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大家加油哦！！！
寒假要开始了，祝各位有个充实愉快的假期，就算是备考，也要快乐备考~
还是很希望得到大家关于难度和长度方面的建议，不要不好意思说~~~
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【每日阅读训练第四期——速度越障13系列】【13-2】经管
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【time 1】
US Congress Avoids Fiscal Cliff, Postpones Budget Decision
From VOA Learning English, this is the Economics Report in Special English.
On January first, both houses of the United States Congress approved a plan that will increase taxes for most Americans. But the agreement avoided much larger tax increases that were set to take effect this year.
President Obama signed the bill into law late Wednesday. In a statement, he noted the importance of a balanced approach to the country's fiscal problems.
"Today's agreement enshrines, I think, a principle into law that will remain in place as long as I am president: The deficit needs to be reduced in a way that's balanced. Everyone pays their fair share. Everyone does their part. That's how our economy works best. That's how we grow."
The combination of higher taxes and automatic budget cuts has been called the "fiscal cliff." That cliff has been avoided. But much remains to be done. Congress has given itself another two months to decide on how to cut the federal budget. More tax money and budget reductions are needed to cut the federal deficit. That deficit was over $1 trillion last year.
The new law increases the tax rate on individuals with earnings of over $400,000 and on couples with earnings of over $450,000. All working Americans will have some kind of tax increase. This is because the share of Social Security taxes paid by employees will return to 2010 levels, an increase from last year of two percent.
But the largest part of the tax increase will affect those with a lot of investment income and those with very high wages. Taxes on investment gains and dividends, payments from some kinds of securities, will increase. Also, the top income tax rate will go to 39.5 percent from 35 percent. Overall, the effect of the law is simple. It will be the first major tax increase in 20 years.
But the new law means only half of the deficit question has been answered. Taxes provide revenue to finance government operations. But budget cuts reduce costs. And lawmakers will have little time to debate. The federal government has reached its legal debt limit. That is the borrowing limit, set by Congress, for the government. Congress will have to raise the debt ceiling by late February. That will be the job of the 113th Congress, which was seated on Thursday.
In addition, lawmakers will have to make difficult budget decisions by March first. On that date, big, automatic budget cuts, or sequestration is set to take place across the federal government.
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The platinum-coin option
Toss a coin
A crackpot idea to circumvent America’s debt ceiling gains currency
Jan 12th 2013 | WASHINGTON, DC | from the print edition
ARCH-CONSERVATIVES have long prescribed a return to the gold standard as the answer to America’s fiscal and monetary excesses. Now liberals are looking to precious metals to solve a fiscal bind.
Sometime between mid-February and early March, the Treasury will run out of legal authority to issue new debt. Republicans in Congress say they won’t raise the debt ceiling without big spending cuts; Barack Obama says he won’t negotiate over the country’s creditworthiness. Unless the impasse is broken, the Treasury will have to renege on billions of dollars of spending commitments—including, possibly, bond-interest payments.
That has prompted a search for loopholes. Mr Obama has already rejected one: invoking the 14th amendment to the constitution, which says the validity of America’s debt “shall not be questioned”. But another has been gaining adherents in the blogosphere, who note that an obscure law allows the Treasury to issue platinum coins of any denomination. Liberals now want Mr Obama to mint a $1 trillion platinum coin, providing all the spending room the government needs to finance the budget for the coming year. At least one Democratic congressman favours the idea; a Republican congressman plans to introduce a bill to prohibit the coin being minted.
Wacky though it sounds, the proposal raises intriguing monetary-policy questions. Ordinarily the Federal Reserve purchases coins from the Treasury to meet demand from commercial banks, and pays for them by printing money that it then deposits in the Treasury’s accounts at the Fed. A $1 trillion coin would use the same mechanism on a vastly bigger scale. In economic terms the Fed’s purchase would resemble “quantitative easing”, in which it prints money to buy bonds.
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Monetarists would fret that creating $1 trillion of new money would spur inflation, but those fears are misplaced. Unlike bank notes, which are liabilities of the Fed and thus part of the monetary base, coins are liabilities of the Treasury. The money the Fed creates to pay for the coins does not become part of the monetary base until the Treasury spends it, and it ends up in a commercial bank’s reserves at the Fed. The monetary base could eventually expand by $1 trillion in this way. But because the Fed has paid interest on reserves since 2008, it would retain control of interest rates and therefore of inflation.
Apart from circumventing the debt ceiling, there might be other practical benefits. Gary Gorton, an economist at Yale, says issuing the coins in smaller denominations of, say, $50m could provide companies with a risk-free alternative to current accounts, easing the financial system’s shortage of safe assets.
The bigger problem is political. The Fed purchases bonds by choice to carry out monetary policy. Being forced to buy the $1 trillion coin would be a textbook case of monetising the debt and a gross violation of the Fed’s independence. The manoeuvre would violate the intent of Congress in creating a debt ceiling (daft though that is). In any case, the idea is just too weird to be taken seriously. When the answer to America’s debt problems is something that could be lost down the back of a sofa, it’s no answer at all.
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【time 4】
Agriculture
Hay — the Stuff Horses Eat — Is the Latest Weird Item Targeted by Thieves
By Martha C. WhiteJan. 10, 2013Add a Comment
Never mind hunting for a needle in a haystack — what if you’re hunting for the actual haystack? Last summer’s drought across the nation’s agricultural belt has led to a spate of hay thefts as farmers face record prices for this crucial livestock feed.
Industry publication Farm Progress reports that hay that should have been worth around $200 sold for record highs of around $320 a ton at auction. It’s just supply and demand, auction manager Dale Leslein told the magazine.
Oklahoma is screaming for hay… Missouri is running short; Nebraska is very tight as is Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee and Kentucky. They’re all running out of hay.
Some thieves will just sneak away with a couple of bales and hope the owner doesn’t notice them missing, authorities in Missouri say. Others are more brazen: The Denver Post says one group of criminals made off with $5,000 worth of hay in a front-end loader back in September.
The biggest problem for farmers is that it’s virtually impossible to recover stolen hay because it all pretty much looks alike. Even if you had a good hunch of who took it, there’s no way to prove that those bales sitting in someone else’s field really belong to you. The New York Times reports that some farmers have started painting their hay with brands or affixing ribbons to bales as means of identification.
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Some people are making attempts to fight back.
One enterprising sheriff in Oklahoma resorted to using GPS tracking to nab hay thieves last spring. And last month, the Coalition to Support Iowa‘s Farmers published a PSA on its website with theft-thwarting tips. Among them:
“Evaluate what security measures they have in place… Store hay close to your farmstead where you can better monitor it. If your hay must stay in the field, put a gate across the field entrance and lock it.”
Of course, hay bales aren’t the only bizarre thing criminals take during economically stressful times. When fuel prices skyrocketed in the summer of 2008, fast-food restaurants filed police reports over theft of their frying oil — which was filtered and used as a substitute for diesel. Last year, as gas prices rose, the phenomenon began popping up again in upstate New York, Philadelphia and other parts of the Northeast.
At one point last year, thefts of Tide laundry detergent got so bad that storekeepers from Maryland to Oregon considered keeping it under lock and key, and authorities in the Washington, D.C. area actually organized a raid on a Tide-theft ring. (Insert your own “ring around the collar” joke here.) Police said the thieves — often drug dealers or users — preferred shoplifting detergent to other items because (like hay), there’s no way to tell if one has been stolen — no serial numbers, no unique identification markers.
Canada’s maple syrup trade was disrupted this fall by a brazen $30 million dollar theft of the sweet stuff in Quebec. The criminals made off with million of pounds of syrup, or more than a quarter of producers’ emergency supply.
What’s weirder: Stealing syrup or having a stockpile of it? Since Quebec produces more than three-quarters of the world’s maple syrup, the producers’ federation has kept a stash on hand for more than 10 years, as a hedge against the big price fluctuations that are caused by particularly good or bad harvest years.
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Personal finance
Ghastly gurus
The best advice is to keep your wallet closed
Jan 12th 2013 | from the print edition
HAVE you ever met anyone who has grown rich just by saving? Probably not. But you may well have met someone who has grown rich looking after other people’s savings. That dark secret lies at the heart of “Pound Foolish”, Helaine Olen’s excellent book, a contemptuous exposé of the American personal-finance industry.
With icy logic, Ms Olen, a journalist, demonstrates that much of the advice given by moneymaking gurus on television or in print is either fatuous or based on ridiculously optimistic assumptions about future investment returns. Take the idea that saving the cost of a daily latte and investing the proceeds in the stock market would make you rich. Saving $3 a day, or $1,100 a year, might be a sensible economy measure but it won’t build a fortune.
Such faddish ideas are the financial equivalent of miracle diets. A belief in instant riches lured millions into buying internet stocks in the late 1990s or overpriced houses in the middle of the past decade, when any personal-finance adviser worth his salt should have been advising clients to run in the opposite direction. But optimism sells, and realism tends not to.
As well as bad advice, the gurus have plenty of expensive products to flog—from courses that teach people how to become better real-estate investors to branded goods like a $49.99 canvas laptop bag or a $34.98 silver leather wallet. By the time clients have bought all the books, attended the courses and stocked up on the accessories, someone has definitely become rich, though probably not the saver.
Savers make all sorts of rookie mistakes—from following the stock tips touted on television to paying through the nose for complex financial products when simple low-cost alternatives (like index-tracking funds) are available. And debtors are similarly foolish, running up big bills on high-charging credit cards. Perhaps such lessons could be rammed home by financial-literacy courses but Ms Olen is cynical, noting that many courses are sponsored by financial-services companies, creating an obvious conflict of interest.
Indeed, this is one of the central problems of personal finance—how to get advice to apathetic consumers. The unwillingness of consumers to pay for advice has led to hard-selling, high-charging salesmen taking over the industry. Britain has just reformed its payment system for financial advice and if Ms Olen’s book has a fault, it is the lack of an international perspective offering such examples. The personal-finance pages of British newspapers are doughty champions of consumer rights. While she rightly attacks the high-cost annuities sold to American consumers, she might have reflected that the kind of low-cost annuities sold in Britain ensure that retirees do not outlive their savings.
But Ms Olen is right to home in on the biggest problem that personal-finance gurus neglect; people earning $20,000 a year will struggle to pay for the basics in life and will simply not be able to save their way to a life of comfort, let alone riches. As Ms Olen concludes, “We do not live in an economic environment that will permit mass personal-financial progress, no matter how well meant the guidance or advice.”
Like Ms Olen, the latest book from Jack Schwager, best known for his “Market Wizards” books based on interviews with traders and fund managers, takes a potshot at TV stockmarket tipsters. A four-year analysis of the share recommendations by Jim Cramer, star of CNBC’s “Mad Money”, shows that while the stocks rose on the day he mentioned them, they underperformed the market over longer periods. The experts polled by Louis Rukeyser on “Wall Street Week” (a programme on public television) proved to be almost perfect contrarian indicators; they were most bullish in December 1999, at the peak of the dotcom bubble.
Mr Schwager’s book starts off with plenty of sound, basic advice—beware of assuming that past high returns can be maintained, for example—before expertly demonstrating that a leveraged exchange- traded fund (a fund that promises to deliver an enhanced market return) is a dreadful investment because of its structure, being almost bound to disappoint.
He then moves on to more sophisticated measures of risk, rightly pointing out that “faulty risk measurement is worse than no risk measurement at all, because it may give investors an unwarranted sense of security.” As the book develops, beginners may start to struggle with mathematical concepts, such as Sortino and Calmar ratios, that regularly get trotted out.
Oddly, this curate’s egg of a book then veers off in a different direction—a lengthy description and defence of the hedge-fund industry. Mr Schwager demonstrates that hedge funds are less risky than many mutual funds, but he does not really deal with the central issue; that their fees are too high for the returns they deliver. One suspects that Ms Olen would respond to his conclusion that “hedge funds are a desirable investment even for unsophisticated, lower-net-worth individuals” with a loud, and well-deserved, raspberry.
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发表于 2013-1-11 21:26:06
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