1006G[REBORN FROM THE ASHES组]备考日记 by 正常点——任何的失败都有太多的必然

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

Comments:

Well, we have come up with the issue concerning about the current arts market against the background of finial crisis. To the majority’s surprise, the real fact is that the amount of good work cannot satisfy the appetite of the current demand, which has to turn to the private arts market in the end. As the author says, what makes this slump different from the last
is that there are still buyers in the market, whereas in the early 1990s, when interest rates were high, there was no demand even though many collectors wanted to sell.

Maybe it is all about a game involving investors, collectors and auctioneers within in the rules of imbalance of supply and demand. Of course, the pivotal role of interest must take into consideration as well. In fact, the key to rescue the world arts market from its unprecedented plight lies in the globalization. It seems that solutions to every worldwide difficult problem roots in globalization deeply. Recently, the agreement of Copenhagen Climate Conference provides a typical example of global cooperation, in spite of its outstanding disputes. On the other hand, the consequence without statutory restriction implies that there are numerous challenges in terms of the free-rider problem and so on. However, wealth, arts, resources and science would break through the artificial barriers thanks to the globalization in the long run.

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

A special report on the art market
Suspended animation（假死）
Nov 26th 2009 From The Economist print edition

The art market has suffered from the recession, but globalisation should help it recover, say Fiammetta Rocco (interviewed here) and Sarah Thornton

Sothebys

THE longest bull（公牛，废物） run in a century of art-market history ended on a dramatic note with a sale of 56 works by Damien Hirst, “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever”, at Sotheby’s in London on September 15th 2008 (see picture). All but two pieces sold, fetching more than £70m, a record for a sale by a single artist. It was a last hurrah（欢呼）. As the auctioneer called out bids, in New York one of the oldest banks on Wall Street, Lehman Brothers, filed for(申请) bankruptcy.

The world art market had already been losing momentum for a while after rising vertiginously（眩晕） since 2003. At its peak in 2007 it was worth some $65 billion, reckons Clare McAndrew, founder of Arts Economics, a research firm—double the figure five years earlier. Since then it may have come down to $50 billion. But the market generates interest far beyond its size because it brings together great wealth, enormous egos, greed, passion and controversy in a way matched by few other industries.

In the weeks and months that followed Mr Hirst’s sale, spending of any sort became deeply unfashionable, especially in New York, where the （保释）bail-out of the banks（银行摆脱困境） coincided with the loss of thousands of jobs and the financial demise（消亡） of many art-buying investors. In the art world that meant collectors stayed away from galleries and salerooms. Sales of contemporary art fell by two-thirds, and in the most overheated sector（部门）—for Chinese contemporary art—they were down by nearly 90% in the year to November 2008. Within weeks the world’s two biggest auction houses, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, had to pay out nearly $200m in guarantees to clients who had placed works for sale with them（让他们代为销售物品）.

The current downturn in the art market is the worst since the Japanese stopped buying Impressionists at the end of 1989, a move that started the most serious contraction in the market since the second world war. This time experts reckon that prices are about 40% down on their peak on average, though some have been far more volatile（易变的，挥发的）. But Edward Dolman, Christie’s chief executive, says: “I’m pretty confident we’re at the bottom.”
What makes this slump different from the last, he says, is that there are still buyers in the market, whereas in the early 1990s, when interest rates were high, there was no demand even though many collectors wanted to sell. Christie’s revenues in the first half of 2009 were still higher than in the first half of 2006. Almost everyone who was interviewed for this special report said that the biggest problem at the moment is not a lack of demand but a lack of good work to sell. The three Ds—death, debt and divorce—still deliver works of art to the market. But anyone who does not have to sell is keeping away, waiting for confidence to return.

The best that can be said about the market at the moment is that it is holding its breath（屏住呼吸）. But this special report will argue that it will bounce back, and that the key to its recovery lies in globalisation. The supply of the best works of art will always be limited, but in the longer run demand is bound to rise as wealth is spreading ever more widely across the globe.

The World Wealth Report, published by Capgemini and Merrill Lynch, charts the spending（花费的，奢侈的） habits of the rich the world over. It includes art as one of a range of luxury items they like to buy. According to the report, in 2007 there were over 10m people with investible assets of $1m or more. Last year that number dropped to 8.6m and many rich people scaled back their “investments of passion”—yachts, jets（喷气机）, cars, jewellery and so on. But the proportion of all luxury spending that went on art increased as investors looked for assets that would hold their value in the longer term.

The regional spread of buyers also changed significantly as some parts of the world became relatively richer. During the boom the number of wealthy people in Russia, India, China and the Middle East rose rapidly. In 2003 Sotheby’s biggest buyers—those who purchased lots costing at least $500,000—came from 36 countries. By 2007 they were spread over 58 countries and their total number had tripled.

That upward trend is still continuing, and many of the new buyers take a particular interest in the art of their own place and time. Last year China overtook France as the world’s third-biggest art market after America and Britain (see chart 1), and some 25% by value of the 100,000-plus works of art sold by Christie’s went to buyers from Russia, Asia and the Middle East.

Auction records remain dominated by Impressionist and modern works (see table 2), but the biggest expansion in recent years has been in contemporary art. Prices of older works keep going up as more people have money to spend, but few such works become available because both collectors and museums tend to hold on to what they have. Old Master paintings, for example, have stuck（停驻） at around 5% of both Sotheby’s and Christie’s sales for many years. By contrast, contemporary art, which in the early 1990s accounted for less than 10% of Sotheby’s revenues, grew to nearly 30% of greatly increased revenues by last year. Dealers and auction houses now sell more post-war and contemporary art than anything else. This report will concentrate on that part of the market, which accounts for about half the world’s art trade and most of the excitement.

Part of the extra demand has come from a large increase in the number of museums. Over the past 25 years more than 100 have been built, not only in America and Europe but also in the sheikhdoms（酋长国） of the Persian Gulf and the fast-growing cities in Asia; sometimes in partnership with Western institutions, such as the Guggenheim or the Louvre, sometimes on their own. Many of these institutions have made their mark by buying contemporary art.

Over the same period the number of wealthy private collectors has also increased many times over, and so has their diversity. The record price for one of Andy Warhol’s giant faces of Chairman Mao was $17.4m, paid by Joseph Lau, a Hong Kong property developer. It was the first major Warhol to go to the Far East. A month later the Qatar royal family bought a Hirst pill cabinet, entitled “Lullaby Spring”, for £9.7m, the first major Hirst bound for the Middle East. Everyone wants an iconic（偶像的）
work, which helps explain the global demand for artists such as Warhol, Jeff Koons and Mr Hirst—and the eye-watering（泪水盈眶）
prices such work can command.
Masters of the art universe

Straddling（跨越） all areas of the art market is a handful of individuals who have emerged as the key figures in the art world in recent years. Chief among them is François Pinault, a luxury-goods billionaire who is also a noted collector of contemporary art and the owner of Christie’s. Philippe Ségalot, his French-born adviser, was behind one of the biggest deals involving a single work of art, the private sale of Warhol’s 1963 painting, “Eight Elvises”, to an anonymous buyer for over $100m.

Mr Ségalot is also believed to be advising the royal family of Qatar, which in the past two years has spent large sums buying modern art at auction, including record-breaking works by Mark Rothko and Mr Hirst. Steven Cohen, an American hedge-fund billionaire, also owns works by Warhol, Mr Hirst and Mr Koons. Mr Cohen used to be a sizeable shareholder（股东） of Sotheby’s and is still an important provider of liquidity to art buyers.

The popularity of blockbuster（一鸣惊人） art exhibitions and the emergence of buyers with a different cultural history have helped change tastes. Artists such as Edvard Munch and Vasily Kandinsky rose sharply after solo shows in London and New York. Alexei von Jawlensky and Emil Nolde were regarded as specialist interests until Russian collectors began seeking them out. Zhao Wuji used to be just another Chinese painter-in-exile（流亡）; now he is recognised as an Abstract Expressionist master influenced by Paul Klee and praised by both Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso.
How to sell it

One of the biggest changes since the market last peaked in 1989 has been the expansion of the auction houses and the change in the nature of the dealer business. Twenty years ago auction houses sold to dealers, and dealers sold to private customers. Today many collectors are advised by auctioneers, both at sales and privately.

Rising costs brought trouble to many old-fashioned fine-art dealer emporiums（商场）. In London Christopher Gibbs has sold his stock and Partridge is in administration. In Paris Galerie Segoura has closed, as has Salvatore Romano in Florence. Many dealers now prefer to take art works on consignment, matching sellers to buyers for a commission rather than investing in stocks of art.

About half the market’s business, reckons Ms McAndrew of Arts Economics, is conducted at public auctions, with Christie’s and Sotheby’s taking the lion’s share（占很大的份额）. Smaller houses include Drouot in Paris, Bonhams, which is based in London but has several offices abroad, and Doyle in New York. The other half is generated by private dealers and galleries that are notoriously secretive（守口如瓶）. One of the biggest private deals in recent years came to light only because the details were disclosed in an American court following the Bernard Madoff scandal. Last July ten paintings by Rothko and two sculptures by Alberto Giacometti were sold by a New York financier to help repay Mr Madoff’s investors. A mystery buyer spent $310m on the works. Two dealers earned $37.5m in fees.

By comparison with that private world, Sotheby’s and Christie’s auction business looks like a model of transparency. Although buyers and sellers are rarely named, the auction price is public. Yet even here there are dark corners. The leading auctioneers offer inducements such as guaranteed prices to persuade sellers to part with their treasures, and generous（慷慨） terms of payment for buyers.

One thing that differentiates the two auction houses is their ownership structure. Sotheby’s is a quoted company whereas Christie’s, once listed, was taken private in 1999 by its current owner, Mr Pinault. Christie’s business has since expanded hugely, partly thanks to Mr Pinault’s pivotal（关键的）
position in the international art world. Even though the company can pick and choose what information it wants to reveal, it has in fact become more open over the past ten years.

Sotheby’s, for its part, is still smarting from the public beating it received in America nearly a decade ago when its chairman, Alfred Taubman, and its chief executive, Diana Brooks, were found guilty of conspiring with Christie’s to fix commissions（固定佣金）. Mr Taubman served ten months of a one-year prison sentence; Mrs Brooks was given six months’ house arrest, a $350,000 fine and 1,000 hours of community service. No one was charged at Christie’s, which had blown（吹）
the whistle on the commission-fixing. Sotheby’s lives in fear of the regulators and discloses only as much financial information as it has to.

In the decade since the scandal both auction houses have concentrated on expansion. Sotheby’s was the first auctioneer to become interested in Russia and remains bigger there than its rival（对手）. Christie’s, which has long been especially strong in the Far East, has put a lot of effort into China. Foreigners are not allowed to own auction houses there, but Christie’s has got around that by signing a licensing agreement with a leading Chinese auctioneer. Both houses have their eye on the Middle East. Christie’s holds regular auctions in Dubai, of which its art and jewellery sales are the most successful. Sotheby’s has opened an office in Qatar which is important for its relationship with the Qatar royal family, one of its biggest clients.

The response of both auction houses to the current slump（暴跌，不景气）
has been broadly similar: staff cuts, unpaid leave, a squeeze on salaries, slashed marketing and travel budgets（旅游市场营销和削减预算）, and an edict（法令） that the glossy（光辉的，有光泽的） auction catalogues（目录）, which in the boom（繁荣） cost each of them £25m a year to produce, were no longer to be handed out（分发） like chocolate drops.

With a hugely expanded international client base, it was only a matter of time before both auctioneers started to muscle in（强行加入） on areas that had previously been the preserve of private dealers, matching buyers and sellers and selling new art rather than items that had already been in the market. Sotheby’s proved to be much the more ruthless（无情） of the two. All the lots in Mr Hirst’s September 2008 sale, for example, had been consigned to Sotheby’s directly from the artist’s workshop, which shocked dealers who had not previously thought of the auction houses as direct competitors.

In 2006 Sotheby’s paid $56.5m for Noortman Master Paintings, a leading dealer in Old Masters. Less than a year later Christie’s bought Haunch of Venison, another high-profile（外形，轮廓）（高调） dealer set up in 2002, whose founders included a former director of Christie’s contemporary-art department. Noortman gave Sotheby’s an entry into the Maastricht Art Fair（博览会）, the pre-eminent dealers’ fest（卓越的经销商巨星）, and Haunch of Venison helped make Christie’s Mr Pinault the biggest art trader in the market. Both galleries operate independently of the auction houses, but the relationships are close.

All things to all men（对什么人说什么话，八面玲珑）

Both auction houses have also put a lot of effort into advising buyers on how to improve their collections. As Jussi Pylkkanen, Christie’s European president, says, “We’re much more than an auction house now.” The recession has made many collectors nervous about offering their treasures at auction, so they are selling them privately（私人的，背地的）. In 2007 Christie’s chalked up（记下） private sales of $542m and Sotheby’s of $730m, which means the two auction houses are now among the world’s biggest private dealers. Both often get calls like the one Sotheby’s recently took from a Moscow collector with $2m to spend on an “optimistic” Chagall oil, “not too feminine” and no more than a metre in height. “We put out the word and immediately received several offers from our offices in London, Geneva and New York,” says Mikhail Kamensky, the firm’s head of CIS business.

In 2007 private deals accounted for 8.7% of Christie’s business. Mr Pylkkanen expects that figure to go up to 20% of its revenue within three years. That should put the wind up（使…害怕） private dealers.

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

A special report on China and America

A wary(小心，谨慎) respect

Oct 22nd 2009 From The Economist print edition


America and China need each other, but they are a long way from trusting each other, says James Miles.

“OUR future history will be more determined by our position on the Pacific facing China than by our position on the Atlantic facing Europe,” said the American president as he contemplated the extraordinary（非凡的） commercial opportunities that were opening up in Asia. More than a hundred years after Theodore Roosevelt made this prediction, American leaders are again looking across the Pacific to determine their own country’s future, and that of the rest of the world. Rather later than Roosevelt expected, China has become an inescapable part of it.

Back in 1905, America was the rising power. Britain, then ruler of the waves, was worrying about losing its supremacy to the upstart. Now it is America that looks uneasily on the rise of a potential challenger. A shared cultural and political heritage helped America to eclipse(蒙蔽) British power without bloodshed, but the rise of Germany and Japan precipitated(促成，加快) global wars. President Barack Obama faces a China that is growing richer and stronger while remaining tenaciously authoritarian（顽强的专制）. Its rise will be far more nettlesome than that of his own country a century ago.

With America’s economy in tatters（碎片） and China’s still growing fast (albeit not as fast as before last year’s financial crisis), many politicians and intellectuals in both China and America feel that the balance of power is shifting more rapidly in China’s favor(对...有利). Few expect the turning point to be as imminent as it was for America in 1905. But recent talk of a “G2” hints at a remarkable shift in the two countries’ relative strengths: they are now seen as near-equals whose co-operation is vital to solving the world’s problems, from finance to climate change and nuclear proliferation(扩散)
Choose your weapons

Next month Mr Obama will make his first ever visit to China. He and his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao (pictured above) stress the need for co-operation and avoid playing up their simmering（酝酿） trade disputes, fearful of what failure to co-operate could mean. On October 1st China offered a stunning（惊人的） display of the hard edge of its rising power as it paraded its fast-growing military arsenal through Beijing.

The financial crisis has sharpened(消尖，消减) fears of what Americans often see as another potential threat. China has become the world’s biggest lender（贷款人） to America through its purchase of American Treasury securities, which in theory would allow it to wreck（摧毁，破坏） the American economy. These fears ignore the value-destroying (and, for China’s leaders, politically hugely embarrassing) effect(价值破坏效应) that a sell-off(抛售) of American debt would have on China’s dollar reserves. This special report will explain why China will continue to lend to America, and why the yuan is unlikely to become a reserve currency(储备货币) soon.

When Lawrence Summers was president of Harvard University (he is now Mr Obama’s chief economic adviser), he once referred to a “balance of financial terror(恐怖，危机)” between America and its foreign creditors（债权人）, principally China and Japan. That was in 2004, when Japan’s holdings were more than four times the size of China’s. By September 2008 China had taken the lead. China Daily, an official English-language newspaper, said in July that China’s massive holdings of US Treasuries meant it could break the dollar’s (储备)reserve-currency status any time. But it also noted that in effect(实际上) this was a “foreign-exchange version of the cold-war stalemate（僵局） based on ‘mutually assured destruction’”.

China is exploring the rubble(暴民) of the global economy in hopes of accelerating its own rise. Some Chines`e commentators point to the example of the Soviet Union, which exploited(利用，开发) Western economic disarray during the Depression to acquire industrial technology from desperate Western sellers. China has long chafed at(恼火) controls imposed by America on high-technology exports that could be used for military purposes. It sees America’s plight as a cue to push for the lifting of such barriers and for Chinese companies to look actively for buying opportunities among America’s high-technology industries.

The economic crisis briefly slowed the rapid growth, from a small base, of China’s outbound direct investment. Stephen Green of Standard Chartered predicts that this year it could reach about the same level as in 2008 (nearly $56 billion, which was more than twice as much as the year before). Some Americans worry about China’s FDI, just as they once mistakenly did about Japan’s buying sprees(狂热), but many will welcome the stability and employment that it provides.

China may have growing financial muscle, but it still lags far behind as a technological innovator and creator of global brands. This special report will argue that the United States may have to get used to a bigger Chinese presence on its own soil, including some of its most hallowed turf(草坪), such as the car industry. A Chinese man may even get to the moon before another American. But talk of a G2 is highly misleading. By any measure, China’s power is still dwarfed by America’s.

Authoritarian though China remains, the two countries’ economic philosophies are much closer than they used to be. As Yan Xuetong of Tsinghua University puts it, socialism with Chinese characteristics (as the Chinese call their brand of communism) is looking increasingly like capitalism（资本主义） with American characteristics. In Mr Yan’s view, China’s and America’s common interest in dealing with the financial crisis will draw them closer together strategically too. Global economic integration（一体化）, he argues with a hint of resentment, has made China “more willing than before to accept America’s dominance”.

The China that many American business and political leaders see is one that appears to support the status quo and is keen to engage peacefully with the outside world. But there is another side to the country. Nationalism is a powerful, growing and potentially disruptive force. Many Chinese—even among those who were educated in America—are suspicious of American intentions and resentful of American power. They are easily persuaded that the West, led by the United States, wants to block China’s rise.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the restoration of diplomatic ties between America and China, which proved a dramatic turning point in the cold war. Between the communist victory in 1949 and President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972 there had been as little contact between the two countries as there is between America and North Korea today. But the eventual disappearance of the two countries’ common enemy, the Soviet Union, raised new questions in both countries about why these two ideological rivals should be friends. Mutual economic benefit emerged as a winning answer. More recently, both sides have been trying to reinforce the relationship by stressing that they have a host of new common enemies, from global epidemics to terrorism.

But it is a relationship fraught with contradictions. A senior American official says that some of his country’s dealings with China are like those with the European Union; others resemble those with the old Soviet Union, “depending on what part of the bureaucracy you are dealing with”.

Cold-war parallels(对比) are most obvious in the military arena. China’s military build-up in the past decade has been as spectacular（壮观） as its economic growth, catalysed by the ever problematic issue of Taiwan, the biggest thorn in the Sino-American relationship. There are growing worries in Washington, DC, that China’s military power could challenge America’s wider military dominance in the region. China insists there is nothing to worry about. But even if its leadership has no plans to displace American power in Asia, this special report will say that America is right to fret that this could change.

Politically, China is heading for a particularly unsettled period as preparations gather pace for sweeping leadership changes in 2012 and 2013. Mr Hu and the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, will be among many senior politicians due to retire(退休). As America moves towards its own presidential elections in 2012, its domestic politics will complicate matters. Taiwan too will hold presidential polls in 2012 in which China-sceptic politicians will fight to regain power.
Triple hazard

This political uncertainty in all three countries simultaneously will be a big challenge for the relationship between China and America. All three will still be grappling（努力解决） with the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Urban Chinese may be feeling relaxed right now, but there could be trouble ahead. Yu Yongding, a former adviser to China’s central bank, says wasteful spending on things like unnecessary infrastructure projects (which is not uncommon in China) could eventually drain the country’s fiscal（财政） strength and leave it with “no more drivers for growth”. In recent weeks even Chinese leaders have begun to sound the occasional note of caution about the stability of China’s recovery.

This special report will argue that the next few years could be troubled ones for the bilateral(双边) relationship. China, far more than an economically challenged America, is roiled by social tensions. Protests are on the rise, corruption is rampant, crime is surging. The leadership is fearful of its own citizens. Mr Obama is dealing with a China that is at risk of overestimating its strength relative to America’s. Its frailties(弱点)—social, political and economic—could eventually imperil both its own stability and its dealings with the outside world.

aladdin.ivyUID: 2596664

正常点别忘了自己抢的Argument翻译题哦
加油加油！
帮你贴上来
http://bbs.gter.ce.cn/bbs/thread-1042763-2-1.html

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

Comments：
Accordingto the author, China has got trapped in the mash of social, political and economicthreats, which would undermine its stability in the long run. First of all, noone can deny the fact that China still falls behind America in some aspects,such as the technology creation. At the same time, the increasingly seriousproblems-rising protest, rampant corruption and surging crime-get in the way ofChinese prosperity.


However,there is nothing wrong with totalitarian and patriotism in the Chinese land. Thehistory has taught us a lesson that a government with strong central power doesnot mean the ignorance of democracy and the deprivation of human rights. It isnot wise to allow everyone to make his choice with absolute freedom, for hemust take his own demand into consideration first. The same is true for thestate governments when making their own policy. On the contrary, the totalitarianpaves the way for the collective power aimed at making policy from an overall pointof view. Besides, the centralism could provide opportunities to gathering resourcesfrom the whole country as well as making use of the national power.


What’smore, the patriotism is seen as a traditional virtue in our ancient culture.Facing the numerous challenges, Chinese people have already learned the appropriateway to deal with them. To illustrate this point clearly, here’s a good example.April 19, a Chinese student made a solemn and exciting speech to demonstratehis support for Beijing Olympic 2008 and boycott against the unjust media. His philosophicaland logical reasoning, analytical formulation, authentic French, passionate,beautiful voice and sooth but bombarding like speed made the Chinese cheeredand the French shocked and ecstatic. This event implies that the Chinese areshaking off the yoke of irritation/hot temper and getting used to settling disputerationally.


In sum, though China and America differin numerous ways, the both sides are making their efforts to pursue themutually economic development in the frame of peace.

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

哦，今天，不，是昨天的作业终于补好了，乎~~:L

Argument的翻译作业：
142. The article entitled 'Eating Iron' in last month's issue of Eating for Health reported that a recent study found a correlation between high levels of iron in the diet and an increased risk of heart disease. Further, it is well established that there is a link between large amounts of red meat in the diet and heart disease, and red meat is high in iron. On the basis of the study and the well-established link between red meat and heart disease, we can conclude that the correlation between high iron levels and heart disease, then, is most probably a function of the correlation between red meat and heart disease.

上一期的《健康饮食》杂志上刊登的题为《食铁》的文章报导说最近一项研究发现饮食中铁的含量过高与心脏病发病风险增加有关联。而且，我们已经知道饮食中大量的牛羊肉和心脏病是有联系的，牛羊肉中铁的含量很高。基于以上研究和牛羊肉与心脏病之间的已知联系，我们可以得出结论，高的铁含量与心脏病之间的关联最有可能对牛羊肉与心脏病之间的关联起作用。

143. The following appeared as a letter to the editor of a national newspaper.

"Your recent article on corporate downsizing* in the United States is misleading. The article gives the mistaken impression that many competent workers who lost jobs as a result of downsizing face serious economic hardship, often for years,before finding other suitable employment. But this impression is contradicted by a recent report on the United States economy, which found that since 1992 far more jobs have been created than have been eliminated. The report also demonstrates that many of those who lost their jobs have found new employment. Two-thirds of the newly created jobs have been in industries that tend to pay above-average wages, and the vast majority of these jobs are full-time." Downsizing is the process in which corporations deliberately reduce the number of their employees.

你们最近关于美国集体裁员的文章是有误导性的。该文章给人们一种错误的印象，即许多因公司裁员而失业的有能力的人通常要经过几年的经济困难期才能找到另一个合适的工作。但这种感觉与最近一次关于美国经济的报告相矛盾，报告发现自1992年以来新增的就业机会数量远多于裁员岗位数量。该报告也指出很多失业人员已经找到了新工作。新增就业机会中有三分之二来源于提供平均水平以上薪酬的行业，而且绝大多数的这类工作是全职工作。裁员时一个公司故意减少雇员的过程。

144. According to a poll of 200 charitable organizations, donations of money to nonprofit groups increased by nearly 25 percent last year, though not all charities gained equally. Religious groups gained the most (30 percent), followed by environmental groups (23 percent), whereas educational institutions experienced only a very small increase in donations (3 percent). This poll indicates that more people are willing and able to give money to charities but that funding for education is not a priority for most people. These differences in donation rates must result from the perception that educational institutions are less in need of donations than are other kinds of institutions.

根据一项针对200个慈善组织的调查，去年对于非营利团体的捐款上升了将近25％，但并非所有组织都增幅相同。宗教团体增幅最大（30％），其次为环境组织（23％），而教育机构所获捐款仅有少量增长（3％）。这一调查说明有更多的人愿意而且有能力为慈善组织捐款，但资助教育并不是大多数人的首选。这些捐款数额上的差异一定是因为人们认为教育机构没有其他组织更需要资助。

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

A special report on the world economy

The long climb

Oct 1st 2009 From The Economist print edition

The world economy is recovering from financial disaster. But it will not return to normal as we know it, says Simon Cox (interviewed here)

NEWPORT BEACH, California, is not a bad place to contemplate the future of the world economy. Its information office(新闻办公室) promises nine miles of pristine sand（原始沙地）, fine dining（餐厅） for devoted epicureans and an atmosphere of laid-back（松懈懒散） sophistication（诡辩）. Yet students of economic turmoil（风暴） will find their subject matter conveniently close to hand. California’s unemployment rate has doubled to 12.2% since the start of 2008. Saddled with（背上，承受，拖累） the worst credit rating in the country, the “Golden State” is cutting spending on schools, prisons and health care for the elderly, as well as closing parks and laying off（休息） staff for three days a month. It will pay its workers a day late at the end of the fiscal year so that the expense will show up in next year’s budget. Financial shenanigans（恶作剧，欺骗，诡计） are not the sole province of the banking industry.

Newport Beach is also the home of Pimco, the biggest bond（债券） manager in the world, which handles $840 billion on behalf of pension funds（养老金，抚恤金）, universities and other clients. In May the company held its annual “Secular Forum”, in which it tries to peer five years into the economic future. After two days of rumination（反刍，深思）, Pimco’s laid-back sophisticates concluded that the financial markets may well “revert to mean（回归平均值）”, which is a statistician（统计员）’s way of saying that what comes down must go up. But the next five years will not resemble the five preceding the crisis. Not every change wrought（制成） by the financial breakdown will be reversed. The world economy is fitfully（不定的，断断续续的） getting back to normal, but it will be a “new normal”.


That phrase has caught on（理解）, even if people disagree about what it means. In the new normal, as defined by Pimco’s CEO, Mohamed El-Erian, growth will be subdued and unemployment will remain high. “The banking system will be a shadow of its former self,” and the securitisation markets, which buy and sell marketable（适销对路） bundles of debt, will presumably be a shadow of a shadow. Finance will be costlier and investment weak, so the stock of physical capital（物质资本）, on which prosperity depends, will erode.

The crisis invited a forceful government entry into several of capitalism’s inner sanctums（书房）, such as banking, American carmaking and the commercial-paper（商业票据） market. Mr El-Erian worries that the state may overstay its welcome（逗留过久而使人生厌）. In addition, national exchequers may start to feel some measure of the fiscal strain now hobbling（蹒跚，阻碍） California. America’s Treasury, in particular, must demonstrate that it is still a “responsible shepherd（牧羊人，领导） of other countries’ savings”.

The notion of a “new normal” is convincing, even if you do not agree with every particular. But some forecasters now harbour（心怀，包庇，躲藏，潜伏） higher expectations. They think the economy will bounce back to its old self, almost as if nothing had happened. They draw inspiration from the work of the late Milton Friedman, who showed that in America deep recessions are generally followed by strong recoveries. He likened the economy to a piece of string stretched taut（紧绷） on a board. The more forcefully the string is plucked（拉）, the more sharply it snaps back（反弹，回应）.

Friedman’s piece of string represents the demand side of the economy: the sum of spending by households, firms, foreigners and the government. The rigid board(硬板) symbolises the supply side. When spending is strong enough, the economy’s resources are fully employed, allowing it to realise its full potential. As the workforce grows, capital accumulates and technology advances, this limit expands over time.
String theory

In a recession demand falls short of supply, leaving a sorry trail of unemployed workers, shuttered factories and unexploited innovations. But when the recovery arrives, Friedman suggested, it is all the more forceful because these resources have been lying idle, waiting to be brought back into production. The economy can grow faster than normal for a period until it reaches the point where it would have been without the crisis, when it reaches its full potential again (see chart 1, scenario 1).

Friedman’s story is heartening, but it can come unstuck in two ways. If the shortfall in demand persists it can do lasting damage to supply, reducing the level of potential output (scenario 2) or even its rate of growth (scenario 3). If so, the economy will never recoup（补偿） its losses, even after spending picks up again.

Why should a swing in spending do such lasting harm? In a recession firms shed labour and mothball capital（后备资本，储备物资）. If workers are left on the shelf too long, their skills will atrophy and their ties to the world of work will weaken. When spending revives, the recovery will leave them behind. Output per worker may get back to normal, but the rate of employment will not.

Something similar can happen to the economy’s assembly lines, computer terminals and office blocks. If demand remains weak, firms will stop adding to this stock of capital and may scrap some of it. Capital will shrink to fit a lower level of activity. Moreover, if the financial system remains in disrepair, savings will flow haltingly to companies and the cost of capital will rise. Firms will therefore use less of it per unit of output.

The result is a lower ceiling on production. In the IMF’s latest World Economic Outlook, its researchers count the cost of 88 banking crises over the past four decades. They find that, on average, seven years after a bust an economy’s level of output was almost 10% below where it would have been without the crisis.

This is an alarming gap. If replicated in the years to come, it would blight the lives of the unemployed, diminish the fortunes of those in work and make the public debt harder to sustain. But even worse scenarios are possible. A financial breakdown could do lasting damage to the growth in potential output as well as to its level. Even when the economy begins to expand, it may not regain the same pace as before.

Financial crises can pose such a threat to national incomes because of the way they erode national wealth. From the start of 2008 to the spring of this year the crisis knocked $30 trillion off the value of global shares and $11 trillion off the value of homes, according to Goldman Sachs, an investment bank. At their worst, these losses amounted to about 75% of world GDP. But despite their enormous scale, it is not immediately obvious why these losses should cause a lasting decline in economic activity. Natural disasters also wipe out wealth by destroying buildings, possessions and infrastructure, but the economy rarely slows in their aftermath. On the contrary, output often picks up during a period of reconstruction. Why should a financial disaster be any different?

The answer lies on the other side of the balance-sheet. Before the crisis the overpriced assets held by banks and households were accompanied by vast debts. After the crisis their assets were shattered but their liabilities remained standing. As Irving Fisher, a scholar of the Depression, pointed out, “overinvestment and overspeculation…would have far less serious results were they not conducted with borrowed money.”

Japan found this out to its cost in the 1990s after the bursting of a spectacular bubble（泡影，幻想） in property and stock prices. For a “lost decade” from 1992 the economy stagnated（停滞）, never recovering the growth rates posted in the 1980s. Richard Koo of the Nomura Research Institute in Tokyo calls Japan’s ordeal a “balance-sheet(资产负债表) recession”.

The typical post-war recession begins when the flow of spending in the economy puts a strain on（对...造成沉重压力） its resources, forcing prices upwards. Central banks raise interest rates to slow spending（经费） to a more sustainable pace. Once inflation has subsided, the authorities are free to turn the taps back on（重新打开水龙头）.

But in a “balance-sheet recession”, what must be corrected is not a flow but a stock. After the bubble burst, Japan’s companies were left with liabilities that far exceeded their assets. Rather than file for bankruptcy, they set about paying down their stock of debt to a manageable level. This was a protracted slog（持久的苦干） which, by Mr Koo’s reckoning, did not finish until 2005. In the meantime Japan’s economy stagnated. By 2002 its output was almost 23% below its pre-crisis trajectory（轨道，航线）.

Since Pimco’s forum concluded in May, the world economy has palpably（具体可见的） improved. In many ways the new normal is beginning to look a lot like the old, vindicating（维护，开脱，表白） Friedman’s plucking（抓住） model. China is outpacing expectations. Goldman Sachs is making hay（弄混乱）. The premium（保险） banks（溢价银行） must pay to borrow overnight（通宵） from each other is now below 0.25%, the level Alan Greenspan, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve, once described as “normal”. Companies in Europe and America are selling bonds（债券） at a furious（暴怒，疯狂） pace. A few months ago financial newspapers were debating the future of capitalism（资本主义）. Now they are merely discussing the future of capital requirements. Shock has given way to（让步，让位） relief.
The persistence of debt

But the relief is likely to be short-lived. Just over a year ago, the day Lehman Brothers filed for（申请） bankruptcy, the world economy fell off a precipice（掉下悬崖）. When you are falling, you do not look up. Only when you hit bottom can you stop and contemplate the cliff you must now climb.

This special report will argue that although a “new normal” for the world economy is now in sight, it will be different from the old normal in a number of ways. Demand in rich countries will remain weak and emerging economies（新兴经济体） will not be able to compensate. The report will explain why many governments will have to keep their stimulus packages（经济刺激方案） going for longer than expected, or face entrenched（顽固的） unemployment that will permanently lower their economic potential. Public debt will rise so that private debt can fall. The banks, the report will show, will remain cautious about lending again, which will slow up the recovery but also make companies more careful about their investment; and the securitisation markets that became so fashionable during the boom will recede, though not disappear altogether.

A persistent shortfall in demand will weigh on（拖累） supply. By the time this crisis is over, as many as 25m people may have lost their jobs in the 30 rich countries that belong to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The danger is that several million may never regain them. The mobilisation of capital will be fitful as the financial system copes with past mistakes and impending regulation. The travails（辛苦，劳作） of finance, in turn, may prevent the recovering economy from backing and exploiting innovations.

Like Japan’s bubble years, the years that led to the global financial crisis have left a heavy legacy of debt on the balance-sheets of banks and households, especially in Britain and America. It is this legacy that allows past losses to depress future gains. Fisher, again, put it best: “I fancy（认为，想象） that over-confidence seldom does any great harm except when, as, and if, it beguiles its victims into debt.” There is no better example of that than American consumers.

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

Comment：

This is another passage on the topic of financial crisis. What makes it different from others is its concern about the new normal as a result of the gradual recovery. Of course, this terrible event can be treated as a horrible disaster that makes the whole world fell off a precipice. Numerous tragedies are directed by its chronic and lasting adverse consequence. However, it is not easy to figure out the final outcome is a new normal which means the economy cannot return to its original track, let alone bounce up to its expected peak. Thanks to this incident mankind start to pay more attention to the inner structure and rationality of banking, car-making and commercial-paper markets, instead of merely concentrating on the profit from these business. The subtle relationship of demand and supply comes in view gradually. As the model--the so-called string theory--describes in this passage, the resource cannot fix and wait for the recovery when the demand declines sharply. A persistent shortfall in demand will weigh on supply. But what eludes me is the ending that over-confidence can do great harm when it beguiles its victims into debt. Though the author makes the example of American to illustrate this point of view, it is of great possibility that the whole thing is just nothing more than a coincidence. So as far as I am concerned, I cannot quiet agree with his conclusion.

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

心得：
本来前3天的comments的字数是一百多，二百多，三百多，令人欣喜啊，可惜第四天有回去二百多了，有点难过的说~~不过，现在看看开始的comments，发现很多地方是属于论证不太充分的，所以今后要在这个方面自我加强咯~~:lol

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

America's health-care bill

Nearer and nearer

Dec 21st 2009 From Economist.com

A procedural vote(程序表决) in America's Senate brings Barack Obama's health-care reforms closer


IT NOW looks certain that Barack Obama will get what he wanted for Christmas—a health-care reform bill passed out of the Senate, probably just a few hours before Santa begins his rounds. Republicans, who have been fighting tooth-and-nail（猛烈的） to block passage of the bill seem to have given up the fight, and have given warning instead that this will be a wish（欲望） that he comes to regret.

Shortly after 1am on Monday December 21st, the health bill cleared the first, and the most difficult, of the procedural hurdles it has to leap in order to secure passage through the Senate. Technically only a motion to end debate on a “manager's amendment” put together by the Senate's majority leader, Harry Reid, what the vote really represented was a crucial exercise in nose-counting（人口普查）. The result was a vote on precisely partisan lines, with all 40 Republicans opposed, and all 58 Democrats plus the two independents who are grouped with them voting in favour. Since 60 votes is the precise number needed to avoid a filibuster, there was no room for error whatsoever, the reason why the procedural motion had taken so long. But with all 60 members of the “Democratic caucus” now signed up, the final vote, on Christmas Eve, looks like a formality.

From the point of view of the Democrats, this victory has come at a high price. The health bill has been stripped（剥落） of something very dear to many of then: a “public option” of a government-backed（政府支持的） insurance scheme that would compete with private insurers（保险人） in order, supposedly, to keep costs down and guarantee access. The version（版本） of the bill already passed by the House of Representatives does contain just such a public option, one of several reasons why final passage of a reconciled（协调） bill is still a way off（路还远着呢）. Some Democrats hope, however, that a public option can be added later on, after the initial bill has gone into effect.

Still, the Senate version does tick most Democratic boxes（在方框内标记）; it obliges（迫使） everyone to have health-insurance, and sets out a generous system of subsides to help the uninsured obtain coverage, along with a system of government-regulated exchanges that should encourage competition among private insurers. It fines employers who do not offer health cover to their workers. And it makes it illegal for insurers to refuse people coverage on the basis of pre-existing medical conditions, as well as putting strict limits on the way that premiums（保险费） are allowed to increase with age. The hope is that tens of million of Americans currently without coverage will now be able to get it, and many tens of millions more, who have insurance but fear losing it through redundancy or ill-health, will have those worries lifted from their shoulders.

Republicans, however, hate the bill, mostly on the ground of cost. The advertised price-tag of the Senate bill is a bit under $900 billion over the next ten years, but Republicans contend that the numbers will be much higher than that, as the cost of subsidies（津贴，补助） has been underestimated and predicted savings will not materialise. Even at the stated number, this is a large bill at a time when America is running huge deficits that it urgently needs to tackle. The Senate bill is "paid for", but only in the sense（意味着） that it provides for large charges on the most expensive private insurance policies, and because it factors in deep cuts to Medicare the health-insurance scheme for the elderly. Republicans say these will never be enacted. Past history provides them with evidence to back up（支持） that claim.

Less politically involved observers also note that it is unprecedented for such a substantive and expensive bill to have been forced through Congress on such a narrow vote. The bill passed the House on a margin（范围） of just five votes, and in the Senate it has no safety margin. With no bipartisan support at all, Democrats will be held solely responsible if the reform turns out to be a disappointment. Some studies have suggested that private insurance premiums could rise substantially in response to the new burdens being placed on insurers.

Completion of work on the bill is by no means a formality, though it does now look more or less certain that the Senate will vote the bill out before Christmas. The next difficulty will come in producing a single “reconciled” version from the very different bills that the Senate and House have produced; that reconciled bill then has to go back for final clearance by both chambers（议院）. The public option is one big stumbling（跌跌撞撞，磕磕绊绊） block. It is clear that the Senate cannot pass any version of a bill that contains a public option, so the House will have to give ground（退却，让步）, which is going to require a lot of presidential arm-twisting（强迫...做某事） in January. And the two bills are funded in very different ways, one with a tax on the rich, the other with an insurance-policy surcharge. As of today though, health-care reform, expensive and imperfect though it is, is looking a lot more likely.

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

Comment：

Well, the passage describes two camps-the Republicans and the Democrats-debating on the passage of the health-care reform bill. Although the consequence of the procedural vote shows the obvious victory of the Democrats, it still needs to reconsider the practicability on the ground of cost in the shadows of unprecedented finial crisis. Once the bill passed, the government would have to guarantee the insurance of every citizen. But no one can ensure the taxpayers are willing to pay for others on the base of charity. Obviously, this measure bounds to reconcile itself with the public on the whole level. Equality has been a fundamental principle of the every president’s policy since the founders of America proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence in 1776. However, this ideal contradicts with the nature of capitalism which emphasizes the dominance of the capitalist. In terms of this health-care reform bill, the passage means the richer have to pay more tax than before for the poor at the aim of prevailing the coverage of the uninsured citizens. So as far as I am concerned, the day of this bill to come true still be a way off unless the president Mr. Obama compel its procedure.

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

Executive pay

This house believes that on the whole, senior executives are worth what they are paid


About this debate

Over the past few decades executive pay has risen dramatically. Bosses who were once paid ten times as much as shopfloor workers are now sometimes paid as much as 300 times as much. This trend was never popular, even during good times. But today it is becoming radioactive, as governments step in to rescue failing companies and ordinary people are forced to tighten their belts.

Is the anger justified? Some argue that executive pay is a long-standing disgrace. Pay is often not tethered(局限，约束) to performance. Huge rewards for the few demotivate the rest of the workforce. Others are more sanguine. Successful executives, such as Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, can add hugely to a firm's profitability, benefiting workers, managers and shareholders alike. The growing pay of executives has to be balanced against the growing difficulty of their jobs, particularly as turnover（营业额） in the boardroom（会议室） increases.

Opening statements

Defending the motion

Steven N. Kaplan Neubauer Family Prof. of Entrepreneurship & Finance, University of Chicago Booth School of Business

In the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere, CEOs are routinely criticised for being overpaid.

Against the motion

Nell  Minow Editor and Co-founder, The Corporate Library

Excessive executive compensation of the past decade is both a symptom and a cause of the current economic mess.

The moderator's opening remarks

Oct 20th 2009 |   Adrian  Wooldridge

Oneof the few things that anti-globalisation campaigners and stockmarketinvestors agree upon is that executive pay is out of control.
Itis not hard to understand this shared outrage(愤怒，暴行): executive pay has exploded since the 1980s. For most of the postwar era executives earned a few multiples of the median pay. But thereafter, starting in America and slowly spreading to the rest of the world, the multiples increased exponentially. Today many American workers earn in a year what their boss takes home in an evening.
Isn't this a disgrace（耻辱，丢脸）? Critics of executive pay worry that even mediocre bosses are given outsized（特大号）rewards. Robert Nardelli received a $20m pay-off when he left HomeDepot even though the share price had fallen during his six-yeartenure. Carly Fiorina was $180m better off when she leftHewlett-Packard despite a lack lustre(光泽) tenure. Defenders of executive pay argue that great bosses such as Louis Gerstner, the former boss of IBM,and Jack Welch, the former boss of General Electric, are worth everypenny because they create huge amounts of wealth for both shareholder（股东） sand employees.
The debate about executive pay, though never cool,is particularly hot at the moment. Workers have been squeezed by the recession. Unemployment is approaching 10% in the United States andmuch higher numbers in many other countries. Numerous governments areplanning to deal with their rising deficits by freezing public-sectorpay. And yet many bosses and bankers continue to make out（看出，辨别） like bandits（匪徒）—or so lots of people think.
We are lucky to have two of the best people in the business to debate this subject. Steven Kaplan,who proposes the motion, teaches at the University of Chicago's BoothSchool of Business. Nell Minow, who opposes it, is a long-time shareholder activist and chairwoman of the Corporate Library, are search company. (For people who want to know more about her she is also the subject of a profile in a recent issue of the New Yorker.)
MrKaplan starts off by making two fundamental points. CEO pay has not gone up in recent years; indeed, it has been dropping since 2000,particularly in relation to other well-paid groups, such as hedge fundmanagers（套头交易基金经理）, lawyers, consultants and professional athletes. Nor is CEO pay unrelated to performance. Boards are increasingly willing to fire CEOs for poor performance.
Ms Minow focuses heavily on the relationship between pay and the recent credit crunch（紧缩）. She points out that executive pay helped to create the mess in the first place:Countrywide's CEO, Angelo Mozillo, made more than $550m during his time in office. She also points out that the fact that many companies that were bailed out（保释） by the government continue to pay their CEOs huge salaries and bonuses is damaging the credibility of the system.
Such bold opening statements raise questions galore（许多）. Is Mr Kaplan justifiedin starting his account in 2000 rather than 1980, when executive payexploded. And is Ms Minow right to concentrate so heavily on thefinancial sector? These are only a couple of the questions that we needto thrash out in the coming days.


The proposer's opening remarks
Oct 20th 2009 |   Steven N. Kaplan

In the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere, CEOs are routinelycriticised for being overpaid. Critics argue that boards do not respondto market forces, but, instead, are dominated by or are over-generousto their CEOs. Boards are criticised for not tying CEOs' pay toperformance. These criticisms have been exacerbated by the financialcrisis and the desire to find scapegoats（替罪羊）.
I argue below that thecritics are wrong and that there are many misperceptions of CEO pay.While CEO pay practices are not perfect, they are driven by marketforces and performance. Contrary to public perception, CEO pay has notgone up in recent years. In fact, the average CEO pay (adjusted forinflation) has dropped since 2000, while the pay of other groups hasincreased substantially. Similarly, the view that CEOs are not paid forperformance is wrong. In fact, the opposite is true and boardsincreasingly fire them for poor performance. And, most recently,consistent with market forces driving pay, the US and UK governmentseach hired a new CEO (of AIG and the Royal Bank of Scotland) for payexceeding that of the median large company CEO.
It is useful tounderstand how CEO pay is measured. It includes three components:salary, bonus and stock-based pay. It is usually measured in two ways.The first is the sum of salary, bonus, restricted stock and theexpected value of stock options. I call this expected pay. Expected paymeasures what boards believe they awarded the CEO. This is the bestmeasure of what a CEO is paid each year. Note that the CEO does not actually walk away with this money. The second measure replaces expected stock option values with values actually realized and realised pay measures what CEOs walk away with.
The first graph shows average and median expected CEO pay forS&P 500 CEOs since 1994 (adjusted for inflation). It shows that median CEO pay has been stable since 2001; it has not increased. And average pay has declined substantially. In fact, average CEO pay in2008 is below the average in 1998.


While average CEO pay has declined, the pay of other highly paid groups hasincreased. The second graph shows S&P 500 CEO pay relative to theincome of the top 1% of US taxpayers. Relative to those other groups,CEOs are no better off in 2008 than in 1994. Strikingly, relative CEOpay is a half of what it was in 2001, a huge decline.


Whichare those groups that have earned increasingly high compensation? Hedgefund, private equity and venture capital investors have increased theirassets and fees substantially, translating into high pay. By oneestimate, the top three hedge fund managers earned more in 2007 thanall 500 S&P 500 CEOs combined. Professional athletes, investmentbankers, consultants and lawyers also have benefited greatly. Forexample, from 2004 to 2008, the inflation-adjusted pay of partners atthe top 20 law firms increased by 12% while that of S&P 500 CEOsdropped 12%. Those law firms had over 3,000 partners making an averageof $2.4m each.
One can look at the Obama administration for otherexamples. Larry Summers made $8m (more than the median S&P 500 CEO)giving speeches and working part-time for a hedge fund. Eric Holdermade $3.5m as a law partner.
So, while CEOs earn a lot, they arenot unique. The pay of people in the other groups has undoubtedly beendriven by market forces; all are compensated in arm's-length markets,not by cronies. Technology, globalisation and scale appear to haveincreased the market value of these groups. CEOs have not done betterand, by some measures, have done worse. Those who argue CEOs areoverpaid have to explain how CEOs can be overpaid and not subject tomarket forces, when the other groups are paid at least as well and aresubject to market forces.
Why is the pay of these other groupsrelevant for CEOs? Top executives regularly leave to work for private equity（私人股份） firms and hedge funds（对冲基金）. Law partners and consultants leave to work for public companies as general counsels and executives. Relative pay matters and all these groups are paid according to market demand.Markets are the driving force for senior executives in all theseindustries and talented people jump across industries, based on marketperceptions of their worth.
Critics also argue that CEO pay isnot tied to stock performance. Again, that is not true. Looking at whatCEOs actually receive—realised pay—Josh Rauh and I found that firmswith CEOs in the top decile（十分位） of realised pay earned stock returns 90%above those of other firms in their industries over the previous fiveyears. Firms with CEOs in the bottom decile of realised payunderperformed by almost 40%. The typical CEO is paid for performance.
Thiswas reinforced in 2008, when average realised CEO pay declined by 25%(according to S&P's Execucomp). And Equilar, another provider ofCEO pay data, estimated that the typical CEO experienced a net worthdecline of over 40%.
The final myth to bust（神话破灭） is that CEOs control their boards and earn high pay through this control and notperformance. In fact, CEO tenure has declined, from ten years in the1970s to six years today, and boards（董事会） have got to ugher on their executives when they do not perform.
In sum, market forces governCEO compensation. CEOs are paid what they are worth. Talented individuals, who are perceived to be valuable, can move between industries to be compensated well. The clearest example of this is that even governments have to pay highly for talented executives. Recently,the Royal Bank of Scotland (under UK government control) hired a CEO with a package worth up to $16m; AIG (under US government control)hired a CEO with a package worth up to $10.5m. For these critical jobs,both of these executives received compensation exceeding the pay of the median S&P 500 CEO.


The opposition's opening remarks
Oct 20th 2009 | Nell  Minow

Excessiveexecutive compensation of the past decade is both a symptom and a causeof the current economic mess. And the post-meltdown awards are all but guaranteed to continue to create perverse incentives that will reward management and further damage the interests of shareholders and every other participant in the economy.
Incentive compensation（激励报酬） rewarded executives for the quantity of transactions rather than the quality of transactions. It inevitably led to failures like the subprime disaster and the dominoes it toppled as it took the economy down with it. Worstof all, the avalanche of post-bailout bonuses and departure packageslike the $53m Ken Lewis got from Bank of America have severely damagedthe credibility of Wall Street and the American financial markets as a whole. The billions of dollars of losses do not come close to the reputational（名誉上的） hit to American capitalism, which will increase the cost of capital for all US companies.
Panglossian observers will always be able to find some metric（度量） to justify any level of pay. But the results speak for themselves. The decisions that led to the meltdownwere made by executives who knew that they would be paid tens, evenhundreds of millions of dollars no matter how successful theconsequences of those decisions.
Let us look at ground zero ofthe subprime mess, Countrywide, where Angelo Mozilo made more than$550m during his time as CEO. When the compensation committee tried toobject to his pay levels, he hired another compensation consultant,paid for by the shareholders, to push them into giving him more. Healso pushed for, and was given, shareholder subsidies, not just for hiswife's travel on the corporate jet but for the taxes on the imputed income from that travel. Instead of telling Mr Mozilo that he had no business asking the shareholders to subsidise his taxes, the board meekly（温顺的） signed off（签收） on it, making it clear to everyone in the executives uite that the pay-performance link was not a priority.
By theend of 2007, when Countrywide finally revealed the losses it had previously obscured, shareholders lost more than 78% of their investment value. Meanwhile, in early 2007 Mr Mozilo sold over $127m in exercised stock options before July 24th 2007, when he announced a$388m write-down on profits. Before the bailout, Countrywide narrowlyavoided bankruptcy by taking out an emergency loan of $11 billion from a group of banks. Mr Mozilo continued to sell off shares, and by theend of 2007 he had sold an additional $30m in exercised stock options.There is the definition of outrageously excessive compensation.
Countrywide responded to a shareholder proposal that year asking for a non-binding advisory vote on its pay plan by urging shareholders to oppose it because "Countrywide has been an outstanding performer" and because"The Board's Compensation Committee（薪酬委员会） has access to the best informationon compensation practices（补偿的做法） and has a thorough process in place tod etermine appropriate executive pay." They could hardly have doneworse. And it is likely that some market feedback on the structure ofthe pay plan could have given compensation committee members Harley W.Snyder (chair), Robert J. Donato, Michael E. Dougherty and Oscar P.Robertson worthwhile guidance.
Michelle Leder of theindispensable Footnoted.org website discovered that Frank A. Keating,Charles T. Maxwell and Frederick B. Whittemore, the compensationcommittee at Chesapeake Energy, not only paid the CEO, AubreyMcClendon, $100m, a 500% increase as the stock dropped 60% and theprofits went down 50%, they spent $4.6m of the shareholders' money to sponsor（创办，担保） a basketball team of which Mr McClendon owns a 19% stake, they purchased catering（餐饮） services from a restaurant which he owns just undera half of, and they took his collection of antique maps off his hands for $12.1m of the shareholders' money, based on a valuation from the consultant who advised Mr McClendon on assembling（集合） the collection. The board justified this by referring to Mr McClendon's having to sell more than $1 billion worth of stock due to margin calls（保证金）, his having concluded four important deals and the benefit to employee morale from having the maps on display in the office. A market-based response would be: (1) that was his risk and it is inappropriate to the point of misappropriation to force the other shareholders, already substantially out of pocket with their own losses due to his poor leadership of the organisation, make up for his losses (2) if the deals are good ones, hewill be adequately rewarded when the benefit of those deals isreflected in the stock price; and (3) you have got to be kidding. Ifthis is pay for performance, what exactly is the performance we arepaying for?
These may be anecdotes, but they are illuminatingones. The numbers and details may be at the extreme, but the underlyingapproaches are representative. Even as outliers（局外人）, they still demonstratethe failure of the system to ensure a vigorous（精力充沛）, arm's-length system fordetermining pay and the inability of the system to require an effectiveincentive programme with a genuine downside as well as an upside.
In my comments, I will discuss the seven deadliest sins of executive compensation, the two key elements that are essential for any plan that merits support from investors and the only metric that matters in looking at pay.

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

Comment：

This is a quiet interesting topic among the ever provided passages. The executives, the focused group, are receiving more attention against the background of financial crisis. According to the author, there are two sides who are arguing about the issue that whether the executives’ payment is excessive or not. The group who propose the statement think the executives are worthy of their package, while the opposite group contend that they are not concerned about the consequence of their decisions. In my point of view, the pay-performance link is so obvious that it is unfair to ignore the data report which implies their wage decreased sharply due to the unprecedented economic mess. No one is capable of justifying the executives without referring to a thorough investigation. The best way to figure out the fact is probably to treat the executive as an ordinary profession like other occupations. Of course, their performance is not only determined by their own efforts, but also depends on the changing market. So if one really wants to evaluate the executives’ performance, he has to take the economic position into consideration as well. What’s more, the high risk is a central factor in measuring the cost effective. In sum, one needs to make a detailed investigation before he gets a fair and comprehensive outcome.

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

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（诽谤的） 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（支撑，扶持） 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（降落伞） 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（群众）. 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(高管薪酬) 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（复数） 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（驱逐，取代） 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（反转，撤销） 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 of（大部分） 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 amples 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（对等） 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（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（过剩）, over-high leverage（杠杆作用） at investment banks, mandates from Congress to provide mortgages to people who could not afford them, flawed ratings from the rating agencies（评价机构） 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 thefirst nine months of 2009, up 46% from a year ago. While its net incomehas tripled, its core investment banking business is down 31%. The Toronto Star quotesGoldman's CFO, David Viniar, using an unforgivable oxymoron（反比） 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 thatGoldman is operating without any government guarantee, ignoring the reality of the government guarantee that kept the system going just ayear ago.
These bonuses have nothing to do with paying for performance. How much of Goldman's bouncing back is due to thegovernment's guarantees and the hundreds of billions of dollars itpoured into Goldman, Wall Street, and other subsidies and outrightwelfare payments to the very institutions that came close to bringingdown the entire economy? Shouldn't the American people expect some sortof discounted calculation of the bonuses that reflect a market-basedassessment of performance? Once again, Wall Street is all aboutcapitalism when it comes to the upside, but all about socialism when itcomes to the downside, that is, from each, according to his ability, toeach, whatever he can get away with.
Also this week, we had thetestimony of Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for thegovernment's financial rescue programme before the House Committee onOversight and Government Reform. The serial offender AIG has promised$198m in bonus pay to its employees next March, according to thetestimony, and there is very little the government or anyone else cando about it. Because the bonus agreements were entered into before thebailout, the government has no legal authority to stop them. AllSpecial Master Kenneth Feinberg can do is ask the company not to paythe bonuses and rattle his sabre（战刀） about the pay he can control goingforward, 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（非耦合） from performance. Even the company has given up on trying to make that case, relying instead on opportunity costs tojustify 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 forshareholders is to let them leave.
Mr Barofksy gave thecommittee a Treasury Department report on the last set of outrageousAIG bonuses. It concluded in part that "Treasury invested $40 billionof taxpayer funds in AIG, designed AIG's contractual executivecompensation restrictions, and helped manage the Government's majoritystake in AIG for several months, all without having any detailedinformation about the scope of AIG's very substantial, and verycontroversial, executive compensation obligations." If a private entityhad been asked for emergency funds, it is unthinkable that any moneywould have been advanced without establishing some control overcompensation. There are two reasons for this. The first is agencycosts. Anyone (other than Secretary Henry Paulson, apparently) puttingmoney at risk will want to ensure that it will not be inappropriatelyappropriated. The second is the high likelihood 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 byProfessor Kaplan.
First, we disagree on the calculations thatsupport 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", asit 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 at aligning CEOs' interests with shareholders'.
Second, ProfessorKaplan 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 performanceon the way out of the door. Just look at Ken Lewis's departure fromBank of America. Disastrous performance that apparently included lying(about what else? bonuses) and an unprecedented vote of no confidencefrom shareholders that removed him as chairman, may indeed have causedhim to be fired (though the board did not use that term). But his $53m retirement 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 otherprivate 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 noted above, the government has repeatedly failed as regulator or as providerof 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（不一致）.
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（空头的） metrics to trigger bonuses.
4.    Dividends on unvested（尚未归属的） stock.
5.    Outrageous departure packages.
6.    Stock options that are not performance-based or indexed.
7.    Perquisites（额外赏赐，临时津贴） and gross-ups.

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

plukaUID: 2721764

唔，其实每次看到你的头像……（小声）……就会忍不住YY……（掩面逃走）……