今天是bank第一次发帖~跟了小分队好长时间，终于从一个跟帖子的人变成了发帖子的人~在小分队里这么久，觉得读东西比以前轻松了一些，虽然我还是读的不快也容易走神。。。不过大家坚持下来，一定会在自己身上看到成长的！
如果有什么需要改进的，字体啦，文章啦尽管留言就好~~【我努力的调了空隙的···可是一直没有成功···下次去掉格式试试=。=】废话不多说啦，阅读走起！ 【速度】
Apple’s new smartphone
Five out of ten
Sep 12th 2012, 21:25 by M.G. | SAN FRANCISCO
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【速度一】
SOME hilarious videos doing the rounds on the internet show people pretending totake photos with invisible iPhones and hold conversations on them. These spoofsare meant to poke fun at Apple and its legion of fans. But the very notion thatthe firm could produce a see-through phone also highlights how closely itsbrand has become associated with revolutionary innovations. What a pity, then,that the iPhone 5, which was unveiled on September 12th, fails to live up tothat hard-won reputation.
The device is thinner than its predecessors andboasts a bigger screen and connectivity to superfast 4G wireless networks. Butit now competes against impressive offerings from the likes of South Korea’sSamsung and other rivals, who are constantly churning out snazzier super-thinhandsets of their own with stunning displays. They are unlikely to lose muchsleep because of the incremental changes made to the iPhone 5.
This is a high-stakes game for Apple, whosephone business still accounts for more than half of its revenues. These are notabout to plummet, because hordes of folk still want to get their hands onsmartphones: IHS, a research firm, reckons that next year global shipments ofsmartphones will exceed those of ordinary feature phones for the first time.But the iPhone is facing much stiffer competition from handsets using Google’spopular Android operating system. According to IDC, another research firm,Android’s share of smartphone sales rose from 24% in 2010 to 66% in the firsthalf of this year; Apple’s grew four percentage points, to 20%, over the sameperiod.
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【速度二】 True, the company still has an importantadvantage over its rivals in the form of its huge “ecosystem” of digital apps,700,000 of which are now available in its online store, and cloud-basedservices such as iTunes, which is getting a revamp. And that advantage will bereinforced by the firm’s new mobile operating system, iOS 6, which will powerthe iPhone 5 and a smaller iPad tablet computer Apple is expected to launchlater this year. The system includes a new digital-mapping app developed byApple and a feature that allows users to store things such as digitisedaeroplane boarding passes and movie tickets. These and other offerings can becombined to make mobile commerce more seamless. “The ability to tie digitalstuff into the real world is becoming much more important for users,” says IanFogg, an analyst at IHS.
Indeed it is. But other firms such as Amazon,which is rumoured to have a smartphone in the works, and Google are busy beefingup their ecosystems of software and hardware too. So Apple will have to workharder to stay ahead of the pack or risk seeing some of its profits vanish likethose imaginary phones.
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Dream turns to nightmare Investment banking once delivered juicy profits.No longer
Sep 15th 2012 | from the print edition
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【速度三】
“THE best countercyclical indicator of the healthof capital markets is when investment banks cut staff,” says a senior banker ata large American investment bank. “We always cut just before the cycle turns.”But what if the cycle doesn’t turn? An industry that once seemed to offer banksthe opportunity to earn juicy returns and expand internationally is now inretreat almost everywhere.
Some of this withdrawal has been going on since thecrisis—the fees paid to banks for trading in capital markets as well as foradvising on takeovers and sales of shares and bonds have been falling for a fewyears now. But lately retreat has turned to rout. Early this month Nomura,which had made a gutsy bet on expansion when it bought the European and Asianbusinesses of Lehman Brothers in 2008, in effect pulled the plug on its globalinvestment-banking business. Peers express little surprise. “Nomura was deadbefore it started,” says the boss of one large bank. “It was a totallyill-conceived foreign expansion.”
Yet other banks are pulling back hard, too.Deutsche Bank, Germany’s banking champion, plans deep cuts to its investmentbank, a part of the business responsible for much of its growth. Barclays issaid to be considering slimming its investment bank by as much as a fifth,reversing a decade-long expansion of a business that contributes more than halfof total profit. Both Barclays and Deutsche are lowering their targets forreturns on equity, in Deutsche’s case to just 12% after tax, well down on the25% pre-tax target it once aimed for.
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【速度四】
There are two main reasons for the sharp falls inprofitability at investment banks everywhere. The first is that their clientsare simply doing a lot less business with them. Income from trading bonds,currencies and commodities (an area of activity known in the industry as FICC)has fallen as slowing economies and turmoil in Europe have discouragedinstitutional investors from trading and companies from buying one another orissuing shares. Equity issuance worldwide dropped by about 30% in the firstseven months of this year from a year earlier; in debt markets, bond issuancehas fallen by about 8%, according to analysts at Mediobanca, an Italian bank.Number-crunchers at Deutsche Bank reckon that revenue from investment bankingaround the world will total some $240 billion this year, down by almost a thirdfrom 2009 (see chart).[attachimg]106277[/attachimg] The second reason is that regulations on capitaland liquidity are starting to bite. These are reducing returns earned by banksas well as forcing them to shrink their balance-sheets and cut back on trading.Many banks are also starting to position themselves for proposed rules that arenot yet in force, such as America’s Volcker rule, which aims to stop bankstrading for their own account, and regulations that will shove over-the-counterderivatives, which command fat margins, onto clearing-houses and exchanges.
Not everyone is gloomy: J.P. Morgan reportedly saysinvestment banking has never been stronger. But most other banks seem to havelost their mojo. The most visible consequence of this is in headcount. London’sfinancial industry will have lost about 100,000 jobs by the end of this yearfrom a peak of 354,000 in 2007, according to CEBR, an economics consultancy.New York’s financial comptroller reckons Wall Street employs almost 20,000fewer people than before the crisis.
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【速度五】
Slashing variable costs is only half the story, however. The industry is reshaping itself in other ways, too. First, there is the decline of stand-alone investment banks, and the concomitant resurgence of universal banks, which combine investment banking with the simpler commercial- and retail-banking sort. Diversified, deposit-taking universal banks can maintain higher credit ratings and can borrow more cheaply than specialist investment banks such as Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs. As credit has become scarce, moreover, universal banks have been able to demand a larger share of lucrative investment-banking business from their clients in return for offering loans. In response, investment banks such as Goldman Sachsand Morgan Stanley are trying to expand into corporate lending, private bankingand retail stockbroking. This week Morgan Stanley reached a deal to buy outCitigroup’s 49% stake in their Smith Barney retail-broking joint venture.
The second shift in the investment-bankinglandscape is a hollowing-out of the midsized banks as the very biggest in theindustry grab a greater share of trading revenues. This is partly because thetitans can afford the best trading systems, but also because a bank with alarge share of trading has the liquidity that further increases its attractivenessas a trading counterparty. Analysts at Deutsche Bank reckon that the fiveleading banks in FICC won 40% of the market’s revenue in 2011, up from 36% in2007. Smaller banks that once aspired to be global are expanding in marketscloser to home instead.
The more open question is whether the industry’sgeographical centre of gravity will also move, away from London and towardsWall Street and Asia. London’s natural advantages of time zone, law andlanguage are not easily bettered. But Asian and American banks have big depositbases to call on to finance expansion; European banks generally do not. AndLondon’s reputation has been sullied by recent regulatory failures over issuessuch as the rigging of LIBOR interest rates, as well as the political backlash againstinvestment banking that arose as a result. “London hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete in termsof wanting to be a centre of global finance,” says the boss of one largeuniversal bank. “Singapore and New York will be the new hubs of global financeand you can’t open enough coal mines…to make up for that.”
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【越障】
The mystery of Jackson Hole
Central bankers wonder why success eludes them
Sep 8th 2012 | from the print edition
IMAGINE that the world’s best specialists in a particular disease haveconvened to study a serious and intractable case. They offer competingdiagnoses and treatments. Yet preying on their minds is a discomfiting fact:nothing they have done has worked, and they don’t know why. That sums up theatmosphere at the annual economic symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, convenedby the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and attended by central bankers andeconomists from around the world*. Near the endDonald Kohn, who retired in 2010 after 40 years with the Fed, asked: “What’sholding the economy back [despite] such accommodative monetary policy for solong?” There was no lack of theories. But, as Mr Kohn admitted, none isentirely satisfying.
His question could hardly be more timely. As The Economist went to press, the European Central Bank (ECB) wasmeeting to discuss a resumption in purchases of bonds of peripheral euro-zonemembers, in a bid to alleviate strains on the single currency. Ben Bernanke,the chairman of the Federal Reserve, suggested in his speech in Jackson Holethat a third round of quantitative easing (QE), the purchase of bonds withnewly created money, would be on the table when the Fed’s policy committeemeets on September 12th-13th. Mr Bernanke cited research by the Fed that previousbouts of QE had lowered bond yields and boosted GDP by as much as 3%. That isgood, but not good enough. In America, Britain and the euro zone, interestrates are at or near zero and central banks’ balance-sheets have ballooned, yetunemployment remains high and growth sluggish (see chart).
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One school of thought is that a high unemploymentrate is structural and immune to the stimulative effects of monetary policy.Edward Lazear of Stanford University and James Spletzer of America’s CensusBureau argue otherwise. In a paper presented to the conference, they showedthat those sectors and demographic groups that contributed most to the rise inunemployment in 2007-09 also contributed most to its decline in 2009-12, whichsuggests that shifts in relative demand for workers could not explain the highlevel of unemployment. The mismatch between the skills of the unemployed andthe skills employers demand did rise during the recession. But by late 2011 themismatch was back down to pre-recession levels.
If most unemployment is cyclical, not structural,the Fed could theoretically help by stimulating demand with easier monetarypolicy. But how? Michael Woodford of Columbia University told the conferencethat with short-term rates around zero, central banks have tried two broadstrategies: “forward guidance”, or promising to keep the interest rate at zerofor some time, or expanding their balance-sheets through QE and the like. MrWoodford acknowledged these strategies had brought down expected short-term andactual long-term interest rates, but was sceptical about their impact oneconomic output. In his paper he recommended that the Fed commit to keepingpolicy easy until the economy reaches a particular target, such as nominal GDP(ie, output unadjusted for inflation) returning to its pre-recession path. TheFed is not about to do that, although it might decide to link future policyaction to progress on unemployment.
Adam Posen, who recently left the Bank of England’smonetary-policy committee, had a different explanation for the apparentimpotence of monetary policy. Since many financial markets are dysfunctional,the monetary medicine isn’t getting into the economy’s bloodstream. Thesolution is for central banks to buy more assets in the markets that are mostobviously impaired. That is what the Bank of England is doing by providingsubsidised credit to banks that lend more, what the ECB is set to do when itresumes purchasing sovereign bonds, and what the Fed could do by buying moremortgage-backed securities.
Sages or dinosaurs?
In another paper, Markus Brunnermeier and YuliySannikov of Princeton University provided theoretical justification for thisapproach. Monetary easing usually works by encouraging businesses andhouseholds to move future consumption and investment forward to today. But italso has “redistributive” effects. For example, low short-term interest ratesredistribute income from depositors to banks, which allows them to rebuildcapital and encourages them to lend more. Similarly, purchases of ten-yeargovernment bonds enrich some investors while hurting others, such as pensionfunds, that depend on bond income to meet longer-dated liabilities. By tailoringtheir instruments to sectors most in need of support, central banks can getmore bang for their buck.
One problem is identifying the areas where directintervention will do the most good. Amir Sufi of the University of Chicago toldthe conference that raising banks’ profits has not done much to restart demandbecause the real problem is that indebted households cannot or will not borrow.He presented evidence that retail spending and car sales have been weaker instates that entered the recession with higher household debt.
An even bigger issue is the political controversythat ensues when central banks favour particular sectors. Fed officials areconstantly told that zero interest rates are hurting savers without helpingbusinesses. ECB purchases of peripheral countries’ bonds transfer risk fromdebtor to creditor states, prompting opposition from the Bundesbank and votersin creditor countries. Mr Posen decried the “self-imposed taboos” and“prehistoric thinking” that makes central banks worry that targeted lendingwill distort the allocation of credit or turn into politically motivatedmoney-printing. This drew a retort from Larry Lindsey, a former Fed governor:“In a free society, individuals and institutions don’t do unusual thingsbecause if you do, and break custom and happen to be wrong, you’re betting thefarm.”
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发表于 2012-9-14 20:54:59
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