Trust and Individual Fair Dealing - 英语演讲
Address by Alan Greenspan
at University of Pennsylvania
Dean Harker, members of the faculty,
Wharton alumni, friends and families and,
especially, members of the 2005 graduating class.
I have more in common with you graduates
than people might think.
After all, before long, after my term
at the Federal Reserve comes to an end,
I too will be looking for a job.
I am delighted to join in celebrating
your achievements and promise.
You are being bequeathed the tools
for creating a material existence
that neither my generation nor any
that preceded it could have even
remotely imagined as we began our life's work.
What you must fashion for yourselves
are those values that will enable you
to contribute and thrive in a world
that is becoming increasingly competitive and frenetic.
The creative abilities of this graduating class
and those of your contemporaries will determine
the magnitude and extent of American prosperity
in this century. And the ideas and values
that you employ in these creative endeavors
will shape the future state of our cultural,
legal, and economic institutions.
You will doubtless foster advances in science,
engineering, and business management.
But scientific proficiency will not be enough.
Technology is a tool that, unless guided
by a set of ethical principles, is of qualified value.
The principles governing business behavior
are an essential support to voluntary exchange,
the defining characteristic of free markets.
Voluntary exchange, in turn,
implies trust in the word of those with
whom we do business. To be sure,
all market economies require a rule of law to function -
laws of contracts, rights to property,
and a general protection of citizens
from arbitrary actions of the state.
Yet, if even a small fraction of legally
binding transactions required adjudication,
our court systems would be swamped into immobility,
and a rule of law would be unenforceable.
Of necessity, therefore, in virtually
all our transactions, whether with customers or with colleagues,
with friends or with strangers,
we rely on the word of those
with whom we do business.
If we could not do so, goods
and services could not be exchanged efficiently.
Trillions of dollars of assets are priced
and traded daily in our financial markets.
Before recent technologies enabled transactions
to clear and settle virtually in real time,
most of the vast volumes of trades
were not legally binding for days.
Their validity rested on trust.
Even today, much of business is transacted
on parties' undocumented verbal agreements.
We take this for granted and rarely pause
to ponder how unusual this practice is.
Moreover, even when followed to the letter,
laws guide only a few of the day-to-day
decisions required of business and financial managers.
The rest are governed by whatever personal code
of values market participants bring to the table.
Trust as the necessary condition for commerce
was particularly evident in freewheeling nineteenth century America,
where reputation became a valued asset.
Throughout much of that century,
laissez-faire reigned in the United States as elsewhere,
and caveat emptor was the prevailing prescription
for guarding against wide-open trading practices.
In such an environment, a reputation for honest dealing,
which many feared was in short supply,
was particularly valued.
Even those inclined to be less than scrupulous
in their personal dealings had to adhere to
a more ethical standard in their market transactions,
or they risked being driven out of business.
To be sure, the history of world business,
then and now, is strewn with Fisks, Goulds,
Ponzis and numerous others treading on,
or over, the edge of legality.
But, despite their prominence,
they were a distinct minority.
If the situation had been otherwise,
late nineteenth and early twentieth century America
would never have realized so high a standard of living.
Indeed, we could not have achieved our current level
of national productivity if ethical behavior
had not been the norm or
if corporate governance had been deeply flawed.
Over the past half-century,
societies have chosen to embrace the protections
of myriad government financial regulations
and implied certifications of integrity
as a supplement to, if not a substitute for,
business reputation.
Most observers believe that the world
is better off as a consequence of these governmental protections.
Accordingly, the market value of trust,
so prominent in the 1800s,
seemed by the 1990s to have become less necessary.
But recent corporate scandals in the United States
and elsewhere have clearly shown
that the plethora of laws and regulations
of the past century have not eliminated
the less-savory side of human behavior.
We should not be surprised then to see
a re-emergence of the value placed by markets
on trust and personal reputation in business practice.
After the revelations of recent corporate malfeasance,
the market punished the stock
and bond prices of those corporations
whose behaviors had cast doubt on the reliability
of their reputations.
There may be no better antidote for business
and financial transgression.
But in the wake of the scandals,
the Congress clearly signaled that more was needed.
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 appropriately places
the explicit responsibility for certification
of the soundness of accounting and disclosure procedures
on the chief executive officer,
who holds most of the decision making power
in the modern corporation.
Merely certifying that generally
accepted accounting principles
were being followed is no longer enough.
Even full adherence to those principles,
given some of the imaginative accounting of recent years,
has proved inadequate.
I am surprised that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act,
so rapidly developed and enacted,
has functioned as well as it has.
It will doubtless be fine-tuned
as experience with the act's details points the way.
But the act importantly reinforced the principle
that shareholders own our corporations
and that corporate managers should be
working on behalf of shareholders to
allocate business resources to their optimum use.
But as our economy has grown,
and our business units have become ever larger,
de facto shareholder control has diminished.
Ownership has become more dispersed
and few shareholders have sufficient stakes
to individually influence the choice of boards
of directors or chief executive officers.
The vast majority of corporate share ownership is,
of course, for investment,
not to achieve operating control of a company.
Thus, it has increasingly fallen to corporate officers,
especially the chief executive officer,
to guide the business, one hopes by
what is perceived to be in the best interest of shareholders.
To be sure, senior officers in today's corporations
no longer have the dominance
that they were able to achieve prior to
the revolution in information technology.
A decade ago, senior officers of a corporation
could tightly control, if they chose,
access to key information systems.
Those senior officers could have far
greater knowledge of the workings of their business
than others and, as a consequence,
were less subject to challenge
when making day-by-day tactical and strategic decisions.
Arguably, with information systems now accessible
to broader ranges of managers and other employees,
the monopoly power that proprietary information
affords has been significantly reduced.
Moreover, the availability of vital information
now often extends beyond the borders of the company
to suppliers and customers as well.
A generation ago, for example,
a purchasing manager rarely divulged to
a supplier the state of the company's inventory position.
It was presumed that such information
in the hands of suppliers would undermine
the bargaining position of the purchasing manager.
Today such information is broadly
and routinely shared to facilitate
just-in-time supply systems.
In general, technologies may be in the process
of facilitating a much broader access to information,
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