05/10/2011 0:05 Cuộc biểu tình từ nhiều tuần nay với khẩu hiệu “Chiếm Phố Wall” ở Mỹ tuy có quy mô nhỏ và tổ chức lỏng lẻo nhưng lại tác động mạnh đến chính trị nội bộ nước này. Nó không chỉ có nguyên cớ từ sự phân hóa giàu nghèo ngày càng tăng mà còn là bằng chứng về sự bất bình của người dân. Thực trạng phân hóa trong xã hội Mỹ được thể hiện qua biểu ngữ thường xuyên xuất hiện trong đợt biểu tình: “Chúng ta là 99%”, ám chỉ 99% người dân luôn phải lo lắng cho cuộc sống thường nhật và bi quan về tương lai. Có nghĩa là chỉ có 1% người Mỹ không ở trong tâm trạng ấy. Việc một bộ phận rất nhỏ người giàu nắm giữ tới 90% của cải mà cả đất nước làm ra cho thấy sự phân hóa trong xã hội có lẽ đã tới đỉnh điểm. |
Showing posts with label Wall Streat. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wall Streat. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Saturday, May 14, 2011
04/05 Pierre Cardin rao bán hãng thời trang giá 1 tỷ euro
04/05/2011 | 08:17:00
Từ khóa : Pierre Cardin, Thương hiệu thời trang, Nhà thiết kế, Doanh nhân, Rao bán
Huyền thoại thời trang Pierre Cardin. (Nguồn: AFP)
Hôm 3/5, trong buổi phỏng vấn với Nhật báo Phố Wall, huyền thoại thời trang người Pháp Pierre Cardin cho biết, ông đã sẵn sàng bán tập đoàn của mình và hy vọng có thể thu về số tiền khoảng 1 tỷ euro (1,4 tỷ USD).
Ông chủ 88 tuổi này chia sẻ: "Bây giờ tôi đang muốn bán tập đoàn. Tôi biết mình sẽ không duy trì công việc này trong vài năm tới, trong khi tập đoàn vẫn phải tiếp tục hoạt động."
Hiện tập đoàn được thành lập vào năm 1949 này đang được định giá sơ bộ vào khoảng 200 triệu euro, tuy nhiên những thông tin tài chính này vẫn chưa thực sự đầy đủ.
Pierre Cardin nổi tiếng là một nhà thiết kế đột phá, cũng như một doanh nhân tài ba với "kho vốn" lên tới 600 giấy phép sở hữu bản quyền trên toàn thế giới.
Hồi năm 1978, Cardin đã trở thành người nước ngoài đầu tiên táo bạo đầu tư vào thị trường Trung Quốc.
Hiện "ông trùm" thời trang này không có người thừa kế. Pierre Cardin nói rằng sau khi bán lại tập đoàn, ông muốn mình vẫn sẽ giữ vị trí giám đốc sáng tạo để duy trì hình ảnh của thương hiệu thời trang quen thuộc./.
Ông chủ 88 tuổi này chia sẻ: "Bây giờ tôi đang muốn bán tập đoàn. Tôi biết mình sẽ không duy trì công việc này trong vài năm tới, trong khi tập đoàn vẫn phải tiếp tục hoạt động."
Hiện tập đoàn được thành lập vào năm 1949 này đang được định giá sơ bộ vào khoảng 200 triệu euro, tuy nhiên những thông tin tài chính này vẫn chưa thực sự đầy đủ.
Pierre Cardin nổi tiếng là một nhà thiết kế đột phá, cũng như một doanh nhân tài ba với "kho vốn" lên tới 600 giấy phép sở hữu bản quyền trên toàn thế giới.
Hồi năm 1978, Cardin đã trở thành người nước ngoài đầu tiên táo bạo đầu tư vào thị trường Trung Quốc.
Hiện "ông trùm" thời trang này không có người thừa kế. Pierre Cardin nói rằng sau khi bán lại tập đoàn, ông muốn mình vẫn sẽ giữ vị trí giám đốc sáng tạo để duy trì hình ảnh của thương hiệu thời trang quen thuộc./.
Văn Hưng (Vietnam+)
11/05 Trang mạng hẹn hò Trung Quốc lên sàn Phố Wall
11/05/2011 | 16:06:00
Từ khóa : Jiayuan, Trang mạng hẹn hò, Phố Wall, Cổ phiếu, Niêm yết
Trang mạng hẹn hò Jiayuan. (Nguồn: Internet)
Trang mạng hẹn hò Jiayuan ngày 11/5 đã tiến hành thủ tục chào bán cổ phiếu lần đầu ra công chúng trên thị trường tài chính phố Wall.
Trang mạng hẹn hò hàng đầu của Trung Quốc này hiện đang tìm cách nâng số vốn của mình thêm gần 78 triệu USD.
Theo hồ sơ trên trang web Nasdaq, Jiayuan có kế hoạch phát hành 7,1 cổ phiếu với mức giá từ 10 đến 12 USD/cổ phiếu.Jiayuan là công ty Internet mới nhất của Trung Quốc tìm kiếm cơ hội làm ăn trên thị trường vốn Mỹ.
Công ty này ví mình là người tiên phong trong lĩnh vực hẹn hò qua mạng “cam kết giải quyết các nhu cầu hẹn hò và cưới hỏi của những người độc thân thành thị đang tăng lên nhanh chóng ở Trung Quốc.”
Trung Quốc hiện có số lượng cư dân mạng lớn nhất thế giới với ít nhất 457 triệu người sử dụng. Hồi tuần trước, Renren, một trang mạng xã hội của Trung Quốc, được xem là đối thủ của Facebook, cũng đã niêm yết trên thị trường phố Wall.
Cổ phiếu của trang mạng này hôm 10/5 được chào bán với giá 14 USD và chốt phiên ở giá 14,75 USD./.
Trang mạng hẹn hò hàng đầu của Trung Quốc này hiện đang tìm cách nâng số vốn của mình thêm gần 78 triệu USD.
Theo hồ sơ trên trang web Nasdaq, Jiayuan có kế hoạch phát hành 7,1 cổ phiếu với mức giá từ 10 đến 12 USD/cổ phiếu.Jiayuan là công ty Internet mới nhất của Trung Quốc tìm kiếm cơ hội làm ăn trên thị trường vốn Mỹ.
Công ty này ví mình là người tiên phong trong lĩnh vực hẹn hò qua mạng “cam kết giải quyết các nhu cầu hẹn hò và cưới hỏi của những người độc thân thành thị đang tăng lên nhanh chóng ở Trung Quốc.”
Trung Quốc hiện có số lượng cư dân mạng lớn nhất thế giới với ít nhất 457 triệu người sử dụng. Hồi tuần trước, Renren, một trang mạng xã hội của Trung Quốc, được xem là đối thủ của Facebook, cũng đã niêm yết trên thị trường phố Wall.
Cổ phiếu của trang mạng này hôm 10/5 được chào bán với giá 14 USD và chốt phiên ở giá 14,75 USD./.
Huy Bình (Vietnam+)
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
15/03 From Japan’s devastation, our Lisbon moment?
By Harold Meyerson, Tuesday, March 15, 7:49 PM
First came the earthquake, then the tsunami and the fires, and then, over time, a critical decline in belief in a benevolent God.
The Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 killed about a fifth of the city’s 200,000 residents and leveled 85 percent of its buildings, including almost every major church — on a church holiday, when they were packed with parishioners. It also shook 18th-century philosophers to the core. “Candide,” Voltaire’s comic polemic against the belief that all was for the best in this best of all possible worlds, was written in the quake’s aftermath, as Voltaire was abandoning any notion of godly oversight of the world’s affairs. The young Immanuel Kant was sufficiently upset to research and write one of the first books ever on the causes of quakes, before he turned to his life’s work of creating ethical codes that functioned in both the presence and absence of God.
Today, the quake, tsunami and, most particularly, the potential of a nuclear catastrophe in Japan should weaken at least one of our own deeply rooted faiths — in our own infallibility. Consider, for a moment, all the systems that the experts said had been rendered safe, foolproof and immune to disaster, and that nonetheless crashed during the past three years. There was the financial system, an assemblage of immense wagers on all manner of things, which an array of mathematicians and economists assured us could not possibly come tumbling down. There was deep-water oil drilling, which the oil companies’ geologists, among others, insisted could not possibly result in a cataclysmic spill. And today, there are nuclear power plants, safeguarded, their engineers have told us, against the oh-so-remote possibilities of meltdowns.
These assurances — at least, most of them — were not given in bad faith. Wall Street’s quants genuinely believed that they had erected a stable system, as did the geologists and the nuclear engineers. The equations were elegant; things penciled out. At long last, humankind had triumphed over risk.
Except when it hadn’t.
What all these wizards did not factor in was that these were all just as much human and social systems as they were mathematical. Behind the equations were human and social assumptions, rooted in such human and social impulses as greed, denial and hubris. The derivatives that the banks’ economists had devised were said to distribute risk so widely that they made the system safe; but in fact, they interlocked risk so completely that they brought the system down. But they also brought the banks such massive profits that few on Wall Street wanted to recognize the risks that economists not in Wall Street’s sway had detected and identified.
What the systemic failures on Wall Street, in the Gulf of Mexico and in Japan should teach us is that the need for active, disinterested governmental regulation is rooted not in any radical impulse, as the American right continually contends, but in a sober, conservative assessment of the human capacity for mistake and self-delusion, not to mention avarice and chicanery. We can underestimate the risks of a particular undertaking, even when we think we have guarded against them. We fall prey to our own sense of infallibility, often as a way to rationalize what is otherwise a risky endeavor. When those risks go bad, the consequences often fall on those who didn’t take those risks themselves, as the millions of Americans who lost their jobs thanks to Wall Street’s follies can attest. This is a concept that libertarians don’t seem able to grasp, which is why the rise of libertarianism within Republican ranks is bad news for food safety, clean air, economic stability and the like.
The market may in time punish bad actors, which is the ostensible safeguard that libertarians prefer to regulation. Yet as the people sealed inside their homes in the vicinity of Japan’s malfunctioning nuclear plant could tell us, untold numbers of innocents may pay a much higher price, more quickly, than the executives and shareholders of offending companies. For that matter, shareholders and non-shareholders alike, all across the planet, may soon feel economic pain as a consequence of Japan’s insufficient precautions.
And yet, the war on regulation in America — backed by Wall Street and such energy-industry leaders as the Koch brothers — rolls on. Before last week’s quake, House Republicans cut funding for training first responders to radiation disasters. Japan, one hopes, should bring an end to such nonsense. It’s time for our own Lisbon moment. We haven’t defeated risk. We haven’t engineered the glitches out of the system. We need some rules, some regs, and a government willing to devise and enforce them.
meyersonh@washpost.com
© 2011 The Washington Post Company
First came the earthquake, then the tsunami and the fires, and then, over time, a critical decline in belief in a benevolent God.
The Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 killed about a fifth of the city’s 200,000 residents and leveled 85 percent of its buildings, including almost every major church — on a church holiday, when they were packed with parishioners. It also shook 18th-century philosophers to the core. “Candide,” Voltaire’s comic polemic against the belief that all was for the best in this best of all possible worlds, was written in the quake’s aftermath, as Voltaire was abandoning any notion of godly oversight of the world’s affairs. The young Immanuel Kant was sufficiently upset to research and write one of the first books ever on the causes of quakes, before he turned to his life’s work of creating ethical codes that functioned in both the presence and absence of God.
Today, the quake, tsunami and, most particularly, the potential of a nuclear catastrophe in Japan should weaken at least one of our own deeply rooted faiths — in our own infallibility. Consider, for a moment, all the systems that the experts said had been rendered safe, foolproof and immune to disaster, and that nonetheless crashed during the past three years. There was the financial system, an assemblage of immense wagers on all manner of things, which an array of mathematicians and economists assured us could not possibly come tumbling down. There was deep-water oil drilling, which the oil companies’ geologists, among others, insisted could not possibly result in a cataclysmic spill. And today, there are nuclear power plants, safeguarded, their engineers have told us, against the oh-so-remote possibilities of meltdowns.
These assurances — at least, most of them — were not given in bad faith. Wall Street’s quants genuinely believed that they had erected a stable system, as did the geologists and the nuclear engineers. The equations were elegant; things penciled out. At long last, humankind had triumphed over risk.
Except when it hadn’t.
What all these wizards did not factor in was that these were all just as much human and social systems as they were mathematical. Behind the equations were human and social assumptions, rooted in such human and social impulses as greed, denial and hubris. The derivatives that the banks’ economists had devised were said to distribute risk so widely that they made the system safe; but in fact, they interlocked risk so completely that they brought the system down. But they also brought the banks such massive profits that few on Wall Street wanted to recognize the risks that economists not in Wall Street’s sway had detected and identified.
What the systemic failures on Wall Street, in the Gulf of Mexico and in Japan should teach us is that the need for active, disinterested governmental regulation is rooted not in any radical impulse, as the American right continually contends, but in a sober, conservative assessment of the human capacity for mistake and self-delusion, not to mention avarice and chicanery. We can underestimate the risks of a particular undertaking, even when we think we have guarded against them. We fall prey to our own sense of infallibility, often as a way to rationalize what is otherwise a risky endeavor. When those risks go bad, the consequences often fall on those who didn’t take those risks themselves, as the millions of Americans who lost their jobs thanks to Wall Street’s follies can attest. This is a concept that libertarians don’t seem able to grasp, which is why the rise of libertarianism within Republican ranks is bad news for food safety, clean air, economic stability and the like.
The market may in time punish bad actors, which is the ostensible safeguard that libertarians prefer to regulation. Yet as the people sealed inside their homes in the vicinity of Japan’s malfunctioning nuclear plant could tell us, untold numbers of innocents may pay a much higher price, more quickly, than the executives and shareholders of offending companies. For that matter, shareholders and non-shareholders alike, all across the planet, may soon feel economic pain as a consequence of Japan’s insufficient precautions.
And yet, the war on regulation in America — backed by Wall Street and such energy-industry leaders as the Koch brothers — rolls on. Before last week’s quake, House Republicans cut funding for training first responders to radiation disasters. Japan, one hopes, should bring an end to such nonsense. It’s time for our own Lisbon moment. We haven’t defeated risk. We haven’t engineered the glitches out of the system. We need some rules, some regs, and a government willing to devise and enforce them.
meyersonh@washpost.com
© 2011 The Washington Post Company
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
15/03 Lessons from the long tail of improbable disaster
By Steven Pearlstein, Tuesday, March 15, 9:02 PM
If it seems that the frequency and size of calamities have been picking up in recent years, it’s only because they probably have.
In just the past decade, we’ve had the attacks of Sept. 11, the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, Hurricane Katrina, the global financial crisis, a global flu pandemic, the earthquake in Haiti, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and devastating floods in Australia and New Zealand. Now, Japan has been hit with a triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis.
What all of these have in common is that they are all low-probability, high-impact events — the “long-tail” phenomenon, to use the jargon of risk modelers, referring to the far ends of the traditional bell curve of probabilities, or “black swans,” to use the metaphor popularized by former Wall Street trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Such calamitous events have been a regular part of the human experience since Noah and the flood, some of them natural, others manmade. In spite of that, however, we continue to underestimate their frequency and severity.
To a degree, that is a good thing. If we were to focus too much of our attention on all the really, really bad things that could befall us, we’d never get out of bed in the morning.
But the same psychological trait that allows us to go about our daily business also creates blind spots. Although we observe that calamities happen, we assume that they won’t happen to us, or they won’t happen again. And if it has been a long time since the calamity, we are apt to take false comfort that we have beaten the odds.
There was no better example of this memory lapse than in the weeks after the Gulf Coast oil spill, when political leaders were jumping up and down demanding that the federal government move more aggressively to contain what they described as a life- and economy-altering disaster, even while expressing outrage over a temporary moratorium on other drilling. Similarly, nine months after Hurricane Katrina, a survey of more than 1,000 residents of coastal areas found that 85 percent had taken no precautions to protect themselves from a similar storm.
Even those who say they can assess risks and probabilities to the third decimal point have a history of wildly overestimating their predictive powers. By their calculation, the BP spill could never happen. Nor could the collapse of national real estate prices or the nuclear crisis in Japan.
Part of the problem is that we don’t know what we don’t know. The other part is that small miscalculations of probabilities can have large effects on outcomes when dealing with long periods of time. Think of the sailor who sets off on a voyage a few degrees off course. A few miles out, the error is small, but by the time he crosses the ocean, he may find himself hundreds of miles from the intended destination.
Our reward structures don’t encourage spending the time or the money to deal with low-probability disasters. The chief executive of Citigroup acknowledged as much when he told a reporter in 2007 that he would lose his job if he gave up profit and market share to shield his bank from the obviously excessive risk-taking that everyone knew was going on. And you can only imagine the outcry from the industry and those Gulf Coast politicians if government regulators back in 2009 had ordered oil companies to spend millions of dollars to have enough boats and booms at the ready to deal with a BP-sized oil spill from deepwater drilling.
Indeed, it seems that when we conclude that the chance of something really bad happening is very small, we wind up taking actions that either increase the probability of the disaster or the damage that it will cause.
Once the rocket scientists on Wall Street, for example, concluded that it was virtually impossible for investors in so-called “mezzanine” tranches of mortgage-backed securities to lose money, it set off a chain of events that made the prediction untrue. The heavy demand for the securities led to dramatically lower lending standards and a sharp increase in housing prices, creating a bubble so large that when it burst, it caused heavy losses for those same mezzanine investors. The declaration that a particular investment was riskless became a self-negating prophecy.
Similarly, when the government builds a levee, it may reduce the frequency of damaging floods but may also encourage even more people to build homes and businesses behind the barrier. When the Big One finally arrives, the total damage will be even greater than if no levee had been built.
We’re also discovering that the impact of disasters is magnified by globalization. The troubles in northern Japan, for example, are beginning to ripple through global supply chains, creating bottlenecks and shortages in dozens of industries. The way globalization increases economic efficiency is by leveraging the advantages of scale and specialization. Yet the bigger and more concentrated production becomes, the more vulnerable it becomes to disruption.
Many scholars now think that the very complexity of modern life — including our transportation and communication systems, our economy and our social interactions — is directly implicated in the severity of catastrophes. In more complex systems, even small changes or perturbations can have disproportionate and unpredictable effects. The things that make our systems more efficient also make them more effective in spreading the impact of a catastrophe.
The lesson to be drawn from all this is not that we should roll back the clock and return to a simpler and less interconnected existence. It is, rather, that more attention must be paid to the extra risks that come with all the advantages of modern life. There may be a significant cost involved in preventing low-probability disasters, or having sufficient infrastructure to deal with them when they cannot be prevented. But as we are reminded by this week’s events in Japan, that cost is likely to be less than the cost of ignoring those risks and doing nothing at all.
pearlstein@washpost.com
© 2011 The Washington Post Company
If it seems that the frequency and size of calamities have been picking up in recent years, it’s only because they probably have.
In just the past decade, we’ve had the attacks of Sept. 11, the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, Hurricane Katrina, the global financial crisis, a global flu pandemic, the earthquake in Haiti, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and devastating floods in Australia and New Zealand. Now, Japan has been hit with a triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis.
What all of these have in common is that they are all low-probability, high-impact events — the “long-tail” phenomenon, to use the jargon of risk modelers, referring to the far ends of the traditional bell curve of probabilities, or “black swans,” to use the metaphor popularized by former Wall Street trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Such calamitous events have been a regular part of the human experience since Noah and the flood, some of them natural, others manmade. In spite of that, however, we continue to underestimate their frequency and severity.
To a degree, that is a good thing. If we were to focus too much of our attention on all the really, really bad things that could befall us, we’d never get out of bed in the morning.
But the same psychological trait that allows us to go about our daily business also creates blind spots. Although we observe that calamities happen, we assume that they won’t happen to us, or they won’t happen again. And if it has been a long time since the calamity, we are apt to take false comfort that we have beaten the odds.
There was no better example of this memory lapse than in the weeks after the Gulf Coast oil spill, when political leaders were jumping up and down demanding that the federal government move more aggressively to contain what they described as a life- and economy-altering disaster, even while expressing outrage over a temporary moratorium on other drilling. Similarly, nine months after Hurricane Katrina, a survey of more than 1,000 residents of coastal areas found that 85 percent had taken no precautions to protect themselves from a similar storm.
Even those who say they can assess risks and probabilities to the third decimal point have a history of wildly overestimating their predictive powers. By their calculation, the BP spill could never happen. Nor could the collapse of national real estate prices or the nuclear crisis in Japan.
Part of the problem is that we don’t know what we don’t know. The other part is that small miscalculations of probabilities can have large effects on outcomes when dealing with long periods of time. Think of the sailor who sets off on a voyage a few degrees off course. A few miles out, the error is small, but by the time he crosses the ocean, he may find himself hundreds of miles from the intended destination.
Our reward structures don’t encourage spending the time or the money to deal with low-probability disasters. The chief executive of Citigroup acknowledged as much when he told a reporter in 2007 that he would lose his job if he gave up profit and market share to shield his bank from the obviously excessive risk-taking that everyone knew was going on. And you can only imagine the outcry from the industry and those Gulf Coast politicians if government regulators back in 2009 had ordered oil companies to spend millions of dollars to have enough boats and booms at the ready to deal with a BP-sized oil spill from deepwater drilling.
Indeed, it seems that when we conclude that the chance of something really bad happening is very small, we wind up taking actions that either increase the probability of the disaster or the damage that it will cause.
Once the rocket scientists on Wall Street, for example, concluded that it was virtually impossible for investors in so-called “mezzanine” tranches of mortgage-backed securities to lose money, it set off a chain of events that made the prediction untrue. The heavy demand for the securities led to dramatically lower lending standards and a sharp increase in housing prices, creating a bubble so large that when it burst, it caused heavy losses for those same mezzanine investors. The declaration that a particular investment was riskless became a self-negating prophecy.
Similarly, when the government builds a levee, it may reduce the frequency of damaging floods but may also encourage even more people to build homes and businesses behind the barrier. When the Big One finally arrives, the total damage will be even greater than if no levee had been built.
We’re also discovering that the impact of disasters is magnified by globalization. The troubles in northern Japan, for example, are beginning to ripple through global supply chains, creating bottlenecks and shortages in dozens of industries. The way globalization increases economic efficiency is by leveraging the advantages of scale and specialization. Yet the bigger and more concentrated production becomes, the more vulnerable it becomes to disruption.
Many scholars now think that the very complexity of modern life — including our transportation and communication systems, our economy and our social interactions — is directly implicated in the severity of catastrophes. In more complex systems, even small changes or perturbations can have disproportionate and unpredictable effects. The things that make our systems more efficient also make them more effective in spreading the impact of a catastrophe.
The lesson to be drawn from all this is not that we should roll back the clock and return to a simpler and less interconnected existence. It is, rather, that more attention must be paid to the extra risks that come with all the advantages of modern life. There may be a significant cost involved in preventing low-probability disasters, or having sufficient infrastructure to deal with them when they cannot be prevented. But as we are reminded by this week’s events in Japan, that cost is likely to be less than the cost of ignoring those risks and doing nothing at all.
pearlstein@washpost.com
© 2011 The Washington Post Company
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