AIG丑闻的内幕真相

音频下载[点击右键另存为]
Back in the dawn of time when I was a young reporter and Watergate was the big story in the country, we all learnt the idea of follow the money. And that's what I’d like to do today with the endless government bailout of the financial system. Let’s follow the money, because God knows there’s so much of it and almost none of it is going to AIG despite what you think you’ve heard. The AIG bonuses amount to 165 million dollars, which is a lot of money but not in terms of the overall bailout.

And as long as we're in the AIG neighborhood, let me hasten to say, I am not as angry at this as most people are, because I know that most of the people getting these bonuses, maybe even all of them, had nothing to do with the collapse of the company.

But even if the 165 million dollars bothers you, you should look at the other aspects of the bailout. You should see what it's costing and the gift it’s giving Wall Street. The Federal Reserve Board has probably a dozen programs, maybe more, that amount to subsidizing Wall Street by more than 30 billion dollars a year.

Who you make? Will you live now? Honey!

The plan that was announced recently about toxic assets, that involves a subsidy I put at at least 18 billion dollars a year. There is the Federal Deposit Insurance Company, which has its program everyone forgets about. This is probably another five or ten billion dollars a year to Wall Street, it goes on and on and on, when you add it up, the AIG numbers turn into a rounding error.

And there are two other things that you want to know. The first is the institution getting more taxpayer-money than anybody, the federal government is paying bonuses this year. Even though it’s a trillion dollars in the hole, it’s paying bonuses of a billion and half dollars.

And the other thing you should know is that the subsidies are not likely to stop any time soon. So if I were you and wanted to figure out what’s going on in the government, I would stop listening to what the government says and watch what it does. And as always, I would follow the money rather than following the noise.

Vocabulary:

1.       follow the money: 跟着钱走，盯紧金钱

2.       Federal Reserve Board: a 7-member board of governors overseeing the Federal Reserve System联邦储备委员会

3.       put at: to calculate or guess an amount, number, age etc, without being very exact

4.       Federal Deposit Insurance Company: The U.S. corporation insuring deposits in the U.S. against bank failure. The FDIC was created in 1933 to maintain public confidence and encourage stability in the financial system through the promotion of sound banking practices. 联邦储蓄保险公司

5.       rounding error: 舍入误差（形容可以忽略不计）

6.       in the hole: 负债，有财政困难