美国前财政部长: AIG倒闭将影响全球

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What you and Paulson and the rest of your team did is what you left President Obama and Treasury Secretary Geithner. And one of the largest, if not the largest, criticisms and where lawmakers come at Geithner most we saw this week on the Hill is AIG, and more and more the payment at par to those counterparties of billions and billions of dollars is coming into focus and there is a lot of anger over that. Looking at the decision to pay back the counterparties to AIG in full with taxpayer money. What’s your take on that at this point?

Yeah, it’s a tough thing, you know. You have to remember at the time, it was a very different decision as well. You know I wasn't involved directly on that, so I tell your my colleagues who were, have said is that, you know, AIG is a very large institution and much more consumer-facing than, say, Lehman Brothers which had, you know, failed just the day or two before. And you know the concern was that you know both because of its size and its presence that the failure of AIG would have very severe negative repercussions throughout the U.S. and the global financial system, and that was what was driving the decision, along with the lack of authority, right? When AIG failed, this was before the TARP, and so there was no authority for the treasury to deploy its financial resources.

You know, Hank Greenberg, the former CEO of AIG takes real issue with this, takes real issue with what he calls a liquidation of AIG, a lack of attempt to build it back up into the power house of insurance company that it once was. He takes real issue with the fact that there were not guarantees' place on those counterparties instead of paying them back at par. Looking back, would you have done it the same way now?

Er, you know, I can’t say for sure. I mean, this is something that people are going to investigate and look at and, you know, did it seem to people that the problems with the financial product unit were as severe, you know, as it seemed to be. No, probably not. And had there been recognition of that? You know, maybe things would have been done differently, but I think at this point, we are just not…no one is really in the position to say that for sure. That’s a subject for the future.

Stemming from the AIG controversy is the request from Bernanke, the request from Geithner to have more regulatory power over these non-bank institutions to be able to sell off assets, to be able to regulate them more fully … they can’t do at this point, they couldn’t do when your team was dealing with AIG, do you agree with their argument that they should have more broad power when it comes to a company like AIG?

Yeah, it’s a really tough issue, because you know we got into this situation where the treasury, or the FED did not have the authority and really had no choice, but either had a very chaotic and disorderly disruption of the firm or do what was done and so the bankruptcy court as we have the bankruptcy process as we have now is not well set up for a multinational company like this. On the other hand, you know, there has to be a fair system, there has to be some system/ that people can trust, say, not to change the capital structure of a firm. And so, if, you know, say, the counterparties of the creditors look at the administration, and see that they are not acting fairly with respect to the seniority of creditors. Well, that poses a challenge, well, I would say, to, you know, to the ability of, you know, of the administration to get additional authorities that might be useful, so in others, additional authorities might be useful, but there has to be a trust that those authorities will be used fairly and under limited circumstances.

And you argued that trust is questionable at this point?

You know, it’s just people are looking what’s being done and you know, especially with automakers and I think there’s a story to be told there that you know, the administration should explain here’s what we did and here’s why we’ve done it, and just explain to people you know these are the choices we made in the capital structure and that story would be useful for, for… there to be more information on that and just a better explanation. And I think people then can look at that and say ok, look, we understand, that’s fair, that’s not fair. And then reflect on whether additional authorities you know then would be merited.

Vocabulary:

1.       at par: 平价,按票面价格

2.       counterparty: The other party that participates in a financial transaction.

3.       what’s your take on: 你对…的看法是什么？

4.       repercussions: .[常 pl.](不良的)影响，反响，后果

5.       reflect on: 考虑(回想,回顾)