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- November 27th, 2009. - p. 112. C.M. – Clouds mar Europe’s sunnier outlook [Text] // The Financial Times. – Ralph Atkins, Stanley Pignal. - December 15th, 2009. - p. 113. D.U. – Decree ushers in insolvency reforms [Text] // The Financial Times. – Anousha Sakoui. - December 15th, 2009. – p. 114. D.A. T. – Dubai to all that [Text] // The Financial Times. – December 15, 2009. - p. 115. F.R.D. – Fed ready to divide liquidity policy [Text] // The Financial Times. – Krishna Guha. – December 15th, 2009. – p.2.
116. G.S. - Goldman Sachs should be allowed to fail [Text] // The Financial Times.
– John Gapper. - December 15th, 2009. - p. 117. G.P.V. – Greek PM vows to cut spending and fight corruption [Text] // The Financial Times. Kerin Hope, David Oakley. – December 15th, 2009. – p.1.
118. J.M.U. –Japan more upbeat but gloom persists [Text] // The Financial Times.
– December 15th, 2009. – Mure Dickie. - p. 119. I.C. – Investors cut short positions on dollar [Text] // The Financial Times. – Peter Garnham. - December 15th, 2009. - p. 120. L.D. - A Lehman deal would not have saved us [Text] // The Financial Times.
– Niall Ferguson. - December 15th, 2009. - p. 121. M.S. – Mitsubishi UFJ suffers sell-off [Text] // The Financial Times. – Stephen Smith. - December 15th, 2009. - p. 122. N.B. – Narrow banking alone is not the answer [Text] // The Financial Times.
– Martin Wolf. - December 15th, 2009. - p. 123. N.G.D. – Number of global defaults reaches record [Text] // The Financial Times. – Anousha Sakoui. - December 15th, 2009. - p. 124. T.S. – Three steps towards a safer financial system [Text] // The Financial Times. Philip Purcell. – December 15th, 2009. – p. 11.
125. T.B. - ‘Too big to fail’ is too dumb to keep [Text] // The Financial Times. – John Kay. - – December 15th, 2009. - p. 126. T.T.G. – Tough test for Greek leader as crisis grows [Text] // The Financial Times. - Kerin Hope. – December 15th, 2009. – p. 3.
127. W.C. T. – World counts true cost of the rescue [Text] // The Financial Times.
– Lionel Barber. - December 15th, 2009. - p. 1- 128. W. C. – Winner from the crisis has clear aims - [Text] // The Financial Times.
– James Wilson and Patrick Jenkins. December 18, 2009.
129. W. C. – Will This Crisis Produce a ‘Gatsby’? [Electronic resource] / The Wall Street Journal. –– Sean Mccann. - February 21, 2009. - Mode access:
http://europe.wsj.com/home-page 130. C. S. – Crisis Spurs Call for Bigger Bailouts [Electronic resource] / The Wall Street Journal. – Sebastian Moffett and Marek Strzelecki and Marcus Walker. – February 23, 2009. - Mode access: http://europe.wsj.com/home-page 131. E. E. – Eastern Europe and the Financial Crisis [Electronic resource] / The Wall Street Journal. – David Roche. – March 28, 2009. - Mode access:
http://europe.wsj.com/home-page 132. C. Q. A. – Crisis Q&A: What If My Bank Fails The Stress Test? [Electronic resource] / The Wall Street Journal. – Dave Kansas.– May 7, 2009. - Mode access:
http://europe.wsj.com/home-page 133. R. F. – Russia Faces Budget Cuts Amid Crisis [Electronic resource] / The Wall Street Journal. – Lidia Kelly. – May 26, 2009. - Mode access:
http://europe.wsj.com/home-page 134. A.D. - Amazon Drops More Affiliates to Avoid Tax [Text] // The Wall Street Journal. –. Geoffrey A. Fowler. – June 30th, 2009. - p. B 135. C. P. - At Chicken Plant, a Recession Battle [Text] // The Wall Street Journal.
– Lauren Etter. – June 30th, 2009. - p. A 136. C. R. L. - Carrefour Restores Low-Price Strategy [Text] // The Wall Street Journal. – Cecilie Rohwedder. – June 30th, 2009. - p. B 137. C. S. R. - Car-Sales Rebound Seen for June [Text] // The Wall Street Journal.
– Sharon Terlep, Jeff Bennett. – June 30th, 2009. - p. B 138. O. C. - One College Sidesteps the Crisis [Text] // The Wall Street Journal. – John Hechinger. – June 30th, 2009. - p. C 139. E.R. - Even ‘Recession Proof’ Schoolteachers Feel Pinch of Employment Downturn [Text] // The Wall Street Journal. –Alex Frangos. – July 3-5, 2009. - p. A 140. E.Z. U. - Euro-Zone Unemployment Hits 9.5% [Text] // The Wall Street Journal. – Joellen Perry. – July 3-5, 2009. - p. A 141. M.S. T. - Merkel Seeks Tougher Rules for Financial Markets [Text] // The Wall Street Journal. –Marcus Walker, Matthew Karnitschnig. – July 3-5, 2009. - p.A 142. R.J. – Rising Job Losses Damp Hopes of Recovery [Text] // The Wall Street Journal. – Kelly Evans, Alex Frangos. – July 3-5, 2009. - p. A 143. S.P. - Stagnant Pay Saps Consumers’ Ability to Spur Recovery [Text] // The Wall Street Journal. –Alex Frangos. – July 3-5, 2009. - p. A 144. P. N. C. - Preventing the Next Financial Crisis [Electronic resource] / The Wall Street Journal. – Allan H. Meltzer. – October 22, 2009. - Mode access:
http://europe.wsj.com/home-page 145. M. S. – Merkel Says German Economic Crisis Makes Tax Cuts a Must [Electronic resource] / The Wall Street Journal. – Andrea Thomas. – November 18, 2009.
- Mode access: http://europe.wsj.com/home-page 146. L. D. C. – The Last Great Dollar Crisis [Electronic resource] / The Wall Street Journal. – Joel Harris. – December 1, 2009. - Mode access:
http://europe.wsj.com/home-page 147. I. G. – Irish GDP Rises 0.3% but Crisis Lingers [Electronic resource] / The Wall Street Journal. – Quentin Fottrell. – December 18, 2009. - Mode access:
http://europe.wsj.com/home-page 148. E. Z. – Euro Zone Grapples With Debt Crisis [Electronic resource] / The Wall Street Journal. – Terence Roth. – December 30, 2009. - Mode access:
http://europe.wsj.com/home-page 149. The Wall Street Journal, 2005 [Text] // Applications in Basic Marketing.
Clippings from the Popular Business Press / E. Jerome McCarthy, William D. Perreault. Michigan State University, Jr. University of North Carolina. -1991-1992 Edition. - 107 p.
(5 articles).
Приложение 1. Репрезентация когнитивных единиц в англоязычных экономических медиатекстах кризисного периода Распределение когнитивных признаков концептов FEAR и FAILURE по степени яркости
FAILURE
Процентное соотношение концептов в дискурсивном пространстве англоязычных экономических медиатекстов кризисного периодаFAILURE
Приложение 2. Примеры медиатекстов The big bear History has to be rewritten after the market’s recent falls AT THE end of 1964 the Dow Jones Industrial Average traded at 874.1. Seventeen years later, despite rapid inflation, the average had inched forward only to 875. It was the kind of grinding bear market that drove investors to despair. Near its end, Business Week famously proclaimed “The Death of Equities”.It is beginning to look as if we are in the middle of another of those great phases, what commentators call a secular, as opposed to a cyclical, bear market. Broadly speaking, the 20th century can be divided into six phases; bear markets from 1901-21, 1929-49 and 1965-82 and bull runs from 1921-29, 1949-65 and 1982-2000.
Those unlucky enough to live through the bear markets saw their savings turn to dust. Equities were shunned in favour of alternatives such as government bonds (in the first half of the century) and property and commodities (in the inflationary second half). In the bull markets, investors made their fortunes, generally driving shares up to excessive valuations.
When the dotcom bubble burst in 2000, share valuations were at ridiculously high levels. In his book, “Irrational Exuberance”, Robert Shiller calculated the cyclically adjusted price/earnings ratio over history. This measure, which takes an average of profits over the previous ten years and adjusts for inflation, is superior to the traditional p/e ratio because profits are highly volatile. In January 2000 the cyclically adjusted p/e on the S&P 500 was 44.3; the previous peak, just before the crash of 1929, was 32.6.
That suggested markets had a long way to fall. And share prices did indeed suffer a long period of decline. In Britain, for example, the FTSE 100 index more than halved between December 1999 and March 2003. At that point, however, the effect of lower interest rates, booming corporate profits and more attractive valuations kicked in. Equities began a four-year bull run that saw the MSCI world index more than double between March 2003 and June of last year.
During that time, it would have seemed ridiculous to ask whether investors were in the middle of a long bear market. But with global equities falling by 41% this year (including the spectacular gyrations of this week), the question is now much more pertinent. The Dow was trading below 9,000 on October 15th, a level it first passed in 1997. In other words, investors who bought stocks more than a decade ago have no capital gains to show for it, only dividends (and yields have been low throughout).
Why does this matter? The existence of a bear market does not preclude the possibility of fantastic returns over shorter periods. Indeed, one striking point about the Dow's 936-point gain on October 13th was that it climbed more in that one day than it did in the first 85 years of its existence (it was founded in 1896). Two of the very best years in American stockmarket history were 1933 and 1935, right in the middle of the Depression.
But bear markets behave rather like Lucy in the Peanuts cartoon strip. Just when Charlie Brown is persuaded to attempt to kick the football, she snatches it away. Just when investors are persuaded the bottom of a bear market has been reached, share prices slump once more. The Dow closed above 1,000 in 1972, only to fall to 616 by the end of 1974. A rally in 1975 took the average to 852, but it then gained only a net 23 points over the next six years.
Equity markets have again reached a stage where valuations look attractive in historic terms. In America, continental Europe and Britain the dividend yield is higher than short-term interest rates, a rare occurrence in the past half-century. A net 43% of fund managers interviewed by Merrill Lynch for a survey published on October 15th thought that equities were undervalued. That was the highest level in a decade.
However, those managers were not snapping up bargains. A net 49% of them had a higher-thannormal weighting in cash, a record figure. That kind of paralysis is typical of a prolonged bear market.
Even if managers feel that a complete economic catastrophe has been avoided by the bank bailouts, they are worried about the prospects for recession, and the potential effect on company profits.
(Pepsi, a core consumer-goods group, gave a disappointing outlook on October 14th.) They might be proved right in five years' time by buying now, but they fear being proved wrong (and losing their jobs) before Christmas.
Snapping investors out of their bear-market mentality takes a lot of work. The shortest of the 20th-century phases was 17 years. With luck, time will move faster in the 21st century.
Margin for error Banking profits have already suffered. Now it is the rest of the market’s turn THE global economy is slowing and many countries are either already in recession or about to enter it. Investors are well aware that the downturn will clobber corporate profits. But how great will the impact be and how much is already reflected in share prices?
The issue is all the more pressing because profits have been so strong in recent years. After falling sharply in 2000-02, earnings rebounded very rapidly between 2003 and 2006. Indeed, as a percentage of GDP, American profits reached their highest level in a generation. A lot of money now rides on whether that improvement was ephemeral.
American firms are now reporting on the July-to-September period and it looks likely to be the fifth quarter in a row that earnings will decline. Two leading technology companies, Texas Instruments and Sun Microsystems, were among the latest to disappoint this week.
Profits tend to fall very rapidly in recessions. This is because of the “operational gearing” of businesses. Most companies have high fixed costs; once those costs are covered, profits can surge. When economies contract, revenues fall and firms are usually slow to cut their fixed costs (by closing factories or laying off workers) so the effect on profits is savage.
Even now, however, with a downturn under way, industry analysts have been reluctant to cut their forecasts for the earnings of the companies they cover. Exclude financial services and Brian Belski of Merrill Lynch notes that consensus forecasts suggest American companies will still record 9.3% annual profits growth in the third quarter. More remarkably, profits are expected to rise a further 11.8% in 2009.
That seems most unlikely. Indeed, the downturn could be unusually sharp. First, the slowdown seems to have spread across the developed economies and has affected emerging markets as well.
Companies that were relying on export growth to compensate for sluggish home markets are now starting to suffer. Second, the credit crisis will impose further strains, increasing financing costs as companies roll over their debts. Third, the recent fall in commodity prices will hit energy companies, some of the biggest contributors to profits growth this year.
Those strategists who take a “top-down” view of the outlook are accordingly more pessimistic than some of their analyst colleagues. Ian Harnett of Absolute Strategy Research, a consultancy, says European non-financial companies are likely to suffer a 30% drop in margins, given the economic outlook; this could translate into a 50% decline in profits over the cycle. Morgan Stanley strategists are predicting a further 10% decline in American corporate profits next year.
How much of this is priced into markets? The answer varies a lot from country to country. James Montier of Socit Gnrale reckons that, notwithstanding bullish industry analysts, Wall Street as a whole is anticipating a 20% slump in profits next year. Karen Olney of Merrill Lynch says European shares are trading on a 38% discount to normal valuations whereas the average profits fall during the past four recessions has been 34%. Morgan Stanley calculates that emerging markets are discounting a 50% decline in earnings per share. While that sounds hugely pessimistic, the decline in 1997-98 was actually worse, with profits falling 67%.
Investors care not just about the size of the decline, but the speed and scope of any subsequent rebound. Their peace of mind probably depends on what drove the profits growth of 2003-06. At the time it was argued that globalisation had boosted capital relative to labour, by allowing companies to outsource functions to developing countries.
The scale of the stockmarket decline suggests investors are no longer convinced of that reasoning. Peter Oppenheimer, a strategist at Goldman Sachs, argues that “the markets are assuming that all of the structural benefits of globalisation have been whittled away and will not be repeated.” Perhaps company profits were boosted by temporarily low borrowing costs or by dodgy accounting (as in the late 1990s). If so, then a recession may reveal more Enrons and WorldComs—to name just two of the companies that collapsed in the aftermath of the dotcom bubble earlier this decade.
Philip Isherwood, a strategist at Dresdner Kleinwort, reckons that almost a third of European companies have balance-sheets that put them at risk of financial distress.
In short, although investors may be braced for bad news at the aggregate level, there is a lot of scope for individual companies to shock. As the saying goes, “Recessions uncover what auditors do not.” An appetising spread The corporate-bond market is discounting very bad news SHERLOCK HOLMES might have called it “the curious case of the corporate-bond market”.
Most commentators agree that bonds issued by companies offer spreads over treasuries that more than compensate for the risk that the issuer might default. But few investors are tempted to buy.
The reason has more to do with the problems of investors than the deteriorating finances of issuers. About 20 years ago, the main buyers of corporate debt were pension funds and insurance companies. They would buy the bonds of creditworthy, investment-grade companies and then hold them till maturity. It made for a reliable-but-dull asset class.
The use of leverage, or borrowed money, changed that. All that hedge funds, and other speculative investors, needed to do was to buy bonds on yields greater than their cost of finance. The difference, or carry, would be the main source of return; if the bonds rose in price as well, so much the better.
Indeed, by early 2007 corporate-bond spreads were ridiculously low, offering a return that failed to compensate investors for the likely level of defaults. Borrowers rode roughshod over investors. In that year, TDC, a Danish telecoms group, was able to cut the interest rate it had agreed to pay lenders only a year earlier; “covenant-lite” loans, which imposed few restrictions on borrowers, were all the rage.
The market has now swung to the other extreme. According to Moody's, a rating agency, investment-grade firms are now paying double the spread over government bonds that speculative, or junk, issuers were paying back in June 2007.
Junk issuers are now paying around 15 percentage points more than treasuries, compared with just two-and-a-half points in June last year. Investment-grade firms are now paying a spread of more than five percentage points, compared with less than one point in February 2007.
That might seem unsurprising, given the deteriorating economic outlook and the defaults we have already seen in the financial sector. But John Lonski, an economist at Moody's, reckons that spreads are signalling the expectation of default levels not seen since the Depression. And Stephen Dulake of JPMorgan calculates that spreads are more than wide enough to compensate for the impact of a 2.5% fall in the American economy next year.
To give an idea of the scale, the default rate in 1933 was 15.4%; in the early 1990s recession, it reached 12%. These are still far in the distance. Over the year to the end of October, only 2.9% of American junk bonds had defaulted, according to Standard & Poor's (S&P), a rating agency. It expects the rate will rise to 7.6% by September 2009 (or 9.6% if the economy tumbles).
So why are investors not buying? The total return of investors is dependent not just on the default rate, but on the recovery rate when companies collapse; in other words, how much investors get paid back. The standard assumption is that the recovery rate will be 40%, but with Lehman Brothers and Iceland's banks it looks as if some investors will get back less than ten cents on the dollar. High spreads could reflect fears of low recovery rates.
A second cause may be potential indigestion. In Europe S&P reckons that some $2.1 trillion of corporate debt will mature between the last quarter of 2008 and the end of 2011. With governments also likely to tap the debt markets heavily, investors may be worried about the prospect of their portfolios being weighed down by fixed-income assets.
But the biggest question-mark is over those leveraged investors. Some hedge funds have been forced to sell bonds to raise cash so they can repay investors who are unhappy with their returns this year.
Others have been forced to cut back because of restrictions imposed by their prime brokers, their main source of finance. And even those that are able to borrow money are finding it more expensive; Barclays Capital reckons that funding costs have risen by more than a percentage point since last year.
For such investors, corporate bonds may not be all that cheap once all the costs have been taken into account. In addition, there is always the risk that bond prices could fall (and spreads could widen) further in the short-term.
However, that still creates an opportunity for old-fashioned investors who do not rely on borrowed money and who can buy on the basis of a five-year time horizon. One such investor is Kathleen Gaffney, a portfolio manager at Loomis Sayles, a fund-management group. “We have moved beyond fear of financial Armageddon to thinking about the steps to recovery,” she says. But for the moment Ms Gaffney is the exception, not the rule.
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