注：英文原文的版权均归其各自的著作权人所有；转载请注明出处，请勿用作商业用途。作者: 二师兄 时间: 2003-6-8 11:40:21 标题: No1. No Rest , from The Economist March 1st 2003, p67
No Rest
未到休息时
Legal torment continues for leading investment firms
对顶尖投资银行的法律煎熬还在继续
These are quiet times on Wall Street—except for lawyers at top investment banks. Even cases that seemed closed refuse to lie down. Three categories of litigation, concerning equity research, Enron and the allocation of initial public offerings (IPOs) during the boom, have had lawyers working all hours.
华尔街现在正处于宁静时期－除了那些顶尖投行的律师们。即使是那些看起来已经了结的案子也不能让人安心。有三个领域的诉讼让律师们穷于应付，它们是：股权研究，安然事件和经济繁荣时期进行的首次公开发行（IPOs）的（股票）分配。
Consider first the charge that Wall Street analysts puffed shares that their investment-banking colleagues were trying to flog. In December, Eliot Spitzer, New York, state’s attorney-general, proudly announced a settlement, worth $1.4 billion, with Wall Street firms. Yet many issues were left unresolved—such as the exact crimes to which the firm would confess. Negotiations have been continuing ever since. The point, for the investment banks, is to limit their exposure to civil suits.
我们先来看看第一项指控：那些华尔街分析员过分鼓吹了其在投行的那些同僚所极力推销的股票。在12月份，纽约州首席检察官Eliot Spitzer骄傲的宣布了一项对华尔街公司价值14以美元的（处罚）决定。但是还有很多事项悬而未决－例如这些公司要承认的确切的罪名。谈判一直还在进行。对于这些投资银行来说，关键是要将他们的曝光限制在民事诉讼范围内。
The latest leaks from the investigation say that Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse First Boston and Citigroup will be found guilty of fraud. If so, it will place a huge burden on their defense in civil case. The investment banks are also attempting to stop Mr. Spitzer publishing all the internal documents he has subpoenaed. These were to have been released in early January, so the banks may have some hope. Mr. Spitzer has offered no reason for the delay. Eager plaintiff attorneys are no doubt pressing for a fast resolution.
调查中最新透漏出来的消息说，美林、瑞信一波和花旗集团将被发现犯有欺诈罪。如果确实如此，这将会给他们在民事诉讼中的辩护带来巨大压力。这些投资银行同时也试图组织Spitzer先生发表所有他调查取证的那些内部文件。这些文件应该在一月份早些时候就公布，所以这些投行还有一些希望。Spitzer没有说明延迟公布的原因。毫无疑问，迫不及待的起诉人律师积极推进此事以求得一个尽快的判决。
The primary target for civil suits will be Citigroup, if only because it has the most money. In an effort to simplify the litigation already filed, a federal judge in lower Manhattan has consolidated 77 lawsuits against Citigroup into nine. They allege that it provided conflicted advice to investors in WorldCom and Global Crossing, among other failed companies.
民事诉讼的主要目标将会是花旗集团，仅仅是因为它的钱最多。为了简化已经登记在案的诉讼，下曼哈顿的一个联邦法官将针对花旗集团的77个案件合并为9个。他们指控花旗集团在世通、环电以及其它倒闭的公司上给投资者提供了自相矛盾的建议。
Second comes Enron. Litigation with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over investment banks’ involvement with the collapsed energy firm is being sorted out. On February 20th Merill Lynch agreed to pay $80m for its part in two Enron transactions. J.P. Morgan Chase and Citigroup are also said to be nearing a settlement. Each has put aside more than $1 billion to cover Enron-related costs—although, as with the research question, the big costs may come from civil suits.
第二类问题是有关安然的。向证监会（SEC）提出的诉讼指控这些投行卷入了这家倒闭的能源公司，目前这些诉讼情况逐渐明朗。在2月20号美林公司同意为其参与的两项安然公司的交易支付8000万美元的处罚。据说摩根大通和花旗集团也可能会遭到处罚。每一家（投行）都已拨备了超过10亿美元以支付与安然相关的事件的费用－尽管如此，和“股权研究问题”一样，最大的费用可能还是来自于民事诉讼。
Finally there are IPOs. On February 19th, another federal judge ruled that civil suits may proceed against Wall Street firms for their role in the IPOs of 300 technology companies between 1998 and 2000. The banks, wrote the judge, had a “coherent scheme to defraud investors”, which suggests that even higher litigation provisions may be needed. Meanwhile, the SEC is looking at whether several banks, notably J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, allocated shares in IPOs in return for promise to buy more shares in the aftermarket－－in effect, to support the price. The case will somehow have to distinguish the proper management of an offering from market manipulation.
最后一项问题是IPO。在2月19号，另一位联邦法官裁定华尔街银行可能会因为他们在1998年到2000年之间的300家高科技公司的IPO中的扮演的角色而接受民事指控。这位法官写到：这些银行“合谋欺骗投资者”，这表明可能需要（适用）更高的诉讼条款。同时，证监会正在调查几家银行，特别是J.P. 摩根、高盛和摩根斯坦利等是否在IPO中分配（接受）股票以作为承诺在二级市场上买入更多股票的回报—买入股票的目的是支持股票价格。在这个案件中必须要区分正当的股票发行运作和市场操纵。
The most perverse outcome of the investigations is its impact on investment research. Top analysts have been leaving Wall street by the dozen, most of them helped through the door with a firm push. Without subsidies from investment-banking fees, research budgets are being crushed; there is little money for stars. Institutions have turned to research boutiques for advice. Unfortunately, these firms rarely cater for retail customers, the supposed beneficiaries of the crusade. Was this really the intended result?
这些调查的最负面的结果是其对投资研究的影响。顶尖的分析员已经在成批的离开华尔街了，他们中的大多数人借助于公司资助来开展工作。没有了投资银行在费用上的资助，研究预算都成了泡影；明星分析员也没有什么钱。大的研究机构变成了研究小作坊。不幸的是，这些公司很少去投合中小投资者的需要，而中小投资者才是这项改革运动预期中的受益者。这真是人们想要的结果吗？作者: 二师兄 时间: 2003-6-8 14:25:47 标题: No.2 Optimists—or just Dreamers? By Robert J. Samuelson
Optimists—or just Dreamers?
乐观者－还是梦想家?
摘自《英语世界》2003年第2期
Economic forecasters may be deluding themselves if they are counting on a quick, strong recovery.
经济预测家如果在指望经济快速强劲的回复，可能只是自欺欺人。
We need to avoid the nostalgia factor— a longing for the late, lamented economic boom that clouds out vision and corrodes our judgment. People understandably yearn to return to the good old days of the late 1990s. It won’t happen any time soon, and those who suggest it might are engaging in wishful thinking. They’re telling us what we want to hear. There’s a lot of that these days. When economic forecasts are flying furiously, it’s important to grasp their limits.
If you believe the conventional wisdom -- which seems reflected in the stock market’s recent rise — the recession is almost over. The Blue Chip Economic Indicators, a news letter, surveys 53 forecasters and finds that about 70 percent think the recession will end no later than April. The latest average forecast predicts 0.4 percent growth in the gross domestic product (the economy’s output) in the present quarter. By the fourth quarter, GDP should expand at a respectable 3.9 percent annual rate. Could happen. But if it does, it will be luck as much as anything else.
Truth be told, most economists don’t really understand this peculiar recession especially well. We know this because most of them didn’t predict it, which wasn’t surprising, because most didn’t understand the preceding boom, either. They constantly underestimated its strength and only belatedly recognized that some of its powerful driving forces – extravagant investment in new technologies, widespread stock-market speculation – were not altogether good. Forecasters’ recent record has been dismal.
Let’s look back, In January 1996 the average Blue Chip forecast was that GDP would increase 2.2 percent that year. The actual increase was 3.6 percent. Here are the January predictions and actual outcomes for the next four years: 1997, 2.3 percent versus 4.4 percent; 1998, 2.5 percent versus 4.3 percent; 1999, 2.4 percent versus 4.1 percent. You might say that these are minor mistakes, just a few percentage points. But the ecomomy usually grows between 2 and 4 percent a year. To have value. a forecast must be closer to the actual numbers. Forecasters were missing GDP growth by as much as 48 percent.
If you didn’t understand the boom, why would you better understand the bust? No obvious reason.
如果你不理解经济增长，你又如何能更好地理解经济崩溃呢？没有明显的理由。
A year ago, the Blue Chip consensus saw 2.6 percent GDP growth fore 2001. The actural figure will be about 1 percent or maybe less. But if Semptember 11 – something no economist could have predicted – caused the recession, don’t forecasters have an excuse? This defense sounds better than it is. Although September 11 worsened the economy, the recession had already started. The National Bureau of Economic Research (a group of academic economists) dates the onset to early spring.
All this suggests that you should treat the present recovery forecasts with skepticism. The standard post-World War II recession has followed a familiar pattern: (a) while the economy is expanding, inflation rises; (b) to dampen inflation, the Federal Reserve increase interest rates; (c) as the economy slows, businesses develop unwanted inventories (excess supplies of unsold goods); (d) to reduce inventories, companies cut production and lay off workers; (e) higher inventories and unemployment cause price and wage increases – a.k.a. inflation – to subside; (f) the Fed then trim the interest rate and the economy recovers. The process usually takes less than a year. Since World War II, the average recession has lasted 11 months.
By this schedule, the recession must nearly be over. It stared almost a year ago. Time fore recovery. Unfortunately, this recession didn’t follow the familiar pattern. True, inflation did rise (very slightly) in 1999 and 2000, and the Fed did increase interest rates beginning in mid-1999. But the economy’s main problems weren’t – and aren’t – inflation and excess inventories, which could be speedily remedied.
The economic euphoria of the late 1990scaused consumers to go on a spending spree and businesses to go on an investment binge – and the rest of the world fed off the American boom. Consumers spent by skimping on savings borrowing heavily or cashing in stock profits. At year-end 2001 consumer debt payments were a near-record 14.3 percent of disposable personal incomes, according to Moody’s Investors Service. Similarly, excessive corporate investment has left enormous unused factory capacity. According to the Fed, the surplus is greater than at any time since 1983.
What’s now occurring is a period of “payback”. Corporate investment dropped during 2001. In early 2000 consumer spending grew at an annual rate of 5.9 percent; by the third quarter of 2001 the gain was a meager 1 percent. This twin retrenchment represents a huge drag on the economy that spills into other sectors. Corporate profits have already plunged. State and local government spending will suffer at tax revenues falter. Nor is the rest of the world helping. Japan is in recession; Europe is in ore near one. Argentina just defaulted on its debt; many developing economies are weakening.
It’s easy to sympathize with forecasters. So many unfamiliar forces are now tugging at the economy that a coherent outlook is hard, maybe impossible. No one truly knows what will happen – especially, how long it will take consumers and business to recover from their recent frenzied spending, and how the economy will react to the Fed’s interest-rate in 2001.
But the forecasters crank out their numbers, and there’s tendency to see the recession simply as a brief and unpleasant interruption to unspoiled prosperity。 This may be too glib。 The central reason economists misinterpreted the 1990s boom was that they assumed that the economy would follow historical patterns。 It didn’t. If economists repeate their error – and they may be doing just that – then they will be surprised, probably unpleasantly, by the pattern of recession and recovery. And that could be bad news for us all.
WOW! thank you so much !!!!作者: 二师兄 时间: 2003-6-9 14:57:06 标题: No.3 McCurrencies
McCurrencies
麦当劳货币
原文出处：The Economist April 26th, 2003, page 67
Hamburgers should be an essential part of every economist’s diet
汉堡包应该是每一个经济学家饮食的基本组成部分。
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The past year has been one to relish for fans of burgernomics. Last April The Economist’s Big Mac index flashed a strong sell sign for the dollar: it was more overvalued than at any time in the index’s history. The dollar has since flipped, falling by 12% in trade-weighted terms.
过去的一年令汉堡包经济学的拥护者十分高兴。去年四月份《经济学人》杂志的巨无霸汉堡指数曾显示了强烈的沽出美元的信号：美元比该指数历史上的任何时期都要高估了。之后美元果然开始跳水，按照贸易加权（汇率）口径下跌了12％。
Invented in 1986 as a light-hearted guide to whether currencies are at their “correct” level, burgernomics is based on the theory of purchasing-power parity (PPP). This says that, in the long run, exchange rates should move toward rates that would equalise the prices of an identical basket of goods and services in any two countries. To put it simply: a dollar should buy the same everywhere. Our basket is a McDonald’s Big Mac, produced locally to roughly the same recipe in 118 countries. The Big Mac PPP is the exchange rate that would leave burgers costing the same as in America. Comparing the PPP with the actual rate is one test of whether a currency is undervalued or overvalued.
汉堡包经济学发明于1986年，（最初是）作为一种轻松的指导（来评价）货币是否处于其“正确”的水平，汉堡包经济学是基于购买力平价（PPP）理论。该理论指出，在一个较长的时间段内，任何两国之间的汇率应该朝着某一方向移动，从而使得在两国购买等量的货物和服务的价格相等。简而言之，一美元在任何地方应该能够买到同样的东西。我们的计量单位就是麦当劳的巨无霸汉堡包，它在118个国家均本地化生产，其配方大致相同。巨无霸购买力平价是一种能够让（某国的）汉堡包与美国的价格相同的汇率。将该PPP与实际汇率进行比较，可以检验一国汇率是否被高估或者低估。
The first column of the table shows local-currency prices of a Big Mac. The second converts them into dollars. The average price of a Big Mac in four American cities is $2.71. The cheapest burgers are in China ($1.20); the dearest are in Switzerland ($4.52). In other words, the yuan is the most undervalued currency, the Swiss franc the most overvalued. The third column calculates Big Mac PPPs. Diveding the local Chinese price by the American price gives a dollar PPP of 3.65 yuan. The actural exchange rate is 8.28 yuan, implying that the Chinese currency is undervalued by 56% against the dollar. The average price of a Big Mac in the euro area is now exactly the same as in America. This implies that the euro’s PPP is exactly $1, so at its current rate of $1.10 the euro is 10% overvalued. The British, Swedish and Danish currencies are still significantly overvalued against the euro.
附表的的第一列显示了一个巨无霸在当地的货币价格。第二列将其转换为美元。在美国四个城市的巨无霸的平均价格是$2.71。最便宜的巨无霸在中国（$1.20）；最贵的在瑞士（$4.52）。换句话说，人民币是价值最被低估的货币，瑞士法郎是最被高估的。第三列是巨无霸购买力平价。将中国价格除以美国价格得到1美元的购买力平价是3.65元。而美元的实际汇率是8.28元，这表明中国的货币对美元大约被低估了56％。现在巨无霸在欧元地区的平均价格与在美国的价格完全相同。这表明欧元的购买力评价恰好是1美元，所以以当前$1.10的汇率计算，欧元被高估了10%。英国、瑞典和丹麦的货币对欧元的汇率更是被显著高估。
Among rich economies, the most undervalued currency is the Australian dollar. The Aussie dollar is still 31% below PPP against its American counterpart: its rise over the past year has been largely offset by a fall in the relative price of burgers in Australia. Many emerging-market currencies are undervalued against the dollar by 30-50%. One exception is the South Korean won, which is exactly at its PPP, implying that it is overvalued against other emerging-market currencies. 在富有的经济体中，最被低估的货币是澳元。与美元相比澳元仍然比其购买力平价低了31％：其在过去一年的上涨被相应汉堡包在澳大利亚价格的下降大大抵消了。很多新兴市场国家的货币与美元相比被低估了30-50％。但是南朝鲜的韩元则是一个例外，它（的汇率）正好在其购买力平价上，表明它相对其他新兴市场国家的货币被高估了。
Many readers complain that burgernomics is hard to swallow. We admit its flawed: Big Macs are not traded across borders as the PPP theory demands, and prices are distorted by taxes, tariffs, different profit margins and differences in the cost of non-tradables, such as rents. It was never intended as a precise predictor of currency movements, but as a tool to make exchange-rate theory more digestible. Yet in the early 1990s, just before the crisis in Europe’s exchange-rate mechanism, it signaled that several currencies, including sterling, were markedly overvalued against the D-mark. It also predicted the fall in the euro after its launch in 1999. 很多读者抱怨说汉堡包经济学难以令人接受。我们承认它的确存在瑕疵：巨无霸并不像购买力平价理论要求的那样（可以）跨国交易，并且其价格被税收、关税、不同的利润以及不可贸易成本，例如租金所扭曲。我们从来没有将其作为一个精确的货币运动的标志，而是作为一个使汇率理论更容易理解的工具。尽管如此，在上个世纪90年代早起，就在欧洲汇率体系危机的前夕，它预报了几种货币的（波动），包括英镑对德国马克的显著高估。它也预测了在1999年欧元启动后的下跌。
Academic economists are taking burgernomics more seriously, chewing over the Big Mac index in almost a dozen studies. Now a whole book has been written about the index* by Li Lian Ong, of the International Monetary Fund. She says it has been surprisingly accurate in tracking exchange rates in the long term. But there are some persistent deviations from PPP. In particular, emerging-market currencies are consistengly undervalued.
经济学家更严肃的对待汉堡包经济学，在很多研究中仔细咀嚼这个巨无霸指数的意义。现在，国际货币基金组织的专家Li Lian One 为此专门写了一本书。她说该指数在长期范围内令人惊讶的准确记录了汇率。但是它与PPP之间有一些稳定的偏差。特别是新兴国家市场的货币被持续低估。
Differences in productivity are one explanation of this. Rich countries have higher productivity than poor countries, but their advantage tends to be smaller in non-traderble goods and services than in tradables. Because wages are the same in both sectors, non-tradables are cheaper in poorer countries. Therefore, if currencies are determined by the relative prices of tradables, but PPP is calculated from a basket that includes non-tradables, such as the Big Mac, the currencies of poor countries will always look undervalued. Ms Ong finds that currency deviations from PPP are indeed related to productivity differences relative to America. After adjusting for this, she finds that the Big Mac index performs better in tracking exchange rates.
The Big Mac index suggests that the dollar is no longer overvalued against the euro. But having overshot PPP, the dollar may well now undershoot, because American’s huge current-account deficit is becoming harder to finance. Without stronger domestic demand in Japan and Europe to help trim the deficit, the dollar will have to take more of the strain. What are this year’s other hot tips? The Australian dollar is likely to see the biggest gain. The pound will fall further against the euro. And China will come under increasing pressure to revalue the yuan.
巨无霸指数暗示了美元对欧元已经不再被高估了。实际上由于其购买力平价已经得到了提升了，美元可能已经被大大的低估了，因为美国已经开始难以承担数额巨大的经常帐户赤字。如果没有日本和欧洲更强的国内需求来填平这个赤字的话，美元可能会承受更大的（升值）压力。今年还有哪些其他的热点呢？澳元似乎会成为最大的赢家。英镑对欧元将会进一步下跌。而中国面临逐渐增加的重新估值（升值）压力。作者: 二师兄 时间: 2003-6-9 15:01:40 标题: 第四篇：When Globalization Suffers, The Poor Take The Heat
When Globalization Suffers, The Poor Take The Heat
当全球化受阻时，穷人将会首当其冲
By Gary S. Becker , From Business Week, April 21, 2003, Economic Viewpoint
（Gary S. Becker，1992年诺贝尔经济学奖得主，在芝加哥大学任教，胡佛经济研究所高级研究员，《商业周刊》专栏作家）
LESS HELP: As hostilities hinder trade, investment, and foreign students’ ability to study abroad, living standards could plummet
于己无益：随着反对力量阻止贸易、投资和外国的学生出国学习，他们的生活水平可能会一落千丈
The War on terrorism – and the rupture in the Western alliance produced by the Iraqi war – might sharply slow down the international movement of capital and people for an extended period. This will please the more extreme critics of globalization and immigration, but it will greatly reduce the opportunities fore poor nations to grow out of poverty.
The expansion in trade and the movements of people among nations was unusually rapid during the past half-century. World trade in goods and services grew by over 5% per year, the international flow of capital also accelerated, and the number of students from poor nations studying in the U.S., Europe, and Japan grew remarkably.
As a result of this movement toward an integrated world economy, global income grew at its fastest rate in recorded history. World population more than doubled from 1950 to the end of the 20th century. Yet real per capita income grew, on average, by about 2% per year around the world.
Not all poor nations had much growth over this 50-year period; many of the African nations, the ex-communist bloc, and some Asian nations lagged far behind. But on the whole, the per capita gross domestic product of poorer nations grew about as fast as that of richer nations, while populations in the less developed world grew much more rapidly.
Economist Xavier Sala-i-Martin of Columbia University has shown that inequality in world incomes declined sharply since the mid-1970s. The decline in income inequality among individuals was much faster than among countries, in part because China and, to a lesser extent, India—two nations with about a third of the world’s population – grew very rapidly. But there was also a narrowing of world inequality beyond the impressive performance of these huge nations.
Without carefully examining the statistics, some critics of the effects of globalization on the world’s poor claim that the number of families living on less than $1 or $2 a day basically remained the same during the past 50 years .Yet it is harder than often recognized to measure the well-being of the world’s poorest, since most of them live on farms and get much of their incomes from the food they grow, the clothing they make, and the houses they build themselves. Still, using official data from the World Bank and the U.N., Sala-i-Martin’s study shows that the fraction of the world’s population living at less than $2 a day fell by about 20 percentage points during the past three decades.
Income measures do not do full justice to the extent of the improvement in the world’s poor, for they take no account of advances in life expectancy and general health. Populations in the less developed world grew fast mainly because they used knowledge gained from the West to produce rapid declines in mortality. As a consequence, the world gap in life expectancy narrowed considerably, despite the raging AIDS epidemic in Africa. My study with two colleagues shows that world inequality declined even more rapidly after national income accounts are adjusted for the greater declines in mortality rates in poorer nations.
It is telling evidence of the benefits of globalization that not a single poorer nation that was isolated from the global economic community, including the Soviet Union and China while they had rigid communist regimes, raised their per capita incomes very much during that time. The poor nations that benefited from the world division of labor initially concentrated production on a few simple goods, which they traded for the high-quality goods that are produced by advanced nations.
These undeveloped nations also imported large amounts of capital to help their agriculture and their expansion of industrial production. Many of these nations also sent large numbers of students to the U.S. and else where to study science, engineering, medicine, and other technical subjects. Some of these students stayed abroad to work and often to prosper, but many came back with the knowledge they gained in the advanced nations.
It is the international movement of people and of capital that is put in greatest jeopardy by events of the past few years. Owners of capital are reluctant to invest in developing nations when there is great uncertainty caused by war and terrorism. Rich countries are less willing to admit young make students and immigrants to study and work, especially those from Muslim nations or other countries with known hostility and resentment toward the U.S. and other Western nations.
The anti-globalization movement may get its wish for a breakdown in the world economic order because of sharp reductions in the international movement of capital and people due to terrorism and a more divided West. But the biggest losers will be not the relatively rich members of the G7 countries but rather the nations that want to extricate the mass of their populations from extreme poverty and disease.
When developing countries turn to economists for advice on trade, they are usually pointed towards David Ricardo. According to his law of comparative advantage, formulated some 190 years ago, countries should specialize in whatever they are best at producing, leaving their trading partners to provide everything else. In Ricardo’s illustrative model, the answers were clear: Portugal, blessed with a fine climate, should cultivate wine; England, blessed with capitalists, should manufacture cloth. The Portuguese gained from importing English cloth (even if they could make it more efficiently) because it freed them to concentrate on wine. As for the English, even the most ardent mercantilist would rather they left viniculture to others.
But if a country’s God-given advantages were clear to Ricardo, they are less so in modern practice. Capital is mobile across borders, and the gifts of nature count for little now that manufacturing eclipses agriculture in world trade. A country’s place in the global economy seems neither predestined nor predictable. As Ricardo Hausmann and Dani Rodrik, two economics at Harvard University, put it in a recent paper*, economic development is a haphazard process of “self-discovery”. Comparative advantage is almost impossible to spot in advance.
Bangladesh, for example, is good at exporting hats, having sold $175m-worth to American in 2000. At one level this is not surprising. Bangladesh is overcrowded and underserved by capital; much of its arable land is periodically under water. As any economist could tell you, it therefore has a comparative advantage in labour-intensive manufactures. But why does Bangladesh specialize in hats rather than, say, bed-sheets? And why did Pakistan, a country with a similar mix of land, labour and capital, export $130m-worth of bed-sheets to America in 2000 but a mere $700,000-worth of that?
Mr. Hausmann and Mr. Rodrik cite many examples of countries that have happened upon a lucrative export niche – cut flowers from Colombia, software from India, footballs from Pakistan – to which raw factor endowments give only the roughest of guides. Nothing written by Ricardo, or by anybody theorizing since, could have told a budding Bangladeshi entrepreneur to make hats rather than bed-sheets.
Sometimes governments try to force the issue. In 1896 Japan’s rulers deemed that their country should have a steel industry to match the best in Europe. Imperial say-so substituted for economic know-how, but met with little success. The government went to great lengths to replicate European technology, importing German engineers, machines and designs. Only after a steel mill had been built did it become apparent that German mills could not run on Japanese coke.
Neither economists nor emperors can be relied upon to pick winners. The best bet is entrepreneurial trial and error. Messrs Hausmann and Rodrik build a theoretical model in which businessmen in a poor country can choose either to invest in a traditional domestic industry or to diversify into a modern industry in which there is no local history of expertise. The costs of production in the traditional industry are well-known; costs in the new industry are not. Entrepreneurs discover these costs only after they have sunk money into the project. Their investments are, in effect, industrial-scale experiments. Profitable or not, they reveal a country’s strengths and weaknesses.
The authors think that entrepreneurs in developing countries may lack sufficient incentives to invest in new industries. Businessmen will take the risk of innovation only if they have a chance of creating some sort of monopoly. They may be helped by patents, trademarks or copyright; if not, they will have an edge only until rivals catch up. In poor countries, the chances are that patents and so on will help less than in rich ones, largely because investors are trying out technology that already exists abroad. So the entrepreneur who first decides to export cut flowers from Colombia to America, for example, cannot hope to stay ahead of imitators for long. His fellow countrymen will rush to copy his business model, poach his staff and encroach upon the ground he has broken.
To create a greater incentive to experiment in new industries, say the authors, there may sometimes be a case for governments to protect companies in infant industries from unfettered competition. This does not mean tariffs, which protect all domestic companies to the same extent; rather, it implies finding ways to help innovators against domestic imitators. The trouble is that this is a much harder trick to pull off in practice than it looks in theory. Latin American development banks used to reserve preferential credit for the first domestic entrant in any industry—raising the potential profits available to innovators. Under such policies, Latin America became a veritable hothouse of industrial diversification. Unfortunately, governments did not weed out failed industrial experiments, instead keeping them alive alongside thriving ones.
Even successful policies can have damaging side-effects. Messrs Hausmann and Rodrik point to South Korea’s willingness, during its drive for industrialization from the 1960s, to use control of bank credit to reward successful companies and penalize poor performers. Yet by the 1990s the channeling of credit to favored companies had wrought huge damage to the Korean financial system. Devising industrial policy, like diving comparative advantage, is a matter of trial and error. Many governments have tried; most have erred.
* “Economic development As Self-Discovery”. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper, Number 8952, revised November 2002. Available on the internet at: http//ksghome.havard.edu/~.drodrik.academic.ksg/selfdiscrev2.pdf
Can Ian Davis or Michael Patsalos-Fox restore Mckinsey to its former glory?
Ian Davis或者Michael Patsalos-Fox能为麦肯锡重振昔日雄风么？
As elections go, the process of choosing a new managing partner for Mckinsey, the world’s best-known management consultancy, is particularly rum. For one thing, it is a studiedly polite affair. The candidates – there were seven, but now just two remain – issue no manifestos. Canvassing is considered to be bad form and is therefore counter—productive. This makes knowing what particular individuals stand for rather tricky.
Moreover, the firm (or, as insiders call it, the Firm) is itself at pains to play down the importance of the election. It refuses to talk openly about it, let alone to share insights into personalities or issues. Normally chatty Mckinsey partners clam up when asked about the race. Junior staff know it could harm their careers if they were heard gossiping. So the election takes place in an atmosphere of near-Trappist silence. How on earth do the 280-odd partners who vote make up their minds?
Decide they must. Next week Mckinsey will announce whether Ian Davis, head of its London office, or Micheal Patslos-Fox, who runs New York, will be its new boss. Both ran three years ago, when Rajat Gupta was eventually re-elected for a third and final term. Mr. Gupta’s long stint saw big changes at Mckinsey, notably greater enrichment of partners relative to up-and-coming associates and a belated rush to join the “new economy” boom. McKinsey is still dealing with the after-effects of a hiring spree in the late 1990s that tested the ability of its culture to absorb large numbers and also created unprecedented tensions when lay-offs followed the pricking of the technology bubble.
Whichever man McKinsey chooses, it cannot avoid some awkward questions. One is whether it wants to be a global firm, or is just an American firm with a series of regional outposts. Already some big offices are relatively independent. McKinsey’s successful German arm, for instance, has long cultivated separateness; its French operation has done less well. But at the heart of the tension is America, where over-hiring was greatest and retrenchment has proved most painful. Under Mr. Gupta, an American though originally from India, most of McKinsey’s managers have also been American. But, say insiders, he has proved the adage that good consultants do not necessarily make good managers. One way to make the firm more global would be to reform its management structures, breaking up the New York based cabal and bringing in fresh blood from elsewhere.
Mr. Davis is an affable Brit who wears his ambition lightly but is deeply committed to the firm’s traditional values, in particular the need to invest in long-term relationships with clients and to nurture the associates who represent the firms’s future. Although it expanded when others did, the London office has escaped the worst of the bad times, in part because Mr. Davis insisted that programmes to train and help associates should not be cut. Were he to win, Mr. Davis could instantly shift the firm’s center of gravity by choosing to run it from his base in London.
Mr. Patsalos-Fox, Greek-Australian by origin but also an alumnus of London, is the first non-American to run New York. That is no mean achievement. He landed the job after a stint in New Jersey, having lost out to Mr. Davis for the top job in London. He is harder-charging and more ruthless than Mr. Davis. One of his first steps after taking over in New York was to try to raise poor morale, but not everybody thinks he has succeeded.
Perhaps the biggest challenge facing McKinsey is whether it can recapture its mystique – the reputational edge that, to the chagrin of such competitors as Bain and Boston Consulting Croup, once mean it was mentioned in a class of its own. This reputation was arguably at its highest in the 1970s and 1980s when McKinsey was the top strategy consultancy, advising chief executives on big trends, sometimes persuading them to reshape entire industries. However, some observers regard its heyday as the 1990s, when so many former partners occupied top jobs outside that the world sometimes seemed to be run by the Firm.
Over the past decade, the consulting market has changed. Rivals got better at touting strategic advice of their own. And many clients began to care less about hold new initiatives and more about running themselves efficiently, a trend that helped “technology integrators” such as Andersen Consulting (now Accenture). As McKinsey adapted to these changes, so it became less distinctive. Its mystique may not have disappeared, but it certainly diminished.
How to reverse that trend? The market is not helping. Client remain fearful of big decisions of the kind that McKinsey likes to advise on. Instead they want nitty-gritty advice – help with IT or marketing. Big mergers, often favoured by McKinsey in the past, are now seen as too risky by managers concerned to regain the good opinion of their shareholders. So too clever management innovations of the sort urged on Enron, whose ex-McKinsey former chief executive, Jeffrey Skilling, is regarded by some critics as an emblem of what went wrong with McKinsey during the 1990s. McKinsey recently invited George Shaheen, a former boss of Accenture who quit to run Webvan, a failed internet start-up, to address partners. Taking lessons from Mr. Shaheen? That worries those who yearn for more mystique.
The managing partner has limited executive power: as one insider puts it, “there wouldn’t be much scope for a command-and-control approach here.” But he does have influence, through personality and through the committees and task-forces that McKinsey uses for internal governance. By setting the agenda and hand-picking the leading decision-makers, he can play a big part in shaping the firm’s identity. That is why this election is more important than most. Do not be fooled by the polite, low-key tone: next week’s announcement will mark a critical moment in the Firm’s history.
二师兄就是好样的。。。。作者: 二师兄 时间: 2003-6-12 16:10:56 标题: 第七篇：Specialist help needed
Specialist help needed
需要“专业人士”的帮助
From: The Economist April 26th, 2003
对纽约证券交易所核心专业人士的一项调查引起了对华尔街的更多关注
毫不夸张的说，在刚刚过去的一周中，有一束光照进了美国证券行业的某些角落。（Hardly a week goes by without an unflattering light being shone into some corner of America’s securities industry.）现在，聚光灯打在Frank Quattrone的身上，他曾经在瑞士信贷第一波士顿工作，但是在4月23日，他成为第一个因为与近期丑闻有关联而受到犯罪指控的投资银行家。同时受到关注的还有一家处于美国金融市场核心的机构：纽约证券交易所（NYSE）。在4月22日，NYSE发表了一项愤慨的声明以回应某些新闻报道，这些报道说美国政监会正在调查某些交易员的违规行为，－交易员就是在交易大厅里执行交易订单的中间人。
交易员的工作是代表其客户进行买卖操作。他们不允许为自己买入股票，因为这样他们就可以将其转售给客户以谋取利益，通常把这种行为称作“跑先”(“front-running”:D，还是叫“出老千”?)。如果买家的要价比卖家的出价还要高，交易员也不许为自己进行交易赚取差额(are not allowed to trade for themselves and pocket the spread)。他们仅仅应该将买家和卖家带到一起，然后就站在一边－见面，用NYSE拗口的话说，这是他们的“消极责任”。
但是现在，由于计算能力成本的戏剧性下降，无线设备变得更加智能，意味着它们能更有效的利用频谱资源并具有更好的抗干扰能力。他们可以同时在很宽的频率范围内通信（这叫做“频谱扩展”），彼此帮助（“网状网络”），并适应当地环境（“灵活无线电通讯”）(They are able to communicate over a broad range of frequencies at once (this is called “spread spectrum”), to help each other out (“mesh networks”) and to adapt to the local environment (“agile radio”))。纽约大学的法学教授 Yochai Benkler辩称，与建立一个频谱市场相反，频谱资源的使用现在可以依赖于智能无线通讯设备，任何人都没有必要控制无线频谱。
(Technology may thus help to create markets; but it also makes some of them obsolete. In this case it has turned land into sea, metaphorically speaking. To draw a historical parallel: the development of better ships did not lead to parceling up the world’s oceans but to something called free trade.)作者: 二师兄 时间: 2003-6-16 15:07:55 标题: 关于麦肯锡那一篇，得到高人指点，呵呵
（1）
Perhaps the biggest challenge facing McKinsey is whether it can recapture its mystique – the reputational edge that, to the chagrin of such competitors as Bain and Boston Consulting Croup, once mean it was mentioned in a class of its own. 或许麦肯锡面临的最大挑战是其能否夺回它的“葵花宝典”－显赫声威。其曾经拥有的独树一帜的霸主地位（it was mentioned in a class of its own)令诸如Bain、BCG等竞争对手望尘莫及。(然后这一段的后面接着说它是如何如何大牛，影响整个咨询行业，甚至领跑全世界）
Over the past decade, the consulting market has changed. Rivals got better at touting strategic advice of their own. And many clients began to care less about hold new initiatives and more about running themselves efficiently,
在过去的十年中，咨询市场风云变幻。麦肯锡的对手们也越来越会吹嘘自己的战略咨询实力乐。而且很多客户逐渐不再那么关心什么先锋还是首创（估计是担心长江后浪推前浪，前浪死在沙滩上），而更关心怎么才能使自己更加有效运作。
（2）"has long cultivated separateness"翻译得更直接一些可以是“早就预谋着要另立山头”
（3）
"Command-and-Control"是英文两个压前韵的单词的组合，估计是固定用法，我一时找不到合适的中文单词来对应，就借用《红楼梦》里说王熙凤的词了，的确非常的不准确 //汗...作者: 二师兄 时间: 2003-6-20 18:59:45 标题: Name theory
ONE by one, the names of once-glorious investment banks are being dropped by those who expensively bought them. This week UBS dispensed with the Warburg name for its European investment bank and PaineWebber for its American one. Both will be known only as UBS. In advertisements the bank reassured clients that, since it had only one aim—to understand their needs and help them make the right financial decisions—one name was enough. Customers doubtless wept for joy.
Banking
UBS, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup
Just as name inflation gathered pace in the go-go 1990s, so deflation has become de rigueur in these more straitened times. A year ago Morgan Stanley Dean Witter became Morgan Stanley again. This April Salomon Smith Barney, Citigroup's investment bank (known in Europe as—deep breath—Schroder Salomon Smith Barney), became plain Citigroup. The Smith Barney name will live on as the group's independent research outfit, for which thank regulators. But the Salomon name has now gone the way of some of the businesses it once advised.
Why now? It is, after all, an expensive business to change all those legal structures, business cards, letterheads and logos, although banks won't say how much it has cost. And the acquisitions were not recent: both UBS and Citigroup were created five years ago. There was perhaps some residual value in the names. In the 1970s Salomon was pre-eminent, with the best investment bankers, the best research and the best traders. Its attitude to risk-taking was legendary, though not, it turned out, always legal: it was hit by a Treasury-bond scandal in 1991. S.G. Warburg was in many ways the antithesis of Salomon and the closest that Britain ever came to an international investment bank. It had little presence in America, less talent for trading, almost no bond business and a singular inability to make money for anybody but its employees. Perhaps that is why it is remembered so fondly.
Certainly, investment banks' bosses need to do something to earn their money besides sacking people. But the truth may be that banking brands have become so devalued that any break with the past is welcome.作者: 二师兄 时间: 2003-6-20 20:39:46 标题: Bad habits
不翻了，看了太多boc的坏话。
Banking in China
Bad habits
Jun 12th 2003 | HONG KONG
From The Economist print edition
Who thought reform would be easy?
Get article background
ON MAY 28th, only a day before its shareholders' meeting, the Bank of China in Hong Kong, a subsidiary of one of China's four huge and troubled state banks, announced that its chief executive, Liu Jinbao, had resigned and moved to Beijing as part of a “routine transfer”. “Routine”, in the language of China's banking system, tends to mean anything but. Sure enough, on June 10th the bank formally admitted that Mr Liu had in fact been detained in Beijing, and was under investigation for corrupt lending to a Shanghai property tycoon, Zhou Zhengyi. Mr Zhou, hitherto best known for evicting thousands of residents in Shanghai to make room for his real-estate projects (many are suing him), is also in detention. Hong Kong's anti-graft police also took in Mr Zhou's wife for questioning.
Graft, bad lending: all this was supposed to be a thing of the past for China's banks, and Bank of China in particular. It made such headlines early last year, when it came to light that nearly half a billion dollars had been embezzled at one of its branches in southern China. Worse, Wang Xuebing, its former boss, was jailed for corrupt loans he had made during the 1990s from the New York branch, which he ran with some flamboyance. Mr Wang is now aiding the investigations against Mr Liu with advice from his prison cell.
At least, the Bank of China said at the time, all the bad news was coming out at once, thus allowing it to clean house and then list shares in a new, improved, and sparkling Hong Kong branch. This offering went ahead last July with moderate success, raising $2.8 billion. Foreign investors seemed to be giving the bank the benefit of the doubt.
That is why the current scandal is so embarrassing. Some of the dodgy transactions between the Bank of China (from its Shanghai branch, probably) and Mr Zhou seem to have taken place during the preparations for the share offering, precisely when the bank was supposedly cleaning up its act.
For those familiar with China's banking reforms, such setbacks are depressingly familiar. At the same time as the Bank of China's share offering, for instance, there was also optimism about what seemed to be a ground-breaking deal with an American finance firm, Newbridge Capital. Newbridge negotiated permission from municipal authorities in the southern city of Shenzhen, a progressive place by Chinese standards, to buy a stake in and take management control of a local bank. This was novel stuff: it implied that the government would allow foreign takeovers and would countenance lending based on borrowers' commercial rather than political credentials.
One year on, however, the deal is in limbo. Shenzhen's cadres, it seems, were not so keen to cede control of their bank after all; or they may have thought that they could haggle something better with a Taiwanese bank run by the Koo family, one of the island's most prominent. Newbridge, which was under the impression that it had signed binding contracts in Shenzhen, is suing the Koos in an American court.
As it has done many times before, Chinese banking has become bogged down in a quagmire just when it seemed to be making progress. Imagine, for instance, what Shan Weijian is going through. Mr Shan, a mainland Chinese, is Newbridge's man in Asia, and thus the fellow behind the negotiations in Shenzhen. As an international banking expert, a rarity in China, he was also invited to be an independent director of the Bank of China in Hong Kong.
Mr Shan is now working around the clock to douse the flames all around him. Which is ironic, because Mr Shan is well known for being pessimistic that China will ever respect private property and the sanctity of contract—opinions that he formed during the Cultural Revolution, when he was doing hard labour in the Gobi desert—and so usually keeps Newbridge out of entanglements in China's state-owned sector. Now he has to help fix it. What else is one to do?作者: princessmia 时间: 2003-6-21 09:51:59
二师兄 发表于 2003-6-8 11:40
No Rest
未到休息时
Legal torment continues for leading investment firms
The primary target for civil suits will be Citigroup, if only because it has the most money.
这句翻译的有点别扭。'仅仅因为它涉及的金额最多"？
J.P. Morgan Chase and Citigroup are also said to be nearing a settlement.
“摩根大通和花旗集团也即将达成和解”？作者: matchamatcha 时间: 2013-1-7 01:43:28
