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Файл:Speak and Write like The Economist говори и пиши как The Economist
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Business, money, trade, economics, professions
Nobody knows how many homeless there are in Paris.
US Treasury Secretary Geithner’s life in the trenches has produced its
own vocabulary. Serious decisions are “consequential”, good ideas are
“cool”, better ideas are “compelling” and the best ideas are at “the optimal frontier”. During a crisis “plan beats no plan”, jury-rigged measures
in the face of unavoidable disaster are “foam on the runway”, and bad
outcomes are “dark”. Managing public perceptions is called “theatre”.
“Fuck” also holds a prominent place in the Geithner lexicon, usually as
an adjective, not a verb, as in “Ihave no fucking idea.”
China’s epic industrial boom will not be repeated; the days of
making billions by shipping iron ore from Goa to Guangdong are
over.
You have a decent job and work hard. You keep your nose clean, respect
authority and have never joined a protest march. Suddenly you have the
bad luck to face a cruel and seemingly impossible choice. Your superiors
tell you to do something outrageous or unacceptable. Do you obey or, at
grave personal cost, refuse?
China makes things you can drop on your foot. America merely
designs, brands and peddles them.
As Fred Hirsch argued in his 1977 book, “The Social Limits to Growth”,
many good things in life are “positional”. You can enjoy them only if
others don’t. Sometimes, a quick car, fi ne suit or attractive house is not
enough. One must have the fastest car, fi nest suit or priciest house.
Consumers cannot compare what is legally produced in California with what is legally produced in Colorado — to say nothing
of what is illegally sold in New York’s Washington Square Park.
Ekhart, Indiana, is the RV capital of the world.
Until recently, Carrefour’s supermarkets in France were run
along Napoleonic lines. Strict orders emanated from its headquarters in Paris. Every store sold a similar range of products. If
selling groceries were like marching an army over the Alps, this
strategy would have worked brilliantly. But it isn’t, and it didn’t.
At the big Carrefour in Monacoout went the racks of cheap luggage, of the sort chic locals would be embarrassed to see their
servants carrying.
41
Часть I
Mr Abe promised that Japan would enter trade negotiations to join the
American-led Trans-Pacifi c Partnership (TPP) — though he offered no
promise to eliminate tariffs of up to 777.7% on rice.
Big pickups are seen in the car industry as a leading indicator:
rising sales point to Americans starting to build kitchens, fi x
roofs and hire contractors.
Family history has large effects that persist for much greater spans of
time. Fathers matter, but so do grandfathers and great-grandfathers.
Indeed, it may take as long as 300–500 years for high- and low-status
families to produce descendants with equal chances of being in various
parts of the income spectrum.
Some 3m wrecks pepper the ocean fl oors, according to the UN
(though few contain riches). Finding them involves lengthy research and lucky breaks. Recovery can take months of work
by specialist crews. Of 52 annual reports fi led by publicly listed
shipwreck-recovery fi rms since 1996, only fi ve show a net profi t.
Acquisitions can also be a form of fi nancial engineering. This was a favourite game of the conglomerates of the 1970s and 1980s. A company
with highly rated shares would bid for a group with poorly rated equity.
Say Acme has 100m shares, earnings of $10m (earnings per share of 10
cents) and a share price of $2 (aprice-earnings ratio of 20). Grotco has
the same earnings and number of shares but its share price is just $1
(ap/e of 10). If Acme makes an all-share bid valuing Grotco at $1.20, it
will need to issue 60m new shares. The combined group will have $20m
of earnings, 160m shares and earnings per share of 12.5 cents. With the
help of nothing more than maths, Acme’s earnings per share will have
jumped by 25%. Merger booms usually peak with the kind of deal that
resembles a Las Vegas wedding after an alcohol-fuelled night: both parties regret it in the morning.
Chairman Mao, as ever, had said it best: imagine the ping-pong
ball as the head of your capitalist opponent, and each shot a point
for the motherland.
Overall, the number without homes in the US is staggering. The number
of homeless veterans of the Vietnam war is greater than the number who
died in it. On any given night in America more than 640,000 men, women
and children are forced to seek shelter, live in their cars, or sleep on the
streets. Last year nearly 1.6m people used an emergency shelter.
42
Business, money, trade, economics, professions
A Polish Jew in an Episcopal graveyard in a largely Dominican
neighbourhood. What could be more New York?
Obama sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China.
The average Swiss watch costs $685. A Chinese one costs around
$2 and tells the time just as well (see chart). So how on earth, a
Martian might ask, can the Swiss watch industry survive? Yet it
does. Few can match the precision of a Nivarox (“Nicht variabel
oxydfest” (G.) or “Non-Variable Non-Oxidizing”) balance spring.
The euro needs French reform, German extravagance and Italian political maturity.
In happier days before the euro crisis, one government in Lisbon
rebranded the Algarve as the Allgarve, hoping to appeal to English-speaking tourists. Now a Portuguese wit suggests rebranding the whole country as Poortugal.
The cult of the insider in Japan is rooted in its paddy fi elds, some scholars argue. To cultivate wet rice, villagers need to work together, sharing
land, labour, water and gossip. Anyone not in the group is out of the loop.
There is something of the rice paddy about Japan’s capital markets, too.
“LVMH is like a mini Germany,” boasts an insider. Like that country’s Mittelstand, it has built a reputation for craftsmanship and
quality that people are happy to pay extra for. The difference is,
the Mittelstand makes unsexy things such as machine tools and
shaving brushes, whereas LVMH makes champagne, handbags
and other objects of desire.
The 1912 games were the last one where gold medals were made entirely
of gold. Now they consist mainly of silver with a thin coat of gold. Winners in London are advised not to bite too hard on their medals, as they
will have a gold content of only about 1.5%.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote that: “In every big transaction, there is a
magic moment during which a man has surrendered a treasure,
and during which the man who is due to receive it has not yet
done so. An alert lawyer will make the moment his own, possessing the treasure for a magic microsecond, taking a little of
it, passing it on.” Like so many novelists, he was talking bosh. No
alert lawyer takes only “a little”.
43
Часть I
When asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton, a prolifi c bank robber
(pictured, after he retired), is said to have replied: “Because that’s where
the money is.” Sutton reportedly pinched $2m during a lifetime of crime.
The phenomenon has been described as the Wimbledon effect:
Britain provides the beautiful arena where foreign champions
come and beat the hell out of British players. The annual OxfordCambridge Boat Race is much the same: a slugfest between predominantly non-British mercenaries.
The real money is where the pain is.
The human animal is a beast that must die. If he’s got money, he
buys and buys and buys everything he can, in the crazy hope one
of those thing.
“Corruption is rampant at high levels, and at low levels,” said an FBI
agent, before adding: “and all levels in between”.
Foreign remittances continue to grow. In all, 250m migrant workers will send home $500 billion this year— up from $410 billion
in 2012. At their destination savings often end up under the mattress— rather than channelled into microfi nance schemes, for
instance, as many development experts have long hoped. The
marriage between remittances and microfi nance has not happened yet.
“Republican gluttons of privilege” who had “stuck a pitchfork in the
farmer’s back”.
He spent his entire career within the DeBeers stable.
It takes pride in sticking to its companies through thick and thin.
The distinction between being a successful tycoon and being an
enemy of the people has been blurred.
Marriott likes to buy to the sound of cannons and sell to the sound of
violins.
40% of Missourians would oppose a new tax even if it was being used “to construct the landing pad for the second coming of
Christ”.
44
Business, money, trade, economics, professions
Once upon a time the overstressed executive bellowing orders into a
telephone, cancelling meetings, staying late at the offi ce and dying of a
heart attack was a stereotype of modernity. Cardiac arrest— and, indeed,
early death from any cause— is the prerogative of underlings. The best
medicine, then, is promotion. Prosper, and live long.
Narcissism index indicators of CEO: prominence of the boss’s
photo in the annual report, company press releases. Length of
his Who is Who entry, frequency of his use of the fi rst singular
interviews, ratios of cash compensation to second-highest paid
exec.
Of course, successfully picking the leader of a big public company has
always been tricky, because the job requires at least two quite different skills. Like the fox, a chief executive must know lots of little things,
must manage successfully the key day-to-day aspects of the business.
But like the hedgehog, he must also know one big thing: every three or
four years, he will have to take a substantial strategic decision, which
may mortally wound the business, if he gets it wrong. Plenty of giants,
such as Cable & Wireless and AT&T, have had leaders who passed the fox
test but failed the hedgehog one.
The Chinese dragon’s coils encircling the world are getting tighter by the day.
In business, as in photography, it pays to stay focused.
The number of people in the United States living in poverty increased last year to 39.8 million— the highest percentage of the
population in 11 years, the Census Bureau said Thursday. The
number equals 13.2 percent of the country’s population and is 2.5
million more than were living in poverty in 2007, which is defi ned
by the agency as a person making less than $10,991 or a family of
four making less than $22,025.
This new elite is not just a breed apart. It lives apart, in bubbles such as
Manhattan south of 96th Street (where the proportion of adults with college degrees rose from 16% in 1960 to 60% in 2000) and a small number of
“SuperZips”, neighbourhoods where wealth and educational attainment
are highly concentrated. These neighbourhoods are whiter and more
Asian than the rest of America. They have less crime and more stable
families. They are not, pace Mr Gingrich, necessarily “liberal”: plenty of
SuperZips voted Republican in 2004. But they are indeed out of touch.
45
Часть I
The have-a-nice-day stuff of Walmart in Germany went down
like a lead Zeppelin with employees and shoppers alike.
Hopkins was the most fl amboyant advertising genius of the early 20th
century— the man who convinced millions of women to buy Palmolive
soap on the basis that Cleopatra had washed with it, and got the world
talking about puffed wheat with the claim that it was “shot from guns”
until the grains puffed to eight times their normal size.
Every company starts out as a shell. Just £ 349 ($560) buys you
a company in the Seychelles, with no local taxation, no public
disclosure of directors or shareholders and no requirement to fi le
accounts. Prices rise to £ 5,000 for more sophisticated corporate
structures in places like Switzerland and Luxembourg. Two fi rms
handle two-thirds of all Delaware companies: CT Corporation
(part of Wolters Kluwer of the Netherlands) and CSC.
There is no limit to human ingenuity in fi nding new ways to go bust.
Before the crisis many central bankers believed that all they
needed was a “hammer” (interest rates) to strike a “monetary
nail” (consumer-price infl ation). But not every problem is a nail.
Policymakers also need a full set of “macroprudential” tools,
from wrenches to duct tape E.
Mr Murray starts by lamenting the isolation of a new upper class, which
he defi nes as the most successful 5% of adults (plus their spouses) working in managerial positions, the professions or the senior media. These
people are not only rich but also exceptionally clever, because America
has become expert at sending its brightest to the same elite universities,
where they intermarry and confer on their offspring not just wealth but
also a cognitive advantage that gives this class terrifi c staying power.
The best time to invest is when there is blood in the streets.
In the 19th century Alexis de Tocqueville marvelled that in America the
opulent did not stand aloof from the people. A great cultural gap separates the elite from other Americans. They seldom watch “Oprah” or
“Judge Judy” all the way through. In fact they do not watch much television at all. They eat in restaurants, but not often at Applebee’s, Denny’s
or Waffl e House, chains that cater to the common taste. They may take
The Economist, with the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and perhaps the New Yorker or Rolling Stone. They drink wine and boutique
46
Business, money, trade, economics, professions
beers (and can discuss them expertly) but only in moderation, and they
hardly ever smoke cigarettes.
Mr Icahn had expounded his theory of the moronisation of American management. The typical chief executive, he said, to chuckles, is “the guy you knew in college, the fraternity president— not
too bright, back-slapping, but a survivor, politically astute, a
nice guy”. To be a chief executive, you need to know how not to
tread on anyone’s toes on the way up. You eventually become the
number two, who “has got to be a little worse than the number
one to survive”. When the number two becomes chief executive,
he promotes someone a little worse than him as his second-incommand. “It is the survival of the unfi ttest,” concluded Mr Icahn.
“Eventually we are all going to be run by morons.”
Most students of taxation know the advice that Jean-Baptiste Colbert,
treasurer to Louis XIV, offered the beleaguered taxman: pluck the goose
so as to get the most feathers with the least hissing. But suppose the
goose is housed on one farm, eats the birdseed scattered in a second,
and lays its eggs in a third. Which farmer gets the plumage?
History offers perhaps only one true example of a reserve-currency shift, from the British pound to the dollar. The pound was
king during the era of the gold standard. But in the years after
1914, Britain switched from net creditor to net debtor, and by the
1920s the dollar was the only currency convertible to gold (although the pound returned to gold in 1925). Two costly wars and
two episodes of currency devaluation in Britain later, the dollar
was unchallenged as the world’s chief reserve currency.
Americans used to believe that their constitution protected private property. The Fifth Amendment allows the state to seize it only for “public use”,
and so long as “just compensation” is paid. “Public use” has traditionally
been taken to mean something like a public highway. Roads would obviously be much harder to build if a single homeowner could hold out
forever or for excessive compensation. The government’s powers of “eminent domain” have also been used to clean up “blighted” slums. “Urban
renewal”, he noted, has sometimes been nicknamed “negro removal”.
The “triangular trade” as it was known, whereby slave-ships left
European ports for west Africa with rum, guns, textiles and other
goods to exchange for slaves, and then transported them across the
Atlantic to sell to plantation-owners, and then returned with sugar
47
Часть I
and coffee, also fuelled the fi rst great wave of economic globalisation. Slavers in France would send their shirts to be washed in the
streams of the Caribbean isle of St Domingue, now Haiti; the water
there was said to whiten the linen better than any European stream.
The price of used furniture is nothing but a viewpoint, and if you wouldn’t
understand the viewpoint is impossible to understand the price. With
used furniture you can’t be emotional 49.
There is almost no house property in London that is not overburdened with a number of middlemen.
Although Britons are cross about high pay, few seek capitalism’s overthrow: they dislike corporate fat cats for being fat, not for being cats.
Some fi rms are employing a “China + 1” strategy, opening just
one factory in another country to test the waters and provide a
back-up. If China’s currency and shipping costs were to rise by
5% annually and wages were to go up by 30% a year, by 2015 it
would be just as cheap to make things in North America as to
make them in China and ship them there.
Mr Rao offered two deals on loose coffee beans: 33% extra free or 33%
off the price. The discount is by far the better proposition, but the supposedly clever students viewed them as equivalent. Even well-educated
shoppers are easily foxed.
If not in coin you must pay in humiliation of spirit for every benefi t received at the hands of philanthropy.
When Deng Xiaoping, China’s paramount leader, died in 1997 his only
post was chairman of the China Bridge Association.
Shopping with coupons and jars of loose change. Watering down
milk to make it go further. Using washing up liquid instead of
shampoo. Inventing excuses for skipping lunch. Having to walk
everywhere. Sharing beds and baths. Mending clothes that are
themselves second-hand. Reviving old newspapers as makeshift
lampshades. Always being tired— poverty in austerity.
The fi rst is that entrepreneurs routinely see opportunities where everyone else sees problems. A surprising number of great companies were
born out of fury and frustration.
48
Business, money, trade, economics, professions
When Wal-Mart tried to impose alien rules on its German staff—
such as compulsory smiling and a ban on affairs with co-workers— it touched off a guerilla war that ended only when the supermarket chain announced it was pulling out of Germany in 2006.
When things went wrong for Middle Eastern tribes a couple of millennia
ago, the accepted remedy was to send a sacrifi cial goat out into the wilderness to placate the gods. The practice continues today, but the voters
have replaced the gods, and highly paid businesspeople the goats.
Why do Americans spend such huge amounts of time, money,
water, fertiliser and fuel on growing a useless smooth expanse of
grass? Much better to cultivate something useful, like tomatoes.
Walmart did not become a $200 billion company without running down
a few pedestrians.
Water fl ows towards money.
The recovery has resembled third-world traffi c, where juggernauts and
rickshaws, cars and cycles ply the same lanes at different speeds, often
getting in each other’s way.
Shoppers have been able to buy from out-of-state merchants since
Sears issued its fi rst mail-order catalogues in the 19th century.
Warren Buffett: “It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who’s
been swimming naked.”
The new strategy looks more promising, but as always success
will depend on implementation.
Consider an imaginary Englishman’s day. He wakes in his cottage near
Dover, ready to commute to London. Chomping a bowl of Weetabix,
aBritish breakfast cereal resembling (tasty) cardboard, he makes a cup
of tea. His privatised water comes from Veolia and his electricity from
EDF (both French fi rms). Thumps at the gate tell him another arm of Veolia is emptying his bins. He takes the new high-speed train to London:
it is part-owned by the French fi rm Keolis, while the tracks belong to
Canadian pension funds. At St Pancras station, a choice of double-decker
buses awaits. In the last couple of years, one of the big London bus companies was bought by Netherlands Railways. A second went to Deutsche
Bahn, the German railway company. In March, a third was taken over
49
Часть I
by RATP, the Paris public-transport authority (its previous owners were
also French). The Dutch railways logo is emblazoned on buses across
London. Thanks to RATP’s logo, a stylised image of the River Seine now
adorns hundreds more: most Londoners neither know nor care. As for
Weetabix, a French billionaire is interested in buying the fi rm, according
to press reports. Yet Britain still feels British.
Polaroid, whose once-iconic instant-photo fi rm, has only one signifi cant asset now— its name.
In a diatribe against the Rothschilds, Heinrich Heine, a German poet,
fumed that money “is more fl uid than water and less steady than air”.
New boss didn’t magic away the problems.
Most state-owned companies are prone to over-staffi ng, underinvestment, political interference and corruption.
Putting business at the heart of the health-care system is not a
must but a bug.
The word “company” is derived from the Latin words “cum” and “pane”
meaning “breaking bread together”.
The sheer size of the Al Saud clan has also helped cement the nation. There have been eight generations of Saudi rulers, dating
back to 18th-century sheikhs who held sway in a few oasis towns
near present-day Riyadh. Many have been prolifi c. King Abdul
Aziz himself sired some 36 sons and even more daughters. The
fi rst son to succeed him, King Saud, fathered 107 children. King
Abdullah is believed to have 20 daughters and 14 sons. The extended Al Saud family is now thought to number some 30,000,
though only 7,000 or so are princes. Of these, only around 500
are in government, and only perhaps 60 carry real weight in decision-making.
There’s no exaggerating China’s hunger for commodities. The country
accounts for about a fi fth of the world’s population, yet it gobbles up
more than half of the world’s pork, half of its cement, a third of its steel
and over a quarter of its aluminium. It is spending 35 times as much on
imports of soya beans and crude oil as it did in 1999, and 23 times as
much importing copper— indeed, China has swallowed over four-fi fths
of the increase in the world’s copper supply since 2000.
50
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