自己翻译的一些经济学时评

二师兄UID: 118950

不过今天好像不在状态上...
翻译做的比较差，汗....

goldenbinUID: 31382

欢迎二师兄经常来啊！

jysaviorUID: 111266

好样的
谢谢

二师兄UID: 118950

Freeing the airwaves
取消无线电管制

From The Economist May 31st, 2003  page 68


对无线电频谱最好的类比是什么？到底是如同大多数人直觉相信的，如同土地一样通过产权来分配并可以被购买和出售呢，还是像海洋一样，得益于技术进步，其资源是如此丰富以至于不需要进行分配（至少对于航运是如此）？在航运的例子中，轮船运行的一般规则就足以保证其能够有效率的利用（海洋）资源。

无线电行业的人士讨论这个问题已经有一段时间了。现在，监管者也开始对这个问题感兴趣，因为日益增长的无线电服务需求要求对频谱资源更有效的利用。本月早些时候，美国联邦通信委员会（FCC）决定允许出租和交易无线电频率执照―产权模式―以作为建立无线电频谱市场的第一步。但是，为了迎接6月9号在日内瓦召开的世界无线电通信大会，美国的监管者将会修正其计划，将其作为公共资源对待，以扩大无需执照即可使用的频谱范围。

这两种不同的无线电监管模式已经在开始互相抵触。一方面，电信公司为取得3G无线服务牌照投入了大量资金－但是目前在建网方面正面临着严重的财务和技术困难。另一方面，已经出现了很多叫做“WiFi”的本地接入网络，在没有执照的频谱内运营，并以显著的速度增长。

如何最佳的分配无线电频率并不是最近才提出来的问题。1991年的诺贝尔经济学奖得主罗纳德 科斯 早在40年前，就论述道无线电频谱不应该和别的资源例如土地区别对待。两者都是稀缺资源－所以市场是其最佳的分配方式。虽然这个道理在今天看来再明白不过了，但是直到20多年以后FCC才开始拍卖无线电频率。

此后辩论进一步深入。现在仅仅有拍卖是不够的，因为它们没有改变传统的频谱分配结构。甚至是在上个月允许频谱出售和交易的改革措施出台后，FCC仍然是一个dirigiste的官僚机构。在大多数情况下，它决定了如何划分频谱，谁来获得某一部分以及作何用途等。

所以取代这种“命令和控制”（command-and-control）的最好办法是什么呢？产权方式的支持者希望尽快建立一个频谱权可以自由交易的市场，－与当前的环境污染权（pollution rights）非常相似。有些人已经做好了一个“大爆炸”式的计划：将尽可能多的频谱同时在市场上进行拍卖。

别忙！公共资源说的支持者喊道。他们辩称：如果自然规律决定了频谱是稀缺资源，则出售执照当然是最佳方法。但是实际上它只是在过去的、落后的技术条件下才是稀缺资源。当时无线电设备需要通过“频道”来通信时（“频道”是通过频率和功率来定义的，保证通信不受到干扰），这时频谱才是稀缺资源。

但是现在，由于计算能力成本的戏剧性下降，无线设备变得更加智能，意味着它们能更有效的利用频谱资源并具有更好的抗干扰能力。他们可以同时在很宽的频率范围内通信（这叫做“频谱扩展”），彼此帮助（“网状网络”），并适应当地环境（“灵活无线电通讯”）(They are able to communicate over a broad range of frequencies at once (this is called “spread spectrum”), to help each other out (“mesh networks”) and to adapt to the local environment (“agile radio”))。纽约大学的法学教授 Yochai Benkler辩称，与建立一个频谱市场相反，频谱资源的使用现在可以依赖于智能无线通讯设备，任何人都没有必要控制无线频谱。

Benkler先生还说，频谱市场不是一个最佳方案还不仅仅是因为技术原因。举例来说，这样做可能会带来很高的交易费用。如果要在一个日益变动的无线行业中对频谱进行有效的定价，必要的管理和测定费用将会十分昂贵。同时这还会对创新不利：频谱的拥有者可能会由于技术进步不符合其商业模式而忽略它。如果将频谱作为一种公共资源，任何人都可以进行创新，正如Internet上的用户一样。

求同存异

尽管两个阵营之间存在分歧，但是他们还都没有充足的数据来证明哪一种管理体制是完全合适的：他们必须对两种方案都进行实验。例如，宾夕法利亚大学的电信教授David Farber和Gerald Fulhaber就希望进行一场大爆炸式的频谱拍卖。但是他们也希望能让其他人自由使用频谱，只要其不“故意”干扰进行清晰广播的权利。

尽管FCC近期的行动向频谱市场的方案靠近，它仍然偏好一种混和的方式，它在一份最近的报告中说“没有一种监管模式适合于所有的频谱”。去年早期，他曾批准一种叫做“超宽带”技术的使用，但是必须在非常低的功率下进行以避免干扰。FCC同时也在寻求扩展无需执照的频谱范围。

如果参照其他技术领域的经验来看的话，很可能两种方式会并存一段时间，虽然公共资源的方案可能最终会占据主导地位。例如，至少从终端用户的角度来看，Internet是一种公共资源，按照先到先得的方式来分配带宽资源。而对于软件来说，通过志愿者发展的自由开放代码项目，共享的方式也正在增加。

技术可能会创造市场，但是它同样也会让这些市场荒芜。在频谱的例子中，打个比方说，它让桑田变成了沧海（让频谱以土地模式的分配转变成了按海洋模式的分配）。历史事件重演：轮船制造技术的发展并没有导致世界上海洋资源的划分，而是导致了一种叫做“自由贸易”的东东。

(Technology may thus help to create markets; but it also makes some of them obsolete. In this case it has turned land into sea, metaphorically speaking. To draw a historical parallel: the development of better ships did not lead to parceling up the world’s oceans but to something called free trade.)

二师兄UID: 118950

（1）
Perhaps the biggest challenge facing McKinsey is whether it can recapture its mystique – the reputational edge that, to the chagrin of such competitors as Bain and Boston Consulting Croup, once mean it was mentioned in a class of its own. 或许麦肯锡面临的最大挑战是其能否夺回它的“葵花宝典”－显赫声威。其曾经拥有的独树一帜的霸主地位（it was mentioned in a class of its own)令诸如Bain、BCG等竞争对手望尘莫及。(然后这一段的后面接着说它是如何如何大牛，影响整个咨询行业，甚至领跑全世界）

Over the past decade, the consulting market has changed. Rivals got better at touting strategic advice of their own. And many clients began to care less about hold new initiatives and more about running themselves efficiently,
在过去的十年中，咨询市场风云变幻。麦肯锡的对手们也越来越会吹嘘自己的战略咨询实力乐。而且很多客户逐渐不再那么关心什么先锋还是首创（估计是担心长江后浪推前浪，前浪死在沙滩上），而更关心怎么才能使自己更加有效运作。

这段好像是说，以前都是麦肯锡发明出各种花样，然后业界其他对手跟风，但发明新东东总不可能是很快的，渐渐的客户更加实际了，开始更加prefer立竿见影的咨询服务。感觉象是中医和西医的区别，安达信们是头痛医头，脚痛医脚，麦肯锡则是无论哪痛都会制订一个个性化的全盘的解决方案，但客户没这么多耐性了。

（2）"has long cultivated separateness"翻译得更直接一些可以是“早就预谋着要另立山头”
（3）
"Command-and-Control"是英文两个压前韵的单词的组合，估计是固定用法，我一时找不到合适的中文单词来对应，就借用《红楼梦》里说王熙凤的词了，的确非常的不准确 //汗...

二师兄UID: 118950

导读：作者发现，很多大的投行在合并以后都把名字都改短了，比如瑞银华宝现在就叫UBS了，摩根斯坦利添惠现在还是改回叫做摩根斯坦利，而所罗门兄弟美邦呢，现在索性对外统称花旗集团了，但是这些合并都是五年前就发生了呀，为什么要到今天才改名字呢：仔细看一看，所罗门兄弟1991发生了国库券承销丑闻，而S.G. Warburg（华宝）则一向以“会给自己的雇员挣钱而不能给客户挣钱”闻名。原来现在投行业不景气，投行老大们除了裁员之外总要做点什么赚钱吧？这也说明了投行品牌贬值如斯以至于做点与过去一刀两断的事情就会受到欢迎了。


Bank branding

Name theory

Jun 12th 2003
From The Economist print edition


Investment banks' names get shorter

ONE by one, the names of once-glorious investment banks are being dropped by those who expensively bought them. This week UBS dispensed with the Warburg name for its European investment bank and PaineWebber for its American one. Both will be known only as UBS. In advertisements the bank reassured clients that, since it had only one aim—to understand their needs and help them make the right financial decisions—one name was enough. Customers doubtless wept for joy.

Banking

UBS, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup

Just as name inflation gathered pace in the go-go 1990s, so deflation has become de rigueur in these more straitened times. A year ago Morgan Stanley Dean Witter became Morgan Stanley again. This April Salomon Smith Barney, Citigroup's investment bank (known in Europe as—deep breath—Schroder Salomon Smith Barney), became plain Citigroup. The Smith Barney name will live on as the group's independent research outfit, for which thank regulators. But the Salomon name has now gone the way of some of the businesses it once advised.

Why now? It is, after all, an expensive business to change all those legal structures, business cards, letterheads and logos, although banks won't say how much it has cost. And the acquisitions were not recent: both UBS and Citigroup were created five years ago. There was perhaps some residual value in the names. In the 1970s Salomon was pre-eminent, with the best investment bankers, the best research and the best traders. Its attitude to risk-taking was legendary, though not, it turned out, always legal: it was hit by a Treasury-bond scandal in 1991. S.G. Warburg was in many ways the antithesis of Salomon and the closest that Britain ever came to an international investment bank. It had little presence in America, less talent for trading, almost no bond business and a singular inability to make money for anybody but its employees. Perhaps that is why it is remembered so fondly.

Certainly, investment banks' bosses need to do something to earn their money besides sacking people. But the truth may be that banking brands have become so devalued that any break with the past is welcome.

二师兄UID: 118950

不翻了，看了太多boc的坏话。

Banking in China

Bad habits

Jun 12th 2003 | HONG KONG
From The Economist print edition


Who thought reform would be easy?

Get article background

ON MAY 28th, only a day before its shareholders' meeting, the Bank of China in Hong Kong, a subsidiary of one of China's four huge and troubled state banks, announced that its chief executive, Liu Jinbao, had resigned and moved to Beijing as part of a “routine transfer”. “Routine”, in the language of China's banking system, tends to mean anything but. Sure enough, on June 10th the bank formally admitted that Mr Liu had in fact been detained in Beijing, and was under investigation for corrupt lending to a Shanghai property tycoon, Zhou Zhengyi. Mr Zhou, hitherto best known for evicting thousands of residents in Shanghai to make room for his real-estate projects (many are suing him), is also in detention. Hong Kong's anti-graft police also took in Mr Zhou's wife for questioning.

Graft, bad lending: all this was supposed to be a thing of the past for China's banks, and Bank of China in particular. It made such headlines early last year, when it came to light that nearly half a billion dollars had been embezzled at one of its branches in southern China. Worse, Wang Xuebing, its former boss, was jailed for corrupt loans he had made during the 1990s from the New York branch, which he ran with some flamboyance. Mr Wang is now aiding the investigations against Mr Liu with advice from his prison cell.

At least, the Bank of China said at the time, all the bad news was coming out at once, thus allowing it to clean house and then list shares in a new, improved, and sparkling Hong Kong branch. This offering went ahead last July with moderate success, raising $2.8 billion. Foreign investors seemed to be giving the bank the benefit of the doubt.

That is why the current scandal is so embarrassing. Some of the dodgy transactions between the Bank of China (from its Shanghai branch, probably) and Mr Zhou seem to have taken place during the preparations for the share offering, precisely when the bank was supposedly cleaning up its act.

For those familiar with China's banking reforms, such setbacks are depressingly familiar. At the same time as the Bank of China's share offering, for instance, there was also optimism about what seemed to be a ground-breaking deal with an American finance firm, Newbridge Capital. Newbridge negotiated permission from municipal authorities in the southern city of Shenzhen, a progressive place by Chinese standards, to buy a stake in and take management control of a local bank. This was novel stuff: it implied that the government would allow foreign takeovers and would countenance lending based on borrowers' commercial rather than political credentials.

One year on, however, the deal is in limbo. Shenzhen's cadres, it seems, were not so keen to cede control of their bank after all; or they may have thought that they could haggle something better with a Taiwanese bank run by the Koo family, one of the island's most prominent. Newbridge, which was under the impression that it had signed binding contracts in Shenzhen, is suing the Koos in an American court.

As it has done many times before, Chinese banking has become bogged down in a quagmire just when it seemed to be making progress. Imagine, for instance, what Shan Weijian is going through. Mr Shan, a mainland Chinese, is Newbridge's man in Asia, and thus the fellow behind the negotiations in Shenzhen. As an international banking expert, a rarity in China, he was also invited to be an independent director of the Bank of China in Hong Kong.

Mr Shan is now working around the clock to douse the flames all around him. Which is ironic, because Mr Shan is well known for being pessimistic that China will ever respect private property and the sanctity of contract—opinions that he formed during the Cultural Revolution, when he was doing hard labour in the Gobi desert—and so usually keeps Newbridge out of entanglements in China's state-owned sector. Now he has to help fix it. What else is one to do?

princessmiaUID: 121566

二师兄我快崇拜死你了
知道这么多东西
和你聊天简直太长见识了
不是恭维的说

慕波UID: 123535

好文章，顶！！！

lindajoeUID: 3303647

二师兄 发表于 2003-6-8 11:40
No Rest
未到休息时
Legal torment continues for leading investment firms

The primary target for civil suits will be Citigroup, if only because it has the most money.
这句翻译的有点别扭。'仅仅因为它涉及的金额最多"？
J.P. Morgan Chase and Citigroup are also said to be nearing a settlement.
“摩根大通和花旗集团也即将达成和解”？

matchamatchaUID: 3405423

PPP只能当一个参考
缺陷太多

尤其是每每想到巨无霸 我就一点胃口也没有 送我也不会吃的
这样的消费偏好肯定会影响企业的定价力


最后 楼主翻译的非常好 谢谢你的辛勤劳动

伪摇滚爱好者UID: 2990861

好贴支持下