Текст 2
Bank shareholders
Changing course
Apr 30th 2009
From The Economist print edition
Bank of America's shareholders get tough—sort of
KEN LEWIS, the boss of Bank of America (BofA). famously said he had had as much fun as he could stand in investment banking in the autumn of 2007. How on earth must he feel now? Mr Lewis's decision to buy Merrill Lynch in September has cost him his reputation, his independence and. on April 29th, one of his many titles. At the bank's annual general meeting shareholders reelected Mr Lewis to the board, but voted to split the role of chairman and chief executive. Walter Massey, a board veteran, replaced him as chairman. Mr Lewis can count himself lucky. True, there was strong logic in buying Merrill Lynch, with its coveted retail brokerage, and Countrywide, a sickly mortgage lender, before that. True too^that the government resisted his belated attempts to get out of the Merrill deal in December, as losses at the bank rapidly worsened.
But these are figleaves. The Merrill deal was stitched together too quickly. Mr Lewis agreed on a price (in shares, to give him some credit) that looked inflated even before Merrill posted losses of more than $15 billion in the fourth quarter. "As a group, they are not disciplined buyers." says Jonathan Finger, a disgruntled shareholder. Claims that Merrill paid out lavish bonuses to employees without BofA's say-so. and that Mr Lewis was forbidden by officials to disclose details of Merrill's losses to shareholders (both disputed), make BofA's managers look impotent at best and contemptuous of shareholders at worst. Hostile investors argue that Merrill was already burning money when they voted on the deal on December 5th. before Mr Lewis crossed swords with the government.
The bank's share price has lost more than three-quarters of its value since September. Things could yet get worse. Leaks about the results of the stress tests that have been conducted on America's largest banks suggest that BofA, which has already received $45 billion from the government, needs yet more capital (it would probably not be the only supplicant). This could well mean that the government's preferred shares are converted into common equity. If other investors do not want to get rid of Mr Lewis, the government may do it for them.
Текст 3
He bade me observe it, and I should always find that the calamities of life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind, but that the middle station had the fewest disasters, and was not exposed to so many vicissitudes as the higher or lower part of mankind; nay, they were not subjected to so many distempers and uneasinesses, either of body or mind, as those were who, by vicious living, luxury, and extravagances on the one hand, or by hard labour, want of necessaries, and mean or insufficient diet on the other hand, bring distemper upon themselves by the natural consequences of their way of living; that the middle station of life was calculated for all kind of virtue and all kind of enjoyments; that peace and plenty were the handmaids of a middle fortune; that temperance, moderation, quietness, health, society, all agreeable diversions, and all desirable pleasures, were the blessings attending the middle station of life; that this way men went silently and smoothly through the world, and comfortably out of it, not embarrassed with the labours of the hands or of the head, not sold to a life of slavery for daily bread, nor harassed with perplexed circumstances, which rob the soul of peace and the body of rest, nor enraged with the passion of envy, or the secret burning lust of ambition for great things; but, in easy circumstances, sliding gently through the world, and sensibly tasting the sweets of living, without the bitter; feeling that they are happy, and learning by every day's experience to know it more sensibly…
ТЕКСТ 4
Canadian symbol for winter tires spreads around the world
O
nce
upon a time they built a highway between Vancouver, British Columbia,
and the resort community of Whistler, high in the Canadian Coastal
Mountains. The road was very steep with lots of curves. So lovely was
it that they called it the Sea-to-Sky Highway.
It was very beautiful, but, it was also very deadly.
Often, skiers depart Vancouver with its nice green lawns, only to find the Sea-to-Ski Highway covered in heavy snow and very slippery. Many of the holidayers are in vehicles ill-equipped for the road conditions - cars shod only with all-season tires.
Along the side of the road are barriers used by the RCMP to stop and warn drivers whose cars don't have proper snow tires. Sometimes, the Mounties close the road altogether.
Despite the RCMP's measures, in 1995 there was a string of fatalities along the Sea-to-Sky Highway, also known as Hwy. 99. Investigating officers identified the problem as a lack of snow traction, coupled with lack of information for motorists to identify whether they had true snow tires or just "all-season" tires, which are a compromise.
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The letter crossed the desk of John Neufeld, an automotive safety engineer at Transport Canada in Ottawa.
Now, the 14 or so major tire companies are all brutal competitors. They're headquartered all over the world. They each have their own standards and closely guarded testing secrets. Building consensus among them as to what constituted a repeatable test that would identify tires that performed to a certain acceptable standard - well, that wasn't easy.
Working with the Rubber Association of Canada and the Rubber Manufacturers Association in the U.S., Mr. Neufeld identified a particular test procedure of the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM). This test evaluates tires in real-world snow conditions.
After a lot of discussion, all the tiremakers agreed to adopt that recommended ASTM standard, along with the pictograph of a peaked mountain with a snowflake inside it. The new standard was announced in February 1999.
Today, if a tire bears the pictograph, even drivers who cannot read well will know it meets specific snow traction performance requirements and has been designed for severe snow, ice and winter conditions.
The actions of certain individual Canadians have led to improved winter driving safety for anyone in Canada and the U.S. willing to take advantage of it. And the mountain-snowflake symbol is spreading to Europe and beyond.