La Vita è Bella Life is Beautiful. La Vita es Bonita. 美麗人生　

242愛的鼓勵 7訂閱站台

記得90年代初期在上課時，老師提到美國的銀行提供 one stop shopping 的服務，不僅僅是存放款或繳款，你還可以買保險，投資股票基金及各式各樣的金融商品，像是JP Morgan。那也是我第一次聽到這個名字。

而現在在經歷了金融海嘯之後，除了民粹式的輿論要求政府對銀行多加管制與限制，一些近八十歲的銀行家們，也都主張銀行不應該從事投機性的金融活動。因為今天銀行的規模太大了，而任何一個經濟體，甚至任何一個政府都不會任其倒閉，而坐視不管。所以這就產生了一個代理問題：無論風險再怎麼大，這些投資銀行的銀行家們都會投身追逐。高風險，高利潤。所以賺錢，每個經理人領數百萬美元，CEO的薪酬甚至以千萬美元作單位；賠錢，賠的是公司（銀行）的錢。如果公司賠不起呢？看看這次的金融海嘯吧！－－國家拿錢來救。

這是2008.9.28 The New York Times 所作關於AIG的分析，其中造成AIG危機的是位在倫敦的金融商品部門，平均每一位員工的薪酬從2001年到2007年每年都超過一百萬美元。從上述的營運模式／心態看來，這根本是合法的搶劫。或者說這些人是詐騙集團也不為過。



保羅·沃爾克，美國經濟學家，曾於卡特及雷根總統當政時擔任美國聯邦儲備委員會主席職務(葛林斯班的前一任)，現為美國總統貝拉克·歐巴馬的經濟顧問。主張禁止銀行從事以本身獲利為目的的證券交易，就是要限縮銀行的從事投機的金融活動。但是不少前輩們仍主張更嚴格的限制。
Paul Adolph Volcker (born September 5, 1927) is an American economist. He was the Chairman of the Federal Reserve under United States Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan (from August 1979 to August 1987). He is currently chairman of the newly formed Economic Recovery Advisory Board under President Barack Obama.

Elders of Wall St. Favor More Regulation        
By LOUIS UCHITELLE        
Published: February 16, 2010        

Put aside for a moment the populist pressure to regulate banking and trading. Ask the elder statesmen of these industries — giants like George Soros, Nicholas F. Brady, John S. Reed, William H. Donaldson and John C. Bogle — where they stand on regulation, and they will bowl you over with their populism.        

They certainly don’t think of themselves as angry Main Streeters. They grew quite wealthy in finance, typically making their fortunes in the ’70s and ’80s when banks and securities firms were considerably more regulated. And now, parting company with the current chieftains, they want more rules.        


While the younger generation, very visibly led by Lloyd C. Blankfein, chief executive of Goldman Sachs, lobbies Congress against such regulation, their spiritual elders support the reform proposed by Paul A. Volcker and, surprisingly, even more restrictions. “I am a believer that the system has gone badly awry and needs massive reform,” said Mr. Bogle, the 80-year-old founder and for many years chief executive of the Vanguard Group, the huge mutual fund company.        

Mr. Volcker, 82, signed up the support of nearly a dozen peers whose average age is north of 70 and whose pedigrees on Wall Street and in banking are impeccable. But while Mr. Volcker focuses on a rule that would henceforth prohibit a bank that takes deposits from also buying and selling securities for its own account — risking losses in the process — most of his prominent supporters see that as a starting point in a broader return to regulation. And most do not hesitate to speak up in interviews.        


Listen to Nicholas Brady, a Treasury secretary in the late 1980s and early 1990s and before that chairman of Dillon Read & Company, now extinct, but in its day a prestigious Wall Street house. “If you are a commercial bank,” he said, “and you wish the government to guarantee your deposits and bail you out if necessary, then you can’t be involved in speculative activity.”        


Does that mean Mr. Brady, now 79, would tell commercial banks they could no longer trade securities for their customers? Mr. Volcker, who gained fame in the 1980s as chairman of the Federal Reserve, would permit this and so would President Obama, who has endorsed the Volcker restriction on proprietary trading, but not the broader ban on trading for customers. Mr. Brady just might take that extra step.        


“I’d certainly look into it,” he said, arguing in effect that the current generation of bankers is so profit-oriented, it might well find a way to convert trading for a customer into surreptitiously trading for the bank itself, risking depositors’ money in the process.        


“You draw a line that is too tight,” Mr. Brady said. “That does not bother me a bit.”        

Nor does it bother John S. Reed, a former Citigroup co-chairman, who played a role in building Citi into a powerhouse that mingled commercial banking and all sorts of trading activities. That mix helped to precipitate the current credit crisis, requiring a costly federal bailout of Citigroup, among others, in 2008.       


Mr. Reed, now 71, was long gone by then, and from retirement he has second thoughts. He even thinks about resurrecting the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which prevented banks from engaging in any sort of trading activity involving stocks and bonds. (It was revoked in 1999, partly at the behest of Citigroup, then run by Sanford I. Weill.)        


“I can be convinced that we should move back in the direction of Glass-Steagall,” Mr. Reed said, disagreeing on this point with Mr. Weill who, at 76, has not retracted his view that deregulation was the right course. Indeed, Mr. Weill has hanging on a wall of his retirement office, as a trophy, one of the pens that President Clinton used to sign the bill that revoked Glass-Steagall.        



Mr. Reed, in contrast, wonders if a trading operation should even exist under the same roof as a standard commercial bank. The traders make more in salary and bonuses than the bank employees, and there are frictions. “The bank people say ‘if the capital market guys take big risks, why can’t we do so too and earn the same bucks?’ ” Mr. Reed said. “They start trying to do things that make them look good, like making risky commercial loans and driving for volume.”        

The Volcker Rule would solve this in part by telling “the capital market guys,” as Mr. Reed put it, that they can trade only as agents for customers and not on behalf of the house. Restricted to serving only customers, they might or might not take fewer risks.        

In any event, the restriction goes in the right direction, which is why George Soros, the billionaire trader, endorses it and falls into place as one of Mr. Volcker’s supportive elder statesmen, referring to him as “an extraordinary public servant.”       



But the Volcker Rule is emphatically not enough, Mr. Soros said. A company like Goldman Sachs, barred from proprietary trading, would probably give up its status as a bank holding company and revert to its role as a big Wall Street investment house, free to trade as it wished. If it then failed, Mr. Volcker would use the federal government to usher it through an orderly liquidation. Mr. Soros, in contrast, would rescue Goldman Sachs.        

“The danger is that Congress and the administration may try to hide behind the banner of Volcker’s reputation, enact this one dimension of reform and nothing more, and pretend that it is sufficient to repair the financial system,” Mr. Soros said. “That would be a dangerous mistake.”        



At 79, Mr. Soros says, he has watched Goldman Sachs, and other firms like it on Wall Street, grow too big to fail, which means that no administration could allow such giants to go through Mr. Volcker’s orderly liquidation and disappear. That would be too damaging to the financial system, the economy and the political party in power.        

“You have to recognize that they enjoy an implicit guarantee,” he said of the big trading houses. “To pretend they will be allowed to fail is not credible.”        
       
The solution for Mr. Soros is to avoid failure in the first place. The big Wall Street firms “would have to be closely regulated to make sure they don’t fail,” he said. “You may decide to break them up, or restrict the number of markets in which they are allowed to operate and you would need to impose capital requirements” to curtail risk-taking.


Derivatives contracts are a major source of risk, and Mr. Soros would limit their use. These contracts — offering insurance, for example, on trading positions — are still ubiquitous. When they come due in great quantities, as they were about to do in the fall of 2008, the contagion spreads, undermining one financial institution after another.        


That worries William H. Donaldson, a chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission in the George W. Bush administration, and a co-founder of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, a prominent Wall Street firm in its day. To deal with such issues, Mr. Donaldson, now 78, would have Congress create a powerful regulatory body, independent of the Federal Reserve or any other government body, whose members would be appointed directly by the president.        

“The Volcker Rule and Mr. Volcker’s initiative,” he said, “are really taking the discussion of regulation to a whole new level.”        

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/business/17volcker.html?ref=business

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The story was taken from The New York Times.  The copyright remains with The New York Times Company.  Mr. Louis Uchitelle and The New York Times are not involved with, nor endorse the production of this blog.

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