【每日阅读训练第四期——速度越障23系列】【23-04】经管

杀G给猴看

大家好，周四经管~~
今天TIME 1/ 2 是一篇，TIME 3/ 4/ 5 是一篇。其中，第二篇来自FT中文网英语速读，原网站后面有相关的阅读小测验，感兴趣的队友们可以去看看~~
下面开始发作业啦！筒子们占了坑以后要记得来填哦~ : )

【PART I: SPEED】

Article 1: What caused China's cash crunch?
Jul 4th 2013 by S.C. | HONG KONG


【TIME 1】
LAST month some Chinese banks found it excruciatingly difficult to borrow the money they required from their fellow banks. The interest rate for an overnight loan from one bank to another briefly hit 30% on June 20th, compared with a typical rate of about 2.5% earlier in the year. This cash crunch or “Shibor shock” (Shibor stands for Shanghai Interbank Offered Rate, a benchmark interest rate) raised immediate fears of bank defaults. It also highlighted broader concerns about financial excesses in China, where the supply of credit has been growing faster than the economy. What caused the sudden cash crunch?
Banks keep cash in reserve both to satisfy regulatory requirements and to meet their obligations to customers, creditors and each other. If a bank runs short of money, it typically borrows cash from other banks that have more than they need. Although banks can run out of money, China cannot. Its central bank, the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), can “print” all the yuan it needs. It transfers this freshly created money to the banks by buying something from them, such as foreign currency, bonds or other safe financial assets. It can also lend it to them. But when China’s banks ran short of cash last month, the central bank surprised everyone by refusing to help. Instead of adding more money to the banking system it sat on its hands, causing the crunch. Exactly why it did so is still in dispute.
【TIME 1 ENDS – 242 WORDS】


【TIME 2】
A central bank may be reluctant to print money if it fears inflation. But inflation in China is quite low. The PBOC was instead worried about something else. In its public statements, it argued that the banks as a group had plenty of money between them. If one or two of them were running short that was because they were behaving badly. Perhaps they had lent too much, in one form or another. Or perhaps they were taking out a lot of short-term loans from their fellow banks in order to make a lot of longer-term ones. Banks can get away with this kind of overstretch and mismatch if they know they can always borrow easily and cheaply. Perhaps the PBOC wanted to shake their complacency by creating a cash squeeze. But instead it caused an unexpectedly severe crunch. As interest rates spiked, the central bank was slow to react or to clarify its intentions. That allowed fear and uncertainty to spread. Eventually the central bank did intervene, ordering big banks to lend to smaller ones and promising to stabilise the market. But the banks remain shaken by its hesitation.
What will be the lasting consequences for China’s economy? The direct damage will be limited. The shock was sharp but short. Interest rates have fallen a lot (although they remain higher than they were pre-crunch). The stockmarket, which plunged on June 24th and 25th, has risen by more than 7% from its lowest point. But the indirect consequences could be profound. The central bank’s foot-dragging shows that China’s leadership is worried about rapid credit growth. This excess lending is contributing little to the economy. Instead of financing consumer spending or business expansion it appears to be financing the purchase of existing assets instead. That adds nothing to growth. The government’s efforts to curb lending could, however, subtract quite a lot from growth. The director of GK Dragonomics, a consultancy in Beijing, has predicted that China will grow by little more than 6% in 2014 at best. Barclays Capital argues that quarterly growth could briefly fall to 3% at some point in the next few years. Neither outfit is known for its bearishness. China has not run out of money, but its double-digit growth model has run out of steam.
【TIME 2 ENDS – 379 WORDS】
Source: The Economist
http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/07/economist-explains-2

Article 2: In the unthinking age, seeing is believing
By Christopher Caldwell


The written word is becoming the language of a scholarly establishment
------------------------------


【TIME 3】
It might be easier to do something about North Korea’s nuclear truculence if we could make head or tail of the cryptic videos it has been posting on the web. The latest shows a dreaming man, some Korean script and a video of rockets flying through space while fires burn in skyscrapers and a pianist plays “We Are the World” at dirge tempo. Is this a harmless fantasy? A thrown-down gauntlet? Should the west respond with a statement? Should it post a video of its own? It is hard to know. Our traditional media are being “replaced” by the internet. But the “information” coming out of the information economy is often hard to decipher, and composed for purposes that are hard to discern.
The film academic Stephen Apkon argues in The Age of the Image, published this week, that it is possible to speak of a new kind of literacy, one built on figuring out such non-verbal messages. At its humblest level, his book is about the “language” of film, but Mr Apkon has a larger philosophical point, too. Our culture is growing more global. While it still relies on words, they are increasingly wrapped up with images, and it is the images people remember. Elizabeth Daley, dean of the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, believes writing today is like Latin on the eve of the Renaissance – the language of a scholarly establishment. YouTube clips and other visuals are the equivalent of vernacular Italian. They are the street language, and the medium for much new and creative thinking.
【TIME 3 ENDS – 262 WORDS】


【TIME 4】
Images have always mattered in public arguments more than we admit. Few people cared that Richard Nixon won the 1960 presidential debates against John Kennedy, so unkempt did the Republican look. Mr Apkon quotes a neuroscientist who says people are so attuned to picking up subtle signals that they make decisions about whether they like or dislike politicians “immediately”. And unsubtle, non-verbal messages with a great emotional wallop can now be broadcast more widely. Video of the shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan, captured during June 2009 protests against irregular Iranian elections, spread round the world. In the gut-wrenching Kony 2012 video (100m views in six days), American activists sought to enlist the US military in a manhunt for a Ugandan warlord.
Eyesight is the most trusted sense, Mr Apkon notes, and that means we need to be careful with it. There is a standing danger that the public will grow so upset by images of mistreatment that it will demand the government send the army off to war. This is arguably what happened Somalia in 1992, with America’s poorly planned military response to the African country’s famine. In future, Mr Apkon says, we are likely to need “a combination of scepticism and incisiveness”, enabling citizens to “[critique] what is put in front of them with some level of sophistication”.
That is unlikely. When the passions provoked by visual imagery lead to the same conclusion as the logic of a verbal argument, people are generally comfortable coming to a decision. But when passion and logic are at odds, one of them must be favoured.
Until recently, it was the essence of statesmanship, scholarship and justice to purge strong emotion from our deliberations. Images today, though, are so plentiful and sharp that they dominate our thought processes. Although Mr Apkon relishes the immediacy of YouTube, he fears that political advertisers will soon be able to craft stories around “hidden mental hungers”, easily manipulating voters.
【TIME 4 ENDS – 321 ENDS】


【TIME 5】
Citizens tend to think about voting in one of two ways. First, you base your vote on your identity. You are a farmer, so you choose the candidate best disposed towards farmers. The second theory is that you vote on arguments, independent of identity. You believe a sales tax should replace income tax, so you vote for the candidate who shares that opinion. But today’s image-based communication has little to do with identity or arguments. It has to do with the lowest-common-denominator traits that mark you as a human animal.
There is no obvious solution. Even if we acquire the skepticism Mr Apkon speaks of, certain institutions “go with” certain styles of perceiving, absorbing and interpreting information. You would not think that there was anything “Protestant” about the printing press. And yet the press seems to have been a prerequisite for Protestantism’s rise. Likewise, our own democracies, imperfect though they may be, are the culmination of the culture of the written word. Mr Apkon notes how Kennedy, in those 1960 debates, “tapped into a lever in the psyche more primal than mere facts”.
In retrospect, that was an ominous moment. Once you find that lever, isn’t democracy bound to lose a bit of its appeal, rather like a detective story in which you have been told the ending?
【TIME 5 ENDS – 218 WORDS】
Source: FT Chinese （金融时报中文版 – 英语速读）
http://www.ftchinese.com/interactive/1283

【PART II: OBSTACLE】

Article 3: Boundary problems
America has changed the way it measures GDP
Aug 3rd 2013 |From the print edition


ECONOMICS is a messy discipline: too fluid to be a science, too rigorous to be an art. Perhaps it is fitting that economists’ most-used metric, gross domestic product (GDP), is a tangle too. GDP measures the total value of output in an economic territory. Its apparent simplicity explains why it is scrutinised down to tenths of a percentage point every month. But as a foundation for analysis it is highly subjective: it rests on difficult decisions about what counts as a territory, what counts as output and how to value it. Indeed, economists are still tweaking it. This week America’s GDP rose by $560 billion, or 3.6%, mainly because the “boundary” that defines what counts as an economic asset was moved.
The modern history of GDP starts with America’s Depression. The set of measures available to those battling the slump that started in 1929 was scarily narrow. Policymakers used stock prices, industrial production and transport data, and little else. The detail needed to diagnose economic problems properly was provided in a 1934 report by Simon Kuznets (see sources below). The new national-income and product accounts that resulted measured income by industry and production by sector; they also introduced lots of new metrics, including GDP. Richard Stone of Cambridge University developed a similar system for Britain, adopted by the UN in 1947 as the first “System of National Accounts” (SNA), a set of international standards for measuring economic activity.
Since these first big steps to make GDP measurement systematic and international, improvements have been more gradual. The big problems are what to measure and how to measure it. Answering the first question involves defining a set of “boundaries”: activities inside the ropes are included, those outside are not. Even the geographical boundary—how to define a nation—can be thorny. A country’s territorial waters are within its national boundary, but foreign crews of ships working in those waters contribute to their home country’s output. Smugglers, whose activity crosses borders and is hard to track, are a real headache.
Defining other boundaries is even harder. Since investment (activity that creates assets) is part of GDP, it is vital to define “assets”. Here practicalities can trump principles. Economists have long thought of spending on research and development, or on making artwork, as types of investment. These efforts create things—patents, for example—that are a lot like fixed assets. They are durable, they give rise to a future stream of income and they help generate future output. But the previous SNA system, set up in 1993, regarded such assets as too difficult to measure. For this reason they were set outside the asset boundary. And so spending to produce them did not count as investment, part of GDP.
But the latest SNA system, agreed upon in 2008, shifted the asset boundary to include these innovative activities, prompting the changes to America’s statistics this week. A new investment class called “intellectual-property products” has been created by America’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). Ideally, the value of private firms’ R&D would be based on the future income it generates, discounted to today’s values. But since future products, and their related prices, are unobservable, those calculations are tricky. So the BEA is measuring R&D investment using firms’ innovation-related costs. Government R&D, mainly spending on health, defence and aerospace, is now measured in the same way.
The BEA faces an even fiddlier task with original artwork, a category that includes films, books, music and TV shows. (Newspaper articles have no lasting value, according to the BEA, but what do they know?) The problem is that there is scant information on investment costs. Moreover, the asset—the right to the music, manuscript or TV format—is rarely sold. Rather it is used to create a future stream of products, like books and TV shows. So the BEA must estimate likely future royalty fees, and translate them into today’s money to value the investment. Since artistic assets can last a long time (“The Simpsons” has been running since 1989) that is a tough task.
In the short term America’s new GDP measure makes international comparisons more difficult. The BEA is not the first mover: Australia made the change in 2009, leapfrogging Canada in the OECD’s country rankings of GDP per person. Canada switched in 2012, making back some of the ground. For the moment, America, Australia and Canada are the only G20 countries on the new system. By 2014 many other countries, including those in the EU, will have joined them.
Carrots and statistics
But GDP is still far from perfect. One problem is how to treat goods and services that are produced and consumed in the home. To do this the SNA defines another boundary. All goods produced and consumed at home are included in GDP: if more fruit and vegetables are grown in the garden the economy gets bigger. The logic is that home-grown produce could be sold at a market, obtain a price and be measurable. But services—cleaning a home, caring for a relative—are excluded from GDP. The logic is that services are produced as they are consumed: since they could not be sold they are outside the market.
But the assumption that there are no market prices for services delivered at home is 1940s thinking. It is easy to put a price on cleaning and caring—far simpler than working out how to price future film royalties. And excluding home-provided health care and education creates an ever-widening faultline under GDP. The market values of these services are rising much more quickly than the general rate of inflation. That means the value of the activity outside the boundary is changing rapidly over time. To stay relevant national accounts may have to change again.
【OBSTACLE ENDS – 959 WORDS】
Source: The Economist
http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21582498-america-has-changed-way-it-measures-gdp-boundary-problems

sherryv

地板占座！

1 242words 1'36
The loan rate in Chinese banks rised sharply but PBOC didn't offer to help as usuall.

2 379words 2'30
As the crunch becomes severe, PBOC standed out, ordering lending between banks. The problem is that lending to buying assets cannot generate any GDP growth, so it is estimated that the growth rate will decrease in the future.

3 262words 1'46
Medium like images and clips is playing an increasingly important role in information spreading.

4 321words 2'17
Image information is very likely to triggers people's emotion. Sometimes it conficts with logical written information.

5 218words 1'26
Use the example of voting for presidents to illustrate the image effect.

Obstacle 6'09
-The measurement of GDP depends on its definition.
-How asset is measured to be added into GDP.
-Problem is that things outside the scope is changing and may have a big effect on GDP.

carolxxchen

深夜占座明早来做!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!默默地回归

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


1.32" Banks in China is getting harder than before to lend money from other banks, the reason why PBOC didn't help remained unknown.
2.18" the PBOC is not worrying about the inflation but the excess credict which is contributing little to the economy.
1.45" quote the north korean incident as an example to lead the topic that the world is basing more on image than verbal messages.
4.42" image is so powerful and plenty today to lead our mind.
1.43" ther's no obvious solution to prevent the seeing is believing thing in this world.
6.49" GDP has been used to measure the value of the economy. It was first introduced by the America and then change from the SNA system to the BEA system, with the change of the boundaries. But still, the GDP is far from perfect for the activities outside the boundary is changing rapidly over time.
果然就不能搞回归这事!!应该一直跟着小分队不掉队的!!!!!!!!!!!!!读的超慢还给我走神
请大家监督我啊!这次我不知道能不能坚持下去啊摔

cherry6891

哈哈 越来越靠近沙发啦

1    1:15 reason :all banks r run out of money and central bank refuse to print more money to help them

Result : the overnight loan rate increase to 30% from 2.5%before

2    2:28 the reason y banks are all run out of money --they lend money a lot that won t help the economic

Government wants to decrease the credit ,so several institutions predict that the increase of economic in China will be 7% or lower

3     1:37 it is difficult to depher the news on line

There is a new film“language”.

one expert hold the opinion the global language is not literacy but non verb message

One expert think you tobe clips and some popular media is street language

4  2:14 the image can express the meaning beyond the language but we should be pay ateention to what what we see because sometimes it mislead us

5   1:21 an example of the importance of image based communication

6   5:17 the defination of GDP

The change from SNA to EBA ,and then other countries change to other methods

But GDP is far from perfect

CheerTTTT

首页·~~~~~~·
速度
1:27
2:28
1:16
2:14
1:13
越障
6:06

olivia瓜瓜

终于来个首页啦。。。不容易啊 ,，加油！！~~~~~
Time1: 1m33s
       & The banks suffer a cash crunch, however, the central banks object the help hand as usual.
Time2: 2m02s
       & The central bank's response to business banks is to keep down the hot lending rate, but it also can limit the growth of economy.
Time3:1m10s
       & Nowadays, it's a  time to believe video of seeing words, not the written words.
Time4: 1m50s
       & Images dominate our thought process today.
Time5:1m11s
       & The voters become more concern the candidate nonverbal  words and traits instead of identity and argument.
Obstacle: 5m30s
       & The GDP have a difficult problem with the boundary.
       & Latest SNA system included the innovative products to GDP.
       & SNA is not the first and the only change among G20 country.
       & GDP is still a tough problem to statistics， so the national account have change again.     

irvan

占个座〜〜

————————————————————————
Speed
01:08
02:40
01:12
01:53
01:11

Obstacle
06:16

枣糕兔

占座！！


——————————————————————作业线——————————————————————————

Speed
01'22
02'13
01'46
02'21
01'31
article 1
"Shibor shock" gives the Chinese financial market a fright, and it certainly goes up to a whole new level when the PBOC refuses to help by printing more money. PBOC's hesitation allows this fright to grow while its initial intention is to clear the complacency through a cash squeeze. The central bank argued that banks finding finance hard are usually behaving badly for they're lending too much or investing too much on the long-term loans. Many predict that the Chinese double-digit growth is running out of steam.
article 2
In a time of web called the Internet, seeing is believing. And the man with the key to people's emotion and mind is the king.
Quite on contrary to those time when the written words still take control, now people stop making judgment and vote decisions based on words and arguments, instead, we let images dominate our thinking progress, the so-called "hidden mental hunger".
--->The author expressed his concern about how the politicians are likely to manipulate the citizens through this hunger.

Obstacle
07'34
Main idea: Summary of the brief history about setting the right boundary for GDP
Attitude: Neutral
Structure:
>>>Central topic: The concept and basic idea of GDP, and brief intro on the boundary---what largely determines its value.
>>>The original boundary: modern history started 【with American's Depression】. Policymakers merely took three parts of the economic activities into account. 【Then there's SNA of Britain.】
>>>The intellectual asset problem: Once people figured out the concept of GDP, then it's all about what and how. The answer to the first Q is simple: We set boundaries, even geographical ones.
       >>>But things got messy when it came to investment. It wasn't until 2008 when SNA finally changed the asset boundary to make more sense.
       >>>New boundary created by BEA: The Americans built their own ones, including the activities going on in the entertainment industry.
>>>【What about international?   The BEA is not the first mover: Australia made the change in 2009, leapfrogging Canada in the OECD’s country rankings of GDP per person.】
>>>Today's boundary: Far from perfect, what about household goods and services?
       Still cares about their producing and pricing? That's the 1940s thinking. Boundary needs to change if one thinks about adapting to the modern society.

————————————————————————总结线——————————————————————
obstacle的速度我也不知道是怎么了……
总之阅读的时候思维越来越跟得上了，可能就牺牲了一部分速度，balance是接下来训练的主要目标。

jay871750293

第二页占座，谢谢小杀妹~

lijinglol

占座占座！明天读！