1006G[REBORN FROM THE ASHES组]（新）备考日记 【雷打不动】by 都说了不是又八

都说了不是又八UID: 2728357

放在沙发的不应该只是决心而已。

出了问题也不应该在潜意识里推掉责任。

过去的东西可以放掉了，且看看自己有没有以更快的速度往前走。



潜力两个字，某种程度上一文不值。不每天只睡五个小时那样拼命，只是认为自己最大的特点就是潜力，就是未开发，这种想法本身一文不值。



没有别的话了。雷打不动地拼。

都说了不是又八UID: 2728357

https://bbs.gter.net/viewthread.php?tid=1043181&extra=

二楼添加修改铺一个。大家可以多多来捧场儿。

都说了不是又八UID: 2728357

今天是十二月十九日。


对今天的自己满意吗。每天都要设定三天后的目标。今天完成了没有。

都说了不是又八UID: 2728357

晚上连着三群人呼叫。结果把会议给错过去了= =

苦难的日子呀。12月20日，不是很满意。

东西写好，明天放上。以上。

都说了不是又八UID: 2728357

今天效率还可以。而且翻出了2772的东西。
从2009-12-22开始，不管多忙多累，要雷打不动地每天三篇。做好答案，到网上找一下详解。希望阅读不要再一次拉自己的后腿。

同时把阅读文章中的好东西抽出来。
加油了。今天还要搞定边边角角的俩论文。

都说了不是又八UID: 2728357

啊啊要断电断网了= =


今天发现在修改铺子的同学居然是自己学校的，囧了。
果然背文章其乐无穷，比别的方法收效都快。背文章本身就是最好的笔记吧。

加油儿啦。渐渐到了末考了。

都说了不是又八UID: 2728357

嗯……过了三五天，前几天好不容易背下来的东西稍微有点儿生分了。

正好，回来都看一遍吧。地毯式啪啪打掉。



在这里加上所有COMMENT篇的规则。给自己的规则多一点儿才好玩儿。

1.每天出的文章【必须】当天背。不准落过去。反正现在也没有考试= =

2.进入打字阶段的文章，必须已经【过去了三天】。艾宾浩斯先生说这样效率能稍微高点儿。同时，打上去的同时，也【必须把别人的comments全部看过】。

3.所有贴在这上头的东西，不是【粘贴】上来的，而应该是【手打】上来的。

4.所有【手打】的文章，都必须按照【再背一会儿】--》【不看原文地打上来】这样地来再深入一遍键盘和肌肉。

5.当然了，单词这种小容量的东西在这样折腾三次之后应该都会处于深层次的记忆缓存中了。不单独标出单词来，因为默认它们在这样打上去之后已经被搞定了。但是句子，如果觉得打上一遍还不过瘾的话，就必须红色标出来。不要弄得祖国山河一片红，一篇文章中最多有五句红色句子，不论长短。嗯。


6.有空再回来看。当然，这个暂时是没空儿啦。学习渐渐紧起来了。

终于，开始在备考日志里头贴COMMENTS啦。如果斑竹前两天作势欲删俺，那么请先缓缓哈。

都说了不是又八UID: 2728357

下面，开始把18日的东西弄上来。等编辑哈。

tracywlzUID: 2522388

加油加油~

都说了不是又八UID: 2728357

嘛，今天稍微井喷一下。背了大约一周，昨天把所有背过的文章一个字一个字敲进电脑里并且重新彻底过了一遍。

活活敲了一万多英文字呀……泪流满面。

大呼过瘾。在一周之内，自己学到了很多东西呀。虽然以前也稍微翻过一些外国的期刊杂志，但是这一周确实有了很大变化——毕竟是在这么多事儿的同时还要下手背诵嘛。

但是同时一个问题也渐渐抬头。在全力训练语言的同时，希望写东西能够不跑题，主题跟得上，段落展开得漂亮，这些东西应该是假期训练的绝对主流。

为此，还是需要再加油啦。

第一天。第一篇文章。

So far the effort to tackle global warming has achieved little. Copenhagen offers the chance to do better, says Emma Duncan.

THE mountain bark beetle is a familiar pest in the forests of British Columbia. Its population rises and falls unpredictably, destroying clumps of pinewood as it peaks which then regenerate as the bug recedes.
But Scott Green, who studies forest ecology at the University of Northern British Columbia, says the current outbreak is “unprecedented in recorded history: a natural background-noise disturbance has become a major outbreak. We’re looking at the loss of 80% of our pine forest cover.” Other parts of North America have also been affected, but the damage in British Columbia is particularly severe, and particularly troubling in a province whose economy is dominated by timber.

Three main explanations for this disastrous outbreak suggest themselves. It could be chance. Populations do fluctuate dramatically and unexpectedly. It could be the result of management practices. British Columbia’s woodland is less varied than it used to be, which helps a beetle that prefers pine. Or it could be caused by the higher temperatures that now prevail in northern areas, allowing beetles to breed more often in summer and survive in greater numbers through the winter.

The Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which the United Nations adopted at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, is now 17 years old. Its aim was “to achieve stabilization of greenhouse-gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”. The Kyoto protocol, which set about realizing those aims, was signed in 1997 and came into force in 2005. Its first commitment period runs out in 2012, and implementing a new one is expected to take at least three years, which is why the 15th conference of the parties to the UNFCCC that starts in Copenhagen on December 7th is such a big deal. Without a new global agreement, there is not much chance of averting serious climate change.

Since the UNFCCC was signed, much has changed, though more in the biosphere than the human sphere. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the body set up to establish a scientific consensus on what is happening, heat waves, droughts, floods and serious hurricanes have increased in frequency over the past few decades; it reckons that those trends are all likely or very likely to have been caused by human activity and will probably continue. Temperatures by the end of the century might be up by anything from 1.1ºC to 6.4ºC.

In most of the world the climate changes to date are barely perceptible or hard to pin on warming. In British Columbia and farther north the effects of the climate change are clearer. Air temperatures in the Arctic are rising twice as fast as in the rest of the world. The summer sea ice is thinning and shrinking. The past 3 years have seen the biggest losses since proper record-keeping started in 1979. Ten years ago scientists reckoned that the summer sea ice would be gone by the end of this century. Now they expect them to disappear within a decade or so.

Since sea-ice is already in the water, its melting has little effect on sea level. Those are determined by the temperature and the size of the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps. The glaciers in south-eastern Greenland have picked up speed. JI, the largest of them, which drains 6% of Greenland’s ice, is now moving at 12km a year-twice as fast as it was when the UNFCCC was signed—and its “calving front”, where it breaks down into icebergs, has retreated by 20km in six years. That is part of the reason why the sea level is rising at 3-3.5mm a year, twice as the average rate in the 20th century.


As with the mountain beetle, it is not entirely clear why this is happening. The glaciers could be retreating because of one of the countless natural oscillations in the climate that scientists do not properly understand. If so, the glacier retreat could well stop, as it did in the middle of the 20th century after a 100-year retreat. But the usual causes of natural variability do not seem to explain the current trend, so scientists incline to the view that it is man-made. It is therefore likely to persist unless mankind starts to behave differently—and there is not much sign of that happening.


Carbon-dioxide emissions are now 30% higher than they were when the UNFCCC was signed 17 years ago. Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 equivalent reached 430 parts per million last year, compared with 280ppm before the industrial revolution. At the current rate they could more than treble by the end of the century, which would mean a 50% risk of a global temperature is only 5`C. To put that in context, the current average global temperature is only 5 `C warmer than the last ice age. Such a rise would probably lead to fast-melting ice sheets, rising sea levels, drought, disease and collapsing agriculture in poor countries, and mass migration. But nobody really knows, and nobody wants to know.


Some scientists think that the planet is already on an irreversible journey to the dangerous warming. A few climate-change skeptics think the problem will right itself. Either may be correct. Predictions about a mechanism as complex as the climate cannot be made with any certainty. But the broad scientific consensus is that serious climate change is a danger, and this newspaper believes that, as an insurance policy that against a catastrophe that may never happen, the world needs to adjust its behavior to try to avert that threat.


The problem is not a technological one. The human race has almost all the tools it needs to continue leading much other sort of life it has been enjoying without causing a net increase in greenhouse-gas concentrations in the atmosphere. Industrial and agricultural processes can be changed. Electricity can be produced by wind, sunlight, biomass or nuclear reactors, and cars can be powered by biofuels and electricity. Biofuel engines for aircraft still need some work before they are suitable for long-haul flights, but should be available soon.


Nor is it a question of economics. Economists argue over the sums, but broadly agree that greenhouse-gas emissions can be curbed without flattening the world economy.


It is all about politics. Climate change is the hardest political problem the world has ever had to deal with. It is a prisoner’s dilemma, a free-rider problem and the tragedy of the commons all rolled into one. At issue is the difficulty of allocating the cost of collective action and trusting other parties to bear their share of the burden. At a city, state and national level, institutions that can resolve such problems have been built up over the centuries. But climate change has been a worldwide worry for only a couple of decades. Mankind has no framework for it. The UN is a useful talking shop, but it does not get much done.


The closest parallel is the world trading system. This has many achievements to its name, but it is not an encouraging model. Not only is the latest round of negotiations mired in difficulty, but the World Trade Organization’s task is child’s play compared with climate change. The benefits of concluding trade deals are certain and accrue in the short term. The benefits of mitigating climate change are uncertain, since scientists are unsure of the scale and consequences of global warming, and will mostly accrue many years hence. The need for action, by contrast, is urgent.


The problem will be solved only if the world economy moves from the carbon-intensive to low-carbon----and, in the long term, to zero-carbon products and processes. That requires businesses to change their investment patterns. And they will do so only if governments give them clear, consistent signals. This policies adopted to avoid dangerous climate change have been partly misconceived and largely inadequate. They have sent too many wrong signals and not enough of the right ones.


That is partly because of the way the Kyoto protocol was designed. By trying to include all the greenhouse gases in a single agreement, it has been less successful than the less ambitious Montreal protocol, which cut ozone-depleting gases fast and cheaply. By including too many countries in detailed negotiations, it has reduced the chances of agreement. And by dividing the world into developed and developing countries, it has deepened a rift that is proving hard to close. Ultimately, though, the international agreement has fallen victim to domestic policies. Voters do not want to bear the cost of their elected leaders’ aspirations, and those leaders have not been brave enough to push them.（注意观点）


Copenhagen represents a second chance to make a difference. The aspirations are high, but so are the hurdles. The gap between the parties on the two crucial questions – emission levels and money – remains large. America’s failure so far to pass climate-change legislation means that a legally binding agreement will not be reached at the conference. The talk is of one in Bonn, in six months’ time, or in Mexico City in a year.


To suggest that much has gone wrong is not to denigrate the efforts of the many people who have dedicated two decades to this problem. For mankind to get even to the threshold of a global agreement is a marvel. But any global climate deal will work only if the domestic policies through which it is implemented are both efficient and effective. If they are ineffective, nothing will change. If they are inefficient, they will waste money. And if taxpayers decide that green policies are packed with pork, they will turn against them.


Emma Duncan, a famous writer working as deputy editor in Economics. According to her reviews made in recent years, and referring to the google stuff, she had been a veteran on delivering reports on sustainability of development, or even enhance the process by herself (in 2009 she delivered the closing keynote of ESCC, the 2009 Environmental Sustainability and Compliance Conference.) So it would save much endeavor on interviewing a chief editor inside Economics.


Alright. Just cut the crap and hit the point.


What’s primarily to be mentioned, the article starts with a specific example of the very pest. Then the aim moved up to the Northern British Columbia, and onto the background of several international meetings--nice try. Seem the LAOWAIS simply keen on the attempt from the specific to the grand view.


The language is perfectly organized and tense in logic. Thus it is really worth reciting. The very writing skills are helpful, due to the extent which could be enhancing the ability.

都说了不是又八UID: 2728357

Second article—


Comment.
Globalization was dressed in the costume of the key factor of the art market price. As the works on sold are exhibited on a worldwide scale, the analysis of the reasons is pretty worth reading.
The article is advertising the art market in the perspective of a reviewer, who is watching Sotheby and Christie in the arena. On introducing the background knowledge of the 2 auction houses and fully describing the attempts they take under the recession, we’re informed of the very detail situation inside the market. However, with marketing and bonds manipulate the art market and production (sorry to use the word “production”), the works which are not accustomed to the contemporary viewers’ perspectives are simply sifted out. Had the works be dragged out of the tomb yard rather later on, the plot would become another regretful story that the artists with perfect talent and performance are neglected during their lifetime. Well, same story happens, doesn’t it.


Generally speaking, the article is emphasizing the background introduction, and it looks more like a history textbook with personal comments, than a well organized issue on the very topic.









A special report on the art market

Suspended animation

The art market has suffered from the recession, but globalization should help it recover, say Fiammetta Rocco and Sarah Thornton.

Sotheby’s

THE longest bull 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. All but two pieces sold, fetching more than £70m, a record for a sale by a single artist. It was a last hurrah. As the auctioneer called out bids, in New York one of the oldest banks on Wall Street, Lehman Brothers, filed for bankruptcy.


The world art market had already been losing momentum for a while after rising vertiginously 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 bail-out of the banks coincided with the loss of thousands of jobs and the financial demise 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 – 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.


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. 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. But this special report will argue that it will bounce back, and that the key to its recovery lies in globalization. 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 Merril Lynch, charts the spending 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, 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, 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, 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 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 of 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 work, which helps explain the global demand for artists such as Warhol, Jeff Koons and MR. Hirst – and the eye-watering prices such work can command.


Straddling 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 Francois Pinault, a luxury-goods billionaire ho is also a noted collector of contemporary art and the owner of Christie’s. Philippe Segalot, 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. Segalot 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, and American hedge-fund billionaire, also owns works by Warhol, Mr. Hirst and Mr. Koons. Mr. Cohen used to be a sizeable shareholder of Sotheby’s and is still an important provider of liquidity to art buyers.


The popularity of blockbuster 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 won Jawlensky and Emil Nole were regarded as specialist interests until Russian collectors began seeking them out. Zhao Wuji used to be just another Chinese painter-in-exile; now he is recognized as an Abstract Expressionist master influenced by Paul Klee and praised by both Joan Miro and Pablo Picasso.


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 cost brought trouble to many old-fashioned fine-art dealer emporiums. 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. 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 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 financer 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 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 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 guity of conspiring with Christie’s to fix commissions. 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 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. 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 has been broadly similar: staff cuts, unpaid leave, a squeeze on salaries, slashed marketing and travel budgets, and an edict that the glossy auction catalogues, which in the boom cost each of them 25m a year to produce, were no longer to be handed out like chocolate drops.


With a hugely expanded international client base, it was only a matter of time before both auctioneers started to muscle in 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 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 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, the pre-eminent dealers’ fest, 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.


Both auction houses have also put a lot of effort into [advising] buyers on how to improve their collections. As Jussi Pylkkanen, Chistie’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. In 2007 Christie’s chalked up 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 private dealers.

都说了不是又八UID: 2728357

3rd article


Comment


Personally speaking, the article is splendid written that I just couldn’t help reciting it to the end.


Meanwhile the article alarms on several points. Chinese are inured to the notion that “the western countries are forming a league on blocking China’s passage to a rise. I’m no activist base on the folk perspective, thus the shrug Westerners exhibited makes me a bit confused. Seems we’ve been creating an enemy in our minds, right.

About politics, nothing is clean with glory. Dirt everywhere.



A wary respect

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

“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 commercial opportunities that were opening up in Asia. More than a hundred years after 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 British power without bloodshed, but the rise of Germany and Japan precipitated global wars. President Barack Obama faces a China that is growing richer and stronger while remaining tenaciously authoritarian. Its rise will be far more nettlesome than that of his own country a century ago.


With America’s economy in tatters 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 favour. 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.


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


The financial crisis has sharpened fears of what Americans often see as another potential threat. China has become the world’s biggest lender to America through its purchase of American Treasury securities, which in theory would allow it to wreck the American economy. These fears ignore the value-destroying (and, for China’s leaders, politically hugely embarrassing) effect that a sell-off 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 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” between America and its foreign creditors, 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 reserve-currency status any time. But it also noted that in effect this was a “foreign-exchange version of the cold-war stalemate based on ‘mutually assured destruction’”.


China is exploring the rubble of the global economy in hopes of accelerating its own rise. Some Chinese commentators point to the example of the Soviet Union, which exploited Western economic disarray during the Depression to acquire industrial technology from desperate Western sellers. China has long chafed at 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, but many will 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, 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 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, 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 are most obvious in the military arena. China’s military build-up in the past decade has been as spectacular 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. 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.


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 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 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 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 – social, political and economic – could eventually imperil both its own stability and its dealings with the outside world.
（最后一段非常赞。值得手写几遍了。）

都说了不是又八UID: 2728357

4th article

Comment


Barack Obama has been famous for its brand smile. The mild and amenable smile suggests a person with little aggression and hostility. Saddled with the several incidents, occurred from the day Obama sit on the throne, that he took a low entrance into breaking the ice on the relationship between America and the countries over the world. He has been paying endeavor, but I have to doubt the persistence of his overfriendly policy.

Who knows what America would do after the recession is controlled within government’s hand. My answer would be a shift on the aggressive path to another supremacy.

And the first, the last paragraph are always the best ones. Worth reading.



The long climb

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


Newport Beach, California, is not a bad place to contemplate the future of the world economy. Its information office promises nine miles of pristine sand, fine dining for devoted epicureans and an atmosphere of laid-back sophistication. Yet students of economic turmoil 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 the worst credit rating in the country, the “Golden State” is cutting the spending on schools, prisons and health care for the elderly, as well as closing parks and laying off 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 are not the sole province of the banking industry.


Newport Beach is also the home of Pimco, the biggest bond manager in the world, which handles $840 billion on behalf of pension funds, 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, Pimco’s laid-back sophisticates concluded that the financial markets may well “revert to mean”, which is a statistician’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 by the financial breakdown will be reversed. The world economy is fitfully getting back to normal, but it will be a “new normal”.


That phrase has caught on, 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 securitization markets, which buy and sell marketable bundles of debt, will presumably be a shadow of a shadow. Finance will be costlier and investment weak, so the stock of physical capital, on which prosperity depends, will erode.


The crisis invited a forceful government entry into several of capitalism’s inner sanctums, such as banking, American car making and the commercial-paper market. Mr. El-Erian worries that the state may overstay its welcome. In addition, national exchequers may start to feel some measure of the fiscal strain now hobbling California. America’s Treasury, in particular, must demonstrate that it is still a “responsible shepherd 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 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 on a board. The more forcefully the string is plucked, the more sharply it snaps back.


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 symbolizes the supply side. When spending is strong enough, the economy’s resources are fully employed, allowing it to realize its full potential. As the workforce grows, capital accumulates and technology advances, this limit expands over time.


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.


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 or even its rate of growth. If so, the economy will never recoup 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. 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 in property and stock prices. For a “lost decade” from 1992 the economy stagnated, 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 recession”.


The typical post-war recession begins when the flow of spending in the economy puts a strain on its resources, forcing prices upwards. Central banks raise interest rates to slow spending to a more sustainable pace. Once inflation has subsided, the authorities are free to turn the taps back on.


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 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.


Since Pimco’s forum concluded in May, the world economy has palpably improved. In many ways the new normal is beginning to look a lot like the old, vindicating Friedman’s plucking model. China is outpacing expectations. Goldman Sachs is making hay. The premium banks must pay to borrow overnight 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 at a furious pace. A few months ago financial newspapers were debating the future of capitalism. Now they are merely discussing the future of capital requirements. Shock has given way to relief.


But the relief is likely to be short-lived. Just over a year ago, the day Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, the world economy fell off a precipice. 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 will not be able to compensate. The report will explain why many governments will have to keep their stimulus packages going for longer than expected, or face entrenched 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 securitization markets that became so fashionable during the boom will recede, though not disappear altogether.


A persistent shortfall in demand will weigh on 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 mobilization of capital will be fitful as the financial system copes with past mistakes and impending regulation. The travails 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 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.

都说了不是又八UID: 2728357

5th article


Seldom a reform wanders without frustrations and confrontations. Japanese cabinet have been tussling on the reform of mailing institutions, and America faces the problem of health-care. So what's exactly the block in China's way? Propaganda and the media? Probably. At least, we're frequently irritated by ridiculous news and policies everyday.


Just wanna find an exit on the issue. No exit actually, but at same time we have to ask why the compensation and aftermath cleaning are totally absent. It's been enough.




Nearer and nearer

A procedural vote 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 to block passage of the bill seem to have given up the fight, and have given warning instead that this will be a wish 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. 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 of something very dear to many of then: a “public option” of a government-backed insurance scheme that would compete with private insurers in order, supposedly, to keep costs down and guarantee access. The version 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 bill is still a way off. 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; it obliges 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 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 has been underestimated and predicted savings will not materialize. 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 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 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 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. The public option is one big stumbling 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, which is going to require a lot of presidential are-twisting 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.

都说了不是又八UID: 2728357

6th article

Logic is the main theme. For the debate could be verbally carried out, there is little to absorb from the language.

But both sides are not firing on the pin of others. K has been stressing the figures adjusted to inflation, and M arguing on the current trend of the mass opinions. Expecting the second article of both.

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 shop floor 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 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 in the boardroom increases.


D. Kaplan
A. Minow


One of the few things that anti-globalization campaigners and stock market investors agree upon is that executive pay is out of control.

It is not hard to understand this shared outrage: 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? Critics of executive pay worry that even mediocre bosses are given outsized rewards. Robert Nardelli received a $20m pay-off when he left Home Depot even though the share price had fallen during his six-year tenure. Carly Fiorina was $180 better off when she left Hewlett-Packard despite a lackluster 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 every penny because they create huge amounts of wealth for both share holders and employers.


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 and much higher numbers in many other countries. Numerous governments are planning to deal with their rising deficits by freezing public-sector pay. And yet many bosses and bankers continue to make out like bandits – 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 Booth School of Business. Nell Minow, who opposes it, is a long-time shareholder activist and chairwoman of the Corporate Library, a research company. (For people who wants to know more about her she is also the subject of a profile in a recent issue of the New Yorker.)


Mr. Kaplan 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 fund managers, 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. 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 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. Is Mr. Kaplan justified in starting his account in 2000 rather than 1980, when executive pay exploded. And is Ms. Minow right to concentrate so heavily on the financial sector? These are only a couple of the questions that we need to thrash out in the coming days.



The proposer’s opening remarks

In the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere, CEOs are routinely criticized for being overpaid. Critics argue that boards do not respond to market forces, but, instead, are dominated by or are over-generous to their CEOs. Boards are criticized for not tying CEOs’ pay to performance. These criticisms have been exacerbated by the financial crisis and the desire to find scapegoats.


I argue below that the critics are wrong and that there are many misperceptions of CEO pay. While CEO pay practices are not perfect, they are driven by market forces and performance. Contrary to public perception, CEO pay has not gone up in recent years. In fact, the average CEO pay (adjusted for inflation) has dropped since 2000, while the pay of other groups has increased substantially. Similarly, the view that CEOs are not paid for performance is wrong. In fact, the opposite is true and boards increasingly fire them for poor performance. And, most recently, consistent with market forces driving pay, the US and UK governments each hired a new CEO (of AIG and the Royal Bank of Scotland) for pay exceeding that of the median large company CEO.


It is useful to understand 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 the expected value of stock options. I call this expected pay. Expected pay measures what boards believe they awarded the CEO. This is the best measure 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 realized pay measures what CEOs walk away with.


The first graph shows average and median expected CEO pay for S&P 500 CEOs since 1994. 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 in 2008 is below the average in 1998.


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


Which are those groups that have earned increasingly high compensation? Hedge fund, private equity and venture capital investors have increased their assets and fees substantially, translating into high pay. By one estimate, the top three hedge fund managers earned more in 2007 than all 500 S&P 500 CEOs combined. Professional athletes, investment bankers, consultants and lawyers also have benefited greatly.