Kozlowski bought with company funds — and that is part of the reason he is now behind bars.

But there is something else as well. Most people still don’t fully understand what, exactly, Wall Street did that caused so much trouble for the country and the financial system. I spoke this week to David M. Smick, author of a scathing book about Wall Street, “The World Is Curved: Hidden Dangers to the Global Economy.” In indignant tones, he talked to me about the sophisticated off-balance-sheet vehicles the banks used to hide risk and game the system, and the “mortgage-backed securities they were shoving out the door.” He concluded, “I find their behavior just appalling.”

But words like “off-balance-sheet vehicles” and “mortgage-backed securities” don’t have much meaning for most of us. What we understand is greed — which, ultimately, is what Mr. Smick was talking about as well. For most Americans, big bonuses and corporate jets and office remodelings become a kind of stand-in for the real sins of the bankers. They signify what people hate about Wall Street.

The truth is, this is probably the last year for a good long while that Wall Street bonuses are going to be so out of line with reality. Partly that is because the government simply isn’t going to let it happen again, at least not at any institution that has taken bailout money. The top executives at those institutions already have some restrictions on their pay, and there are other, further restrictions in the works at the Treasury Department and in Congress. nulle proposed new wrinkle would call for bank executives to get most of their bonuses in stock — which they wouldn’t be able to unload until the government was no longer a shareholder in the bank.

Bonuses will also go down because, after this year’s bonus fiasco, Wall Street finally understands that the public scrutiny is going to be fierce. At many firms, 50 percent or more of revenue goes out the door in the form of compensation. That’s simply untenable now.

Finally, the business model of the investment banks is almost certainly going to change. Over the last 20 years, investment banking went from being primarily an advisory business to being mostly a business where firms traded for their own accounts — so-called proprietary trading. It is the trading business that made the banks so immensely profitable. It is also what propelled the creation of mortgage-backed securities and credit-default swaps and all the rest of it. Those vehicles generated both enormous fees and enormous profits.

But that game is over. “It will be impossible to rebuild that business model, which relied so heavily on leverage,” said William Hambrecht, founder and chief executive of the investment firm WR Hambrecht & Company. “I don’t think the government is going to let them take that kind of leverage again.” And the government will also tightly regulate complex securities. “So we are faced with an era of sharply reduced profit opportunities, which means a lot less income,” Mr. Hambrecht added. To him, the big bonuses this year signaled that “Wall Street hasn’t been able to admit that yet.”

Wall Street traders are also extremely reluctant to give up the “eat what you kill” mentality that has dominated their profession these past two decades. There is no sense of shared enterprise at most firms, and no belief among the rank and file that they should have to pay a price if the firm is drowning in losses and needs government support. That is why they are so blind to how they appear to the rest of us. They just want theirs. That is the culture they have created.

Indeed, Ira Kay, a top executive consultant with Watson Wyatt, told me that this bonus season has been akin to “war” inside many Wall Street firms. “It is a small group of people who caused the problems,” he said. But other bankers had very good years — and all over New York they are now complaining about their smaller bonuses, completely tone-deaf to how this sounds outside their Wall Street silos. You can make a pretty convincing argument that that culture — and the bonuses that flowed from it — had a lot to do with creating the financial crisis. If Wall Street can’t bring itself to admit as much, the new administration and the Democratic Congress are going to be more than happy to point it out.

•

It’s not just Wall Street, either. I’ve long thought that the reason executive compensation became such a flashpoint was because it, too, signaled an “I want mine” mentality among chief executives. It was infuriating to see them bring home tens of millions of dollars even as their company’s stock fell and they laid off employees. Next month, proxy season will begin, and we’ll start to see how much not just Wall Street chieftains made in 2008, but also all executives who run public companies.

I asked Mr. Kay what we should expect. Did corporate executives understand the need to show that they were willing to sacrifice in these hard times, just like the rest of us — or will we see them still grasping for every last dime?

“I am a little disappointed with the reaction of some of the executives,” he replied. “The emphasis on pay-for-performance has gone up to an extent, but the executives are definitely not where their boards are, where the shareholders are, where the media is, or where the government is. They are lagging on this.”

I’m guessing that President Obama is going to be jawboning again before too long.

두번째 보도는 물건이 안팔리는 소비심리 급랭입니다.. 실물위기이지요..

Steep Slide in Economy as Unsold Goods Pile Up

 

Published: January 30, 2009

The economy shrank at an accelerating pace late last year, the government reported on Friday, adding to the urgency of a stimulus package capable of bringing the country back from a recession that appears to be deepening.

The actual decline in the gross domestic product — at a 3.8 percent annual rate — fell short of the 5 to 6 percent that most economists had expected for the fourth quarter. But that was because consumption collapsed so quickly that goods piled up in inventory, unsold but counted as part of the nation’s output.

“The drop in spending was so fast, so rapid, that production could not be cut fast enough,” said Nigel Gault, chief domestic economist at IHS Global Insight. “That is happening now, and the contraction in the current quarter, as a result, will probably exceed 5 percent.”

The dismal fourth quarter, and the likelihood of more of the same through the spring, are fueling discussion among policy makers and politicians over the best way to spend the soon-to-be-authorized federal money.

Some caution that President Obama’s proposals try to achieve too many objectives — for example, broader health care coverage and energy efficiency — at the expense of focusing tax dollars on the core issue of job creation. By this argument, more should be spent on things like infrastructure repair, either directly or by channeling money to the states for projects now delayed for lack of adequate tax revenue.

Others argue that the best bang for the buck would come from a stimulus package devoted mainly to tax cuts rather than public investment. The breakdown in the $819 billion bill that the House approved on Wednesday and the Senate will take up next week is two-thirds spending, on-e-third tax cuts.

The president took a different approach in a press conference on Friday. Seizing on the damaging fourth-quarter figures and the prospect of an even weaker first quarter, he called the contraction “a continuing disaster” for working families and pushed Congress to act quickly to provide relief.

Even with the help of swelling inventories, the 3.8 percent contraction, adjusted for inflation and representing all of the nation’s economic activity, was the largest quarterly drop in the nation’s output since the 1982 recession.

Business investment, commercial construction, home building and exports all fell steeply, most of them doing so for the first time since the recession began 13 months ago. Data released this week suggested that the decline had continued. As for consumer spending, in on-ly on-e other quarter since records were first kept in 1947 have final sales of goods and services produced in America fallen so much.

“Consumer spending is often held up as the engine of growth, and we are now experiencing the second-largest contraction on record,” said Ben Herzon, an economist at Macroeconomic Advisers in St. Louis, referring to the 7.6 percent drop in spending in the midst of the 1974-75 recession, and 5.1 percent now.

Christina D. Romer, chairwoman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, said in a statement that “aggressive, well-designed fiscal stimulus is critical to reversing this severe decline.” She did not describe the elements of a well-designed fiscal stimulus, but the vast majority of the nation’s economists agree that on-e is necessary, and soon.

Virtually none dispute that the usual route to recovery, cheap credit, has failed to work this time — not when lenders are pulling back, despite prodding from the Federal Reserve, and borrowers are focused more on paying down debt and building up savings.

“I’m hoping the fiscal stimulus will be a catalyst to reignite the private sector,” said Stuart Hoffman, chief economist at the PNC Bank Corporation in Pittsburgh. “My hope is that as the fiscal stimulus kicks in, people will begin to spend and invest more, modestly anyway, in the second half of the year.”

Absent a large stimulus package, most economists expect the nation’s output to shrink not on-ly in the first half of the year, but in the second half as well. In April, the recession would become the longest since the 1930s. Until now, the record, 16 months, was shared by the severe recessions of 1974-75 and 1981-82. This on-e began in December 2007 as employment peaked and began to fall.

“We are in the thick of it now,” said Robert Barbera, chief economist for ITG Investment Technology Group.

The Federal Reserve ended the mid-’70s and early ’80s recessions by cutting interest rates sharply to encourage borrowing and spending in the private sector. This time, the credit crisis, rising unemployment, plunging home prices and bank failures have disrupted that mechanism, particularly since late summer.

Indeed, until the fourth quarter, the nation’s output had declined on-ly in the third quarter, falling by half a percent at an annual rate. The Fed, in response to the accelerating decline, cut rates to nearly zero — a tactic that in the past would have raised cries of loose money and rising inflation.

The concern now, however, is deflation, or falling prices, and Friday’s report from the Bureau of Economic Analysis suggested that the fear had some justification. Personal consumption expenditures, not counting food and energy, rose at an annual rate of on-ly 1.6 percent, the smallest quarterly increase in years. If prices were to actually fall, consumers might respond by putting off purchases until prices were even lower.

“My sense is that business is slashing hugely and across the board,” said Allen Sinai, president and chief global economist of Decision Economics. “Everyone is cutting prices, people, capital spending and all kinds of expenses. It is almost a herd instinct.”