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It has been a wretched few weeks for America's celebrity bosses. AIG’s Maurice Greenberg has been dramatically ousted from the firm through which he dominated global insurance for decades. At Morgan Stanley a mutiny is forcing Philip Purcell, a boss used to getting his own way, into an increasingly desperate campaign to save his skin. At Boeing, Harry Stonecipher was called out of retirement to lead the scandal-hit firm and raise ethical standards, only to commit a lapse of his own, being sacked for sending e- mails to a lover who was also an employee. Carly Fiorina was the most powerful woman in corporate America until a few weeks ago, when Hewlett-Packard (HP) sacked her for poor performance. The fate of Bernie Ebbers is much grimmer. The once high-profile boss of WorldCom could well spend the rest of his life behind bars following his conviction last month on fraud charges.
In different ways, each of these examples appears to point to the same, welcome conclusion: that the imbalance in corporate power of the late 1990s, when many bosses were allowed to behave like absolute monarchs, has been corrected. Alas, appearances can be deceptive. While each of these recent tales of chief-executive woe is a sign of progress, none provides much evidence that the crisis in American corporate governance is yet over. In fact, each of these cases is an example of failed, not successful, governance.
At the very least, the boards of both Morgan Stanley and HP were far too slow to address their bosses' inadequacies. The record of the Boeing board in picking chiefs prone to ethical lapses is too long to be dismissed as mere bad luck. The fall of Messrs Greenberg and Ebbers, meanwhile, highlights the growing role of government—and, in particular, of criminal prosecutors—in holding bosses to account a development that is, at best, a mixed blessing. The Sarbanes-Oxley act, passed in haste following the Enron and WorldCom scandals, is imposing heavy costs on American companies; whether these are exceeded by any benefits is the subject of fierce debate and may not be known for years.
Eliot Spitzer, New York's attorney-general, is the leading advocate and practitioner of an energetic "law enforcement" approach. He may be right that the recent burst of punitive actions has been good for the economy, even if some of his own decisions have been open to question. Where he is undoubtedly right is in arguing that corporate America has done a lamentable job of governing itself. As he says in all article in the Wall Street Journal this week: "The honour code among CEOs didn't work. Board oversight didn't work. Self-regulation was a complete failure." AIG's board, for example, did nothing about Mr. Greenberg's use of murky accounting, or the conflicts posed by his use of offshore vehicles, or his constant bullying of his critics—let alone the firm's alleged participation in bid-rigging—until Mr. Spitzer threatened a criminal prosecution that might have destroyed the firm.
In the opening paragraph, the author introduce his topic by
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Judging from the context, "think-tanks"(Line 5, Para.2,) probably means
Judging from paragraph 3, we may infer that oil prices will
According to the author the main cause of the issues in Asia is
Asia's real boat-rocker is a growing China, not Japan, a senior American economist observed.
There is so much noise surrounding and emanating from the world's miracle economy that it is becoming cacophonous. In Washington, DC, the latest idea is that China is becoming too successful, perhaps even dangerously so: while Capitol Hill resounds with complaints of trade surpluses and currency manipulation, the Pentagon and sundry think-tanks echo to a new drumbeat of analysts worrying about China's 12.6% annual rise in military spending and about whether it might soon have the ability to take pre-emptive military action to force Taiwan to rejoin it. So it may be no coincidence that for three consecutive weekends the streets of big Chinese cities have been filled with the sounds of demonstrators marching and rocks being thrown, all seeking to send a different message: that Japan is the problem in Asia, not China, because of its wanton failure to face up to its history; and that by cosying up to Japan in security matters, America is allying with Asia's pariah.
Deafness is not the only risk from all this noise. The pressure towards protectionism in Washington is strong, and could put in further danger not only trade with China but also the wider climate for trade liberalisation in the Doha round of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). So far words have been the main weapons used between China and Japan, but there is a chance that nationalism in either or both countries could lead the governments to strike confrontational poses over their territorial disputes in the seas that divide them, even involving their navies. And the more that nationalist positions become entrenched in both countries but especially China, the more that street protests could become stirred up, perhaps towards more violence.
All these issues are complex ones and, as is often the case in trade and in historical disputes, finding solutions is likely to be far from simple. A revaluation of the yuan, as demanded in Congress, would not re-balance trade between America and China, though it might help a little, in due course. A "sincere" apology by Japan for its wartime atrocities might also help a little, but it would not suddenly turn Asia's natural great-power rivals into bosom buddies. For behind all the noise lies one big fact: that it is the rise of China, not the status or conduct of Japan, that poses Asia's thorniest questions.
From the first paragraph we may see that America's attitude towards China's success is
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