世界500强CEO访谈 第33期:花旗集团潘迪特 面临着信用危机(3)

　　Vikram Pandit: Gives them a place for their-it takes deposits and put them to work. That’s what a bank does.

　　潘迪特：银行吸收人们的储蓄并且使它们发挥一定的作用。那就是银行的工作。

　　Reporter: Tell me what happened. How did you get to this place where you had so many obligations? There was a very tough piece by Eric Dash in The New York Times over the weekend, an exhaustive look at Citibank, and it basically painted the picture of a bank where risk management was not handled very well at all.

　　记者：告诉我都发生了些什么，您是怎样做到如今负有重任的这样一个高位的？根据埃里克.戴史周末时在《纽约时报》中所说的，花旗集团现在处于非常困难的时期，从审视的角度来看，其风险管理并没有得到很好的处理。

　　Vikram Pandit: Charlie, go back again to what a bank does. A bank takes deposits and puts deposits to work, by lending money, et cetera. We learned historically that if you take deposits in Houston and put them in Houston real estate, it didn’t work 20 years ago. So, a good bank takes deposits from a diversified 1 set of places and puts that money to work in a diversified set of risks. What went wrong? What went wrong is we had tremendous concentration, in the sense we put a lot of our money to work against US real estate. So, how we got here is we got here by lending money and putting money to work in the US real estate market.

　　潘迪特：查理，让我们再讨论一下银行的职能所在。银行吸收存款，银行借钱给人们使存款发挥其作用等等。从历史来看我们知道，如果你在休斯顿接受存款，并将存款用于休斯顿的房地产行业中，20年之前那并不会发挥什么作用。那么，一个好的银行能够从各种各样的地方种吸收存款，并能够将存款投资于各式各样的风险中。哪里出问题了呢？出问题的地方在于我们有很多关注的焦点，那也就意味着我们将太多存款投资于美国房地产以外的事业。所以我们之所以能够做到今天这一步，是因为我们借钱给人们，并且把资金应用于美国的房地产事业之中。

　　Reporter: There’s no question about that, is there?

　　记者：那并没有什么问题，是吗？

　　Vikram Pandit: Well...

　　潘迪特：嗯……

　　Reporter: You said “probably”.

　　记者：您说的是“可能”。

　　Vikram Pandit: Results would show that’s kind of where we are.

　　潘迪特：最终的结果将会告诉我们到底是怎样的。

　　Reporter: And that the role of risk management, which Warren Buffett said to me is the role of the CEO - that’s the man who has to be in charge of risk management. He’s right. And risk management at Citi seemed to have gotten out of control. Will you accept that?

　　记者：沃伦.巴菲特曾对我说，风险管理所扮演的角色就是首席执行官扮演的角色，首席执行官也就是要进行风险管理的人。他是正确的。花旗集团的风险管理似乎已经不在掌控之内，您接受这个说法吗？

　　Vikram Pandit: I do consider... I do consider the role of the CEO as that of a risk manager. I’ll take that. And that is my role. I’m very clear about that.

　　潘迪特：我的确考虑过……我的确考虑过首席执行官的任务就是要进行风险管理，我也会接受，我很清楚那就是我的任务。

　　Reporter: You seem to be saying that it was—we shouldn’t—no one should have expected a better performance, because no one could have imagined the housing collapse 2 that we saw in this country, correct? Is that what you are saying? Because it says that no one was to blame.

　　记者：您的意思是，人们不应该总是期待有更好的表现，因为没有人曾料想过我们今天所看到的房产业崩溃的现象，是吗？您的意思是这个吗？我们不应该将其归罪于任何人。

　　Vikram Pandit: What I’m saying is that when you look at the housing market, when you look at what has happened to housing prices over time, they’ve steadily 3 gone up. And customers, consumers, the average person in the US has looked at their house as their bank. It’s where you collect equity 4, where you have your savings 5. And they started using them. And so yes, I think Wall Street, financial institutions went a little bit further, went to a point where they started encouraging people to use those savings. They went a little bit further in the sense of saying, OK, housing prices have really not dropped that much over the years; encourage them to buy more houses. Now, we’re not the first country that has gotten into this bubble. There’s a lot of different places that have gone into that.

　　潘迪特：我是说，当你看一下房地产市场的时候，看一下房地产价格的变化，你会发现房产价格一直在持续稳定上升。而我们的顾客们，消费者，普通的美国公民，开始将房产视为他们的银行。那里才是他们收集普通股的地方，那里才是他们放置储蓄的地方。然后 他们开始使用自己的房产。所以我想，华尔街的金融机构做得确实有一些过分，他们已经开始鼓励人们去利用那些储蓄。他们说房地产的价格一直居高不下，他们鼓励人们去买更多的房子，这就有点儿过分了。现在，我们不是第一个掉进这种泡沫中的国家，有很多的国家也曾经经历过。

　　Reporter: Let me just come back to this question, though. I mean, Citibank had become much larger than the functions that you had talked about. Trading was a central part of this. And you look around, and all these functions were under this one institution.

　　记者：让我们还是回到这个问题上来，我的意思是说，花旗现在的职能已经不仅仅局限于你说的那些了。贸易就是其中心部分，当你去进行调查的时候，你会发现所有的职能都是在这个机构负责的范围之内的。

　　Vikram Pandit: Yes, absolutely.

　　潘迪特：是的，绝对是这样的。