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1、-经济学人经济类文章精选2-第 6 页Crash courseBEFORE banks, the last global industry to commit collective suicide was telecoms during the boom and bust of 1997-2003. The parallel is imperfectbanks are uniquely vulnerable to runs and have a special role in the economy. Reflecting this, only a few telecoms companies
2、 received state bail-outs. But in a narrower corporate sense, the meltdown rivalled that of the banks. From peak totrough the industry lost $2.8 trillion of market value, compared with the $4.6 trillion banks have shed (see chart). Just like banks, telecoms had imperial bosses, kamikaze deals and in
3、comprehensible jargonif collateralised-debt obligations troubled you, try gigabit Ethernet routers. In telecoms leading firms were reduced to indebted objects of ridicule. The consequences were bankruptcies, huge job losses, fraud, trashed reputations and,eventually, a clean-up.By these standards, b
4、anks remain in a fantasy world. They are largely still run by the same people, they have a piecemeal approach to cutting leverage, and their goal,beyond firefighting, is to tinker with their portfolios, removing areas of egregious excess. If the telecoms industry is anything to go by, this gradualis
5、m will fail. A management cull is both inevitable and desirableonly a handful of telecoms bosses clung on and prospered, Ivan Seidenberg of Verizon being one example. Firms, like Vodafone, that took an evolutionary approach to replacing the old guard regretted it, with rows souring the boardroom for
6、 years. Complacency can kill even the biggest firms. The two leading telecoms firms of the 1990s, AT&T (since bought by SBC, which took its name) and British Telecom, were more or less dismantled by investors tired of their flawed cultures and incoherent empires.Bank conglomerates like Citigroup sho
7、uld take note.What should new managers do first? Define a core business and be brave enough to raise the equity to fund it. Those telecoms firms, such as Telecom Italia, that failed to cut their debt went on to shrink into obscurity. Too many others chose expedient fire sales, especially of emerging
8、-market assets. Banks look vulnerable to this, since governments want them to bolster their domestic balance-sheets, but the telecoms firms that did best were those, like Spains Telefnica, that clung to the assets that promised growth.Telecoms companies, like banks today, were encouraged to go “back
9、 to basics”. But once they wiped away the froth, their core businesses were mature and mediocreas banks will discover with their branches.That raised the temptation for acquisitions. Sadly for the telecoms firms, bottom-fishing for distressed assets rarely worked, and investors vetoed empire-buildin
10、g deals involving mature assets that yielded few cost synergies. Even domestic deals had mixed results. In America SBC successfully swallowed several rivals, but the merger of Sprint and Nextel, two mobile-phone firms, was ruined by bad execution. This pattern of European ossification and American c
11、onsolidation is holding true for banks. Doubtless the difficulties of meshing combinations like Bank of America/Merrill Lynch and Wells Fargo/Wachovia during a downturn are being underestimated.Next, new bosses must start a cultural revolution. Bubbles corrupt firms intellectual capital; in telecoms
12、,everything from sales incentives to budgeting had become based on measures that had little to do with a sober view of profits. The rot reached the top, with investors, directors and managers evaluating performance using cashflow models that were so long-dated that they broke even after their author
13、s planned to retire. This problem is deeply embedded in banks, where most common measuresreturn on equity, cost/income ratios and price/earnings ratiosflatter leveraged firms, and where a culture of giving cheap capital to high-risk units has thrived. Bank bosses must create a new financial language
14、 and may find they are treated as heretics when they do so.Ideally, this revolution can be extended to reinventing brands and business models. But a depressing precedent has been set by incumbent telecoms firms, which, like most banks, are stodgy bureaucracies at heart. Despite endless product launc
15、hes and reorganisations, perhaps only two firms, KPN (see article) and O2 (subsequently bought by Telefnica) were transformed by innovative managers. For most others, the decade since the bubble has been a slog against competitors and reinvigorated regulators. That is the lot of most firms in most i
16、ndustries. They face a constant battle to protect pockets of high profits and have few chances to grow. For telecoms, the glamour and infamy were followed by mediocrity. Banks are still staggering about in the limelight, but the same fate surely awaits them.Atlas felt a sense of dj vuBOOKS do not se
17、ll themselves: that is what films are for. “The Reader”, the book that inspired the Oscarwinning film, has shot up the bestseller lists. Another recent publishing success, however, has had more help from Washington, DC, than Hollywood. That book is Ayn Rands “Atlas Shrugged”.Reviled in some circles
18、and mocked in others, Rands 1957 novel of embattled capitalism is a favourite of libertarians and college students. Lately, though, its appeal has been growing. According to data from TitleZ, a firm that tracks bestseller rankings on Amazon, an online retailer, the books 30-day average Amazon rank w
19、as 127 on February 21st, well above its average over the past two years of 542. On January 13th the books ranking was 33, briefly besting President Barack Obamas popular tome, “The Audacity of Hope”.Tellingly, the spikes in the novels sales coincide with the news (see chart). The first jump, in Sept
20、ember 2007, followed dramatic interest-rate cuts by central banks, and the Bank of Englands bailout of Northern Rock, a troubled mortgage lender. The October 2007 rise happened two days after the Bush Administration announced an initiative to coax banks to assist subprime borrowers. A year later, sa
21、les of the book rose after Americas Treasury said that it would use a big chunk of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Programme to buy stakes in nine large banks. Debate over Mr Obamas stimulus plan in January gave the book another lift. And sales leapt once again when the stimulus plan passed a
22、nd Mr Obama announced a new mortgagemodification plan.Whenever governments intervene in the market, in short, readers rush to buy Rands book. Why? The reason is explained by the name of a recently formed group on Facebook, the worlds biggestsocial-networking site: “Read the news today? Its like Atla
23、s Shrugged is happening in real life”. The group, and an expanding chorus of fretful bloggers, reckon that life is imitating art.Some were reminded of Rands gifted physicist, Robert Stadler, cravenly disavowing his faith in reason for political favour, when Alan Greenspan, an acolyte of Rands, testi
24、fied before a congressional committee last October that he had found a “flaw in the model” of securitisation. And with pirates hijacking cargo ships, politicians castigating corporate chieftains, riots in Europe and slowing international tradeall of which are depicted in the bookthis melancholy meme
25、 has plenty of fodder.Even if Washington does not keep the books sales booming, Hollywood might. A film version is rumoured to be in the works for release in 2011. But by then, a film may feel superfluous to Rands most loyal fans;events unfolding around them will have been dramatisation enough.Harin
26、g awayIT IS 1979 and Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, the hero of John Updikes series of novels, is explaining to his wife why he has just spent more than $11,000 on 30 gold krugerrands. “The beauty of gold is, it loves bad news,” he says. Three decades later, gold is once again thriving on despair. Before
27、Christmas, a troy ounce could be bought for around $800. By the third week in February, gold was trading at close to $1,000 an ounce.A surge in demand for gold as an investment lies behind the jump in prices. Flows into exchange-traded funds, which buy and store gold for their shareholders, rose fro
28、m 105 tonnes in January to 208 tonnes in the first three weeks of February, according to Suki Cooper at Barclays Capital. At that rate, inflows will soon surpass the total of 322 tonnes for the whole of 2008. Buying by investors has more than made up for a slump in gold-jewellery purchases in key ma
29、rkets, such as India and Turkey, where higher prices and wilting exchange rates have crushed demand.People have long viewed gold, rightly or wrongly, as a hedge against high inflation and a weak dollar. So when the gold price briefly broke through the $1,000 mark in March last year, it was easily ex
30、plained by fears that rising commodity prices (and, in America, a weak dollar) would feed inflation. An earlier run-up in gold prices, between 2002 and 2005, coincided with a sustained fall in the dollar. But now gold is strong even as the dollar thrives and economies face deflation.Golds recent pro
31、gress seems to be a response to generalised fears of economic turmoil. When supposedly safe savings vehicles, such as bank deposits, look shaky and offer scant returns, gold has greater appeal as an alternative store of wealth. It also looks like an attractive each-way bet. If drastic cuts in intere
32、st rates work too well, that will fuel inflation. If they do not work, prices of assets, such as stocks and houses, will sink further.Like Updikes protagonist in “Rabbit is Rich”, the new wave of gold investors typically have wealth to preserve, according to Adrian Ash at BullionVault, an online ser
33、vice for gold investors. “Gold is something you buy if you have something to lose,” he says. What links todays gold fever with the 1970s rush is negative real deposit rates. Many savers now prefer a claim on gold in a vault to one on cash in the bank. There is less risk that a counterparty blows up,
34、 and the “carrying cost” of gold in terms of lost interest is, in any case, vanishing.How high might the gold price go? Gold bugs talk excitedly about it reaching $2,300, which would match the January 1980 peak in real terms (see chart). Already the gold price is above its average since 1972 when ca
35、lculated in todays money. There is a limited supply of gold and lots of potential buyersideal conditions for a bubble, says Stephen Jen at Morgan Stanley. If gold is burnished by grim news, it seems likely to become still more alluring.The outstretched palmTHE Jebel Ali port in Dubai boasts of being
36、 the largest man-made harbour in the world. Its “quad-lift” cranes can hoist four 20-foot containers at once. The ports second terminal will raise its capacity to 14m containers. But plans for a third terminal look premature. Dubai is suffering from a slump in the trading, lending, holidaying and pr
37、ofiteering that buoyed this remarkable emirate for so long.On February 22nd Dubai was hoisted out of its financial trouble by its oil-rich neighbour, Abu Dhabi. The central bank for the United Arab Emirates (UAE) bought $10 billion-worth of Dubais five-year bonds. The bail-out confirmed everyones as
38、sumption that Abu Dhabi would not let the second-biggest member of the UAE fail. But its benefactor waited long enough to plant a seed of doubt in peoples minds. In recent weeks, the spreads on credit-default swaps for securities issued by Dubais government and several of its biggest corporations ha
39、ve widened alarmingly, if a little hysterically.Having long ago depleted most of its oil reserves, Dubai has reinvented itself as a “sell-side” emirate, dreaming up ingenious schemes for other people to invest in. Chris Davidson of Durham University, who has written a history of the emirate, describ
40、es it as a “spongelike economy”, designed to absorb foreign money. The government imposes few levies (Dubai has no income tax) and accounts for only $10 billion of the emirates debts. But its rulers sponsor an extended family of companies. Between them, these corporations have amassed about $70 bill
41、ion of liabilities (see chart), adding to a debt pile that almost matches the emirates 2008 GDP of $82 billion.On the other side of Dubais ledger, the government claims to have $90 billion in assets on top of the $260 billion held by its corporations. But it has not revealed the composition or liqui
42、dity of its holdings. The very fact that it had to turn to its neighbour for help suggests that its own family silver is not that easy to sell.The bond proceeds will allow Dubai to meet its obligations this year (which amount to about $10 billion-15 billion) and probably next. But what will Abu Dhab
43、i ask in return? On the face of it, not much. Tristan Cooper, of Moodys, a rating agency, had expected Abu Dhabi to be “a bit more fussy” about how the funds were used. It might, say, have taken equity stakes in Dubais freewheeling corporations or sought some control over their managers.But Mr David
44、son thinks the unstated price of Abu Dhabis support will be stiff indeed. “It is the end of the second emirates economic autonomy, which it has fiercely protected,” he says. Why else did Abu Dhabi put Dubai through “months of pain and humiliation”, if it did not see some long-term gain from chasteni
45、ng its neighbour and strengthening the UAE federation, Mr Davidson asks. Dubai will now have to be more accommodating of its neighbours wishes, he says. It will, for example, have to forgo its independent foreign policy, which had seen it become Irans outlet to the world, even as Abu Dhabi kept a ca
46、reful distance.Dubai will also have to “lose its ambitions to become the Monaco of the Gulf,” Mr Davidson says. Abu Dhabi will insist on greater prudence and Dubais go-getting rulers may also now feel defeated. Their economic ambitions were driven partly by their political insecurities. “A lot of th
47、e urgency we saw in the last ten years was fuelled exactly by Dubais need to keep its autonomy,” Mr Davidson says.But for all Dubais woes, the Gulf still needs a financial centre, a port, and a secure place to live, Mr Cooper points out. With a little less gumption and a lot less gearing, “Dubai is
48、plausible”.Stress-test messASSESSING banks capital adequacy has become almost as tortured as trying to work out their exposures to toxic credit. Disclosure is patchy and a plethora of measures exists, with most banks emphasising those that flatter them most. American regulators hope to clean up the
49、mess by imposing stress tests on lenders and requiring them to raise new capital, probably from the government, to plug any shortfalls. Behind the scenes such a test will probably require banks to meet a given, but undisclosed, standard of capital adequacy. It will also involve checking that asset valuations reflect the possibility of a severe recession.Judged by tier-one capital, a comm