Paraphrasing (Briefing)
Main idea of the paragraph of the passage：
The passage tells a story of the new breed of CEOs, who viewed acquisitions as the basis for maintaining heady growth rates and now face a situation where the growth slows down, the regulations is tightened after Enron, and Wall Street turns a cold eye to them, while they have a hard time and have to pay huge debts related to their acquisitions that happened in the 1990s of the acquisition sprees.
这篇课文讲的是新一代的首席执行官，他们把购并交易视为维持公司迅猛扩张的基础，目前他们面临这样一种局面：经济增长的放慢，“安然事件”之后管理的增强，以及华尔街的冷落，同时，他们的前途艰难，不得不支付在上世纪购并热潮中为购并而举借的巨额债务。
Structure of the passage：
The passage can be divided into four parts, the first three paragraphs being the first part, paragraph 4 to paragraph 8 being the second part, paragraph 9 to paragraph 13 the third part, and paragraph 14 the last part.
The first part serves as the introduction – the go-go acquisitive companies like WorldCom were the heroes of the 1990s; however, with growth slowing down, earnings and cash flow becoming smaller, and accounting practices coming under close scrutiny after Enron, those companies have fallen out of favor with investors and are beginning to have a hard time, facing falling stock prices and big debts to service.
The second part tells the reader – the fallout from Enron is having a chilling effect on the urge to merge, and falling share prices reflect investors’ heightened fears that earnings growth at many of the biggest acquirers may not have been as strong. Against this background, many experts believe that if the 1990s was about using mergers to fuel growth, the coming decade will mark a return to a more old-fashioned notion of growth and companies will shed many of their unprofitable acquisitions and focus on generating growth from the businesses they know best.
The third part presents a grim picture of the future for the go-go acquisitive companies: some, at best, will face slow growth like Commerce One Inc., which admitted that the days of acquiring growth on the cheap are over, and some, at worst, will see the need to strip away at their empires to service their debt loads such as George-Pacific and Conseco, who have to spin off some assets to remain in compliance with their lending covenants.
The fourth and last part predicts that as the corporate heroes of the deal-crazed 1990s fade away, they will take with them their now-repudiated business model and there will be no more deals for deals’ sake, at least not for some time to come.
