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饭饭今天替小白酱贴出小白酱整理出滴阅读小分队内容~以下均为小白酱滴阐述：
声明两点：1.大家礼拜四有好的经济金融管理类的越障文章都可以推荐给小白（QQ:504391506 隐身在线），我筛选一下发出来希望大家选择难度和GMAT类似或者微难的文章，投稿的同学我都会列出来表示感谢！！！！
2.今天的越障讲的金融创新的弊端蛮好的一篇，有点长2000字大家能读完就读，不能就看看大概。
【速度】
Europe's central bank and the euro crisis
Draghi strikes back II
【计时1】
AT LAST the waiting has ended. Over the past few weeks the markets have been obsessing over just how much liquidity banks would tap from the European Central Bank (ECB) in the second of its extraordinary three-year LTROs (long-term refinancing operations).
The answer came on February 29th from the Frankfurt-based central bank of the 17-country euro area. The ECB announced that it had lent ?30 billion ($710 billion), a bit more than traders had expected. The funding also exceeded the previous LTRO, in late December, which had already provided a massive ?89 billion. The number of banks dipping into the honeypot reached 800, well above the 523 that borrowed in the first operation.
Just as sequels rarely match the success of blockbuster movies, so with the ECB’s second funding operation. For one thing, since the amount was only a bit higher than expectations, it should broadly be priced into the markets (though such rationality should never be taken for granted). For another, more of the take-up is likely to have come from banks outside the euro area.
More important, the first three-year LTRO proved a runaway hit because the ECB showed its hand—or rather that of the wily Mario Draghi, who had taken the helm only weeks before, replacing Jean-Claude Trichet, the bank’s previous president. No, Mr Draghi clearly signalled, the ECB under his leadership would not become the lender of last resort to troubled governments. Instead, it would become the lender of first resort to troubled banks, which could in turn prop up toppling sovereigns by purchasing their debt. Moreover, it would provide funds for a record length (LTROs are usually for months rather than years and the previous record was just one year) and at dirt-cheap rates (the three-year average of the ECB’s main policy rate, currently at 1% and tipped to fall later this year to 0.5%).
【311】
【计时2】
The ECB’s eleventh-hour intervention in December dampened down the euro crisis, which had threatened to go critical. Italian and Spanish government bond yields had soared and scared investors had shunned European banks, causing an ominous funding drought. The first three-year LTRO broke this spiral of pessimism by removing fears of an imminent banking implosion.
As confidence returned, funding markets re-opened for stronger banks in stronger European economies. And crucially, the ECB’s backdoor approach worked a treat in Italy and Spain. Banks there lapped up the central bank’s funds and purchased their own governments’ debt. That pushed down Italian and Spanish sovereign bond yields whose spreads over German Bunds narrowed markedly.
At best, the second LTRO will maintain that return of confidence for a while. But the ECB’s provision of liquidity buys time rather than solving the euro area’s deep-seated problems, which are as much political as economic. A sharp reminder of the dangers ahead came on February 28th when Enda Kenny, the Irish prime minister, unexpectedly announced that Ireland would hold a referendum on the European treaty to enshrine budget discipline in national law. Even if the Irish vote against it, the “fiscal compact” will take effect, since it requires only 12 countries in the euro area to back it. But the referendum will reveal public resentment against the harsh austerity that has been imposed on Ireland under its bail-out.
【230】
【计时3】
There are other tripwires ahead, highlighted by this week’s decision by Standard & Poor’s, a credit-rating agency, to put Greece into “selective default” as a result of the debt-exchange deal that will slash the face value of private-sector holdings of Greek public debt by more than half. A vote in the German parliament endorsed the linked second bail-out of ?30 billion, but opinion polls revealed that over 60% of Germans were opposed to it. Even if the debt swap goes according to plan, an election in April could move Greece closer to an exit from the euro area, with potentially forbidding consequences not just for Greece but the rest of the single-currency zone.
Perhaps most worrying of all, the economic prospects are not just bleak for bailed-out and beleaguered Greece and Portugal but also for much larger Italy and Spain. Italian and Spanish borrowing costs may have fallen but that will be of little avail if these economies, already forecast to shrink this year, are unable to return to growth. Moreover, the austerity that Spain must undergo is fiercer than had been expected since its deficit last year has turned out to be 8.5% of GDP rather than the 6% that had been targeted.
The ECB’s second dollop of easy money has comforted markets. But the euro crisis has not gone away. It would not take that much for it to turn acute again.
【234】
【计时4】
World Bank Call for Chinese Reforms Elicits Rare Protest
World Bank President Robert Zoellick held a news conference in China Tuesday to explain a new report calling for structural economic reforms in China. A lone protester disrupted the event and called attention to China’s growing income inequality.
Zoellick had just sat down and was starting to talk at Tuesday's news conference, when Du Jianguo came to the front of the room to shout slogans and hand out copies of his protest statement.
Before Du was dragged away, he said the World Bank is poisonous to China and that its policies exacerbate the country's already growing wealth gap. He called himself an independent scholar. Some of his English-language comments echoed the Occupy Wall Street movement.
The translator for the news conference conveyed his complaints to the World Bank president. Zoellick, a veteran of anti-World Bank protests, was unperturbed.
“As you see, this report has provoked some interesting debate in China,” he said.
Zoellick explained the new report, “China 2030”, urges China's leaders to ask what he describes as “tough questions” about how the country's economy will adapt to the global financial crisis and slowing export demand.
“China has been very successful over the past 30 years with one structural model for development," he noted. "That model has focused on export-led and heavily investment-led growth. The 12th five-year plan recognizes that needs to change, to focus more on domestic demand and consumption.
【231】
【计时5】
The report says the country’s brisk economic growth is unsustainable unless China makes major free-market reforms.
The World Bank head says he expects vested interests that benefit from the current structure will resist that change, but he said the change is necessary for the good of all Chinese people.
Arvind Subramanian, with the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, rejected the argument that the World Bank is responsible for bringing inequality to China, but he acknowledged the protester's anger - especially over related issues like corruption.
“There is no question that in this country, rising inequality is a major - one of the big imbalances,” he admitted.
He added that adequately addressing these problems will require more than strictly economic solutions.
“I think that people see that one of the solutions to that is to have greater accountability and that might be the mechanism through which greater political freedoms are demanded," Subramanian said. "I think political reform, economic accountability mechanism, is perhaps kind of, if I can peer through the lens, is kind of the way forward in China.”
During this trip, Zoellick also visited Guangdong province and Inner Mongolia. He says this is likely his last trip to China before he steps down as World Bank president in June.
【211】
【越障】
Playing with fire
Financial innovation can do a lot of good, says Andrew Palmer. It is its tendency to excess that must be curbed
Feb 25th 2012 | from the print edition
FINANCIAL INNOVATION HAS a dreadful image these days. Paul Volcker, a former chairman of America’s Federal Reserve, who emerged from the 2007-08 financial crisis with his reputation intact, once said that none of the financial inventions of the past 25 years matches up to the ATM. Paul Krugman, a Nobel prize-winning economist-cum-polemicist, has written that it is hard to think of any big recent financial breakthroughs that have aided society. Joseph Stiglitz, another Nobel laureate, argued in a 2010 online debate hosted by The Economist that most innovation in the run-up to the crisis “was not directed at enhancing the ability of the financial sector to perform its social functions”.
Most of these critics have market-based innovation in their sights. There is an enormous amount of innovation going on in other areas, such as retail payments, that has the potential to change the way people carry and spend money. But the debate—and hence this special report—focuses mainly on wholesale products and techniques, both because they are less obviously useful than retail innovations and because they were more heavily implicated in the financial crisis: think of those evil credit-default swaps (CDSs), collateralised-debt obligations (CDOs) and so on.
This debate sometimes revolves around a simple question: is financial innovation good or bad? But quantifying the benefits of innovation is almost impossible. And like most things, it depends. Are credit cards bad? Or mortgages? Is finance as a whole? It is true that some instruments—for example, highly leveraged ones—are inherently more dangerous than others. But even innovations that are directed to unimpeachably “good” ends often bear substantial resemblances to those that are now vilified.
For a demonstration, look at Peterborough. The cathedral city in England’s Cambridgeshire is known for its railway station and an underachieving football club nicknamed “the Posh”. But it is also the site of a financial experiment that its backers hope will have big ramifications for the way public services are funded.
Peterborough is where the proceeds of the world’s first “social-impact bond” are being spent. This instrument is not really a bond at all but behaves more like equity. In September 2010 an organisation called Social Finance raised £5m ($7.8m) from 17 investors, both individuals and charities. The money is being used to pay for a programme to help prevent ex-prisoners in Peterborough from reoffending. Reconviction rates among the prisoners recruited to the scheme will be measured against a national database of prisoners with a similar profile, and investors will get payouts from the Ministry of Justice if the Peterborough cohort does better than the rest. If all goes well, the first payouts will be made in 2013.
The scheme is getting lots of attention, and not just in Britain. A mixture of social and financial returns is central to a burgeoning asset class known as “impact investing”. Linking payouts to outcomes is attractive to governments keen to husband scarce resources. And if service providers like the people running the Peterborough prisoner-rehabilitation scheme can get a lump sum up front, they can plan ahead without bearing any financial risk. There is talk of introducing social-impact bonds in Australia, Canada and the United States.
Here, surely, is a financial innovation that even the industry’s critics would agree is worth trying. Yet in fundamental ways an ostensibly “good” instrument like a social-impact bond is not so different from its despised cousins. First, at its root the social-impact bond is about creating a set of cashflows to suit the needs of the sponsor, the provider and the investor. True, the investors in the Peterborough scheme may be more willing than the average individual or pension fund to sacrifice financial returns for social benefits. But as Franklin Allen of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and Glenn Yago of the Milken Institute, a think-tank, argue in their useful book, “Financing the Future”, the thread that runs through much wholesale financial innovation is the creation of new capital structures that align the interests of lots of different parties.
Second, the social-impact bond is based on the concept of risk transfer, in this case from the government to financial investors who will get paid only if the scheme is successful. Risk transfer is also one of the big ideas behind securitisation, the bundling of the cashflows from mortgages and other types of debt on lenders’ books into a single security that can be sold to capital-markets investors. The credit-default swap is an even simpler risk-transfer instrument: you pay someone else an insurance premium to take on the risk that a borrower will default.
Third, even at this early stage the social-impact bond is grappling with the difficulties of measurement and standardisation. An obvious example is the need to create defined sets of measurements in order to work out what triggers a payout—in this case, the comparison between the Peterborough prisoners and a control group of other prisoners in a national database. Across finance, standardisation—around contracts, reporting, performance measures and the like—is what enables buyers and sellers to come together quickly and new markets to take off.
Neither angels nor demons
For all the similarities, there are two big differences between the social-impact bond and other, less lauded financial instruments. The first is that the new tool has been designed explicitly for a social purpose. But ask a pensioner how much money he wants to put into prisoner rehabilitation, and it isn’t likely to be all that much.
Whether protecting a retirement pot or signalling problems with a government’s debt burden, finance can be “socially useful” (to use a phrase popularised by Adair Turner, the outgoing chairman of Britain’s Financial Services Authority) without being obviously social. Lord Turner himself acknowledged that in a speech he gave in London in 2009: “It is in the nature of markets that there are some things which are indirectly socially useful but which in the short term will look to the external world like pure speculation.”
Many people point to interest-rate swaps, which are used to bet on and hedge against future changes in interest rates, as an example of a huge, well-functioning and useful innovation of the modern financial era. But there are more contentious examples, too. Even the mention of sovereign credit-default swaps, which offer insurance against a government default, makes many Europeans choke. There are some specific problems with these instruments, particularly when banks sell protection on their own governments: that means a bank will be hit by losses on its holdings of domestic government bonds at the same time as it has to pay out on its CDS contracts. But in general a sovereign CDS has a useful signalling function in an area tilted heavily in favour of governments (which do not generally have to post collateral and can bully domestic buyers into investing).
The second difference is that social-impact bonds are still in their infancy, whereas other crisis-era innovations were directly involved in a gigantic financial crisis. There are questions to answer about their culpability. A few products from that period do look inherently flawed. Only the bravest are prepared to defend the more exotic mortgage products that sprouted at the height of America’s housing bubble as lenders found ever more creative ways to bring unaffordable houses within reach. Finance professionals almost blush to recall an instrument called the constant-proportion debt obligation, a 2006 invention of ABN AMRO that added leverage when it took losses in order to make up the shortfall. The end of the structured investment vehicle (SIV), an off-balance-sheet instrument invented to game capital rules, is not much lamented. And the complexity of the “CDO-squared” has been widely condemned.
But even now it is hard to find fault with the concept, as opposed to the practical application, of many of the most demonised products. The much-criticised CDO, which pools and tranches income from various securities, is really just a capital structure in miniature. Risk-bearing equity tranches take the first hit when things go wrong, and more risk-averse investors are more protected from losses. (Euro-zone leaders like the idea enough to have copied it with their plans for special-purpose investment vehicles for peripheral countries’ sovereign debt.) The real problem with the CDOs that blew up was that they were stuffed full of subprime loans but treated by banks, ratings agencies and investors as though they were gold-plated.
As for securitisation and credit-default swaps, it would be blinkered to argue they have no problems. Securitisation risks giving banks an incentive to loosen their underwriting standards in the expectation that someone else will pick up the pieces. CDS protection may similarly blunt the incentives for lenders to be careful when they extend credit; and there is a specific problem with the way that the risk in these contracts can suddenly materialise in the event of a default.
But the basic ideas behind both these two blockbuster innovations are sound. India, with a far more conservative financial system than America, allowed its first CDS deals to be done in December, recognising that the instrument will help attract creditors and build its domestic bond market. Similarly, securitisation—which worked well for decades—allows banks to free up capital, enabling them to extend more credit, and helps diversification of portfolios as banks shed concentrations of risks and investors buy exposures that suit them. “Securitisation is a good thing. If everything was on banks’ balance-sheets there wouldn’t be enough credit,” says a senior American regulator.
Rather than asking whether innovations are born bad, the more useful question is whether there is something that makes them likely to sour over time.
Greed is bad
There is an easy answer: people. When bubbles froth, greedy folk use innovations inappropriately—to take on exposures that they should not, to manufacture risk rather than transfer it, to add complexity in order to plump up margins rather than solve problems. But in those circumstances old-fashioned finance goes mad, too: for every securitisation stuffed with subprime loans in America, there was a stinking property loan sitting on the balance-sheet of an Irish bank or a Spanish caja. “Duff credit analysis is always the cause of the problem,” says Simon Gleeson of Clifford Chance, a law firm.
This argument has a lot of power. When greed takes hold, finance in all its forms is undone. Yet blaming the worst outcomes of financial innovation on human frailty is hardly helpful. This special report will point to the features of financial innovations that can turn them into troublemakers over time and show how these can be managed better.
In simple terms, finance lacks an “off” button. First, the industry has a habit of experimenting ceaselessly as it seeks to build on existing techniques and products to create new ones (what Robert Merton, an economist, termed the “innovation spiral”). Innovations in finance—unlike, say, a drug that has gone through a rigorous approval process before coming to market—are continually mutating. Second, there is a strong desire to standardise products so that markets can deepen, which often accelerates the rate of adoption beyond the capacity of the back office and the regulators to keep up.
As innovations become more and more successful, they start to become systemically significant. In finance, that is automatically worrying, because the consequences of any failure can ripple so widely and unpredictably. In a 2011 paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Josh Lerner of Harvard Business School and Peter Tufano of Said Business School also argue that in a typical “S-curve” pattern, in which the earliest adopters of an innovation are the most knowledgeable, a widely adopted product is more likely to have lots of users with an inadequate grasp of the product’s risks. And that can be a big problem when things turn out to be less safe than expected.
【1999】
http://www.economist.com/node/21547999 |
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发表于 2012-3-1 19:59:16
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