1006G 备考日记by C。——认真是一种可怕的力量。

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

Comments：
Hadn’t been the financial crises, nobody would take executive pay as a big deal. But it happened, then that issue became on the table. In fact, as the author said, average CEO pay in2008 is below the average in 1998.However, the other highly paid has increased, while CEOs are paid by salary, bonus and stock-based pay. The point is the argument that the executives are overpaid compared to their performance. And the author focus on this issue, analyzing this situation happened.
Speaking to that issue, I thought they may be sort of paid too much actually. Well, the truth is I don’t quite understand the equity between the pay and the gain in executive world. But every time I heart the number of their pays, it is kind of too huge. Since we are in the hard time now, I guess it’s quite easy to be noticed for their high paid. Paying them according to the performance, which is a good way as what I am concerned.

QuincySMUID: 2162088

考完了，来看你一眼

爱妳不变UID: 2733836

Good luck with your GRE!

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

122# QuincySM

咦 不是明天吗？

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

123# 爱妳不变

thanks so much！

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

12.25
READING:


Rebuttal statements

The moderator's rebuttal remarks
Oct 23rd 2009 | Adrian Wooldridge  

It seems that experts are just as passionate on the subject of executive pay as the general public.
Mr Kaplan argues that the most powerful criticism of executive pay-that bosses get upside and no downside-is simply false. He points out that three of the most maligned bosses in the financial services sector, Vikram Pandit of Citigroup, John Mack of Morgan Stanley and Kenneth Lewis of Bank of America, all lost small fortunes in 2008. CEOs as a group lost roughly 40% of their wealth in 2008.
Ms Minow argues that her rebuttal is being written by the headlines. Financial service companies are once again paying huge bonuses despite the fact that their companies have been propped up by public money. She points out that CEOs enjoy the unique privilege of being able to appoint the people who decide their pay. She also reiterates the point that there are plenty of devices such as golden parachutes that cannot possibly be justified by performance.
In his expert evidence Rakesh Khurana tries to focus on fundamental questions such as what the purpose of compensation is. He argues that the market for CEOs is a highly distorted one because CEOs themselves can influence the process and performance is hard to measure. He suggests that extreme pay differentials can damage companies by attracting the wrong sort of bosses and demotivating the rank and file. He also worries about the legitimacy of the system. One survey suggests that only 13% of people trust what CEOs say.
So far the voting is going heavily against the motion. But I wonder how far this is driven by emotion rather than a reasoned assessment of the evidence. I would urge the participants to pay close attention to the wording of the motion-particularly the key phrases 'one the whole' and 'deserve'. We need to focus more on the overall picture, around the world as well as in the United States, rather than on a few attention-grabbing anecdotes. And we need to think more closely about the word 'deserve'. Mr Kaplan's best chance of turning the voting around is to demonstrate that outstanding bosses can boost the performance of the organisations that they head, not only earning their pay but also benefitting workers, shareholders and consumers.


The proposer's rebuttal remarks
Oct 23rd 2009 | Steven N. Kaplan

Nell Minow argues that top executive compensation was a major cause of the financial crisis. She bases her conclusion on two "outlier" examples, Angelo Mozillo and Aubrey McClendon, that she calls "anecdotes". The plural of anecdote is data. And the data, that is the pay at a broad sample of financial companies, simply do not support her conclusion. Ironically, neither do her two anecdotes.
Ms Minow makes the following claims. (1) Incentive compensation rewarded top financial executives for the quantity of transactions, not the quality. (2) Top CEOs, like Mr Mozillo, took large amounts of money out of their companies before their companies failed. (3) The CEOs knew they were making bad investments, but did so anyway because they could make more money doing so. (4) CEOs get upside, but no downside. (5) The post-meltdown awards create incentives that reward management, but damage shareholders and everyone else.
These claims are false. As David Yermack of NYU pointed out in a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal, Vikram Pandit of Citigroup, John Mack of Morgan Stanley and Kenneth Lewis of Bank of America:
"all lost small fortunes in 2008. The 2008 compensation of Messrs Pandit, Mack, and Lewis was approximately minus $105 million, minus $40 million, and minus $108 million, respectively, after taking account of the losses on the stock that each CEO owned in his firm. Other CEOs in the financial industry had similarly bad years. Kerry Killinger of Washington Mutual lost more than $25 million before being ousted in September, Kennedy Thompson of Wachovia lost more than $30 million before being fired in June, and Jeffrey Immelt of General Electric lost more than $60 million ... These CEOs' financial reversals were part of a robust system of pay-for-performance widely used by most U.S. companies."
Yermack also points out that James Cayne lost most of his billion-dollar fortune when Bear Stearns failed and Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers lost hundreds of millions of dollars.
The fact is that most financial-company CEOs received the lion's share （大部分的）of their pay in stock and options. And they kept most of that pay as shares in their companies which they never cashed in. When the crisis hit and their stock prices sank, those CEOs lost a large fraction of their wealth and, in many cases, their jobs.
As I wrote in my first entry, this is true, in general, of the overall CEO market. CEOs earn a lot and their stock appreciates when their companies perform well. CEOs lose large amounts of wealth and their jobs when their companies perform poorly. It is irresponsible to claim that CEOs do not bear any downside risk. In 2008, CEOs as a group lost roughly 40% of their wealth.
In direct contradiction to Ms Minow's conclusion, the financial CEOs were compensated in the end for the quality of their transactions. The CEOs did not take much off the table. The CEOs had a substantial amount of downside risk. In fact, those CEOs would have been much better off if they had not engaged in the transactions they did.
It is worth adding that David Yermack is a noted researcher on CEO pay who studies large samples over long periods. He has written several articles highly critical of specific CEO pay practices, like corporate jet usage. Nevertheless, his conclusion on the relation of CEO pay to the financial crisis is diametrically opposed to Ms Minow's (as is his characterisation of the CEO market in general).
A study of CEO incentives in a broader group of financial institutions during the crisis by Rudi Fahlenbrach and Rene Stulz of Ohio State (and a former president of the American Finance Association) confirms Yermack's analysis and also clearly refutes Ms Minow's conclusion.
Ironically, even her two anecdotes about Angelo Mozillo of Countrywide and Aubrey McClendon of Chesapeake Energy fail to support her case.
Unlike the other CEOs mentioned above (and most financial-institution CEOs), Mr Mozillo did manage to sell a lot of his stock. Unfortunately for him, the SEC has charged him with securities fraud and insider trading. And it is unlikely to lead to a good outcome for him. If found guilty, he potentially will end up paying three times what he took out. Clearly, he appears to have behaved badly, but he did not get away with it.
As for Mr McClendon, he runs an energy company. How could he possibly have had anything to do with the financial crisis?
The preponderance（数量上的优势） of the data and, even Ms Minow's "outlier" "anecdotes," therefore, fail to provide any evidence that top executive compensation had much to do with the financial crisis.
Top executive compensation did not cause the financial crisis. Instead, the crisis was caused by loose monetary policy, a global capital glut, over-high leverage at investment banks, mandates from Congress to provide mortgages to people who could not afford them, flawed ratings from the rating agencies and poor incentives at mortgage origination (not the CEO) level. Consistent with this, the financial crisis has spread to financial institutions in other countries with very different pay practices.


The opposition's rebuttal remarks
Oct 23rd 2009 |  Nell Minow

The headlines are writing my rebuttal for me.
GoldmanSachs set aside $16.7 billion for compensation and benefits in the first nine months of 2009, up 46% from a year ago. While its net income has tripled, its core investment banking business is down 31%. The Toronto Star quotes Goldman's CFO, David Viniar, using an unforgivable oxymoron in a conference call with reporters: "Our competitors are paying people quite well [and are] very willing to pay employees guaranteed bonuses of very high amounts." (emphasis added)
MrViniar also showed that he has a very short memory, arguing that Goldman is operating without any government guarantee, ignoring the reality of the government guarantee that kept the system going just a year ago.
These bonuses have nothing to do with paying for performance. How much of Goldman's bouncing back is due to the government's guarantees and the hundreds of billions of dollars it poured into Goldman, Wall Street, and other subsidies and outright welfare payments to the very institutions that came close to bringing down the entire economy? Shouldn't the American people expect some sort of discounted calculation of the bonuses that reflect a market-based assessment of performance? Once again, Wall Street is all about capitalism when it comes to the upside, but all about socialism when it comes to the downside, that is, from each, according to his ability, to each, whatever he can get away with.
Also this week, we had the testimony of Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for the government's financial rescue programme before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The serial offender AIG has promised$198m in bonus pay to its employees next March, according to the testimony, and there is very little the government or anyone else can do about it. Because the bonus agreements were entered into before the bailout, the government has no legal authority to stop them. AllSpecial Master Kenneth Feinberg can do is ask the company not to pay the bonuses and rattle his sabre about the pay he can control going forward, hoping that the threat of clamping down on the 25 executives at each of the covered companies he does have authority over will be enough of an incentive to force a change. In the meantime, once again, pay is uncoupled from performance. Even the company has given up on trying to make that case, relying instead on opportunity costs to justify the bonuses and arguing that these kinds of payments are necessary in order to keep the employees from leaving. Based on their past performance and their unwillingness to tie future pay to genuine measures of sustainable growth, I suggest that the best choice for shareholders is to let them leave.
Mr Barofksy gave the committee a Treasury Department report on the last set of outrageous AIG bonuses. It concluded in part that "Treasury invested $40 billion of taxpayer funds in AIG, designed AIG's contractual executive compensation restrictions, and helped manage the Government's majority stake in AIG for several months, all without having any detailed information about the scope of AIG's very substantial, and very controversial, executive compensation obligations." If a private entity had been asked for emergency funds, it is unthinkable that any money would have been advanced without establishing some control overcompensation. There are two reasons for this. The first is agency costs. Anyone (other than Secretary Henry Paulson, apparently) putting money at risk will want to ensure that it will not be inappropriately appropriated. The second is the high likelihood（n.可能性） that the previous incentive structure was a significant factor in the bad decisions and catastrophic risk management that created the need for the funds in the first place.
And really, that is all the argument one needs. By definition, the incentive compensation was badly designed, as proved by the results. However, I will respond to some of the points raised by Professor Kaplan.
First, we disagree on the calculations that support the conclusion that CEO play has been declining. Our figures, based not on theoretical pay but on realised pay, are as follows.


Clearly actual pay is the better measure of pay effectiveness. I also question the validity of the Equilar survey figures. They are based on the reported total compensation in the summary compensationtable, which is even further from reality than the "expected pay", as it is just an accounting cost.
I do not understand why he brings up the net worth of CEOs; that has no relationship whatsoever to their pay, its relationship to performance, or its effectiveness ataligning CEOs' interests with shareholders'.
Second, Professor Kaplan states, "The typical CEO is paid for performance. Boards increasingly fire CEOs for poor performance." The second sentence has no relationship to the first. Boards may fire CEOs for poor performance, but they pay them boatloads of money for that performance on the way out of the door. Just look at Ken Lewis's departure from Bank of America. Disastrous performance that apparently included lying(about what else? bonuses) and an unprecedented vote of no confidence from shareholders that removed him as chairman, may indeed have caused him to be fired (though the board did not use that term). But his $53mretirement package does not feel like pay for performance to me.
Professor Kaplan tries to obscure the point by bringing in law firm partners, athletes and other highly-paid professionals. Partners in law firms are paid according to formulas set by the partnership. As in any other private firm, there are no agency costs to worry about and they can do whatever they like. Athletes, movie stars and recording artists, who have a much greater range and far greater elasticity in compensation,engage in vigorous arm's length negotiations on pay; their pay is not set by boards they appoint, as CEOs' is.
And it is hard for me to understand how anyone could point to the US or UK government authorising excessive pay as a validation of the system. As notedabove, the government has repeatedly failed as regulator or as provider of capital in curbing outrageously destructive executive compensation.
Here are seven deadly sins found in executive compensation plans. Each of them is conclusive evidence that the system is out of whack.
1.    Making up for losses in stock value with other grants of cash or stock.
2.    Imputed years of service to increase retirement benefits.
3.    Setting the performance goals too low or other phony metrics to trigger bonuses.
4.    Dividends on unvested stock.
5.    Outrageous departure packages.
6.    Stock options that are not performance-based or indexed.
7.    Perquisites and gross-ups.

In my next response, I will explain how to do it right.


Comments：
Shamefully, I didn’t get this debate quite well. Then I go back to the first piece of comments work, take a glance of it. I do have a better understanding of it. But still not as good as I should be.
The first round of debate is focus on the motion. Mr.Wooldridge conclude the two specialists’ arguments of this debate. Then Mr. Kanplan continues his conclusion by arguing Ms Minow’s view, which is that the top executive compensation was a major cause of the financial crisis. He quotes David Yermack’s words on what” the top CEOs’ financial reversals were just part of a robust system of pay-for-performance widely used by most U.S. companies”. And he says the CEOs’ pay decreased as the financial crisis happened. Also the CEOs were paid by performance. On the other hand, Ms Minow insist that CEOs took a big part of the companies financial supports. And she says the bonuses they had got had nothing to do with paying for performance.
Compared with these two people’s ways for debate, Mr. Kanplan’s article has good and clear structure, while Ms Minow is really good at quoting examples. That’s probably great if I can put them together in my writings. HOPE so.

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

12.26.
READING

Tech.view
Passwords aplenty
Dec 18th 2009 | LOS ANGELES
From Economist.com
How to stay sane as well as safe while surfing the web
AT THIS time of the year, your correspondent crosses the Pacific to Japan for a month or so. He repeats the trip during the summer. He considers it crucial in order to keep abreast of all the ingenious technology which, once debugged（debug：to remove a concealed microphone or wiretapping device from） by the world’s most acquisitive consumers, will wind up in American and European shops a year or two later.

Each time he packs his bags, though, he is embarrassed by having to include a dog-eared set of notes that really ought to be locked up in a safe（n.）. This is his list of logons and passwords for all the websites he uses for doing business and staying in touch with the rest of the world. At the last count, the inch-thick（这个形容词我怎么就不会用呢？） list accumulated over the past decade or so—your correspondent’s sole copy—includes access details for no fewer than 174 online services and computer networks.

Alamy
He admits to flouting the advice of security experts: his failings include using essentially the same logon and password for many similar sites, relying on easily remembered words—and, heaven forbid, writing them down on scraps of paper. So his new year’s resolution is to set up a proper software vault for the various passwords and ditch（v. to get rid of） the dog-eared list.

Your correspondent’s one consolation is that he is not alone in using easily crackable words for most of his passwords. Indeed, the majority of online users have an understandable aversion to strong, but hard-to-remember, passwords. The most popular passwords in Britain are “123” followed by “password”. At least people in America have learned to combine letters and numbers. Their most popular ones are “password1” followed by “abc123”.

Unfortunately, the easier a password is to remember, the easier it is for thieves to guess. Ironically, the opposite—the harder it is to remember, the harder it is to crack—is often far from true. That is because, not being able to remember long, jumbled（乱七八糟的） sets of alphanumeric（alpha+num+eric=文字数字的，包括文字数字的） characters interspersed with symbols, people resort to writing them down on Post-it notes left lying around the office or home for all and sundry（various） to see.

Apart from stealing passwords from Post-it notes and the like, intruders basically use one of two hacks to gain access to other people’s computers or networks. If time and money is no problem, they can use brute-force methods that simply try every combination of letters, numbers and symbols until a match is found. That takes a lot of patience and computing power, and tends to be the sort of thing only intelligence agencies indulge in.

A more popular, though less effective, way （插入语，以及怎么跟way断开和连接的用法——长见识了。）is to use commercial software tools such as “L0phtCrack” or “John the Ripper” that can be found on the internet. These use dictionaries, lists of popular passwords and rainbow tables (lookup tools that turn long numbers computed from alphanumeric characters back into their original plain text) to recover passwords.

According to Bruce Schneier, an independent security expert, today’s password crackers “can test tens—even hundreds—of millions of passwords per second.” In short, the vast majority of passwords used in the real world can be guessed in minutes. And do not think you are being smart by replacing the letters “l” or “i” in a password with the number “1”; or the letter “s” with the number “5” or the symbol “$”. Cracking programs check all such alternatives, and more, as a matter of course.

What should you do to protect yourself? Choose passwords that are strong enough to make cracking them too time consuming for thieves to bother.

The strength of a password depends on its length, complexity and randomness. A good length is at least eight symbols. The complexity depends on the character set. Using numbers alone limits the choice to just ten symbols. Add upper- and lower-case letters and the complexity rises to 62. Use all the symbols on a standard ASCII keyboard and you have 95 to choose from.

The third component, randomness, is measured by a concept borrowed from thermodynamics热力学—the notion of entropy （平均信息量）(the tendency for things to become disordered). In information theory, a tossed coin has an entropy of one “bit” (binary（二进制） digit). That is because it can come down randomly in one of two equally possible binary states.

At the other extreme, when you set the encryption of a Wi-Fi link, you are usually given the choice of 64-bit or even 128-bit security. Those bit-numbers represent the entropy (or randomness) of the encryption used. A password with 64 bits of entropy is as strong as a string of data comprising 64 randomly selected binary digits. Put another way, a 64-bit password would require 2 raised to the power of 64 attempts to crack it by brute force—in short, 18 billion billion attempts. A 64-bit password was finally cracked in 2002 using brute-force methods. It took a network of volunteers nearly five years to do so.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology, the American government’s standards-measuring laboratory in Gaithersburg, Maryland, recommends 80-bit passwords for state secrets and the like. Such security can be achieved using passwords with 12 symbols, drawn from the full set of 95 symbols on the standard American keyboard. For ordinary purposes, that would seem overkill. A 52-bit password based on eight symbols selected from the standard keyboard is generally adequate.

How to select the eight? Best to let a computer program generate them randomly for you. Unfortunately, the result will be something like 6sDt%k&3 that probably needs to be written down. One answer, only slightly less rigorous, is to use a mnemonic（记忆的） constructed from the first letters (plus contractions) of an easily remembered phrase like “Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” (MCa1otFA) or “To be or not to be: that is the question” (2Bo-2b:?).

Given a robust 52-bit password, you can then use a password manager to take care of the dozens of easily guessable ones used to access various web services. There are a number of perfectly adequate products for doing this. In an early attempt to fulfil his new year’s pledge（fulfill pledge）, your correspondent has been experimenting with LastPass, a free password manager that works as an add-on to the Firefox web browser for Windows, Linux or Macintosh. Versions also exist for Internet Explorer on Windows and Safari on the Mac.

Once installed and given a strong password of its own, plus an e-mail address, LastPass encrypts all the logons and passwords stored on your computer. So, be warned: forget your master password and you could be in trouble—especially if you have let the program delete (as it urges you to let it do) all the vulnerable logons and passwords on your own computer.

Thereafter, to visit various web services, all you have to do is log into LastPass and click the website you wish to check out. The tool then automatically logs you on securely to the selected site. It will even complete all the forms needed to buy goods online if you have stored your home address, telephone number and credit-card details in the vault as well.

Your correspondent looks forward to using the service while travelling around Japan over the next month or so. To be on the safe side, however, his dog-eared list of passwords will still go with him.


Comments：
It is very practical articles not only for correspondents but all of us who take computer as a close friend. The structure of this article is clear, which the end of it echoes the beginning in a humorous way. It begins by the narrative situation of correspondents. The fact is that a lot of people use the same passwords in different accounts of different website. According to the idea, we set the passwords should consider length(a good one is at least eight symbols), complexity(using the numbers and letters) and randomness(the most complicated and useful part. ).
The important information I got here is trying not to use the same passwords, the simple one. And the detail about post-it, to be honestly, I can’t live without it. Or, I would not get logon any of my accounts.
This kind of articles should not be difficult except the vocabularies.

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

Back to the future
Dec 19th 2009
From Economist.com
The taste for clutter（ a crowded or confused mass or collection ） and realism is curiously buoyant（capable of maintaining a satisfactorily high level）
WHILE the contemporary art market constantly seeks the new—new names, new imagery, new media or simply new novelty—another curious corner of the art market has remained steadfastly old-fashioned, cluttered and sentimental. With bad weather coming, much of London may have been preparing to shut down early for Christmas last week. But Christie’s sale of Victorian and British Impressionist pictures on December 16th and Sotheby’s sale of Victorian and Edwardian paintings the next day were surprisingly busy.


Of the two auctions, Sotheby’s was by far more successful, fetching £4.4m ($7.1m) for works by some of the best-known names of the period, including Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Sir Alfred Munnings, Dame Laura Knight and Charles Spencelayh. The cover lot, Spencelayh’s “The Old Dealer”, sold for a record price for the artist at auction. The buyer was David Mason, a London dealer who joined his father’s firm, MacConnal-Mason, when he was just 17. Mr Mason, who has seen recessions come and go in the 53 year he has been in the business, said afterwards: “Prices today reflect what is happening out there. People are discounting the coming inflation and buying quality. They know that inflation has always been the art dealer’s friend.”

Buyers in every sector of the art market, from Chinese porcelain （瓷器）to Old Masters, now seem to follow a pattern. They are happy to pay over the odds for top-ranking pictures, but leave the rest untouched. Nearly 40% of the lots in Sotheby’s sale were bought in. Its success lay in the high prices achieved for those that sold, half of which were bid up beyond their high estimate. Some pieces went for as much as four times what the auction house had predicted.

John Atkinson Grimshaw is a painter who celebrated industry, commerce and conspicuous wealth during Queen Victoria’s reign, dying in 1893. His works are often dark social commentaries featuring streets and portsides, full of ships’ rigging and lamplight that seems visually interchangeable with moonlight. Eight years ago Mr Mason sold an 1881 Grimshaw entitled “Prince’s Dock, Hull” to an American collector for £130,000. Consigning the picture to Sotheby’s, that same American saw his Grimshaw sell to an anonymous bidder for £397,250 (including commission and taxes), the third highest price achieved for the artist at auction.

Spencelayh, the son of an iron and brass founder, rose to be a prolific member of the Royal Academy of Arts and a favourite of Queen Mary. His work is, if anything, even more unfashionable-looking than Grimshaw’s. Spencelayh, who died in 1928, liked to paint fussy interiors. The most sought after are realistic pictures of men, often gathered around a table in a room full of clutter, with glazed jugs, books, umbrellas and pieces of velvet jumbled together. There is usually a pipe or two on the table, and there is nearly always a clock hanging on the wall.

A Manchester cotton merchant named Levy supported Spencelayh from the early 1920s. He offered the artist and his wife a house to live in and bought a number of his paintings. When Levy's widow, Rosie, auctioned his collection in 1946, the picture that fetched the highest sum was “The Old Dealer”, which Spencelayh had painted in 1925. It was sold again in 1973, where it was bought by Richard Green, a London dealer, on behalf of an American collector for about £30,000.

Consigned last week to Sotheby’s by this same collector, it sold for more than ten times that (£337,250 including commission and taxes) to Mr Mason. Mr Green, an earlier owner, was the underbidder. “It has everything you could want: the old man, the clock, the knickknacks（a small trivial article usually intended for ornament）,” Mr Mason said afterwards. “It is quite simply the best example of a Spencelayh I have ever seen.” Mr Mason said he bought the picture for stock, with no particular collector in mind.

“On the Cliffs” (pictured above) is one of a series of pictures that Laura Knight painted of women sitting high above the water on the Cornish coast. In one of the earliest examples, “Daughter of the Sun”, the women were naked. That picture did not sell when Knight exhibited it at the Royal Academy in 1912, and Knight later cut it up and sold the pieces after it had become damaged. She continued to be inspired by the Cornish theme in the years before the end of the first world war, after she and her husband moved to London. In “On the Cliffs” one woman is sewing while the other may be threading a needle. Both are strong, calm figures. Behind them the sea, silvery, shimmering and full of light, has the same idyllic quality of water painted at the time by the Scottish Colourists. But there are no men in any of Knight’s pictures of this period, reminding viewers that war was close at hand.

“On the Cliffs” sold to an anonymous bidder for £646,050, nearly twice the top estimate. Even at that price, many regard the painting as a bargain. In July, Galen Weston, a Canadian billionaire whose family owns Fortnum & Mason, bought the companion picture, “Wind and Sun”. It cost him £914,850.

John Atkinson Grimshaw is a painter who celebrated industry, commerce and conspicuous wealth during Queen Victoria’s reign, dying in 1893.
这个celebrate把我搞懵了。

"Old Master" (or "old master") is a term for a European painter of skill who worked before about 1800, or a painting by such an artist.In theory an Old Master should be an artist who was fully trained, was a Master of his local artists' guild, and worked independently, but in practice paintings considered to be produced by pupils or workshops will be included in the scope of the term. Therefore, beyond a certain level of competence, date rather than quality is the criterion for using the term.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Masters

Comments:
There are two points confuse me. First one is the title—BACK TO THE FUTURE, which I think it is a good one but can’t understand well. The second one is a word in a sentence.
On the whole, it’s clear structure help me much. The auctions are busy, people buy the paints at a high price compared to a few years ago. All the figures above, the author is trying to show us what exactly the art market is. “People are discounting the coming inflation and buying quality. They know that inflation has always been the art dealer’s friend”. Those words conclude what the author’s idea and the describing below.
Though, actually, I still am unfamiliar with the economic rule.

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

John Atkinson Grimshaw is a painter who celebrated industry, commerce and conspicuous wealth during Queen Victoria’s reign, dying in 1893. His works are often dark social commentaries featuring streets and portsides, full of ships’ rigging and lamplight that seems visually interchangeable with moonlight.
The explaination of "celebrate" in M-W is as follows:
transitive verb
1 : to perform (a sacrament or solemn ceremony) publicly and with appropriate rites
2 a : to honor (as a holiday) especially by solemn ceremonies or by refraining from ordinary business b : to mark (as an anniversary) by festivities or other deviation from routine
3 : to hold up or play up for public notice

I think this "celebrate" here is quite fit for the third explaination: to hold up or play up for public notice. John's works show the industry, commerce and conspicuous wealth during Queen Victoria's reign, which make the public think deeply about the dark society that time.

thank Adeline~~

海王泪UID: 2673613

128# 123runfordream

Though, actually, I still am unfamiliar with the economic rule.

It doesn't matter. Maybe I can help you sometimes.
The concept is very easy here, people bought articles as assets maintaining value.
In contrast, holding cash or keeping them in bank would suffer from value depreciation as inflation in money.

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

130# 海王泪

people bought articles as assets maintaining value

arts?right?
but how could you know the art piece would be valuable? that's the problem confuse me.

海王泪UID: 2673613

131# 123runfordream

I use "article" as "object" , and in your words as "art piece".  Doesn't it works?

Why is art piece valuable?
As far as I concern, it has basic value and extra value.

First, art piece has aesthetic value as its basic value. Truly valuable art can provoke our emotion and people are willing to pay for appreciation. Art is signal, it stimulate our brain.
Reference: “How art made world.” (In this video you may learn why we need art.)
http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/avTa5pTZsOM/

If you accept that people need art, what confused you must be the extra value determined by growing demand and limited supply. Maybe you doubt if the price of art is too high. But I think it is normally driven by the market force.

Supply of masterpiece is limited for the following two reasons: 1.Existent number is little; 2.Circulating number is small, when people tend to stock them rather than to frequently deal in them. In other words, a thing is valued in proportion to its rarity.

And demand is growing, because more people become richer and richer. Those richer develop greater interests in various luxuries and they certainly can afford art. There must be someone, psychologically, believes that a painting is worth a higher price, then he or she buy it. Such process keeps running. Thus "the art piece’s success in extra value lay in the high prices achieved for the last buyer".

Finally, although the price would fluctuate, the general trend is upward and stable. Hardly could people refuse to believe that art piece can serve as good investment. Therefore some speculators who hold expectation of future higher price come into being and make great contribution to the current art market. That's why Mr. Mason in today's eco said:"...inflation has always been the art dealer’s friend."

qxn_1987UID: 2610437

加油！:)

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

132# 海王泪

you enlighten me.   Vincent van Gogh must be rich if he had born in this century.

miki7catUID: 2533330

I think the title "Back to the future" means that buyers now prefer old-fashioned articles because they are
1. proved valuable for collection and deal.
2. able to remain viewers what happened before. The example of “On the Cliffs” seems to show this purpose.

Thanks for the 海王泪's explanation.