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Les places boursières mondiales dans la tourmente

PARIS (AFP) - Les principales places boursières en Europe et aux Etats-Unis étaient en nette baisse jeudi après-midi, notamment en raison de l'annonce de la faillite d'un fonds d'investissement américain, sur fond de records du prix du pétrole, de l'or, et de chute vertigineuse du dollar.
En milieu d'après-midi, le Dow Jones (actualité) perdait 1,71% et le Nasdaq (NASDAQ: actualité) 1,52%, la Bourse de New York ne résistant pas à de nouveaux signes d'une consommation américaine en berne et d'une inflation accrue.


Les indices de consommation sont observés à la loupe, car celle-ci compte pour les deux-tiers de la croissance américaine. Or les ventes de détail ont accusé un recul inattendu de 0,6% en février.

En Europe, le CAC 40 (Paris: actualité) parisien chutait de 3,05% vers 14H00 GMT, Londres cédait 2,20%, Francfort 2,78% et l'Eurostoxx 50 (Zurich: actualité) 2,88%.

L'inquiétude a gagné toutes les places financières du monde après l'annonce du fonds Carlyle Capital Corporation (CCC), coté à Amsterdam, de son incapacité à trouver un accord avec ses créanciers, ce qui devrait aboutir à sa liquidation.

"C'est un nouveau symptôme d'une crise financière qui dure, et où certains s'enlisent", a commenté un vendeur d'actions à Paris, interrogé par l'AFP.

"Quand vous avez de très grands professionnels qui sont touchés alors qu'ils avaient accumulé les succès depuis quelques années, cela fait peur. Bear Sterns est apparemment en difficulté aussi. Je suis très circonspect sur la suite des événements", a ajouté cet analyste.

Les Bourses asiatiques ont clôturé en nette baisse, dans un climat alourdi par la baisse inexorable du dollar et le pétrole qui ne cesse de battre des records, franchissant pour la première fois le seuil de 110 dollars le baril.

Autre record : l'euro est monté jusqu'à 1,5602 dollar pour la première fois depuis sa création en 1999, les investisseurs craignant une baisse des taux d'intérêt aux Etats-Unis, sur fond de crise financière et de craintes de récession.

Et à Londres, l'once d'or a atteint pour la première fois le seuil psychologique de 1.000 dollars l'once.

L'ascension de l'euro ne semble pas inquiéter le président de la Banque centrale européenne, Jean-Claude Trichet, volant au secours de la monnaie unique: "L'euro nous protège de certaines turbulences" financières et "a joué le rôle d'un bouclier efficace" depuis son adoption, notamment contre la flambée pétrolière, a-t-il déclaré dans un entretien à l'hebdomadaire français Le Point paru jeudi.

Aux Etats-Unis, le secrétaire américain au Trésor, Henry Paulson, a présenté une vaste réforme de la réglementation du secteur financier aux Etats-Unis, "pour éviter que les erreurs du passé ne se reproduisent" et ne provoquent une nouvelle crise.

En Asie, toutes les places boursières ont subi le même sort à la clôture : Shanghai a abandonné 2,43% et glissé sous les 4.000 points, le Straits Times (actualité) de Singapour a cédé 3,85%, l'indice de la Bourse de Jakarta 4,5%, celui de Kuala Lumpur 2,5%, et le BSE Sensex de Bombay a plongé de 4,78%.

L'indice Hang Seng (actualité) de Hong Kong a chuté 4,79% et le Nikkei (actualité) de Tokyo a cédé 3,33%, victime notamment de l'envolée du yen: la devise japonaise a atteint son plus haut niveau en plus de 12 ans face au billet vert, ce qui pénalise lourdement les exportateurs japonais.

Pour la première fois depuis octobre 1995, le dollar est tombé sous la barre des 100 yens, victime des craintes de récession et des perspectives de baisses des taux d'intérêt aux Etats-Unis.

"Les ventes ont touché les banques, les sociétés immobilières et les compagnies exportatrices. Personne ne veut acheter", a commenté Kazuhiro Takahashi, chef du service actions chez Daiwa Securities SMBC, selon qui la dégringolade du dollar effraie les investisseurs.

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Cornell Dubilier, a manufacturer of electronic parts and components, operated the plant from 1936 to 1962. Part of the site is now an industrial park; Cornell’s buildings were torn down. An E.P.A. report said the company dumped PCB-contaminated material and other hazardous substances into the soil; Mr. Spiegel said the site has the highest concentration of PCBs in the state.

Mr. McCabe said that contaminated groundwater at the Cornell Dubilier site was so extensive and difficult to deal with that a total cleanup could take “any number of years.” He said the agency’s invoking of the year 2034 “could be taken both ways” by the public — that the agency was being honest, “or we’re never going to be out of there.”

But he said that “anybody who knows that site knows the reality; I’ll opt for the openness.”

Superfund reality, as defined politically or economically, is often long-range. In Congress now, according to Senate staff members, there is some inclination to try to revive the kind of tax against industries that financed the Superfund for 15 years. Legislation may be introduced this year, but whether it would pass with the narrow Democratic majority and the Bush administration in power is uncertain, the staff members said.

Former Gov. James Florio of New Jersey, a Democrat who as a congressman played a role in starting the Superfund more than a quarter century ago, noted that its “key principle was that polluters pay.” He said that he thought that the tax would get through after this year if the Democrats win in November.

At the moment, the tax issue, last pursued by Congress in 2003, although without success, seems to be back on the table. Katherine N. Probst, a principal author of a report to Congress, “Superfund’s Future: What Will It Cost?,” said her report received only limited attention after she completed it in 2001. But recently she has received an increasing number of inquiries from Congressional staff members about the possibility of reviving the tax.

“They’re using the book more now,” she said.

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Some of the substances found at Superfund sites are considered carcinogenic, and children are especially susceptible to many of the pollutants, say experts like Dr. Philip J. Landrigan, chairman of community and preventive medicine and a pediatrics professor at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City.
Superfund sites are designated by the E.P.A. under a hazard-ranking system and thus become eligible for cleanups. When and how those cleanups are made and who pays for them are sources of contention among the E.P.A., environmental groups and owners or former owners of the contaminated sites.

After the Superfund tax against businesses generating pollution expired in 1995, the $3.8 billion then in the fund for cleanups was gone by 2003; money for cleanups also came from companies determined to have polluted the sites. The E.P.A. has scrambled for Congressional financing for Superfund cleanups ever since. Since the cleanup fund ran out, the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit research organization based in Washington, said in a report, Superfund has relied on an annual appropriation of $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion in tax dollars and the increasing amount of money the E.P.A. recovered from companies it had linked to polluted sites.

At the old Roosevelt Field on Long Island, the E.P.A. says groundwater was polluted and two Garden City supply wells were tainted by chemicals used at the airfield’s maintenance shop. The agency recently estimated that cleanup of the groundwater would cost $13.2 million and take at least 10 years.

In Connecticut, the National Priorities List sites include the 30-acre former Scovill industrial landfill in Waterbury. The site was used by the Scovill Manufacturing Company for the disposal of ash, cinder and other wastes from 1919 to the mid-1970s. According to the E.P.A., soil samples showed elevated levels of a variety of toxic substances — organic chemicals; PCBs; and metals like cadmium, nickel, silver and zinc.

At the Horseshoe Road site in New Jersey, a sign posted by the E.P.A. on a locked gate said: “Warning: hazardous material present in soil and marsh area. Avoid contact.”

Mr. Spiegel and his organization conceded that the E.P.A. had carried out its cleanup mission successfully at some Superfund sites. One that he termed “a model for a total cleanup” was on his itinerary earlier that morning — the former Chemical Insecticide Corporation plant in Edison Township.

The company operated a plant on the site for 16 years beginning in 1954, processing pesticides. The E.P.A.’s enormous cleanup included the excavation of 207,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil, at a cost of $66 million, and 13,500 cubic yards of contaminated sediments, at a cost of $2.2 million.

But not all cleanups progress the same way. Mr. Amper of the Long Island Pine Barrens Society said that different cleanups require different approaches, a viewpoint he said environmentalists took a while to accept. “A cleanup approach to a site that will be recycled for, say, a factory is different than if you’re anticipating a day care center,” he said.

Still, environmentalists are concerned about the efforts at some cleanups. Mr. Spiegel said that there were insufficient signs in the woods around the Horseshoe Road site and that the gates, even when locked, could be easily circumvented, especially by children or hunters.

William J. McCabe, who retired earlier this month as the deputy director of the emergency and regional response division of Superfund’s Region 2, acknowledged in a telephone interview that maintaining adequate security at the Horseshoe Road site and others was a recurring problem.

“We keep doing stuff,” he said — like repairing broken fences — “but if people really want to get on a site, they probably will find a way.” He said it came down to “how much can we do” to prevent trespassing?

Mr. Spiegel contended that the E.P.A. sometimes misled the public about safety and other factors at Superfund sites, which the agency denies, saying that communities in close proximity to sites are kept fully informed. Mr. Spiegel specifically chided the agency for the lengthy time frame it listed in a recent report on cleaning up another nearby site he visited that morning — the former location of a Cornell Dubilier Electronics plant in South Plainfield. The E.P.A., which began work on the site in 1997, said the cleanup would not be completed until 2034.

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“It’s the politics that interferes sometimes,” she said, adding that there needs to be a point where officials conclude about a given site, “Let’s clean it up.”

Alan J. Steinberg, the E.P.A. administrator for Superfund’s Region 2, which includes New Jersey, New York, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, defended the Superfund, calling it “one of the most effective programs in federal government,” and said politics did not play a role in E.P.A. decisions.

“Our motto is ‘the polluter pays,’ ” he said, adding that 75 percent of polluters currently singled out by the agency have paid for cleanups and that $1 billion in fees were recovered from polluters last year.

The E.P.A. does not estimate the number of hazardous waste sites over all in the country or, generally, in individual states, because there is federal and state and multiagency involvement, and Superfund projects are at too many different stages for quantification, a spokeswoman said.

In Middlesex County, on the 12-acre Horseshoe Road site, there are buried toxins that leak into the nearby Raritan River, a home to commercial crabbing; patches of underbrush with possibly contaminated debris; and toxic sludge.

Mr. Spiegel made two discoveries on his exploratory trek, accompanied by the wetlands association’s director of operations, David Wheeler, and a reporter and photographer. He stumbled upon a strikingly purple puddle of water marked by a faint deer track, and a tiny green frog that struggled for life on an old railway tie. Mr. Spiegel picked the frog up and examined it, then dropped it in a nearby pond.

Both the colorful puddle and the floundering frog may have been contaminated by chemicals, whose odor was detectable at the edge of the Raritan, a river once ranked as the 16th-most polluted in the nation. In 1989 the Environmental Protection Agency conducted its first soil analysis on the site, which has four separate areas, including a drum dump and a pesticide dump. E.P.A. investigators found volatile organic compounds, or VOCs; heavy metals; pesticides; and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs.

At Some Superfund Sites, Toxic Legacies Linger

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/20Rsuperfund.html?_r=3&pagewanted=1&ref=nyregionspecial2&oref=slogin


EXPOSURE The former location of a Cornell Dubilier Electronics plant in South Plainfield, N.J., where the E.P.A. began cleanup in 1997 but says the work will not be completed until 2034.



THERE was nothing unspoiled about the woods that Robert Spiegel trudged through recently on a single-minded quest for wrongs against nature.

The woods off Horseshoe Road here in Middlesex County are still tainted by human intrusions from decades ago. They are the target of a Superfund project — a lengthy federal cleanup of a former chemical-processing plant that Mr. Spiegel, executive director of the Edison Wetlands Association, said was inadequately financed and too prolonged.

Like many Superfund sites in New Jersey and elsewhere in the New York City area, it has an intriguing history that is hard to trace — mobsters reportedly owned one business here before abandoning it abruptly years ago. In 1981 a brush fire exposed 70 drums containing silver cyanide and other dangerous chemicals.

This 12-acre site is among the 114 hazardous waste sites in New Jersey on the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Priorities List, which includes about 1,200 sites nationwide that the agency has determined present a “significant risk to human health or the environment.”

On Long Island, 26 hazardous waste sites are on the National Priorities List; 15 in Nassau County and 11 in Suffolk, including the former Roosevelt Field in Garden City, where Charles Lindbergh took off for his historic trans-Atlantic flight in 1927. In Connecticut, 14 sites are on the list, including 3 each in New Haven and Windham Counties and 2 each in Fairfield and Hartford Counties.

The federal Superfund program to clean up the most dangerous hazardous waste sites began in 1980 after 22,000 tons of toxic waste were discovered dumped in the Love Canal neighborhood of Niagara Falls, N.Y. Billions of dollars have been spent since then completing the cleanup of more than 1,000 sites nationwide, but money for the program has been harder to come by since a Superfund tax levied against industries generating pollution, which helped pay for cleanups, expired in 1995.

“Government and private industry have been historically indifferent to environmental consequences, and this generation is paying for it,” said Richard Amper, the executive director of the Long Island Pine Barrens Society, an environmental group. “And this generation needs to clean it up.”

But the Environmental Protection Agency’s task is not easy, even though it has hard-working, well-trained staff members, said Ella Filippone, a longtime environmentalist who is executive director of the Passaic River Coalition in New Jersey. Business owners and politicians sometimes raise objections to cleanups that the agency is obligated to examine even though that is time-consuming, she said.