For the record, this recession isn’t over yet. A committee of economists, charged with determining the beginnings and ends of recessions, confirmed Monday that it cannot yet declare an end to the recession that began in December 2007.“Although most indicators have turned up, the committee decided that the determination of the trough date on the basis of current data would be premature,” the group at the National Bureau of Economic Research said in a statement. Such an acknowledgment is rare in the history of setting dates to business cycles and could affect the behavior of investors and consumers.Despite a recent uptick in employment and income, the decision of the committee at a meeting last week — details of which were finalized over the weekend — reflects a lingering worry that the economy could turn downward again in a so-called double-dip recession.Several economists on the committee, which has seven active members, said they considered such a 英雄合击
turn to be unlikely. But, they said, the duration and severity of the contraction have made it hard to determine with authority that a recovery has begun.“Many indicators are quite preliminary at this time and will be revised in coming months,” the committee statement said. A number of private economists have said they believed the recession ended in June or July last year.The gross domestic product, the broadest measure of economic activity, officially began rising in the second half of 2009, suggesting that a recovery might have quietly started. But the committee takes other factors into consideration, like employment trends and consumer confidence.Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, and Christina D. Romer, the chairwoman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, are former members of the committee, and its position could potentially affect their outlook on monetary and fiscal policy.The two previous recessions, in 1990-91 and in 2001, each lasted eight months and were mild enough that the committee felt confident in pronouncing them over in a year or less. As it was, the current recession was 11 months old before the committee announced its start date.Now, the committee says that the timing of an upward turn has been harder to discern than in the past. Moreover, the government has revised several statistics after they were initially released, making it more difficult to say when the economy hit bottom.“Hypothetically, if there were a new sharp downturn that came along tomorrow, would it count as a new recession or part of the same recession?” asked Jeffrey A. Frankel, a member of the panel, officially known as the Business Cycle Dating Committee. “In the latter case, we would have made a mistake by calling the trough last year and saying the recession was over.”In interviews before Monday’s announcement, several committee members carefully chose their words. Citing job gains in March, Mr. Frankel, an economist at the Harvard Kennedy School, declared on his blog last week, “The recession is over.” He said he made that case when the committee met Friday in Cambridge, Mass., but added that he could see that a strong argument could be made for holding off on a pronouncement.Another committee member, Robert E. Hall of Stanford, said, “The odds favor the view that a true expansion has begun and that the recession beginning in 2007 is over.”But he added that “one cannot totally rule out the unlikely possibility that the economy might christian louboutin pumps
resume contraction again soon.”Under such a situation, he said, the upswing that began in the second half of 2009 would be “only an interruption in a longer contraction, and not an expansion.” But he added, “Currently, forecasters are assigning low probability to such a development.”A third committee member, James H. Stock, a Harvard economist, has also been associated with the belief that the recession ended last year. On Sunday, Mr. Stock would not describe the discussion at the committee meeting.But he said: “It’s incumbent on the N.B.E.R. to maintain its decades-long tradition of care in the detailed assessment of the date of turning points. That is a far more difficult task than I think many commentators understand.”A fourth committee member, Martin S. Feldstein, also of Harvard, warned in January of the risk of a double-dip recession. “There is a significant risk the economy could run out of steam sometime in 2010,” he said at a meeting of the American Economic Association. Reached on Sunday, Mr. Feldstein declined to elaborate publicly on his views.Mr. Frankel and Mr. Hall have been quoted as saying that the recession has ended. In the Internet era, those comments generated more buzz than the bureau is accustomed to. Asked why the committee would not just wait, several members cited the public interest and a desire for transparency.There is no formula for defining a recession, even though it is often casually described as two consecutive quarters of economic contraction. The committee relies on interpretation to determine the beginning or end of one.The last time it made such a cautious statement was in December 1990, when it said that a recession had most likely begun between June and September but that it could not make a determination until the contraction was sufficiently long and deep; the committee announced four months later that the recession had started in July 1990.It seems nearly certain that the present recession will end up lasting longer than the 16-month christian louboutin pumps
recessions of 1973-75 and 1981-82. They had been the longest downturns since the 43-month period from 1929 to 1933 that was the first phase of the Great Depression.The committee, created in 1978, has assigned the start and end dates of economic contractions for every business cycle since 1854. It has long emphasized that it looks only backward, and does not make forecasts or predictions.
The two men who steered Citigroup into the eye of the financial storm offered a striking contrast on Thursday. Charles O. Prince III, Citigroup’s former chairman and chief executive, abased himself before the federal panel investigating the causes of the crisis, apologizing repeatedly for the billions of dollars in losses at an institution that ended up the recipient of $45 billion of taxpayer aid.But Robert E. Rubin, the former Treasury secretary, faced withering questions from the panel, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, for his spare expressions of remorse. Repeatedly playing down his role as chairman of the executive committee of Citigroup’s board, he was met with anger and disbelief.“You were either pulling the levers or asleep at the switch,” Philip N. Angelides, the committee’s chairman, told him.After three hours of testimony, Mr. Prince emerged as dignified though blameworthy. christian shoes
Mr. Rubin, the consummate wise man of Washington and Wall Street, looked demoralized.In the second of three days of hearings this week, commission members dug into myriad reasons behind Citigroup’s collapse. They depicted a company so troubled that its crisis meetings were called “Def-Con calls” and so callous to risks that its regulators were confounded.But the bulk of the hearing was spent assessing the men’s responsibility for a company that has come to represent the concept of “too big to fail.”Mr. Prince tried to get ahead of the criticism by departing from his prepared statement to offer an abject apology.“I’m sorry the financial crisis has had such a devastating impact for our country,” Mr. Prince said. “I’m sorry about the millions of people, average Americans, who lost their homes. And I’m sorry that our management teams, starting with me, like so many others could not see the unprecedented market collapse that lay before us.”His unusually blunt statement of remorse seemed to take some of the oxygen out of a series of hearings more accustomed to corporate legalese.Mr. Rubin stopped short of accepting personal responsibility. He grudgingly conceded that a few savvy investors saw the crisis coming, asserting that nearly everyone in the financial services industry had failed to see a dozen powerful forces — from excessive debt levels to trade imbalance — come together in a perfect storm.“We all bear responsibility for not recognizing this, and I deeply regret that,” Mr. Rubin said.Mr. Rubin’s stance left several members of the panel angry. Mr. Rubin earned more than $100 million during a decade at Citigroup. But he emphasized that period less than he did his tenure as a co-chief executive of Goldman Sachs, where he worked before joining the Clinton administration.Mr. Angelides, a former California state treasurer and a fellow Democrat, did not buy it. “You were not a garden-variety board member,” he said. “I think to most people chairman of the executive committee of the board of directors implies leadership. Certainly $15 million a year guaranteed implies leadership and responsibility.”Mr. Rubin maintained that his role had been misconstrued, saying that Citigoup’s executive committee met infrequently and “wasn’t a substantive part of the decision-making process.” He reiterated that his employment contract explicitly exempted him from operational duties.Mr. Angelides was so critical of that explanation that Mr. Prince spoke up for Mr. Rubin.“It is absolutely incorrect to suggest that Mr. Rubin had central responsibility, or mbt outlet
any central responsibility for what happened to Citigroup,” Mr. Prince said.Bill Thomas, a former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, assailed both executives for accepting millions of dollars in pay. He also leveled criticism at four Citigroup executives who oversaw the mortgage desk at the heart of the bank’s troubles and who testified on Wednesday. Together, they earned $150 million as business boomed.“That same team, on the way down, didn’t have a nickel clawed back,” Mr. Thomas said angrily.Earlier on Thursday, Mr. Prince spoke in personal terms about the impact of Citi’s troubles on his own net worth.“As I sit here today, I own nearly every share of stock that I acquired in a nearly 30-year career,” he said. “I have watched it go from $50 to nearly $30 to less than $1 a share.”Mr. Prince has kept a relatively low profile since resigning under pressure in November 2007. Now a corporate adviser, he is an avid golfer and spends much of his time in Palm Beach, Fla.After the hearing, Mr. Prince stuck around to shake hands with commission members. “I’m a private citizen. I feel great,” he said. In contrast, Mr. Rubin raced out of the hearing room.Though Mr. Rubin has many friends within the Obama administration and on Wall Street, he has kept a low profile since leaving Citigroup in January 2009. He keeps a Park Avenue office at the Council on Foreign Relations. He was a mentor to Timothy F. Geithner, now Treasury secretary. Mr. Rubin also is trying to revitalize the Hamilton Project, an economic policy group.But it was Mr. Prince who was more expansive on Thursday. He weighed in with policy prescriptions, arguing that consolidating banking regulation would “lend itself to greater probity for the industry.” Mr. Rubin said he supported individualized financial advice for “the most vulnerable consumers,” though he added that it would be expensive.When questioned about derivatives regulation by Brooksley E. Born, Mr. Rubin said his past reservations were grounded in legal concerns. Ms. Born, a former regulator who had clashed with him over derivatives during the Clinton administration, quoted from Mr. Rubin’s best-selling 2003 memoir to draw out his position on regulation.Mr. Rubin got somewhat testy when he was asked about a risk assessment conducted by federal supervisors in November 2007, soon after the bank reported gigantic losses related to subprime mortgages. The report noted poor communication between business units and lax controls.“I think you should read the reports before the crisis developed,”英雄合击
not just the autopsy, he responded.Mr. Thomas told both men that contrition was not enough. “To make the argument that somehow a simple apology still allows you to maintain a profile of income based upon what devastated everybody else doesn’t fit the scale test,” he said, “no matter how often you feel really, really sad about what happened.”
After initially denying involvement or any cover-up in the deaths of three Afghan women during a badly bungled American Special Operations assault in February, the American-led military command in Kabul admitted late on Sunday that its forces had, in fact, killed the women during the nighttime raid. The admission immediately raised questions about what really happened during the Feb. 12 operation — and what falsehoods followed — including a new report that Special Operations forces dug bullets out of the bodies of the women to hide christian louboutin
the nature of their deaths.A NATO official also said Sunday that an Afghan-led team of investigators had found signs of evidence tampering at the scene, including the removal of bullets from walls near where the women were killed. On Monday, however, a senior NATO official denied that any tampering had occurred.The disclosure could not come at a worse moment for the American military: NATO officials are struggling to contain fallout from a series of tirades against the foreign military presence by the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, who has also railed against the killing of civilians by Western forces.Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the American and NATO commander in Afghanistan, has tried hard, and with some success, to reduce civilian casualties through new rules that include restricting night raids and also bringing Special Operations forces under tighter control. But botched Special Operations attacks — which are blamed for a large proportion of the civilian deaths caused by NATO forces — continue to infuriate Afghans and create support for the Taliban.NATO military officials had already admitted killing two innocent civilians — a district prosecutor and a local police chief — during the raid, on a home near Gardez in southeastern Afghanistan. The two men were shot to death when they came out of their home, armed with Kalashnikov rifles, to investigate.Three women also died that night at the same home: One was a pregnant mother of 10 and another was a pregnant mother of six. NATO military officials had suggested that the women were actually stabbed to death — or had died by some other means — hours before the raid, an explanation that implied that family members or others at the home might have killed them.Survivors of the raid called that explanation a cover-up and insisted that American forces killed the women. Relatives and family friends said the bloody raid followed a party in honor of the birth of a grandson of the owner of the house.On Sunday night the American-led military command in Kabul issued a statement admitting that “international forces” were responsible for the deaths of the women. Officials have previously stated that American Special Operations forces and Afghan forces conducted the operation.The statement said that “investigators could not conclusively determine sale mbt shoes
how or when the women died, due to lack of forensic evidence” but that they had nonetheless “concluded that the women were accidentally killed as a result of the joint force firing at the men.”“We deeply regret the outcome of this operation, accept responsibility for our actions that night, and know that this loss will be felt forever by the families,” said Brig. Gen. Eric Tremblay, a spokesman for the NATO command in Kabul.The admission was an abrupt about-face. In a statement soon after the raid, NATO had claimed that its raiding party had stumbled upon the “bodies of three women who had been tied up, gagged and killed” and hidden in a room in the house. Military officials had also said later that the bodies showed signs of puncture and slashing wounds from a knife, and that the women appeared to have been killed several hours before the raid.And in what could be a scandalous turn to the investigation, The Times of London reported Sunday night that Afghan investigators also determined that American forces not only killed the women but had also “dug bullets out of their victims’ bodies in the bloody aftermath” and then “washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened.”A spokesman for the Afghan Interior Ministry, Zemary Bashary, said that he did not have any information about the Afghan investigation, which he said remained unfinished.In an interview, a NATO official said the Afghan-led investigation team alerted American and NATO commanders that the inquiry had found signs of evidence tampering. A briefing was given by investigators to General McChrystal and other military officials in late March.“There was evidence of tampering at the scene, walls being washed, bullets dug out of holes in the wall,” the NATO official said, adding that investigators “couldn’t find bullets from the wounds in the body.”The investigators, the official said, “alluded to the fact that 传奇私服
bullets were missing but did not discuss anything specific to that. Nothing pointed conclusively to the fact that our guys were the ones who tampered with the scene.”A senior NATO official denied Monday there was any effort to tamper with evidence.“We have discovered no evidence in our investigation that any of our forces did anything to manipulate the evidence at the scene or the bodies,” said Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith, the deputy chief of staff for communications for General McChrystal.Several bullets that were fired but had not struck either of the two men were removed from the walls, Admiral Smith said. But he said that was done “to make sure what kinds of rounds they were.”NATO officials have also rejected allegations that the killings were covered up. But it was not immediately clear on Sunday night how troops who shot the women and later examined their bodies would not have recognized that it was their bullets that killed them.