经济类文章：Currency teaser

下面是小编给大家整理的经济类文章：Currency teaser，本文共7篇，欢迎大家借鉴与参考，希望对大家有所帮助。

篇1：经济类文章：Robo-traders

经济类文章精选：Robo-traders

6 Robo-traders

Computerised trading agents may help humans build better markets

THANKS to slumping markets, investment banks are shedding many of their highly-paid traders. When markets recover, the banks might be tempted to replace them with rather cheaper talent. One alternative has been around for a while but has yet to catch on: autonomous trading agents-computers programmed to act like the human version without such pesky costs as holidays, lunch breaks or bonuses. Program trading has, of course, been done before; some blamed the 1987 stockmarket crash on computers instructed with simple decision-making rules. But robots can be smarter than that.

Dave Cliff, a researcher at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Bristol, England, has been creating trading robots for seven years. In computer simulations he lets them evolve “genetically”, and so allows them to adapt and fit models of real-world financial markets. His experiments have suggested that a redesign of some markets could lead to greater efficiency. Last year, a research group at IBM showed that Mr Cliff's artificial traders could consistently beat the human variety, in various kinds of market. Nearly all take the shape of an auction. One well-known type is the English auction, familiar to patrons of the salesrooms of Christie's and Sotheby's, where sellers keep mum on their offer price, and buyers increase their bids by stages until only one remains.

At the other extreme is the Dutch auction, familiar to 17th-century tulip-traders in the Netherlands as well as to bidders for American Treasury bonds. Here, buyers remain silent, and a seller reduces his price until it is accepted. Most markets for shares, commodities, foreign exchange and derivatives are a hybrid of these two types: buyers and sellers can announce their bid or offer prices at any time, and deals are constantly being closed, a so-called “continuous double auction”.

篇2：经济类文章：Ripe

经济类文章精选：Ripe

17 Ripe

America's bond markets are due for scrutiny--and competition

CURIOUSLY, bonds were the first products traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) back in 1792. It took the exchange 30 years to put the “stock” in its name. The exchange lost any significant stake in the bond business generations ago. Now, though, caught in a war over the cost of trading shares, the NYSE quite rightly is looking at other markets with fatter spreads. And its attention has settled on old haunts. It has begun talks with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over permission to trade thousands of unlisted corporate bonds.

The obvious attraction of the bond market is its size: some $10 trillion-worth of corporate bonds traded in , a quarter more than the trading volume on the NYSE. And yet the bond market's size and maturity ought to mean that there are no rich pickings left. It has been hard, though, to tell how efficient bond markets are. In contrast to equities, information on the price of dealing in bonds has been scarce.

That began to change two years ago when the National Association of Securities Dealers began collecting transaction prices. This month the SEC released a study, based on these data, by its own Amy Edwards and Michael Piwowar, and Lawrence Harris of the University of Southern California. For all but the largest investors, trading bonds is many times more expensive than trading stocks. This is odd. In theory bonds should be no more expensive to trade than equities.

Even before sales commissions, the spread between what investors receive when selling $20,000-worth of corporate bonds and what they pay when buying is about 1.4%, or about one-quarter of a year's return. Costs are still higher in the convertible-bond market. And in the municipal-bond market, the spread reaches 2%, according to a similar study published by the SEC in the summer. All told, this is at least four

篇3：经济类文章：Plumper

经济类文章精选：Plumper

1 Plumper

How does the country’s economy compare with those of the EU?

SOME of the concerns surrounding Turkey’s application to join the European Union, to be voted on by the EU’s Council of Ministers on December 17th, are economic-in particular, the country’s relative poverty. Its GDP per head is less than a third of the average for the 15 pre- members of the EU. But it is not far off that of one of the ten new members which joined on May 1st 2004 (Latvia), and it is much the same as those of two countries, Bulgaria and Romania, which this week concluded accession talks with the EU that could make them full members on January 1st .

Furthermore, the country’s recent economic progress has been, according to Donald Johnston, the secretary-general of the OECD, “stunning”. GDP in the second quarter of the year was 13.4% higher than a year earlier, a rate of growth that no EU country comes close to matching. Turkey’s inflation rate has just fallen into single figures for the first time since 1972, and this week the country reached agreement with the IMF on a new three-year, $10 billion economic programme that will, according to the IMF’s managing director, Rodrigo Rato, “help Turkey... reduce inflation toward European levels, and enhance the economy’s resilience”.

Resilience has not historically been the country’s economic strong point. As recently as , GDP fell by over 7%. It fell by more than 5% in 1994, and by just under 5% in . Indeed, throughout the 1990s growth oscillated like an electrocardiogram recording a violent heart attack. This irregularity has been one of the main reasons (along with red tape and corruption) why the country has failed dismally to attract much-needed foreign direct investment. Its stock of such investment (as a percentage of GDP) is lower now than it was in the 1980s, and annual inflows

篇4：经济类文章：Burnished

经济类文章精选：Burnished

4 Burnished

Up goes gold, down goes the dollar

MOST economists hate gold. Not, you understand, that they would turn up their noses at a bar or two. But they find the reverence in which many hold the metal almost irrational. That it was used as money for millennia is irrelevant: it isn't any more. Modern money takes the form of paper or, more often, electronic data. To economists, gold is now just another commodity.

So why is its price soaring? Over the past week, this has topped $450 a troy ounce, up by 9% since the beginning of the year and 77% since April 2001. Ah, comes the reply, gold transactions are denominated in dollars, and the rise in the price simply reflects the dollar's fall in terms of other currencies, especially the euro, against which it hit a new low this week. Expressed in euros, the gold price has moved much less. However, there is no iron link, as it were, between the value of the dollar and the value of gold. A rising price of gold, like that of anything else, can reflect an increase in demand as well as a depreciation of its unit of account.

This is where gold bulls come in. The fall in the dollar is important, but mainly because as a store of value the dollar stinks. With a few longish rallies, the greenback has been on a downward trend since it came off the gold standard in 1971. Now it is suffering one of its sharper declines. At the margin, extra demand has come from those who think dollars--indeed any money backed by nothing more than promises to keep inflation low--a decidedly risky investment, mainly because America, with the world's reserve currency, has been able to create and borrow so many of them. The least painful way of repaying those dollars is to make them worth less.

The striking exception to this extra demand comes from central banks, which would like to sell some of the gold they already have. As a legacy of the days when their currencies were backed by

篇5：经济类文章：Staggering

经济类文章精选：Staggering

3 Staggering

Things are slow to change in America's boardrooms

THE annual review of American company board practices by Korn/Ferry, a firm of headhunters, is a useful indicator of the health of corporate governance. This year's review, published on November 12th, shows that the Sarbanes-Oxley act, passed in to try to prevent a repeat of corporate collapses such as Enron's and WorldCom's, has had an impact on the boardroom--albeit at an average implementation cost that Korn/Ferry estimates at $5.1m per firm.

Two years ago, only 41% of American firms said they regularly held meetings of directors without their chief executive present; this year the figure was 93%. But some things have been surprisingly unaffected by the backlash against corporate scandals. For example, despite a growing feeling that former chief executives should not sit on their company's board, the percentage of American firms where they do has actually edged up, from 23% in to 25% in .

Also, disappointingly few firms have split the jobs of chairman and chief executive. Another survey of American boards published this week, by A.T. Kearney, a firm of consultants, found that in 2002 14% of the boards of S&P 500 firms had separated the roles, and a further 16% said they planned to do so. But by 2004 only 23% overall had taken the plunge. A survey earlier in the year by consultants at McKinsey found that 70% of American directors and investors supported the idea of splitting the jobs, which is standard practice in Europe.

Another disappointment is the slow progress in abolishing “staggered” boards--ones where only one-third of the directors are up for re-election each year, to three-year terms. Invented as a defence against takeover, such boards, according to a new Harvard Law School study by Lucian Bebchuk and Alma Cohen, are unambiguously “associated with an economically significant reduction in

篇6：经济类文章：Fast-food succession

经济类文章精选：Fast-food succession

2 Fast-food succession

Another change at the top

CHARLIE BELL became chief executive of McDonald's in April. Within a month doctors told him that he had colorectal cancer. After stockmarket hours on November 22nd, the fast-food firm said he had resigned; it would need a third boss in under a year. Yet when the market opened, its share price barely dipped then edged higher. After all, McDonald's had, again, shown how to act swiftly and decisively in appointing a new boss.

Mr Bell himself got the top job when Jim Cantalupo died of a heart attack hours before he was due to address a convention of McDonald's franchisees. Mr Cantalupo was a McDonald's veteran brought out of retirement in January 2003 to help remodel the firm after sales began falling because of dirty restaurants, indifferent service and growing concern about junk food. He devised a recovery plan, backed by massive marketing, and promoted Mr Bell to chief operating officer. When Mr Cantalupo died, a rapidly convened board confirmed Mr Bell, a 44-year-old Australian already widely seen as his heir apparent, in the top job. The convention got its promised chief executive's address, from the firm's first non-American leader.

Yet within weeks executives had to think about what to do if Mr Bell became too ill to continue. Perhaps Mr Bell had the same thing on his mind: he usually introduced Jim Skinner, the 60-year-old vice-chairman, to visitors as the ”steady hand at the wheel“. Now Mr Skinner (pictured), an expert on the firm's overseas operations, becomes chief executive, and Mike Roberts, head of its American operations, joins the board as chief operating officer.

Is Mr Roberts now the new heir apparent? Maybe. McDonald's has brought in supposedly healthier choices such as salads and toasted sandwiches worldwide and, instead of relying for most of its growth on opening new restaurants, has turned to upgrading its 31,000 exis

篇7：经济类文章：WIELDING THE AXE

经济类文章精选：WIELDING THE AXE

14 WIELDING THE AXE

Investment banks cut with a vengeance

THE 25,000 or so jobs cut by international investment banks so far this year have been presented as judicious pruning, though they were really more panicky than that. Privately, the banks admit that, if business does not pick up soon, then the serious axe-wielding will have to start, on Wall Street and in the City of London. Some banks would have liked to act more aggressively before now, but were restrained by a desire not to be first with the bad news. This week's announcement of 3,500 fresh job losses at Citigroup, followed immediately by reports that J.P. Morgan Chase is about to slash its investment-banking operations, may mark the point at which the blood really starts to flow.

As they decide whom to shed, executives face a tricky question. How quickly might they be able to hire workers in the event that business recovers faster than most people now dare hope? Merrill Lynch suffered badly after it fired workers, including technical staff, as financial markets stumbled in late 1998. When the markets rebounded soon after, not only were these workers loth to return, but employees at other firms would not join a firm that had shown itself to be a fickle employer.

Today, worries about ”doing a Merrill“ are fading fast. Jobless investment bankers are legion, though few are willing to admit to being ”unemployed“. New York now has nearly as many ”resting" bankers as actresses, though they do not yet have to wait at tables. Senior executives are being fired at a rate not seen since 1990, says Laura Lofaro of Sterling Resources, a firm of head-hunters. They are paid so much that the revenues they bring in for the firm fall short of their pay--even before other overheads are taken into account.

Banks are also eagerly searching out ways to shed workers through increasing use of technology. Curiously, firms like Me