博文
|
标签：杂谈 |
Jan 10th 2008|NEW YORK
From The Economist print edition
Only Panglossians think that the sector is over the
worst
The deawing of a new year is supposed to be about hope,but
fear remains the domiant emotion among bankers.This week saw
another round of bloodletting as they grappled with the effectd of
the credit crunch. Barclays Capital and CIBC joined the long
list of lenders to jettison senior investment bankers.And,to
nobody's surprise,Jimmy Cayne stepped down as boss of Bear
Stearns,the WAll Street bank with the Hedge-fund problems that
arguably marked the start of the crisis last June.
Mr Cayne had been under huge pressure to go,thanks to
$1.9billon of mortgage write-downs-leading to the bank's first-ever
quarterly loss_and accusations that he had been more interested in
improving his own performance at bridge and golf than shoring up
hia bank's standing in the markets.He will remain as no
|
标签：育儿 |
Dec 13th 2007
Frome The Economist print edition
A TYPICAL Protestant view of European religious history might
go like this.In medieval times,the Roman Catholic church grew
increasingly corrupt and impervious to criticism.Then came the
Reformation,with its new breath of freedom and tolerance.after a
brief fightback that culminated in the ghastly Thirty Years War in
1618-48,Europe moved smoothly towards the Enlightenment and today's
ideal of secular tolerance.It was all quite unlike,for
example,Islam and the horrors aof the Ottoman empire.
Most of this conventional picture is entirely wrong,as this
splendid book by Brnjamin Kaplan shows.Certainly,the medieval
Catholic church continued to stamp heavily on heresy，but
Enlightenment Protestants were often also deeply
intolerant,not only of Catholic but also of each other(Mr Kaplan's
book opens with the burning of Serventus,a noted Spanish
Protestant,in Ca
|
标签：杂谈 |
From the Economist print edition
The risks posed by CDOs should have been familiar to Wall
Street's finest HOW dis bankers so misunderstand their own
creations?The Frankensteins of Wall Street thought they had
protected themselves from harm by holding only the safest slices of
collateralised-debt obligations(CDOS),enticingly known as 'super
senior'tranches,while selling the risker bits to other investors.A
report issued this week by JPMORGAN,an investment bank,estimated
tht banks alone held around $216 billion worth of super senior
tranches of CDOS backed by assets such as mortgages and issued over
the post two years.It now expects losses on these tranches to be
'immense'
The super senior tranches did have some attractions for
banks.They protected investors from initial lossers on the
mortagges backing the CDOS while offering
better returns than bonds with a similar rating.But as ERik
Sirri, a senior official at
|
标签：杂谈 |
Dec 19th 2007
From The Economist print edition
The crises to watch for in 2008
LEAF through the finacial magazines at this time of year and
they are full of Predictions.The five stocks to own!The hottest
mutual funds!Wall Street's
finest are asked to spell out their forecasts in full.The
venerable Abby Joseph Cohen of Goldman Sachs assert,with remarkable
precision,that profits will grow by 5.6% and that the S&P 500
index will end the year,not at 1,670 ,but at 1,675.
The one forecast Buttonwood can safely make for 2008 is that
the consensus will prove to be wrong.Although many anticipated a
fall in American house prices for 2007,for example,few expected the
scale of the ramifications for financial markets,as a whole system
of structured finance appeared to unravel and the banking system
was plunged into crisis.In one of the defining phrases of 2007,the
author and investor Nassin Taleb has called
Nov 15th 2007
From The Economist print edition
'THERE is more than one way not to read,the most radical of
which is not tp open a book at all.'Thus begins Pierre Bayard's
witty and provocative meditation on the nature,scale and necessity
of non-reading.With thousands of books published every year,it
is,he points out,the primary way people relat to books.And even
those books they do get round to opening remain in a sense outside
their knowledge.'Even as I read',he observes,'I start to forget
what I have read.'
The first section explores the four categories of unread
books,into at least
one of which Mr Bayard places every book he mentions.These are
the 'books unknown to me',the'book I have skimmed','the books I
have heard about'and 'the books I have forgotten'.No exceptions are
admitted,even for books he himself wrote.
Each category is illustrated with an example frome
literature.The librarian in \ro
The pair suspect that everyone will turn out to have narrow
chinks in their immune armour that leave them vulnerable to
certain infection,and that most life-threatening infectous
disease that strike before puberty will be monogenic-although they
are far from proveing tjis.Others belive that the genetic control
of susceptibility to infectious disease forms a spectrum,of which
Dr Abreland Dr Casanova have
LOUSE PASTEUR, the 19th-century Frence microbiologist and
chemist,is credited with confirming that microbes cause
disease.When studying ailing silkworms,he made two vital
observations.The first was that,as the worms'illness was called,to
the development of antibiotics to threat infectious illnesses
and,ultimately,to the development,was contagious.This led to the
germ theory of disease and,In all the excitement over
germ,however,his second observation got overlooked:la flacherie was
passed from parent to offspring.Almost 150 years later.the idea
that susceptibility to infectous disease can be inherited is
finally coming of age.A meeting held last week at the Pasteur
Institute in Paris heard how the next generation of drugs will
target not the microbial agents of infectious illness but their
human hosts.
To this end
Dec 6th 2007
From The Economist print edition
America's illicit gun-markrt is surprisingly inefficient
As AMERICANS digest the news of another gun atrocity,a mall
shooting in Nebraska on December 5th,they cannot be blamed for
thinking that guns are in too ready supply.But an article in the
latest Economic Journal*suggest that the demand for illegal guns,at
least,is not met as easily as people might fear.Sudhir
Venkatesh,now of Columbia University,has talked to 132
gang-members,77 prostitutes,116 gun-owning youths,23 gun-dealers
and numerous other denizens of Chicago's Grand Boulevard and
Washington Park neibourhoods.He did not find many satified
customers.
Chicago has unusually tough restrictions on legal
handguns.Even so the black market is surprisingly'thin',attracting
relatively few buyers and sellers.The authous reckon that the
48,000 residents of the two neighbourhood
Nov 29th 2007
From The Economist print edition
Farm animals are infecting people with a new strain
superbug
FILHY surroundings that are home to a population fed on
antibiotics provide the ideal breeding grounds for superbug.But
badly run hospitals are not the only such place.Farm where animals
are reared intensively also provide an incubator for drug-resistent
diseases.Recent research suggests that veterinary surgeons and
farmers in Europe and Canada may be picking up potentially fatal
infections from pigs and possibly cattle.
Superbugs evolve when common bacterial infextions develop
resistence to the drugs used to treat them.The most widespread
cause of hospital infections,methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus
aureus,or MRSA,is one such example.About a third of people carry
some from of S.aureus on their skin,where the bacteria do no
harm.However,if they enter the bloodstream,they can cause
disease.
Nov 29th 2007 From The Economist print edition A full-blown
dollar collaspse would be disastrous.Thankfully,it need not happen
THE weather may be cold and wet,but in tje rich world's financial
markets it is beginning to feel like August all over again.Credit
spreads have widened and shares are pitching from gloom to elation
as investors look to the
A full-blown dollar crisis on top of a credit crunch and a weakening economy would be frightening.It would send finacial markets reeling and tie the hand of the Fed,perhaps forcing it to raise interest rates even as recession looms.The sky-high euro would soar further,choking off Europe's growth.Political tensions would also rise.Already Airbus has called the dollar's decline'life-threatening'and
