尚同家园
安妮果果33
EVEN by the standards of the worst financial crisis for at least a generation, the events of Sunday Spetember14th and the day before were extraordinary. The weekend began with hopes that a deal could be struck, with or without government backing, to save Lehman Brothers, America’s fourth-largest investment bank. It ended with Lehman’s set for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and the bank preparing to wind itself up after those efforts failed. Other vulnerable financial giants scrambled to sell themselves or raise enough capital to stave off a similar fate. Merrill Lynch, the third-biggest investment bank, sold itself to Bank of America (BofA), an erstwhile Lehman suitor, in a $50 billion all-stock deal. American International Group (AIG) brought forward a potentially life-saving overhaul and went cap-in-hand to the Federal Reserve. 即使以至少一代人所经历的最坏的金融危机的标准来看,上周六及周日(9月14日)的事件仍是非同寻常的。那个周末开始于拯救美国第四大投行雷曼兄弟的交易有望达成,无论有或者没有政府的支持。然而却以雷曼兄弟的所有努力均告失败后,根据美国破产法案第11章申请破产保护而告终。其它脆弱的金融巨头同样努力地将自己卖出或是筹集足够的资金以避免与雷曼相同的命运。第三大投行美林以500亿美元全额换股交易将自己卖给了以前雷曼的收购者–美国银行。美国国际集团(AIG)正在提出一个潜在的挽救重整方案,并且毕恭毕敬地照美联储脸色行事。
小小小雨桐
EVEN by the standards of the worst financial crisis for at least a generation, the events of Sunday Spetember14th and the day before were extraordinary. The weekend began with hopes that a deal could be struck, with or without government backing, to save Lehman Brothers, America’s fourth-largest investment bank. It ended with Lehman’s set for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and the bank preparing to wind itself up after those efforts failed. Other vulnerable financial giants scrambled to sell themselves or raise enough capital to stave off a similar fate. Merrill Lynch, the third-biggest investment bank, sold itself to Bank of America (BofA), an erstwhile Lehman suitor, in a $50 billion all-stock deal. American International Group (AIG) brought forward a potentially life-saving overhaul and went cap-in-hand to the Federal Reserve.On Sunday night the situation was still fluid, with bankers and regulators working to limit the fallout. They were girding themselves for a dreadful Monday in the markets. Australia’s stockmarket opened sharply lower on Monday (most other Asian bourses were closed). American stock futures were deep in the red too, and the dollar weaker. Spreads on risky credit, already elevated, widened further.The takeover of Merrill leaves just two large independent investment banks in America, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs.
nixiaoyanzz
It seems that the USA is experiencing the same thing Hong Kong experienced in 2003, when the housing bubble burst and the SARS virus spread. Being a small open economy, Hong Kong can do nothing to remedy the situation. The USA is different, it has fiscal and monetary policy on its side. I hope that America will try their best to reverse the trend so that the world economy will grow again. A recession in the US will certainly affect China, because the growth of the Chinese economy is, to a certain extent, export-led and America is the largest market for Chinese goods. If the Chinese economy is affected, it will affect Hong Kong too because every year we have a large number of visitors from China. They also buy houses as well as stocks and shares in Hong Kong. However, it will be impossible to have a recession as severe as the great depression of 1930’s. The reasons are as follows:1. The gold standard has been abandoned. In the past, a dollar was not just a piece of paper, it was also a piece of gold. You could convert it into gold at a fixed rate. Now a dollar is just a piece of paper. Under the gold standard the government lost the freedom to control (or to increase) the money supply. Now the government can print as much money as she likes. The probability of having inflation is much larger than that of having a recession.2. The knowledge that private virtue is public vice. Private individuals still want to save more and spend less during bad times. But governments know that people should spend more in bad times. To encourage people to do so, governments will have deficit budgets by cutting taxes and spend more money than they have.3. Governments learn from history. The experience of the Great Depression leads them to prevent such a tragedy from happening again. The Ph.D. thesis of Ben Bernanke (Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the U.S.) is about the causes of the Great Depression and how to prevent it from happening again.4. There are coordinated measures taken by the main countries of the world, including those of the emerging economies such as China. During the Great Depression, the governments did not take coordinated measures, and one country’s measure was nullified by another country’s measure.