【Native Speaker每日综合训练—26系列】【26-18】经管

杀G给猴看

Official Weibo:  http://weibo.com/u/3476904471

大家好，周四经管~~
今天的越障和第一篇速度仍然是关于今年的诺贝尔经济学奖。上周也PO了几篇相关的文章，不知道大家对这个话题稍有熟悉之后 读起来会不会有更顺畅爽快的感觉呢~ Enjoy！

PART I: SPEAKER

Listen to a TED Talk on
The Surprising Need for Strangeness

【REPHRASE 1】




【SPEECH - 08:00】





Source: TED
http://www.ted.com/talks/maria_bezaitis_the_surprising_need_for_strangeness.html

PART II: SPEED

A very rational award
Investors can profit from the insights of this year’s Nobel prizewinners in economics
Oct 19th 2013 |From the print edition

【TIME 2】
IF THE credit boom and bust of the past decade taught economists anything, it was that asset prices matter. So it is right and proper that three academics who have worked on the difficult issue of understanding why such prices move have won this year’s Nobel prize for economics (see article).

At first sight, it may seem odd that Eugene Fama (pictured left), a Chicago professor who believes in efficient markets, should share the award with Robert Shiller (centre), a Yale academic who argued that the stockmarket in the late 1990s and American house prices in the early 2000s were driven by “irrational exuberance”. (The third winner, Lars Peter Hansen, on the right, also of Chicago, developed statistical techniques to analyse asset prices.) But there is more common ground than meets the eye.

Mr Fama’s great insight was that, because profit-seeking investors quickly incorporate new information into asset prices, the movements of those prices are not predictable in the short term, and thus professional fund managers are unlikely to beat the market. This revolutionary notion led to the development of the index-tracking industry, which allows small investors to diversify their portfolios at very low cost. Pundits who seek to persuade the public to follow their stockmarket tips may curse Mr Fama’s work, but the underlying principle—there are no free lunches to be had—still holds good. Mr Fama’s faith in the efficiency of markets has some limits, however, since he set up a fund-management firm that exploits market anomalies, such as the way that companies which are priced cheaply relative to their assets tend to outperform.
【TIME 2 ENDS – 267 WORDS】

【TIME 3】
Mr Shiller’s pioneering paper in 1981 looked at the relationship between the prices of shares and their intrinsic value—the cashflows that shareholders will eventually receive. He found that prices were much more volatile than their intrinsic value would suggest, something that is hard to square with the idea of efficient markets. In the long term the valuation of assets tends to revert to the mean, and thus market movements are eventually predictable. But that element of Mr Shiller’s work does not invalidate Mr Fama’s insight that it is hard to make money from short-term trading.

The reason markets are volatile, according to Mr Shiller, is that financial assets are unlike consumer goods; when their prices rise, that creates more demand, not less. Nothing is more intoxicating to an investor than seeing a friend get rich; everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon. It is no use hoping that “rational” investors will drive prices back to fair value. Such sobersides get knocked over by the stampede, losing their shirts or their clients.

Hence the recent bubbles in asset markets. Mr Shiller’s data show that house prices rose by 7% in real terms between 1890 and 1997 and then by 85% between 1997 and 2006. As for American shares, equities traded at 44 times cyclically adjusted profits (using a ten-year average) at the height of the dotcom boom, compared with a long term average of 16.
【TIME 3 ENDS – 235 WORDS】

【TIME 4】
Central bankers, led by Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve’s chairman from 1987 to 2006, argued that it was impossible to spot bubbles when they are happening. They also said that using higher interest rates to prevent bubbles from forming would do the economy more harm than good. But the central banks did intervene to prop prices up when markets wobbled in 1987 and again in 1998, even when the economy was fairly robust. This “asymmetric ignorance”, as it was dubbed, may have led to greater risk-taking and more bubbles, because traders felt they were underwritten by the “Greenspan put”.

Is this a bubble that I see before me?
Even today, too many of those who play financial markets ignore Mr Shiller’s work. A new book on forecasting from Mr Greenspan fails to mention him at all. Wall Street strategists, keen to sell equities, rarely refer to his valuation approach.

Investors would do well to pay attention. Just as they should bear in mind Mr Fama’s research and put the bulk of their portfolios in low-cost trackers, they should be wary of stockmarkets when they look expensive relative to the long-term trend in profits. And that is the case with Wall Street at the moment; the cyclically adjusted ratio is 23.5, well above the long-term average. After this week’s Nobel awards, investors cannot claim they have not been warned.
【TIME 4 ENDS – 228 WORDS】
Source: The Economist
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21588090-investors-can-profit-insights-years-nobel-prizewinners-economics-very



Why is the liquidity trap?
Oct 21st 2013  by R.A.

【TIME 5】
CREDIT where credit is due; Paul Krugman anticipated this where many others did not:

“Since late 2007 the monetary base has risen more than 300 percent, while GDP and consumer prices have risen less than 20 percent. And no, the disconnect is not all due to the 0.25 percent interest rate the Fed pays on reserves.”

Huge growth in a central bank's balance sheet need not imply runaway inflation. But it seems strange to me to pivot from that understanding to the broad claim that Milton Friedman misdiagnosed the Great Depression:

“You can argue that the Fed could have done more — it could have expanded its balance sheet even further, and/or moved into riskier assets, and/or done more to change expectations. But I don’t see how you can deny that making monetary policy effective has been far harder since we hit the ZLB than it was before, and that this retroactively casts great doubt on Friedman’s claims that the Fed could easily have prevented the Great Depression.”

Wait, wait, wait. No, it doesn't. There is a school of thought that one might call "naive Friedmanism", in which money supply growth is the only monetary variable that matters, and it's easy enough to find examples of cases where that doesn't pan out. But identifying that as the main contribution of "A Monetary History" or of Friedman's monetary economics work more generally strikes me as profoundly unfair. Friedman and co-author Anna Schwartz conclusively demonstrated that monetary shocks have large effects on the real economy. Christina Romer and David Romer argue in this working paper that while the "Monetary History" was suggestive, it did not prove conclusively that monetary shocks caused the Depression. Yet the Romers go on to argue that Friedman's and Schwartz's supposition was right: contractionary Fed policy created deflationary expectations that raised real interest rates and gutted the economy. That is: the Fed did it. When Franklin Roosevelt took America off gold and sought reflation, then expectations flipped and economic growth surged, led by private investment (which rose 500% between 1932 and 1937).
【TIME 5 ENDS – 343 WORDS】

【TIME 6】
This is not just historical arcana. Monetary stabilisation has obviously not worked as one would have hoped since interest rates fell to near zero in 2008. The critical question is why that should be the case.

Mr Krugman has written on multiple occasions that monetary policy is not completely helpless at the zero lower bound. If the central bank were to raise inflation expectations that would provide the necessary monetary traction. I have never understood why that hasn't been the focus of his writing over the past five years: "The liquidity trap is real, and all the Fed has to do to end it is promise higher inflation!" Instead, Mr Krugman has concentrated on fiscal policy (and on occasionally pushing the idea that the conventional wisdom, that the Fed bears primary responsibility for the Great Contraction, is wrong).

I'm all for a big tent approach. If Congress were ready with a big, well-conceived fiscal stimulus and it seemed as though the Fed would allow that stimulus to raise inflation expectations, then I'd cheer. But that's not where we are. An American fiscal stimulus is as far out of the realm of the possible as it could be. What's more, it seems abundantly clear that the Fed would react to less contractionary fiscal policy by bringing forward planned monetary tightening. It might not offset fiscal expansion dollar for dollar. But if the Fed really wanted in its heart of hearts to see inflation expectations up around 3% it might have said so at some point in the past five years, and it might have refrained from pulling the plug on one of its many asset-purchase plans while expectations were short of the mark.

The bottleneck remains, as it has for most of the past half decade, within the Federal Open Market Committee. One of these days Mr Krugman should start treating the lessons of the Depression and the need for a more aggressive monetary policy as something more than a bloggy footnote.
【TIME 6 ENDS – 331 WORDS】
Source: The Economist
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/10/monetary-policy-2

PART III: OBSTACLE

Methods for all moments
The Nobel prize in economics reveals how little we know about the behaviour of markets
Oct 19th 2013 |From the print edition

【REPHRASE 7】
THE “prize in economic sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel”, as it is officially known, sometimes struggles to command the same respect as its counterparts. Though awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, just like the prizes in physics, chemistry and medicine, it was a latecomer to the ceremonies, established in 1968 by Sweden’s central bank rather than in 1896 by Mr Nobel’s will. This year’s winners appeared to reinforce doubts about the prize’s standing. One, Eugene Fama of Chicago, is known for his ardent belief in the efficiency of markets: he declined to renew his subscription to this newspaper after tiring of its incessant warning about bubbles, the very existence of which he denies. Robert Shiller from Yale, in contrast, is known for his prescient warnings of bubbles, in technology stocks in the 1990s and in housing in the 2000s.

Yet for all the apparent contradiction, Messrs Fama and Shiller, along with Lars Peter Hansen (also of Chicago), have established most of the surprisingly small amount economics has to say about asset prices. Although they disagree with one another about how markets operate, the work for which they are being recognised is not itself irreconcilable. For proof, look no further than investors, who have profited from the work of all three men.

Mr Fama began studying data on asset prices while working on his doctoral dissertation in the early 1960s. He set out to test the hypothesis that markets are efficient—that stock prices incorporate all available information immediately and are therefore entirely unpredictable over the short term. His analysis revealed that this is true over horizons of days or weeks, or at least that markets are efficient enough that no trader could consistently profit from a stock price’s predictability after taking into account transaction costs. With co-authors Mr Fama pioneered the use of the “event study” in the analysis of asset prices. By tracking prices in the days immediately before and after important news breaks, they demonstrated that markets react quickly and then once again become unpredictable. An influential article entitled “Efficient Capital Markets”, published in the Journal of Finance in 1970, laid out a research programme for asset-price analysis. Subsequent work has provided a wealth of evidence underlining the efficiency of markets over short periods.

Mr Shiller entered the debate in 1981 with a paper in theAmerican Economic Review entitled “Do Stock Prices Move Too Much to be Justified by Subsequent Changes in Dividends?” It concluded that they did. Although efficient-market theory would suggest that share prices should simply reflect the latest information on the value of the revenues they will yield, they are in fact far more volatile than dividends. Mr Shiller’s work implied that, given some knowledge of the underlying trend in the price of a stock, one could predict future movements. He devised a modified price-to-earnings ratio for shares which used a rolling ten-year average of earnings instead of current earnings. He reckoned stocks that looked overvalued by that measure could be expected to fall over time: an insight that guided his warnings of bubbles in both the 1990s and 2000s. It was after a conversation with Mr Shiller that Alan Greenspan, then head of the Federal Reserve, said high share prices might reflect “irrational exuberance”.

Whereas Mr Fama’s work demonstrated that short-run prices were unpredictable, Mr Shiller’s showed that over periods of several years assets could move in foreseeable ways. Mr Fama does not disagree entirely: one of his papers found that short-run interest rates often influence longer-term trends in the stockmarket. Research he did with Kenneth French of Dartmouth College indicated that the longer the period one considered, the more predictable stock returns became. But he still disputes the idea that asset prices can lose all purchase on the information at hand.

Mr Shiller, meanwhile, sees a role played by individual and crowd psychology, drawing on the work of Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist turned economist who won the Nobel prize in 2002. (Indeed, the Swedish academy might plausibly have paired Mr Shiller with Richard Thaler, another academic at the University of Chicago, in a Nobel prize for behavioural economics.) Other economists reject the behavioural approach, maintaining that predictable returns reflect investors’ rational insistence on compensation for holding riskier assets.

In 1982 Mr Hansen developed what has since become a very influential statistical technique known as “generalised method of moments estimation”. This helps econometricians test theories and make the best use of what information they have (even when it is not all they would like to have), by identifying which of various potential explanatory variables are most likely to deliver statistically robust results. Since then, much of his work has focused on understanding the linkages over time between the prices of assets and macroeconomic variables such as total consumption—a fast-growing field known as macro-financial modelling. Among the questions he has looked at is how the business cycle influences asset prices, and vice versa. His models typically involve people having to make decisions without all the information they would like and with considerable uncertainty about the future, sometimes resulting in asset-price behaviour that seems relatively efficient and at other times quite irrational.

Back to work
What all three laureates share is a commitment to backing up theoretical work with rigorous empirical analysis. The world of finance could do with more of that sort of thing, judging by the wild mispricing of assets revealed by the crisis. Shortly after being told of his award, Mr Hansen was asked how well economists are doing in understanding asset prices. “We are making a little bit of progress,” he replied, “but there’s a lot more to be done.”
【OBSTACLE ENDS – 942 WORDS】
Source: The Economist
http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21588059-nobel-prize-economics-reveals-how-little-we-know-about-behaviour

捉妖

占 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 谢谢小杀妹  & 早上好楼下，楼上的空气真是清新宜人啊~~~

speaker：感觉听清了她说的，但是没听懂==
Not talk to strangers means stay away from people we are not familiar.
We should learn from people not like us.
the point is not strangers but how much strangless we are.
social relation & digital relation
qustion is not I am not like you, but what I can learn form you and  do things together with strangers.
strangers can give information who you are,the person you need and inspiration .
we have to change our norms that not to talk to strangers.

Time2[267]2'39
Three scientists shared one Nobel prize in economy.
F's theory.
Time3[235]1'56
S's thory and his discoveries in the American house.
Time4[228]1'56
Federal Reserve chairman mentioned the mesasures to the bubbles. S's work was ignored by investors.

Time5[343]3'07
F's idea of the contribution to monetary economics is too naive and opposized by Romer and the author, though F's supposition was supported by Romer.
Time6[331]2'47
K suggested to increase the inflation, and the author agrees with that

Obstacle[942]:被打断好多次读下来，没有计时了~~
Nobel Price in economics was set much later than in other fields, and its winners often make the price doubted. this year 3 economists with diffirnet views shared one prize.
Mr Fama made a lot of researches and "demonstrated that markets react quickly and then once again become unpredictable".
Mr Shiler believed that "one could predict future movements"
Fama agree with Shiler a little on the condition that the period is long, the market is predictable.
Mr Hansen " looked at is how the business cycle influences asset prices"

olivia瓜瓜

哈哈哈哈哈喽 楼上

Time2:1m27s

Three economists all devoted to the asset prices，and win nobel prize.   

Time3:1m21s  

Asset price is not like the goods price in which their price rise the demand fall and reversely for asset price .

Time4: 1m21s

The people who play the financial market ignore shiller’s work about the bubble economy .  

Time5:2m12s

Money history does not prove that monetary shocks caused the depression.   

Time6: 1m51s

The monetary policy when go through the great depression haven’t been supported by the fed fiscal stimulus.

Dora7

哟哟哟~~~~~~~~地板
-------------------------------------------------------------
TIME2：1'44''67
three academics won the nobel seems proper and rational
why mr.fama can award:his revolution notion.

TIME3：1'16''59
Mr shiller's research.---＞didn't invalidate that it is hard to make money from short-term trading
why markets are volatile.

TIME4：1'37''31
-Greenspan argued that it was impossible to spot bubbles when happening and using higher interest rates to
prevent bubbles from forming would do the economy more harm than good but banks do it again and again
-investors should pay attention on MRshiller'work which was ignore before

TIME5：2'40''72
PAUL's idea opposite ---＞the author's:fed  policy make real interest rates raised and gutted the economy

TIME6:1'42''14
liquidity trap is real.all fed do will led to higher inflation.prefer'fiscal policy'
bottleneck :more aggressive monetary policy ?没完全弄懂~

OBSATCLE:6'37''31
-the prize in economy sciences established by sweden's central bank
-introduce the three person's work about asset price who win the nobel
-Mr Hansen's research

空De杯具

谢谢 杀G给猴看~~~
占个地下室 去补坑~~~
=======================
Speaker:
the new relationship with strangers and how can the new technology influence this new relationship

Speed:
2'29
Mr Fama's theory mainly held in his area
1'24
Mr Shiller's contribution in his area and there are bubbles recently in asset markets
2'05
central bankers argued that it was impossible to stop bubbles when they are happening and investors should be be wary

of stockmarkets
5'30
some experts believes that monetary shocks did not caused the depression, the Fed did
3'21
the action of the Fed is somehow different from the author's opinion

Obstacle
10'40
M: The Nobel prize in economics reveals how little we know about the behaviour of markets
A:
P:
S:
+ an introduction of the Noble Prize and the new winners of the Noble Economic Prize
+Yet for all the apparent contradiction, the three winners have established most of the surprisingly small amount economics has to say about asset prices
  - Mr Fama's main theory and contribution in his area
  - Mr Shiller's main theory and contibution
  - contraries between the experts
  > Mr Fama VS Mr Shiller
  > Mr Shiller VS the other economists
  - Mr Hansen's main contribution - a statistical technique
+ conclusion: there's a lot more to be done

irvan

占个～谢谢杀妹！

__________________
Obstacle
05:48
Introduction to the research that made these three persons win the Nobel prize in economics

晓野的野

占座！不能懒惰
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lxskyfly

thank you 杀杀~~~~~
--
SPEED
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1. Fama & Shiller, both earning Nobel price, seems to have "contradictory" theories, one of which can't invalidate the other actually.
    --> why recent boom and bust happened can by explained by the reason that how price of profolio chhanges in response to demand long-term and short-term.
2. central banker's strategies, asysmetric ignorance would lead to more risks & bubbles.
    Wall street investers should pay more attention to Shiller's work in lont-term run, which was usually ignored before.
OVREALL
Nobel awards two scientis holding opposite theories--> how the theories combined in real investment field--> many, including central bankers, are ignoring the latter in long-term run--> they definitely should pay more attention

3. it can't be concluded that montary shock is the only variable that matters in eco development & FED economics policies.
    however, Fed's contradictory policies still cause deinflated rate that raise interest rates and stimulate eco development.
4. why that happens? the answer lies in liquidity gap.
   --> for any reason, Fed wil definitely choose contradictory eco policies, which should be shifted to more aggressive ones in author's opinion.

cherry6891

占坑~~~~~~~~~

1 Speaker :

Social norm :don t speak to strangers

Strangers are not the point--what can i do with u benifit us--positive in the future

Close distance--technology will help us to find the people i need right now

Pave the way to new relations

No strangers in the world ,safely seek strangers

2 1:39 3 Nobel prize holder explain why the price move

The house price during 200--irrational exuberance

The price of stock price is unpredictable because the the investor add information to asset price

3 1:30 the relationship with the intrinsic value and the prices

4 1:25 Greenspan thought that it was impossible to spot bubbles but the central bank did intervine to prop price

Mr shill’s theory ignored should be paid attention

5 2:20 the shock of monetary caused the depression

6 2:14 不太懂 stimulate can not raise inflation expectations,while fed would react to less contractionary fiscal policy by bringing down planned monetary tighting

疏离无罪

一环木有了！回学校，晚上回来补，感谢杀G给猴看
01:32
Talk about why this year's nobel economic prize is meaningful.
Introduce the theory of Fama.

01:06
Introduce the theory of Shiller,which study the the relationship between the prices of shares and their intrinsic value.
And the attribution of financial assets is opposed from common good.

00:56
Shiller's theory is useful in preventing bubbles,but many bankers and regulators ignore it.

02:16
Monetary shock may not lead to the depression.But it really has large effects on the real economy.

01:39
Monetary policy does not work since the interest rates fell to near zero.And the US is in liquid trap.Fiscal policy stimulus may work while raising the inflatio.But the Fed does not apply this policy.

04:54
Main Idea:Introduce the work of the winners of this year's Nobel economic prize
The article firt introduces the Nobel economic prize.
Then the article talks about the common main idea of this year's winners' theory:asset price.Although they have the same topic,they disagree with each other.
Introduce Fama's theory ,shiller's theory and Hansen's theory in detail.
Finally,the article comes back to the influence of these works.