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团团这两天各种忙，忙得快要飞起来了。担心过会儿没时间发今天的小分队作业，就提前发了吧。今天的作业都不是很难，大家可以松口气了
【速度】
Enter the B20
Business hopes to be heard at next week’s G20 summit
【计时1】
WHEN the G20, a group of governments from the world’s biggest economies, meets in Los Cabos, Mexico, later this month, business will have a seat at the table. The bosses of more than 300 large companies will be at the same beach resort for the fourth summit of the B20, a group that tries to persuade governments to be more business-friendly. For the first time, B20 leaders will be invited to address the assembled politicians.
They will give advice on matters ranging from infrastructure to jobs, but the B20’s most useful role may be as a watchdog. The politicians at these powwows have a reputation for saying one thing and doing another (or nothing) when they return home. To hold them to account, the B20’s chairman, Alejandro Ramírez, touts a new “performance dashboard”.
This dashboard, prepared with input from the International Chamber of Commerce, the McKinsey Global Institute and the University of Toronto, will track each G20 country’s progress in keeping promises made at each year’s summit. Initially, the dashboard will focus only on commitments directly relevant to business.
The Economist has seen a draft dashboard, minus the country names. It tracks progress made between the 2010 and 2011 G20 summits on 13 categories of pledge. They include improving the financial system (by implementing Basel 3 capital-adequacy rules), fighting climate change, promoting free trade and curbing corruption.
[227 words]
【计时2】
It makes dismal reading, in places. On trade, only four of the G20 did what they said they would. Five made no progress at all, or regressed. Pledges to fight corruption, manage exchange rates sensibly and price fossil fuels to reflect their carbon emissions were also widely breached.
The dashboard ought to embarrass people who deserve to be embarrassed. But although it has been shown to the G20 governments, the B20 is dithering about whether to publish it. Fans of good government will be disappointed. What use is a watchdog that does not bark?
For now Mr Ramírez, whose day job is boss of Cinépolis, a Mexican cinema chain, will say only that Australia has performed best, making progress on every pledge, whereas Argentina has performed poorly. No surprises there. Australia has grown rich selling food and minerals to China, and is rolling out the welcome mat for foreign talent (see next article). Argentina, in contrast, cannot even keep honest inflation statistics, and has a nasty habit of nationalising foreign companies.
Following a disappointing B20 last year in Cannes, when the politicians lectured the bosses but did not listen, Mr Ramírez has been doing all sorts of sensible things to make the B20 seem more than just a club of rich grumblers. He has invited NGOs and other outsiders to join its deliberations. Barbara Stocking, the head of Oxfam UK, is on the B20’s food-security task force. John Evans, a veteran trade-union official, is on its employment task force. But a pressure group is measured by results, not intentions. The B20 has yet to prove itself.
[266 words]
My big fat Greek divorce
How and whether Greece might exit is the biggest and fattest uncertainty of all
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ON JUNE 17th the brinkmanship on the Aegean will take another twist. Even if the New Democracy party manages to form a government it will seek to renegotiate the terms set earlier this year by European creditor nations for Greece’s second bail-out. If instead the victor is Syriza, the left-of-centre group bent on scrapping the deal, the markets fear that this will lead ineluctably to Greece leaving the euro and inflicting heavy collateral damage on the rest of the euro zone on the way. But there is nothing automatic about the precise timing and mechanism of a “Grexit”.
If Alexis Tsipras, Syriza’s leader, were unilaterally to announce a debt moratorium, as he has threatened to do, then this would almost certainly precipitate a swift exit. All bail-out funds would be cut off. With Greece defaulting on its debt, the European Central Bank (ECB) would no longer be prepared to permit the provision of liquidity for Greece’s tottering banks. If the Bank of Greece did not comply with the ECB’s ruling, Greece could in the last resort be cut off from the euro zone’s payments system, points out Malcolm Barr, an economist at JPMorgan. The Greek government would have to reintroduce the drachma, which would immediately plunge in value against the euro.
But Mr Tsipras would have to form a coalition and would be constrained by his partners. And he has not campaigned to leave the euro, which remains popular in Greece. He is calculating that Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, will blink at the prospect of the wider costs of a Greek exit. He believes that she will not want to be seen as forcing Greece out of the euro, not least since on strict legal grounds a country can neither leave nor be forced to leave the currency union.
[300 words]
【计时4】
Even a Syriza victory will thus probably lead in the first place to negotiations. While these are taking place, there would be no bail-out money to fill the hole in Greece’s primary budget (ie, excluding interest). But Greece would still need funding to avoid default, since it must also service debt and redeem maturing bonds, notably one held by the ECB due to be repaid in August. One suggestion is that the Europeans could channel bail-out financing to meet such payments through the “escrow account”, a segregated account at the Bank of Greece set up as part of the second bail-out to ensure that Greece honours its debts. A precedent for this was set in May, after the first inconclusive election, when a payment of ?.2 billion ($5.3 billion) was made to Greece, most of which went to cover another maturing bond held by the ECB.
Even if this tortuous routing of European bail-out money to the ECB helped avoid an immediate default, any new Greek government would face huge strains. When the second rescue was approved, Greece looked close to balancing its primary budget. In March the IMF envisaged a 2012 deficit of just ? billion (1% of GDP) and a surplus of ?.7 billion in 2013. But such forecasts have been overtaken by events. Fearing the worst, the Greeks are holding back on taxes (revenues were ?95m below target in the first four months of 2012) and the government is postponing payments to suppliers.
[246 words]
【计时5】
Some economists think that Greece could nonetheless avoid a sudden departure from the euro. The government could pay some of its bills by issuing its own IOUs direct to its domestic creditors. These notes (“scrip”) would start to circulate at a steep discount to euros. In effect, argues Thomas Mayer, an adviser to Deutsche Bank, Greece could create its own parallel and depreciated currency while still remaining in the monetary union.
Something similar happened in Argentina as it struggled to retain its rigid link between the peso and the dollar before the link eventually snapped in early 2002. Bankrupt regional governments started to pay their workers in scrip, such as the patacones issued by Buenos Aires Province. But these desperate measures were desperately unpopular because the patacones immediately fell in value. Within just a few months, the Argentine government restricted withdrawals of bank deposits, defaulted on its debts and broke the link with the dollar, allowing the peso to devalue.
Mario Blejer, who was Argentina’s central-bank governor in the middle of the crisis, says that resorting to scrip would be even worse than creating a new currency outright (which he thinks would be disastrous). It would create monetary chaos and generate inflationary pressure before the exit that would inevitably ensue.
Any negotiations between Mr Tsipras and Greece’s creditors may in any case be short-circuited. Greece’s bank run could turn into a sprint after the election, making the country ever more reliant on the ECB for emergency funding. If the condition for further support is compliance with the terms of the bail-out, then it may be Mr Tsipras who blinks after all. If he doesn’t, then Greece could indeed leave the euro in a rush after the election.
[287 words]
【越障】
The magazine industry
Non-news is good news
The threat of the internet has forced magazines to get smarter
Jun 9th 2012 | BERLIN, NEW YORK AND PARIS | from the print edition
“PRINT is dead” was a common refrain a couple of years ago. The costly print advertisements that kept magazines and newspapers alive were migrating to the web, where they earned only pennies on the dollar. To publishers, it felt as if a hurricane was flattening their business.
But as the storm has cleared, a new publishing landscape has emerged. What was once a fairly uniform business—identify a group of people united by some shared identity or passion, write stories for them to read and sell advertising next to the stories—has split into several different kinds.
Hard news is perhaps the hardest to make profitable. It is increasingly instant, constant and commoditised (as with oil or rice, consumers do not care where it came from). With rare exceptions, making money in news means publishing either the cheap kind that attracts a very large audience, and making money from ads, or the expensive kind that is critical to a small audience, and making money from subscriptions. Both are cut-throat businesses; in rich countries, many papers are closing.
But among magazines there is a new sense of optimism. In North America, where the recession bit deepest (see chart), more new magazines were launched than closed in 2011 for the second year in a row. The Association of Magazine Media (MPA) reports that magazine audiences are growing faster than those for TV or newspapers, especially among the young.
Unlike newspapers, most magazines didn’t have large classified-ad sections to lose to the internet, and their material has a longer shelf-life. Above all, says David Carey, the boss of Hearst Magazines, a big American publisher, they represent aspirations: “they do a very good job of inspiring your dreams.” People identify closely with the magazines they read, and advertisers therefore love them: magazines, says Paul-Bernhard Kallen, the chairman of Hubert Burda Media, a large German publisher, remain essential for brand-building.
Which is why luxury magazines are doing particularly well, as are those in emerging markets, where a fast-growing middle class is coming into those advertisers’ sights. In Brazil, for example, the Abril Group has made Minha Casa, a home-improvement magazine, the leader of its kind in two years thanks to a careful focus on new homeowners.
Back in the United States, the number of ad pages in magazines has dropped for three quarters in a row, according to the Publishers’ Information Bureau. But that is partly cyclical, says Nina Link, the MPA’s head, and it doesn’t account for the growing number of ads in digital form.
Once, digital ads would have been scant comfort. On the web they are typically worth a small fraction of what they were in print. But tablets, such as Apple’s iPad, could change this.
They have been around for only two years and most magazine subscriptions on them for less than a year; the MPA suggested measurement standards for advertising on tablets only in April. Yet already there are signs that advertisers are accepting higher rates on tablets than on the web, because magazines on tablets are more like magazines in print: engrossing, well-designed experiences instead of forests of text and links.
Publishers are still experimenting with formats: some are little different from their print versions, while others are more interactive, perhaps too much so. Hearst’s Cosmopolitanlaunched the digital-only Cosmo for Guys, which purports to shed light on feminine psychology for baffled males; an early issue included 3-D models of sexual positions that you could rotate to view from every possible angle. Who says glossy mags aren’t educational?
But the wiser publishers are finding ways to rely less on advertising. They are looking to make more not only from subscriptions but also from other sources. Today, “you need five or six revenue streams to make the business really successful,” says Mr Carey. Spurred by necessity and enabled by technology, magazines “innovate in ways they never dreamed of a few years ago,” says Ms Link.
What else a magazine can do besides sell copies depends on its audience and subject matter. Many are turning themselves from mere carriers of ads into marketing-services companies, giving their advertisers a range of new ways to reach readers. Travel magazines’ websites can track if their readers end up buying the holiday packages they write about, and take a cut. “I count that as advertising,” says Mr Kallen. “What many people call advertising…is definitely declining, but advertising in the broader sense isn’t.”
Other commercial branchings-out include a growing range of conferences or celebrity events, the licensing of magazines’ names to products such as cosmetics, and tie-ups with deal and coupon websites such as Groupon. Successful new magazines have been launched on the back of TV programmes, such as Hearst’s “Food Network” and “HGTV” (a home-improvement show) and the BBC’s “Top Gear” (a show about macho cars). With so many countries now boasting a big middle class, international franchises often work well; Hearst’s Cosmopolitan now has 66 different country editions.
There are also more esoteric business models. Monocle, a global magazine for the insufferably stylish, claims that the online radio channel it launched last autumn has been profitable from the start, since normal commercial radio stations never deliver the kinds of listeners its high-end advertisers want. The Atavist, an American iPad magazine that publishes one long piece of narrative journalism each month, says it makes money largely because it licenses its iPad publishing software to other people.
Loyalty is lucrative
The ability of magazines to inspire fierce loyalty among readers means there are also lots of small-time, quirky successes. XXI, a French quarterly of long-form reportage, is profitable despite carrying no ads, not putting its text online and being sold only in bookshops; it seems to capitalise on French intellectual traditions and the concentration in Paris of voracious readers. Germany’s Landlust, which extols the virtues of living at a relaxed pace and in close contact with nature, is another print-only holdout, with a circulation of 1m after seven years. As long as there are coffee tables, people will want things to put on them.
[1,008 words]
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发表于 2012-6-14 20:05:25
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团团，希腊那篇一点也不简单么...1'18 G2 summit, a group that tries to persuade governments to be more business-friendly. But the G20's most useful role is to trac the country's progress in keeping promises.
rint is dead" ,more are published through web, less print advertisment,less income for News. But magazines audiences are growing faster than others.Magazines do not depend on advertisment too much. 
ther business model.