The Americans may still go to the moon before the Chinese
也许美国人仍会比中国人更早登月
Feb 18th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
Can you direct me to reception, please?
请您告诉我服务台怎么走，好吗？
WHEN America’s space agency, NASA, announced its spending plans in February, some people worried that its cancellation of the Constellation moon programme had ended any hopes of Americans returning to the Earth’s rocky satellite. The next footprints on the lunar regolith were therefore thought likely to be Chinese. Now, though, the private sector is arguing that the new spending plan actually makes it more likely America will return to the moon.
The new plan encourages firms to compete to provide transport to low Earth orbit (LEO). The budget proposes $6 billion over five years to spur the development of commercial crew and cargo services to the international space station. This money will be spent on “man-rating” existing rockets, such as Boeing’s Atlas V, and on developing new spacecraft that could be launched on many different rockets. The point of all this activity is to create healthy private-sector competition for transport to the space station—and in doing so to drive down the cost of getting into space.
Eric Anderson, the boss of a space-travel company called Space Adventures, is optimistic about the changes. They will, he says, build “railroads into space”. Space Adventures has already sent seven people to the space station, using Russian rockets. It would certainly benefit from a new generation of cheap launchers.
Another potential beneficiary—and advocate of private-sector transport—is Robert Bigelow, a wealthy entrepreneur who founded a hotel chain called Budget Suites of America. Mr Bigelow has so far spent $180m of his own money on space development—probably more than any other individual in history. He has been developing so-called expandable space habitats, a technology he bought from NASA a number of years ago.
These habitats, which are folded up for launch and then inflated in space, were designed as interplanetary vehicles for a trip to Mars, but they are also likely to be useful general-purpose accommodation. The company already has two scaled-down versions in orbit.
Mr Bigelow is preparing to build a space station that will offer cheap access to space to other governments—something he believes will generate a lot of interest. The current plan is to launch the first full-scale habitat (called Sundancer) in 2014. Further modules will be added to this over the course of a year, and the result will be a space station with more usable volume than the existing international one. Mr Bigelow’s price is just under $23m per astronaut. That is about half what Russia charges for a trip to the international station, a price that is likely to go up after the space shuttle retires later this year. He says he will be able to offer this price by bulk-buying launches on newly man-rated rockets. Since most of the cost of space travel is the launch, the price might come down even more if the private sector can lower the costs of getting into orbit.
The ultimate aim of all his investment, Mr Bigelow says, is to get to the moon. LEO is merely his proving ground. He says that if the technology does work in orbit, the habitats will be ideal for building bases on the moon. To go there, however, he will have to prove that the expandable habitat does indeed work, and also generate substantial returns on his investment in LEO, to provide the necessary cash.
If all goes well, the next target will be L1, the point 85% of the way to the moon where the gravitational pulls of moon and Earth balance. “It’s a terrific dumping off point,” he says. “We could transport a completed lunar base [to L1] and put it down on the lunar surface intact.”
There are others with lunar ambitions, too. Some 20 teams are competing for the Google Lunar X Prize, a purse of $30m that will be given to the first private mission which lands a robot on the moon, travels across the surface and sends pictures back to Earth. Space Adventures, meanwhile, is in discussions with almost a dozen potential clients about a circumlunar mission, costing $100m a head.
The original Apollo project was mainly a race to prove the superiority of American capitalism over Soviet communism. Capitalism won—but at the cost of creating, in NASA, one of the largest bureaucracies in American history. If the United States is to return to the moon, it needs to do so in a way that is demonstrably superior to the first trip—for example, being led by business rather than government. Engaging in another government-driven spending battle, this time with the Chinese, will do nothing more than show that America has missed the point.
The Story of the Scrolls: The Miraculous Discovery and True Significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls. By Geza Vermes. Penguin; 260 pages; £9.99. Buy from Amazon.co.uk
WITHIN a century or so of Christianity’s emergence, Jews and Christians were having heated disputes over certain prophetic passages in the Hebrew scriptures. They were arguing not only over the meaning of those verses, but over their precise wording. Each side suspected the other of doctoring manuscripts in order to support its own interpretations.
At least until the late 20th century, it was almost impossible for modern scholars to throw any light on the substance of these disputes: in other words, to say which party was correct in its claims as to which wording was the oldest. There are clearly some small but significant differences between the Hebrew used by most Jews for at least 1,400 years or so—the Masoretic text—and the Septuagint, a translation into Greek made for Hellenistic Jews in Egypt about 800 years earlier, using a Hebrew original which has been lost. But nobody could really explain the source of these differences. Was it the case that the translators deliberately set out to mislead, or did later editors alter the Hebrew?
Debate about this and many other delicate matters was transformed by the discovery, starting in 1947, of nearly 900 documents, in a series of caves in the desolate landscape east of Jerusalem. The scrolls, the first of which was found by a young goatherd, are a mixture of biblical and quasi-biblical texts, plus some previously unknown writings, all apparently possessed by (and perhaps produced by) a dissident Jewish community just before and during the time of Jesus Christ.
The analysis of such ultra-sensitive material requires calm judgment—and Geza Vermes, a retired Oxford professor, is widely credited with having the coolest head among the scholars who have devoted their careers to studying the scrolls and sharing their insights. Some of his writing is controversial. He has, for example, strong personal opinions on the “historical Jesus”, and like anybody who enters that field he has attracted both admirers and detractors. But in this short personal memoir, he sticks mainly to the known facts about the scrolls, and the arguments they have caused. On this matter, he is careful and fair-minded.
It may help that his personal story stands at the tragic interface between Christianity and Judaism in the 20th century. As the 85-year-old Mr Vermes recalls, his Hungarian Jewish parents died in the Holocaust, even though the family, which was not religious, had converted to Catholicism in the 1930s. Young Geza was saved by the family’s Catholic contacts and went on to study in western Europe. Ordained as a Catholic priest and educated at Catholic universities, he later reverted to his Jewish roots. As a lifelong analyst of the scrolls, whose efforts to maximise scholarly access have been gratefully recalled by younger biblical scholars, such as Britain’s Philip Davies, Mr Vermes is well placed to dissect the precise significance of this unique discovery, and to assess the many theories it triggered.
One popular conspiracy theory held that the Catholic scholars who did the initial analysis of the scrolls kept their conclusion secret because it challenged the Christian faith. Mr Vermes, who was close to that research effort, finds good reason to criticise it for slowness and carelessness—but no ground to assert a conspiracy. Nor does he accept oversimplified theories that directly link the community which gave rise to the scrolls with the advent of Christianity. The manuscripts are relevant to the study of Christian beginnings, but they are not the whole story.
For Mr Vermes, the Dead Sea scrolls provide both reassurance and difficult questions for believing Christians and Jews alike. The reassuring news for Jews is that the scrolls, comprising versions of the Hebrew scriptures in use about 2,000 years ago, are mostly pretty close to the later Masoretic version.
Although Mr Vermes does not spell this out in detail, there is also some intriguing news for Christians: certain “Old Testament” passages which they hold dear—but which are mysteriously absent in the Masoretic version—do feature in the scrolls. They don’t seem to have been late Christian inventions. The challenging thing for both faiths to accept is that multiple versions of the Hebrew scriptures appear to have been in circulation for a very long time—to a degree that casts doubt on the existence of one original set of words. Indeed, the very idea there was a single Ur-text from which later versions diverge either more or less is hardly tenable, as Mr Vermes persuasively argues.
Many believers in revealed religion, especially those who regard text as the primary medium of revelation, will find that hard. But if they do accept it, it will be much easier for believers in different religions to have civilised debates without coming to blows. As someone who has significantly advanced that cause, Mr Vermes can look back on a life well lived.
[注２]：基督徒一般称希伯来语圣经为“旧约”，是相对“新约”而言，因为按照基督徒一般都接受的观点，神在“新约”圣经里和人定立了一个新的约，即主耶稣为人赎去了罪过，人可以（也只能）通过主耶稣得到神的拯救，从而得进神的国度。“旧约”中的约是神和神的选民以色列人之间的约－－以色列人应该守神定的律法，作为回报，神则应该佑护以色列人（换句话说，连神都是有义务的）。“旧约”似乎不属于别的人群，但“新约”中的救赎和永远的生命却可以属于来自任何一个族群的人。犹太人对基督徒把他们读的圣经称作“旧约”是不满意的（which can be an understatement)，所以若要公允，“旧约”一词确实是应该加上引号的。
The IMF changes its mind on controls on capital inflows 国际货币基金组织在控制资本流入的问题上改变想法。
Feb 18th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
LEFTOVER piles of slushy snow from the heaviest snowfall in over a century make it hard to take sharp turns on the roads of Washington, DC, these days. But the past couple of weeks have seen plenty of ideological swerves at the IMF’s downtown headquarters.
百年不遇的特大暴雪袭击华府过后，现在的街道上残留着成堆的雪泥，如此路况驾车，要是来个急转弯，可不够呛？但是过去几周，在华府商业区的IMF总部中，却发生了许多观念的转变。
Earlier this month the fund’s chief economist, Olivier Blanchard, questioned the focus of modern macroeconomic policy on keeping inflation low, arguing that central banks should aim at an inflation rate of 4%, rather than the conventional goal of 2%. Now a paper* by a group of IMF economists suggests that the fund has substantially rethought its position on the use of restrictions by emerging markets on capital inflows. It concludes that controls are sometimes “justified as part of the policy toolkit” for an economy seeking to deal with surging inflows.
这个月的早些时候，国际货币基金组织的首席经济学家Olivier Blanchard对现代宏观经济政策的重心——将通胀维持于低水平——提出了质疑，并认为中央银行应该将目标定在4%的通货膨胀率，而非作为传统目标的2%。如今，一篇报告——由IMF的一群经济学家撰写——这样认为，国际货币基金组织在关于新兴市场国家对资本入境的限制措施如何使用的问题上已经切实再三思考其立场。文章结论道，资本控制有时是一经济体政策工具组合中的合理一部分，它使该经济体摸索出如何去处理海量外资入境的方法。
This is surprising. The fund has historically opposed capital controls, even trying in 1997 to amend its articles of agreement to allow it explicitly to promote capital- account liberalisation. Its economists have argued both that capital controls are costly because they induce distortions to resource allocation and that they are not effective because they are easily evaded. But there is a contradiction between these arguments: if controls have no effect, how can they be distortionary?
这令人吃惊。从历史的角度来看，国际货币基金组织一贯反对资本控制，在1997年亚洲金融危机时，它甚至尝试修改该组织协议中的一些条款，好使其公开倡导资本性账户自由化。该组织中的许多经济学家一直认为资本控制代价高昂（因为这样做会导致资源分配扭曲）并且毫无效果可言（又因为可以轻易地避开资本控制）。但是上述观点中确有一矛盾之处，即：如果资本控制没有效果，那它们是怎样造成资源分配扭曲的呢？
The new paper provides some welcome clarity on the effectiveness of inflow controls. Its authors find that GDP fell less sharply during the financial crisis in countries that already had such policies in place. Prior research has shown that the maturity structure of a country’s external liabilities gets longer as a result of capital controls. The composition of inflows also seems to matter. Countries with a larger overall stock of debt had bigger credit booms and suffered bigger growth collapses during the crisis. So too did countries with more foreign direct investment (FDI) in the financial sector. Unlike other types of FDI, these flows contribute to debt growth because they include lending from parent banks to local subsidiaries. “The use of capital controls,” the fund’s economists write, “was associated with avoiding some of the worst growth outcomes.”
刚出炉的报告在外资控制是否有效的问题上提供了一些可喜的澄清。报告的作者们发现，资本控制政策到位的许多国家在金融危机期间，其GDP的缩减并不严重。先前的研究一直表明，由于资本控制，一国的外债到期结构可以延续较长的时间。外资的构成也显得十分重要。承担着更为庞大债务的国家会出现更大规模的信贷激增并且在经济危机期间蒙受更为巨大的增长崩溃。同样，金融领域中出现更多境外直接投资的一些国家也会产生类似的结果。与其他类型的境外投资不同，这种资金流入会助推债务的增长，因为这种资金流动包括总行（指外国银行的总行——Y版主注）向国外地方银行注资。“使用资本控制，”国际货币基金组织的经济学家们写道，“与避免一些最为严重的经济衰退后果有关”
The economists are also candid about situations in which capital controls may be needed. In the past the fund has urged countries facing surging capital inflows to allow their exchange rates to appreciate or to accumulate reserves. But exchange rates can overshoot, with consequences for the competitiveness of a country’s exports. And if reserves are adequate, then further accumulation is not optimal.
关于怎样的局面下需要采取资本控制，经济学家们也有清楚的交待。在过去，IMF常常敦促面临海量境外资金流入的国家要么升值本国货币，要么积累（本国货币）准备金。但是汇率工具用得过头，其结果是伤害本国的出口竞争力。接着，如果准备金充足，那么进一步增加（准备金）就不是最优选择。
If allowing exchange rates to adjust is not a viable option, the fund has typically advocated cutting interest rates to make the country less attractive to foreign funds. One reason for the resurgence in capital flows to emerging markets—which the Institute of International Finance, a financial-industry association, thinks will rise to $721.6 billion in 2010 from $435.2 billion last year—is the difference between their interest rates and the very low rates of the rich world. But some countries would risk overheating if they cut any further.
如果调整汇率政策不是一个可行的选择，那么IMF一般就会建议削减利率来使该国避免成为境外资金的垂涎之地。资金再次流入到新兴市场的原因之一——国际金融研究所，一家金融产业协会，认为流入（新兴市场的）资金额将会从去年的4352亿美元上升至2010年的7216亿美元——是富裕国家的利率呈超低之势而新兴市场则并非如此。但是，如果削减利率过了度，那么一些国家可能会出现经济过热。
The fund’s reconsideration of capital controls suggests that it is trying to adapt its advice to global economic realities. That is welcome. But the paper has little to say about what an effective and non-distortionary system would look like. Now that the IMF views controls on inflows more kindly, perhaps it could help countries to design them more cleverly.
国际货币基金组织对资本控制的再思考表明它正在力图使其建言同全球经济现状相适应。那值得称赞。但是这篇报告却对有效并且未被扭曲的（或“公正有效的”——译者注）系统是何等模样只字不提。既然IMF以更为赞许的态度看待“境外资金流入控制”，那么这或许有助于世界各国更为灵活地去规划它们的经济政策（控制资金流入政策——译者注）。
* “Capital Inflows: The Role of Controls” by Jonathan Ostry, Atish Ghosh, Karl Habermeier, Marcos Chamon, Mahvash Qureshi and Dennis Reinhart.
Feb 11th 2010 | NEW ORLEANS | From The Economist print edition
Two sorts of good news from an unhappy city
来自一个不高兴城市的两条好消息
Something to celebrate at last
终于有值得庆祝的事了
NEW ORLEANS is used to big weekends, but the last one stood out. On February 6th voters elected a new mayor, Mitch Landrieu, in a landslide more dramatic than any in memory. The next day the city’s beloved football team, the Saints—famous mostly for bumbling—won the Super Bowl for the first time in their 43-year existence.
To those monumental happenings the annual bacchanal of Carnival, now in full swing, seemed an appropriate backdrop. The day after the big game New Orleanians walked around in a blissful haze, with schools, courts and workplaces operating at half-strength, and strangers greeting one another with hugs and the team’s signature chant: “Who dat!” All this has given the city a dose of optimism it sorely needs. A bit of the old swagger is back.
It is hard to know how much to connect the Saints’ success to that of Mr Landrieu, the state’s lieutenant-governor, who snapped up 66% of the vote. But there is a common theme to both results: cross-racial unity in a city that was once staunchly segregationist, and which in more recent times has experienced an uneasy detente between wealthy whites who control most of the city’s economic affairs and powerful blacks who run its politics.
The election of Mr Landrieu, a scion of Louisiana’s most prominent political clan and a surprise late entry into the race, may signal a departure from all that. Mr Landrieu is white. But his family has always been popular across racial lines, in part because his father, Moon Landrieu, was the first mayor to put blacks in positions of real power at City Hall. (Moon Landrieu was also the city’s most recent white mayor; he left office in 1978. One of his daughters, Mary, is Louisiana’s senior senator.)
Still, the latest election was uncharted territory. Mr Landrieu won overwhelmingly among both blacks and whites; early analysis suggests he won 70% of the white vote and 63% of the black vote. It was a remarkably unanimous verdict considering that New Orleanians have historically voted along racial lines. Just over a year earlier, of course, Americans had elected a black president, a result that clearly shook up the old patterns.
It is hard not to read Saturday’s results as a rebuke to Ray Nagin. The outgoing mayor was barred from running by a term limit, but he was certainly on voters’ minds. Four years ago Mr Landrieu lost to Mr Nagin in a tight election after Mr Nagin made a naked appeal to black voters’ racial loyalties. In that election, Mr Landrieu managed to get only about one in five black votes.
Since then, however, blacks and whites alike have become increasingly dissatisfied with Mr Nagin. His approval rate was recently estimated at a dismal 20%. These low numbers have several causes. They stem partly from the city’s halting recovery after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. But they are also a result of Mr Nagin’s habit of dividing his constituents. He tends to suggest that any criticism of him is racially motivated; he mutters darkly about a “shadow government” and a conspiracy to install whites in offices once held by blacks. Last weekend, New Orleanians of all colours and walks of life seemed to say: let’s move on. That is reason for celebration.
RISK antennae twitch after a crisis. Bankers, regulators and academics, shaken from their complacency, jostle to identify the next tempest. Right now gusts are blowing from several directions. Many countries’ fiscal positions are deteriorating fast after costly interventions to shore up financial systems and restore growth. There is talk of demanding collateral even on deals with formerly unimpeachable sovereign entities. Recent terrorist incidents have raised the spectre of external shocks.
Yet at least a fragile sort of optimism has surfaced, born of ultra-cheap money and relief at having avoided a depression. In some markets fresh bubbles may be forming. Stockmarkets have rebounded sharply. America’s, though still well off their peaks, are up to 50% overvalued on a historical basis. Banks are once again throwing money at hedge funds and private-equity firms (though with tougher margin requirements). Issuance of structured-loan funds, which a few months back looked dead, is booming. Investment banks’ profits, and bonus pools, are back near pre-crisis levels. International regulators have been issuing warnings to chief executives about a return of irrational exuberance. Banks have been ordered to run stress tests involving a sudden jump in interest rates, in preparation for central banks’ withdrawal of monetary adrenaline.
Many will already be doing this as they try to show that they have learnt their lessons. Like the best chess players, bankers insist that they are now concentrating as hard on avoiding mistakes as on winning. Those that sidestepped the worst mortgage-related landmines now top the industry’s new order. Blackrock’s Mr Fisher defines risk as “deviation from objective”, on the upside as well as the downside. If your models tell you that a security is safer than its returns imply, as with CDOs, that might just suggest hidden risks.
Fancy mathematics will continue to play a role, to be sure. But finance is not physics, and markets have an emotional side. In their struggle with the quants, those who would trust their gut instinct have gained ground.
Governments are taking no chances. Bloomberg counts some 50 bills and other serious proposals for financial reform in America and Europe. Leaders in America’s Senate hope to pass new rules by March. But there are limits to what can be expected from regulators and supervisors. Like bankers, they have blind spots. As the mortgage fiasco showed, they are vulnerable to capture by those they police.
Their job will be made easier if new rules tackle incentives for the private sector to take excessive risk. It is human behaviour, more than financial instruments, that needs changing, says Mr Mauboussin of Legg Mason. Like Odysseus passing the sirens, bankers need to be tied to a mast to stop them from giving in to temptation. Pay structures should be better aligned with the timescale of business strategies that run for a number of years and should not reward “leveraged beta”, unremarkable returns juiced with borrowed money. In securitisation, originators will have to disclose more information about loan pools and hold a slice of their products.
Some of the worst abuses in securitisation stemmed from the use of credit ratings. Rating agencies systematically underestimated default risk on vast amounts of debt, resulting in puffed-up prices and a surfeit of issuance. Paid by issuers, they had every incentive to award inflated ratings and keep the market humming: average pay at the agencies rose and fell in tandem with the volume of asset-backed issuance (see chart 7).
An obvious way to deal with this would be to eliminate the agencies’ official “nationally recognised” status, opening the business to unfettered competition. Raters would then have to persuade investors of their competence, rather than relying on a government imprimatur. This, in turn, would force investors themselves to spend more time analysing loans. Oddly, proposed reforms fall far short of this, with no sign of anything tougher on the horizon. CreditSights, a research firm, awarded ratings firms its “Houdini was an Amateur” award for 2009.
Nor, alas, is there much appetite to tackle some of the public policies that contributed to the crisis. The non-recourse status of mortgages in large parts of America, for instance, gives the borrower a highly attractive put option: he can, in effect, sell the house to the lender at any time for the principal outstanding. An even bigger problem is the favourable tax treatment of debt relative to equity. Phasing this out would discourage the build-up of excessive leverage. But the idea has little political traction.
There are, to be sure, risks to rushing reform. Post-crisis regulation has a long history of unintended consequences, from the pay reforms of the early 1990s (when new limits on the deductibility from corporate tax of executive salaries merely shifted the excesses to bonuses) to key parts of the Sarbanes-Oxley act on corporate governance. Another danger is the pricing of risk by regulation, not markets. The credit-card act passed in America last year leaves providers with a choice between underpricing for some products, which is bad for them, or restricting their offerings, which is bad for consumers.
Most would agree, however, that markets need both tighter rules and better enforcement. The biggest question mark hangs over the fate of those institutions whose collapse would threaten the system. America’s proposal to cap banks’ size and ban proprietary trading has fortified those calling for radical measures to tackle the “too big to fail” problem.
By itself, though, the plan does little to back up Barack Obama’s promise to stop such firms from holding the taxpayer hostage. Proprietary trading and investments are a small part of most big banks’ activities and played only a minor role in the crisis. Nor does the plan cover brokers, insurers or industrial firms’ finance arms, all of which had to be bailed out. To persuade markets that the giants no longer enjoy implicit state guarantees, whether they are banks or not, policymakers will need to present a cocktail of solutions that also include tougher capital and liquidity standards, central clearing of derivatives and credible mechanisms to dismantle firms whose losses in a crisis would overwhelm even a strengthened safety buffer.
Together, intelligent regulatory reforms and a better understanding of the limitations of quantitative risk management can help to reduce the damage inflicted on the financial system when bubbles burst. But they will never eliminate bad lending or excessive exuberance. After every crisis bankers and investors tend to forget that it is their duty to be sceptical, not optimistic. In finance the gods will always find a way to strike back.
A set of positive indicators hides troubling realities 一组表现优异的宏观经济指标暗藏着许多令人不安的现实。
Feb 18th 2010 | TOKYO | From The Economist print edition
Kabuki economics
PICK a number, any number. Statistics released this week show that the Japanese economy staged a vigorous rebound in the fourth quarter of last year. Real gross domestic product grew by 1.1% from the previous quarter, which amounted to an annualised rate of 4.6% (see chart). The economy is growing, but the closer you look the murkier things get.
（分析日本经济）挑选一组数据，任一数据（都藏有不安）。这周公布的数据表明，去年第四季度日本经济出现了强势反弹。第四季度实际国内生产总值较第三季度增长了1.1%——按年率计算为4.6%（见图表）。日本经济正在回升，但是你越仔细观察她，越是难以看清她。
The bounce in fourth-quarter GDP partly reflects the economy’s starting point. In the previous quarter growth had been nil, having been readjusted downward twice, from an initial estimate of 1.2% in November and a revised one of 0.3% in December. (If the latest numbers are to be believed, Japan’s GDP ended up contracting by 5% last year.)
去年第四季度国内生产总值的回升在一定程度上可以看成是经济发展的起点。上一季度（指2009年第三季度——译者注）的经济增长率为0%，（该季度经济）增长年率向下调整了两次——一次是从1.2%（11月）下调到0.3% （12月），后又从0.3%（12月）下调到0%。（1.2%和0.3%均是按年率计算所得，若以0.3%的年率为计算基础，则第三季度环比经济增长率为0.0749%。根据第三季度年增长率为0，得出该季度经济环比增长率为0%——译者注）（如果最近的数据可信，那么2009年日本国内生产总值会以缩水5%收官）
Similar revisions are possible this time round. Japan’s number-crunchers continually update the economic numbers using new information and eschew statistical methods to smooth the figures, as in other countries. Like Japanese kabuki theatre, in which characters use exaggerated gestures to energise the audience, the country’s statistics unrealistically magnify both good news and bad.
这次可能也要做出类似的数据修正。日本内阁府中的财务省屡屡利用新信息来更新宏观经济数字并且没有像其他国家一样采用统计方法来平滑数据。在日本的歌舞伎座剧场里，表演者利用夸张的举止来感染观众，同样，这个国家的宏观经济数据不切实际地同时夸大利好消息和利空消息。
The uncertainties do not end there. The big drivers of growth last quarter were domestic demand, which contributed 2.1 percentage points to annualised GDP growth, and exports, which contributed 2.2 percentage points. (The balance came from public-sector demand.) This might suggest that Japan’s economy is gradually rebalancing away from a dependence on external demand. Not so.
经济发展的不确定性依然存在。上一季度经济增长的主要驱动力是国内需求，它给GDP的年增长率贡献了2.1个百分点，同时还有出口，它则贡献了2.2个百分点。（剩下0.3个百分点来自于公共需求）。这或许表明日本经济正逐渐恢复平衡，告别了（过去两个季度中）依靠外需的经济增长模式。但是事实并非如此。
Nearly all the growth in consumer spending came from durable goods like cars and electronic gadgets, which have benefited from government subsidies introduced last year. These subsidies are ending in September (for cars) and December (for electronics and appliances). Once durable goods are removed from the data, consumer spending in the fourth quarter was flat. That is unsurprising. Wages are falling and unemployment, though below its peak of 5.7% last July, remains above 5%, high by Japanese standards. Household consumption fell in 2009 as a whole but sales of beansprouts, a classic belt-tightening purchase in Japan, jumped by more than 10%.
几乎所有私人消费开支的增加都来自于耐久商品诸如汽车和电子设备的购买，这得益于去年政府推出的补贴计划。汽车补贴在9月份结束，而在12月，家用电器的补贴也告一段落。一旦将耐用消费品的开销不纳入数据，那么第4季度私人消费开支便呈低迷之状。这一点都不奇怪。工资在下降并且失业率，尽管低于去年7月份的峰值5.7%，但是依然徘徊在5%以上，这高于日本标准。家庭消费在2009年整体下降但是豆芽菜的销量却跳升了10%还多，在日本，豆芽菜是勒紧裤带度日的传统食品。
What about investment? Capital expenditure rose by 1% in the final three months of 2009, the first increase in seven quarters. But that came after a cumulative 25% decline since mid-2008. Firms’ capacity-utilisation rate, which measures the usage of existing equipment, is low. This suggests that capital expenditure has stabilised but not recovered, says Hiroshi Shiraishi of BNP Paribas.
那投资如何呢？资本开支在2009年最后一个季度上升了1%，是七个季度以来的首升。但那是在经历了自2008年中期以来累计下跌25%之后出现的。企业的产能利用率——用来测量现有设备的利用程度——处于低位。这表明资本开支一直稳定但是并没有恢复，法国巴黎银行的Hiroshi Shiraishi如是说。
That leaves exports, Japan’s normal route out of recessions. Exports produce the bulk of corporate profits, even though domestic consumption accounts for about 60% of GDP. The recovery is fragile here too. The country’s biggest export destination last quarter was China, sales to which increased by 43% in December alone. As Beijing tamps down on bank lending to address potential overheating, that number may yet turn out to be another illusion.
剩下的就是出口了，它是日本摆脱经济衰退的正规之路。日本的出口带来了丰厚的企业利润，尽管国内需求在GDP中的比重约占到60%。 经济复苏（的基本面）依旧脆弱。去年第四季度日本最大的贸易出口对象是中国，单单在12月，日本对中国的贸易额就上升了43%。 随着中国政府打压银行信贷来应对可能出现的经济过热，那一数据还可能最终证明是另一番幻影。
A bail-out for Greece will not be the end of the euro area’s fiscal troubles
对希腊的救助绝非欧元区国家财政困境的终结
Feb 11th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
AS FINANCE ministers from the European Union gathered in Brussels for a two-day “informal” summit on February 11th, there was only one topic on the agenda: how best to help Greece avoid defaulting on its debts while, at the same time, reassuring bond markets that other euro-area countries with big budget deficits, such as Ireland, Portugal and Spain, were still safe bets.
As The Economist went to press, only the basic elements of a possible backstop for Greece had emerged. Pride is at stake, so it will be a “European solution”, with the IMF limited to an advisory role. It will be a joint effort led by France and a somewhat reluctant Germany, the country with the deepest pockets. Berlin frets that a rescue will only encourage further profligacy.
Acting in concert limits the political fallout that comes from rescuing countries. It helps put pressure on Greece for more reforms and cuts in public spending as conditions of the bail-out. But the need for co-ordination makes it hard to act decisively, and leaves bond markets nervous. Funding will be limited, perhaps just enough to help Greece meet its immediate obligations (euro 20 billion of its debts fall due in April and May). Help may take the form of a guarantee on refinancing bonds or an outright purchase of those bonds by Greece’s rescuers.
There is talk that one reason to keep the IMF out is that its chief, Dominque Strauss-Kahn, may be a rival to President Nicolas Sarkozy in the French elections in 2012 (see article). If Europe snubs the IMF, it may eventually need to set up a clone—a European Monetary Fund—to deal with future funding crises. That idea has little support for now, it seems. The ad hoc response to the Greek crisis may partly reflect a fear that a formal set-up with a staff, budget and the ability to raise funds in capital markets would be too close to a fiscal union for many countries to stomach.
For some, the rescue of Greece marks a new wave of the global financial crisis. The first was about the solvency of banks; this one is about the solvency of sovereign countries. Yet Greece’s public-finance problems were brewing long before the rich world’s banks started to falter. When it joined the euro in 2001, its public debt was already more than 100% of GDP. Despite a long boom spurred by low interest rates inside the euro, Greece did little to tackle its persistent deficits.
After its new government admitted, last October, that its budget shortfall would be 13% of GDP, more than twice previous forecasts, Greece’s cost of borrowing started to pick up. Bond investors were further unnerved by the revelation that Greece’s debt had been understated by keeping unpaid bills off the books. With the country’s credibility shot, even the tough austerity programme announced earlier this month could not rally confidence.
Talk of a bail-out brought some calm to financial markets, though there is a risk that the lack of detail may trigger fresh paroxysms. The yield on ten-year Greek bonds fell below 6% the day before the EU gathering: in late January it had risen above 7%. The euro, which had been falling steadily against the dollar, perked up a bit.
Some euro-crats (and more than a few people in Greece) feel the euro zone has been picked on by speculators. They point out that its debt burden is no worse than in other parts of the rich world. The OECD reckons public debt in Britain and America will be higher than in the euro zone by 2011, as a proportion of GDP. The problem for the euro area is that it has trouble-spots, like Greece, with worse than average finances, and no means (until now) to tap the credit of their thriftier brethren.
Even that may be too kind a comparison. Bond investors have worried most about countries with big borrowing needs adding to an already high stock of debt. In future, they may fret more about the longer-term prospects for GDP growth. Sluggish economies cannot sustain a big debt burden for ever; and the euro-zone countries with the most bloated debt burdens also face severe obstacles to growth. Fixing public finances is just the beginning of a much-needed programme of reforms.
Sir PercyCradock, ambassador to China, died on January 22nd, aged 86
珀西•柯利达爵士，英国驻华大使，1月22日辞世，享年86岁。
Feb 11th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
WHEN the registry filled up with smoke, and he realised the building was on fire, PercyCradock knew it was time to leave. The date was August 22nd 1967. For months, both tension and noise had been gradually increasing. Drums, gongs and loudspeakers blaring revolutionary songs had made earplugs standard issue in the British Mission in Beijing. The diplomatic round had gone on much as normal; but dinner with the Danish chargé d’affaires, amid the gleam of silverware, had also featured scenes outside the window of people being dragged out of buses and beaten in the street. Now mobs of Red Guards were storming the mission as Mr Cradock, then political counsellor, and the rest of the staff retreated. There was only one thing for it. He raised his arms “in a generally reassuring way” and cried, “We’re coming out.”
Some would call it surrender. Mr Cradock knew, on the contrary, that it was the only realistic response. Confrontation would be useless. Besides, having made that concession, he went no further. He was asked by the Guards, as they beat him round his back and shoulders, to cry “Long Live Chairman Mao!” He refused, “and fortunately the demand was not pressed.” Forced to bow his head in the ritual kowtow, he kept trying to raise it. He was asked afterwards why he could not make just one small gesture of obeisance. He replied, with that opaque courtesy beloved of both Chinese officials and Whitehall mandarins, that it could not be done.
He was a figure who might have been at home in the Middle Kingdom, where professional scholar-officials, with the equivalent of his double starred firsts in English and law from Cambridge, kept the vast realm ticking like clockwork. Like them he was low-key but razor-sharp, happy to let ministers have their say first, but with an impish glint in his eye, or a slow steepling of his fingers, that showed he had instantly grasped the danger, or the absurdity, of a situation.
His regret was that he could not always lead others to grasp it too; that they could not learn to see things from the Chinese point of view. “Know your enemy” was his motto, as well as the title of his book about a late stint as chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. But for the British governments he served from the 1960s to the 1990s, China was simply unfathomable. Even he—on his scattered tours of duty in 1962, 1966-69, 1978-84 (as ambassador) and secretly thereafter—found the changes baffling. One decade uniformed crowds would be chanting to Mao as the red sun shining in their hearts; the next, “louche young men in T-shirts” proclaimed Deng Xiaoping’s drive to open and modernise. In one dispatch, in his literary way, he resorted to Auden to describe the fading of the Cultural Revolution in 1968:
The vases crack, the ladies die,
The Oracles are wrong:
We suck our thumbs or sleep; the show
Is gamey and too long.
瓶碎
女亡
圣语妄：
我们舐吸拇指或眼屎
戏剧龌龊也太长
Beneath it all, however, he believed China preserved a self-sufficiency, secrecy and superiority that would not change, and had not done since Britain had been dismissed as “a handful of stones in the Western Ocean”.
His fascination was first sparked by reading Arthur Waley’s[1] translations from the Chinese at school. He stayed intrigued after years of meetings with Chinese leaders who smoked, spat or pickled themselves with mao-tai. A Beijing autumn, calm and golden, with persimmons hanging like lanterns in the trees, would enchant him. But the romance of China was soon eclipsed by the struggle to live, as a free-thinking foreigner, within the communist system. China was, he confessed, an addiction with him. But it was also “an acquired taste, much of it bitter”.
The toughest episode—though also, in his view, a triumph—came in 1983-84, with the talks that arranged the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty. Sir Percy, as he now was, eschewed a showdown. Britain “had virtually no cards”; it was therefore essential to make a deal, while pressing for whatever freedoms could be salvaged. Margaret Thatcher, still fiery from the Falklands war, at first disagreed with him; popular newspapers talked of betrayal. Chris Patten, who became governor of Hong Kong in 1992, pressed democracy a good deal too much for Sir Percy, who knew it would unnecessarily upset the Chinese. He accused him, in Prospect magazine, of a “fatal miscalculation”.
This was uncharacteristic. Sir Percy usually made his points, and got his way, stealthily and quietly. He would steal upstairs, when foreign-policy adviser at Number 10, to watch Wimbledon on television; he would travel incognito to Beijing, once to negotiate the new Hong Kong airport, and would be snapped pacing in the grounds of the Summer Palace, looking much like George Smiley. But he was provoked into open war with Mr Patten by his very hatred of confrontation. Dealing with China and its arcana imperii was a matter for professionals, not politicians. And his method was not surrender, though it might look as though he had put his hands up, or made a cringing kowtow to the Chinese. It was just, as he saw it, a nod in their direction, in a coolly realistic way.
Feb 11th 2010
From The Economist print edition
Illustration by Tim Marrs
Risk managers to the fore
IN A speech delivered to a banking-industry conference in Geneva in December 2006, Madelyn Antoncic issued a warning and then offered some reassurance. With volatility low, corporate credit spreads growing ever tighter and markets all but ignoring bad news, there was, she said, “a seemingly overwhelming sense of complacency”. Nevertheless, she insisted that the firm she served as chief risk officer, Lehman Brothers, was well placed to ride out any turbulence, thanks to a keen awareness of emerging threats and a rock-solid analytical framework.
2006年在日内瓦举行的金融会议上，Madelyn Antoncic作了一个演讲，其间她发出了警告但随后又给出了一些安慰。随着低波动率，企业的信用利差越来越小（紧），而市场几乎是忽略所有不利信息，正如她所说的：“似乎是一种压倒性的自满”。然而，她坚持她作为首席风险官所效力的雷曼兄弟公司，因着对可能出现的风险有敏锐的体察和坚如磐石的分析框架，是有能力渡过任何动荡。
Behind the scenes, all was not well. Ms Antoncic, a respected risk manager with an economics PhD, had expressed unease at the firm’s heavy exposure to commercial property and was being sidelined, bit by bit, by the firm’s autocratic boss, Dick Fuld. Less than two months after her speech she was pushed aside.
而幕后所有的一切皆不尽如人意。受人尊敬拥有经济学博士学位的Antoncic女士，对公司商业用房地产贷款存在的巨大风险敞口表达了不安但却被公司独裁的老板Dick Fuld逐渐边缘化。在她发言不到两个月后就被排挤冷落了。
Lehman’s story ended particularly badly, but this sort of lapse in risk governance was alarmingly common during the boom. So much for the notion, generally accepted back then, that the quality of banks’ risk regimes had, like car components, converged around a high standard. “The variance turned out to be shocking,” says Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase.
雷曼的故事以无比恶劣的结局结束了，但这种风险管理的失误在繁荣期却是惊人地普遍。当年普遍存在一种观念， 认为银行的抗风险机制的质量就象汽车零部件一样达标甚高， 这个观念到此休矣。 因为结果发现， 有的银行距离高标准的差距大的惊人，正如摩根大通的行政长官Jamie Dimon所言。
The banks that fared better, including his own, relied largely on giving their risk-managing roundheads equal status with the risk-taking cavaliers. That was not easy. In happy times, when risk seems low, power shifts from risk managers to traders. Sales-driven cultures are the natural order of things on Wall Street and in the City. Discouraging transactions was frowned upon, especially at firms trying to push their way up capital-markets league tables. Risk managers who said no put themselves on a collision course with the business head and often the chief executive too.
那些经营好的银行，包括他自己的，都有赖于给圆颅党和保皇党以同等地位。那并非易事。在风险看似低的繁荣期时，当权者往往会从风险管理者转为交易商。以销售为主导的文化在华尔街和这座城市是正常运转制序。疲软交易是令人难以接受的，尤其是各公司都在为资本市场排名而角力时。风险经理们说不要把自己置身于与业务主管也常包括行政长官的冲突中。
At some large banks that subsequently suffered big losses, such as HBOS and Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), credit committees, which vetted requests for big loans, could be formed on an ad hoc basis from a pool of eligible members. If the committee’s chairman, typically a business-line head, encountered resistance from a risk manager or other sceptic, he could adjourn the meeting, then reconstitute the committee a week or two later with a more pliable membership that would approve the loan.
在许多随后遭受巨大损失的银行中，比如苏格兰哈里法克斯银行和皇家苏格兰银行，对大额贷款进行审查的信贷委员会，是从有资格的成员队伍中临时性选拔组成的。如果委员会主席正好是业务线的领导，在遭遇风险经理或其他不信任者的阻挠时，他可以中止会议，然后在一两周后选择那些会同意借贷更圆通的人选重新组建委员会。
Another common trick was for a business line to keep quiet about a proposal on which it had been working for weeks until a couple of hours before the meeting to approve it, so the risk team had no time to lodge convincing objections. Exasperated roundheads would occasionally resort to pleading with regulators for help. In the years before the crash the Basel Committee of bank supervisors reportedly received several requests from risk managers to scrutinise excessive risk-taking at their institutions that they felt powerless to stop.
另一普遍的技俩就是业务线对他们做了几星期的提案始终保持沉默，直到举行审批会议前几小时才出示，这样风险小组就没有时间提出令人信服的反对意见。愤怒的圆颅党偶尔也诉诸管理者以求帮助。在金融崩溃的前几年内，巴塞尔银行监管委员会据说收到了好几起来自风险经理的审查请求，要求审查在他们机构内他们根本无力阻止的过度风险。
Many banks’ failings exposed the triumph of form over substance. In recent years it had become popular to appoint a chief risk officer to signal that the issue was receiving attention. But according to Leo Grepin of McKinsey, “it was sometimes a case of management telling him, ‘you tick the boxes on risk, and we’ll worry about generating revenue’.”
许多银行的倒闭揭示了重形式而不重实质的问题。近几年来，任命首席风险官逐级变得风行起来，但这只不过是对外表示风险问题正在受到重视。但据麦肯锡的Leo Grepin所言：“这种情况只不过是形式，管理层借此通知他（风险官）‘你只要给抗风险注意事项前头的空格通通打钩就行，赚钱的事我们来操心。’”
Since 2007 banks have been scrambling to convince markets and regulators that they will continue to take risk seriously once memories of the crisis fade. Some are involving risk officers in talks about new products and strategic moves. At HSBC, for instance, they have had a bigger role in vetting acquisitions since the bank’s American retail-banking subsidiary, bought in 2003, suffered heavy subprime-mortgage losses. “Everyone should now see that the risk team needs to be just as involved on the returns side as on the risk side,” says Maureen Miskovic, chief risk officer at State Street, an American bank.
自从2007年以来，银行纷纷说服市场和管理者一旦危机记忆淡化他们将继续实行高风险政策。在谈论新产品和战略举措时也提到了风险官。比如，在汇丰银行，自从2003年收购了美国零售子公司并饱受巨大的次级抵押货款损失后，风险官在审批收购时则扮演了重要的角色。“现今每一个人都要明白风险小组既需要利润方也需要风险控制方”，波斯顿金融街一家美国银行的首席风险官Maureen Miskovic如是说。
Glamming up
乱花渐欲迷人眼
Ms Miskovic is one of an emerging breed of more powerful risk officers. They are seen as being on a par with the chief financial officer, get a say in decisions on pay and have the ear of the board, whose agreement is increasingly needed to remove them. Some report directly to a board committee as well as—or occasionally instead of—to the chief executive.
Miskovic女士是这类新型更有权势的风险官之一。他们正被视为与首席财务官相提并论，在薪酬决策上有发言权，董事会听他们的话，要罢风险官的职务越来越多地要经过董事会的同意。风险官的有些报告不但呈递给CEO 也直接呈递给董事会——偶然情况下， 这些报告不呈递给CEO, 但是直接给董事会。
。
For many, the biggest task is to dismantle cumbersome “silos”, says Ken Chalk of America’s Risk Management Association. Risks were often stuffed into convenient but misleading pigeonholes. Banks were slow to refine their approach, even as growing market complexity led some of the risks to become interchangeable.
对许多风险官司而言，他们最大的任务是拆除繁琐的“孤岛”，美国风险管理协会的Ken Chalk如是说。风险常被轻易界定而误导方向。银行在修正方向是很迟钝的，日益增长的市场复杂性导致了一些风险交错产生。
Take the growth of traded credit products, such as asset-backed securities and CDOs made up of them. Credit-risk departments thought of them as market risk, because they sat in the trading book. Market-risk teams saw them as credit instruments, since the underlying assets were loans. This buck-passing proved particularly costly at UBS, which lost SFr36 billion ($34 billion) on CDOs. Many banks are now combining their market- and credit-risk groups, as HSBC did last year.
随着诸如资产保证证券和债务抵押构成的交易信用产品的增长，信用风险部门则把它们当成市场风险，因为它们属于正当交易类型。而市场风险小组认为它们是信用工具，因为标的资产是贷款。这种相互推诿让瑞士联合银行付出高昂的代价，在债务抵押项目上损失了360亿瑞士法朗（340亿美元）。现今许多银行都把市场风险团队和信用风险团队并在一块，就象汇丰银行去年所做的那样。
For all the new-found authority of risk managers, it can still be hard to attract talent to their ranks. The job is said to have the risk profile of a short option position with unlimited downside and limited upside—something every good risk manager should avoid. Moreover, it lacks glamour. Persuading a trader to move to risk can be “like asking a trapeze artist to retrain as an accountant”, says Barrie Wilkinson of Oliver Wyman, a consultancy.
所有新欣的风险经理机构依然难以吸引人才加入其中。这份职业本身的风险特征就像空头期权（头寸）一样，正回报有限， 负回报（即损失）无限，这是每一个优秀的风险经理人都应尽量避免的。此外，它缺乏魅力。说服一个交易员转而关注风险“犹如把一个空中飞人再培训成一个会计师。”，奥纬咨询的咨询师Barrie Wilkinson如是说。
A question of culture
文化建设
Besides, there is more to establishing a solid risk culture than empowering risk officers. Culture is a slippery concept, but it matters. “Whatever causes the next crisis, it will be different, so you need something that can deal with the unexpected. That’s culture,” says Colm Kelleher of Morgan Stanley. One necessary ingredient is a tradition of asking and repeating questions until a clear answer emerges, suggests Clayton Rose, a banker who now teaches at Harvard Business School.
此外，建立牢固的风险文化要比授权给风险官要难得多。文化是个难以把握的概念，但它重要。“无论是什么引起下轮的危机，那将是不同的。因此你需要一些对不可预知事项应变的能力，那就是文化。” 摩根斯坦利Colm Kelleher认为。“其中一个必要的因素就是要有询问和不断怀疑的传统，直到一个清晰答案出现”，Clayton Rose—现在哈佛商学院教书的银行家如此建议道。
The tone is set at the top, for better or worse. At the best-run banks senior figures spend as much time fretting over risks as they do salivating at opportunities (see article). By contrast, Lehman’s Mr Fuld talked of “protecting mother” but was drawn to the glister of leveraged deals. Stan O’Neal, who presided over giant losses at Merrill Lynch, was more empire-builder than risk manager. But imperial bosses and sound risk cultures sometimes go together, as at JPMorgan and Banco Santander.
这种声音出自高层也许更好也许更糟。在经营最好的银行内，高层们在面对令人垂涎欲滴的良好机会时也会花许多时间来考量风险。相反，雷曼的Fuld先生谈到“保护根源”时更多是为杠杆交易的光芒所吸引。对美林的巨大损失负责的Stan O’Neal，相对于风险管理者他更是一个狂热的帝国建造者。但是有时帝国老板也能和健全的风险文化融为一体，比如摩根大通和西班牙的坦桑大通银行。
A soft-touch boss can be more dangerous than a domineering one. Under Chuck Prince, who famously learned only in September 2007 that Citigroup was sitting on $43 billion of toxic assets, the lunatics were able to take over the asylum. Astonishingly, the head of risk reported not to Mr Prince or the board, but to a newly hired executive with a background in corporate-governance law, not cutting-edge finance.
优柔寡断的老板可能比独断专横的老板更为危险。Chuck Prince最为出名的教训源于2007年9月花旗集团涉及430亿美元的不良资产，在此管理下，疯子们都能接管精神病院了。令人惊讶的是，风险部门的领导既没有向Prince先生报告也没有向董事会报告，而向一位毫无高端金融背景仅有公司治理法案背景的新招主管作了报告。
Another lesson is that boards matter too. Directors’ lack of engagement or expertise played a big part in some of the worst slip-ups, including Citi’s. The “sociology” of big banks’ boards also had something to do with it, says Ingo Walter of New York’s Stern School of Business: as the members bonded, dissidents felt pressure to toe the line.
另一教训与董事会有关。主管们缺乏约束或专业素养在那些管理疏漏最为严重的公司占了主要原因，包括花旗集团。大银行董事会的社会关系学与此也有些关联，纽约斯特恩商学院的Ingo Walter认为：因为利益联盟，持不同政见者在那些循规蹈矩者中总要承受更大的压力。
Too few boards defined the parameters of risk oversight. In a survey last year Deloitte found that only seven of 30 large banks had done so in any detail. Everyone agrees that boards have a critical role to play in determining risk appetite, but a recent report by a group of global regulators found that many were reluctant to do this.
太少的董事会对风险监督的因素予以界定。在德勤去年的调查中30家银行仅有7家对此有详细的规定。大家都认为董事会在风险偏好中起决定作用，但在最近的全球临管组的报告中发现他们大都不愿意这么做。
Boards could also make a better job of policing how (or even whether) banks adjust for risk in allocating capital internally. Before the crisis some boards barely thought about this, naively assuming that procedures for it were well honed. A former Lehman board member professes himself “astonished”, in retrospect, at how some of the risks in the company’s property investments were brushed aside when assessing expected returns. The survivors are still struggling to create the sort of joined-up approach to risk adjustment that is common at large hedge funds, admits one Wall Street executive.
董事会还可以在制定政策上做得更好，比如在制定银行内部分配资本时如何调整分险。在危机发生前一些银行几乎没有考虑到这点，天真地认为那些程序已完美无缺。雷曼的一名前董事会成员承认自己事后回想起来深感吃惊，因在公司财产投资时仅对预期回报评估而根本没有考虑到有多少的风险存在。幸存者仍挣扎于是否加入风险调整的路径中，但在大型对冲基金中风险调整是很普遍的，华尔街的一名执行官司承认说。
Board games
董事会的游戏
Robert Pozen, head of MFS Investment Management, an American asset manager, thinks bank boards would be more effective with fewer but more committed members. Cutting their size to 4-8, rather than the 10-18 typical now, would foster more personal responsibility. More financial-services expertise would help too. After the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley act in 2002 banks hired more independent directors, many of whom lacked relevant experience. The former spymaster on Citi’s board and the theatrical impresario on Lehman’s may have been happy to ask questions, but were they the right ones?
Robert Pozen是MFS投资管理公司的领导人，一个美国资产管理专家，他认为银行董事会需要数量更少但更为忠诚的成员从而能更加高效地运转。把人数减为4-8人，而不是现在的10-18个代表，也能够培养更多的个人职责。也能提供更多的专业金融服务。2002年通过塞班斯法案后，规定银行需要雇佣更多独立董事，他们中许多是缺乏相关经验。前花旗银行董事会的超级间谍和雷曼的戏剧表演家可能会很乐意提问，但又有哪些问题是提得恰当的？
Under regulatory pressure, banks such as Citi and Bank of America have hired more directors with strong financial-services backgrounds. Mr Pozen suggests assembling a small cadre of financially fluent “super-directors” who would meet more often—say, two or three days a month rather than an average of six days a year, as now—and may serve on only one other board to ensure they take the job seriously.
在监管压力下，比如象花旗和美洲银行等雇佣了更多有着强劲金融服务背景的董事。Pozen先生认为聚集这些娴熟的金融精英作为超级董事，相对于以前一年平均六天工作于董事会，现在每月工作二到三天的时间，如此以来他们仅能再多服务一家别的董事会，这样他们就会更加专注于董事会工作。
That sounds sensible, but the case for another suggested reform—creating independent risk committees at board level—is less clear. At some banks risk issues are handled perfectly well by the audit committee or the full board. Nor is there a clear link between the frequency of risk-related meetings and a bank’s performance. At Spain’s Santander the relevant committee met 102 times in 2008. Those of other banks that emerged relatively unscathed, such as JPMorgan and Credit Suisse, convened much less often.
那听起来似乎在理，但对另一项改革建议即在董事会层面上建立独立风险委员会一事却缺乏明晰性。在一些银行风险事项由审计委员会或全职董事完好操控。举行风险会议的频率和银行绩效间是否有关联依然不清晰。西班牙的桑坦德2008年开这种相关的会就达102次。其它那些受损相对较小的银行诸如摩根大通和瑞士信贷，它们就更常开会。
Moreover, some of the most important risk-related decisions of the next few years will come from another corner: the compensation committee. It is not just investment bankers and top executives whose pay structures need to be rethought. In the past, risk managers’ pay was commonly determined or heavily influenced by the managers of the trading desks they oversaw, or their bonus linked to the desks’ performance, says Richard Apostolik, who heads the Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP). Boards need to eliminate such conflicts of interest.
此外，一些未来几年内最为重要的风险决策将取决于另一方向：薪酬委员会。这不光是投行银行家和高管的薪酬结构需要重构。过去，风险经理的薪酬通常是由他们所监管的交易柜台经理来决定或受其重大影响，或者他们的奖金与柜台的业绩挂钩，全球风险专业人士协会的领导Richard Apostolik介绍说。董事会需要剔除这种利益冲突的现状。
Meanwhile risk teams are being beefed up. Morgan Stanley, for instance, is increasing its complement to 450, nearly double the number it had in 2008. The GARP saw a 70% increase in risk-manager certifications last year. Risk is the busiest area for financial recruiters, says Tim Holt of Heidrick & Struggles, a firm of headhunters. When boards are looking for a new chief executive, they increasingly want someone who has been head of risk as well as chief financial officer, which used to be the standard requirement, reckons Mike Woodrow of Risk Talent Associates, another headhunting firm.
同时风险团队需要增强。比如摩根斯坦利，其队伍已增至450人，差不多是2008年的两倍。全球风险专业人士协会去年也看到风险管理认证增加了70%.在金融招募中风险部门是最忙碌的，猎头公司Heidrick & Struggles的Tim Holt说到。现今董事会寻找新的行政总裁，逐渐想要那种曾有风险管理经验的和首席财务官的人选，这已成为挑选标准，另一猎头公司风险人才协会Mike Woodrow认为。
The big question is whether this interest in controlling risk will fizzle out as economies recover. Experience suggests that it will. Bankers say this time is different—but they always do.
现今最大的问题是当经济复苏时对风险控制的兴起终会消逝。经验证明那是可能的。银行家们说这次是不同的，但他们总是这么说的。
Charityasadvertising 慈善之名 广告之实 Give and take 欲取之，先予之
Will Pepsi profit by enlisting the public in its philanthropic efforts? 争取公众参与其慈善活动，百事能从中获益吗？
Feb 11th 2010 | NEW YORK | From The Economist print edition
THE 107m Americans who tuned in to watch the Super Bowl on February 7th did not see any advertisements for Pepsi. Instead of spending $20m on a handful of 30-second *spots*（注1）, the firm decided to give that amount away. Under the slogan “Refresh Everything”, the Pepsi Refresh campaign asks the public to vote online for charities and community groups to receive grants ranging from $5,000 to $250,000. A few days before the game its arch-rival, Coca-Cola, was also bitten by a charitable *bug*（注2）. It promised to give $1 to the *Boys & Girls Clubs *（注3）of America every time someone watched its Super Bowl ads on its Facebook page, up to a maximum of $250,000. 二月七日，有1.07亿美国人收看了橄榄球超级大赛。但他们没有看到百事可乐的任何广告。百事可乐公司决定与其投资2000万美元用于插播30秒的广告，不如把这笔资金捐赠出去。打着“刷新一切”的口号，百事换新项目鼓励民众在网上投票，以决定哪些慈善机构和社区团体能接收5000美元至250000美元的慈善基金。大赛前几天百事可乐的主要竞争对手，可口可乐也积极进行慈善活动。可口可乐承诺，人们在Facebook网页上每观看一次其橄榄球超级大赛的广告，就捐1美元给美国男孩女孩俱乐部（25万美元封顶）。
Pepsi Refresh is probably the most prominent example so far of “cause marketing”—trying to win customers by ostentatiously doing good. Other recent examples include Chase Community Giving, in which small charities competed to win $5m in donations from JPMorgan Chase, and American Express and *NBC Universal’s*（注4） “Shine A Light” programme, which awarded a grant of $100,000 to a small business chosen through its website.
百事换新活动也许是目前为止最著名的“公益营销”例子——旨在通过行善而争取顾客。最近的另外几个例子还有，大通社区竞捐大赛（小型慈善机构相互竞争以赢取摩根大通捐赠的500万美元资金）和美国运通以及NBC环球联手举行的“亮光”项目（该项目奖励其网站上选出的小型企业10万美元）。
Marketing people say consumers are increasingly trying to do good as they spend. Research in 2008 by Cone, a brand consultancy, found that 79% of consumers would switch to a brand associated with a good cause, up from 66% in 1993, and that 38% have bought a product associated with a cause, compared with 20% in 1993. Rather than try to make products that can be marketed as ethical in their own right, such as “fair trade” goods, firms are increasingly trying to take an ordinary product and boost its moral credentials with what one marketing guru calls “embedded generosity”. The fad for online competitions to award the *handouts*（注5） also appeals to another trend, so-called* “slacktivism”*（注6）, whereby people are turning to the internet to give their consciences a boost without doing anything more onerous than clicking a mouse a few times.
营销人员指出，消费者花钱的同时越来越愿意行善。品牌评估公司，康恩的调查显示，2008年79%的顾客转向消费与公益相关的品牌，1993年只为66%，38%的顾客购买过与公益相关的产品，1993年仅为20%。不象之前的“公平贸易”产品那样——公司以自己的方式把产品标榜成道德之物。这次公司纷纷推出普通的产品，以营销专家称之为“嵌入式慷慨”的方式来增加它们的道德内涵。网上竞争进行慈善的风尚有赖于另外一种潮流”懒惰主义” ，即人们通过互联网不需劳神，只需点几下鼠标，就可以“大发良心”。
The strategy seems to be working, judging by the proliferation of articles (such as this one) noting Pepsi’s campaign. JPMorgan Chase claims its campaign was not marketing, but simply an attempt to manage its existing corporate philanthropy more imaginatively. If so, its marketing staff are missing a trick, given that around 2m people signed up to vote on Facebook, many of whom were not existing Chase customers. Moreover, the favourable headlines generated by Chase’s $5m outlay contrasted strikingly with the grudging reaction to Goldman Sachs’s launch around the same time of a $500m campaign to support small businesses.
针对百事可乐此项活动的大量报道相继出现（比如这篇），据此可知，这项活动效果不错。摩根大通集团声称公司参加此次活动并不是营销策略，只是开展形式多样的公司慈善事业。如果事实真的如公司所说，那营销部工作人员不免错失良机，因为约有200万人在Facebook上投票，这些人大部分不是公司现有的顾客。另外，旨在帮助小型企业的5亿美元筹集活动中，摩根大通积极响应，捐资500万美元，引来各大头条报道的赞许之声，而高盛集团却迟迟不愿捐资，二者形成鲜明对比。
Although the public likes online popularity contests, they can have unintended consequences. Chase, for example, caused a fuss by excluding a pro-life group and an outfit that wants to legalise cannabis from its competition. Moreover, many firms see virtue in tying themselves to a particular cause. Ten firms, including Gap, Apple and most recently Nike, have deals with (RED), a scheme fronted by Bono, a rock star, to raise money to fight AIDS. It has raised $140m so far, despite fears that, as Susan Smith Ellis, its boss, puts it, “it would be just a big launch on Oprah then never heard of again.” Equally, Pepsi’s efforts to promote healthy lifestyles while selling healthier products and Coca-Cola’s various initiatives to protect water supplies in developing countries are critical to the pair’s future. Refreshing everything, in contrast, is a more nebulous goal.
尽管民众喜欢网上这种投票活动，但却会产生一些意想不到的后果。比如说，大通银行将一家反堕胎团体和一个提倡大麻合法化的团队排除比赛，此事引起轩然大波。另外，许多公司认为从事某项公益活动益处多多。包括Gap，苹果以及新近加入的耐克等十家公司与摇滚歌手波诺发起的（RED）计划联合起来为抗击艾滋病筹集资金。尽管曾有担心，但目前已筹集1.4亿美元。正如RED计划首席执行官Susan Smith Ellis所言，“像是在奥普拉节目上宣扬了一番，然后却不了了之”。百事可乐销售更健康的产品以努力提倡健康的生活方式，可口可乐也采取不同行动保护发展中国家的供水系统，这些对于两大公司的未来发展至关重要。与此相比，刷新一些不过是个朦胧的目标。
注1.Spot: A short presentation or commercial on television or radio between major programs
注2.An enthusiasm or obsession: got bitten by the writing bug.
注3.美国男孩女孩俱乐部，致力于增进会员健康，培养其社交、教育、职业、个性能力的全国性俱乐部组织。俱乐部成员6至18岁不等。各俱乐部都是相互独立的非营利性组织，由义务性质的理事会管理，其中管理人员是拿工资的专业人士。俱乐部的重要项目涉及健康与体质、职业规划、教育发展、少年犯罪预防和禁毒禁酒等领域。俱乐部由联合劝募会（United Way）募捐或靠直接捐赠维持。
俱乐部起初只面向少年，19世纪60年代在新英格兰州出现。1906年，大约50家俱乐部共同组建美国男孩俱乐部。由于很多地方俱乐部后来接受少女入会，于是1990年更名为“美国男孩女孩俱乐部”以便名副其实。该组织现有会员200多万，分属大约1670家地方俱乐部。全国性机构位于佐治亚州的亚特兰大。
注4.NBC环球（NBC Universal）是美国的一家大型媒体集团，于2004年5月成立，由国家广播公司（隶属于通用电气）和维旺迪环球（法国维旺迪集团的娱乐事业部门）合并而成。
注5.handout – giving money or food or clothing to a needy person
注6.Slacktivism (sometimes slactivism) is a portmanteau formed out of the words slacker and activism. It is a pejorative term that describes taking painless “feel-good” measures in support of an issue or social cause that have little or no practical effect other than to make the person doing it feel satisfaction. A person that engages in such activity is called a slacktivist.
