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Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. spoke at the Fortune 500 Forum in Washington on Monday. Published: December 1, 2008 WASHINGTON — The United States economy officially sank into a recession last December, which means that the downturn is already longer than the average for all recessions since World War II, according to the committee of economists responsible for dating the nation’s business cycles. Ben Bernanke, speaking in Texas, onscreen behind traders on the floor of the new York Stock Exchange. In declaring that the economy has been in a downturn for almost 12 months, the National Bureau of Economic Research confirmed what many Americans had already been feeling in their bones. But private forecasters warned that this downturn was likely to set a new postwar record for length and likely to be more painful than any recession since 1980 and 1981. “We will rewrite the record book on length for this recession,” said Allen Sinai, president of Decision Economics in Lexington, Mass. “It’s still arguable whether it will set a new record on depth. I hope not, but we don’t know.” As if adding a grim punctuation mark to what could become the worst holiday shopping season in decades, the Dow Jones industrial average plunged nearly 680 points, or 7.7 percent, to 8,149.09. Part of the drop may have reflected profit-taking after last week’s surge in stock prices, but it also came in response to new data showing that manufacturing activity dropped to its lowest point in 26 years. Both the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben S. Bernanke, and the Treasury secretary, , vowed to use all the tools at their disposal to restore a measure of normalcy to the economy. Mr. Bernanke, speaking to business leaders in Austin, Tex., said it was “certainly feasible” to reduce the Fed’s benchmark overnight lending rate below its current target of 1 percent, signaling that the central bank would lower the rate at its next policy meeting in two weeks. And in an unusually explicit follow-up, Mr. Bernanke said the central bank was also prepared to use the “second arrow in our quiver” if policy makers have already reduced that rate, called the federal funds rate, to nearly zero. Among the options, he said, the Fed can start aggressively buying up longer-term Treasury securities. That would have the effect of driving down longer-term interest rates. The Fed is already doing something of that sort, by buying up commercial debt from private companies as well as mortgage-backed securities guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Investors reacted to Mr. Bernanke’s remarks by pouring money into longer-term Treasury bonds, which briefly pushed already-low yields on 10-year and 30-year Treasuries to new record lows. Investors appeared to be reacting mainly to the clear signal from Mr. Bernanke that the Fed was preparing to pump money into the economy by buying up longer-term bonds. The yield on 30-year Treasuries declined 0.23 percentage points, to 3.21 percent, and briefly touched a record low of 3.18 percent. The yield on 10-year Treasuries fell 0.19 percentage points, to 2.73 percent. In normal times, those kinds of yields would automatically mean lower interest rates on mortgages, automobile loans and other forms of consumer debt. But the credit markets have been stalled by continued fears among financial institutions about who can be trusted for even short-term transactions, so the effects on home loans and other purposes could remain modest. Mr. Paulson, in a speech in Washington on Monday, vowed to look at new ways to use the fund that Congress approved in October. In Congress, Democratic leaders are drawing up a huge new fiscal stimulus plan that could total more than $500 billion. Democrats said they planned to have the measure ready as soon as Congress convened with a strengthened Democratic majority in January. Meanwhile, Democrats could take up legislation next week that would provide financial assistance to the automobile industry. President Bush, increasingly the odd man out in the last weeks of his term, said his administration would do whatever was necessary to safeguard the system. “I’m sorry it’s happening, of course,” Mr. Bush said in an interview with ABC’s “World News” on Monday. “Obviously, I don’t like the idea of Americans losing their jobs or being worried about their 401(k)s. On the other hand, the American people got to know that we will safeguard the system.” But many analysts said they saw no signs yet that the economy was nearing a bottom. American consumers, who for decades have been the country’s tireless source of growth when all else failed, have cut back on their spending more sharply than at any time since the early 1980s. 引文来源 Officials Vow to Act Amid Forecasts of Long Recession - NYTimes.com |
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