3. Напишите реферат и аннотацию данного текста.
Text C.
1. Прочитайте следующий текст и найдите ключевые слова и предложения (фрагменты)::
Globalisation is sweeping the world of finance. Ignoring that trend has turned an also-ran into the world’s biggest bank - Lloyds TSB. In Britain, Lloyds Bank is a familiar face on the high street. Elsewhere, it is all but unknown to the general public. But its emphasis on serving retail customers with extraordinary efficiency -along with its firm refusal to follow the financial industry’s drive for international diversification—has turned it into a money machine.
Measured by assets, Lloyds tsb is only the fourth-largest banking company in Britain and 33rd in the world. Take market value as the yardstick, however, and a different story emerges. With a stockmarket capitalisation of £42.1 billion ($68.7 billion), LloydsTSB has become the world’s most valuable bank. Its shares are changing hands at seven times book value, twice as much as its British competitors command. A £l,000 investment in Lloyds shares five years ago would now be worth nearly £4,000.
Not long ago, such giddy numbers seemed a pipedream. In the mid-1980s, Lloyds Bank almost went bust in the backwash from Latin America’s debt crisis. The bank had to write off £2.6 billion of dud loans, and its claim to be “a thoroughbred among banks” (its logo is a black horse) met with sniggers. Other British banks that had been hurt in Latin America went cap-in-hand to their shareholders, who patiently gave them new money. Lloyds was in far worse shape, and its shareholders were disinclined to buy a rights issue. Brian Pitman, who became chief executive in 1983, decided that the best way to advance was to retreat. He jettisoned loss-making foreign subsidiaries, wound down investment banking and international lending, and concentrated on the bank’s bread-and-butter business: selling financial services to British consumers.
This flew in the face of banking orthodoxy, which confused size with strength. Mr Pitman, who became Sir Brian in 1994, insisted that increasing the share price was more important than expanding the balance sheet. The bank’s”declared aim is to double the share price every three years. This is not just hot air: it has met this goal consistently for the past 15 years. «He was the first to realise that planting flags around the world was not always the best way to make money», says Fred Crawley, a former Lloyds executive.
Spot the trend
The attention to shareholders has been accompanied by a knack for sensing the direction in which banking was moving. Lloyds was the first big British bank to buy a life assurer, Abbey Life; the first to offer mortgages and to bid for a building society, Cheltenham & Gloucester; the first to close much of its branch network; and the first to bid (unsuccessfully) for another clearing bank, Midland, sparking much-needed banking consolidation in Britain.
The £ 1.8 billion purchase of Cheltenham & Gloucester in 1994 gave Lloyds a valuable brand through which to push its own mortgage business, which had been flagging. Lloyds now issues 16% of new mortgage loans in Britain. In 1995 Sir Brian went after tsb, an institution whose strategy was so obscure that wags had dubbed it “That Sorry Bank”. But TSB could help plug gaps—it had lots of branches in Scotland, where Lloyds had few—and offered plenty of scope to cut costs by eliminating overlaps. Not all the savings have come from tsb. Lloyds discovered that some of tsb’s businesses were better than its own. The telephone bank, which has 800,000 customers, is run by managers from tsb.
These acquisitions have given Lloyds tsb a retail-banking breadth that no other British bank can match. It is the market leader in cheque-writing accounts and personal loans, and the second-largest credit-card issuer. It pumps Lloyds, tsb and c&g products to 15m customers through a network of 2,700 branches, hundreds more than its nearest rival, NatWest.
Lloyds TSB, however, cannot trace its blessings to good management alone. Britain has offered an ideal banking environment in the mid-1990s: the economy has been buoyant, creating heavy demand for loans; long-term interest rates have dropped significantly, increasing the value of banks’ bond and loan portfolios; and rapid employment growth has reduced loan default rates. Under these conditions, the bank’s heavy exposure to Britain is a plus. But if the British economy sputters, rivals like to suggest, Lloyds TSB will sputter with it, far more than its more diversified competitors.
The stockmarket seems to think this an unlikely prospect. But it is clearly the biggest risk in Sir Brian’s strategy. The bank has sought to reduce its vulnerability to economic swings by broadening its consumer-related business. A fifth of its profit now comes from insurance, primarily life insurance, which moves in a different cycle from consumer banking.
In trying to broaden its business, however, Lloyds TSB runs head-on into a problem that most other banks would envy: it simply earns too much money. It would gladly use this for acquisitions. But short of buying another big British bank and closing down hundreds of branches, which would almost certainly be blocked on competition grounds, it is difficult to imagine an acquisition that would be as profitable as Lloyds TSB’S current business. The bank is considering a share buy-back as a way of returning that extra cash to shareholders.
The alternative lies in finding a second “home” market where Lloyds could work its magic. With a single currency looming, continental Europe has attractions. But few banks have a culture similar to Lloyds TSB’s - and few countries would allow the redundancies that would be necessary to meet stringent profit targets.
VOCABULARY
| 1. retail customer | зд. Мелкий вкладчик |
| 2. to go bust | обанкротиться |
| 3. to write off | списать |
| 4. dud loans (bad loans) | безнадежные долги, невозвратные долги |
| 5. rights issue | дополнительный выпуск акций |
| 6. foreign subsidiaries | филиалы за границей |
| 7. investment banking | инвестиционная деятельность банков |
| 8. international lending | кредитовых иностранных клиентов |
| 9. balance sheet | балансовый отчет |
| 10. life assurer | фирма, занимающаяся страхованием жизни |
| 11. clearing bank | клиринговый банк |
| 12. mortgage loans | ипотечные кредиты |
| 13. overlaps | зд. Параллельные, дублирующиеся расходы |
| 14. telephone bank | банк, осуществляющий обслуживание клиен-тов по телефону |
| 15. cheque-writing accounts | чековые счета |
| 16. personal loans | личные ссуды, т.е. ссуды частному лицу |
| 17. loan default | несвоевременное погашение ссуды |
| 18. buy-back | «обратная покупка» (акций) |
2. Переведите отрывок «Spot the trend».
3. Напишите реферат и аннотацию данного текста.
Text D.
1. Прочитайте следующий текст и найдите ключевые слова и предложения (фрагменты):
When bond yields rose sharply last year many economists got into a tizzy about the possibility that the world would start to run short of capital. This triggered an avalanche of studies, of which the latest, from the imf, finds some evidence for such fears. It is this savings shortfall, says the Fund, that is largely to blame for high real interest rates.
By saving rather than consuming current output, countries enjoy less jam today, but because these savings are invested they can look forward to higher income and consumption tomorrow. So if the total supply of savings (whether by individuals, firms or governments) falls, global investment and hence growth will be constrained. Some economists worry that the ageing populations of industrial countries are going to start running down their savings just when the investment appetite of emerging economies is growing. The resulting capital shortage would hit rich industrial economies harder than the developing countries, because they offer a more meagre return on investment.
The IMF finds three pieces of evidence that investment is already being choked off by a savings shortage. Real long-term interest rates are historically high, suggesting an imbalance between desired investment and the supply of capital. Savings and investment have both fallen as a share of GDP over the past decade or so. And the average rate of return on productive capital has almost doubled since the 1960s, suggesting that marginally profitable projects have been squeezed out by a scarcity of savings.
The rise in real interest rates has certainly been striking. And since real long-term interest rates are the price at which global investment demand matches the supply of savings, the rise clearly signals a shift in the balance between savings and investment. But has this been due to greater investment opportunities (due to technological advances, say) or to lower savings?
The former seems unlikely given that the ratio of investment to gdp has fallen since the 1960s. Lower savings seem to be the culprit.
Private savings rates have barely changed since the 1960s in rich countries as a whole (despite some notable exceptions, such as spendthrift America). Instead, the cause of the savings shortfall is that governments in these countries are saving less, i.e. they are borrowing (dissaving) more. The IMF calculates that, on average, each one percentage point rise in the world ratio of government debt to gdp adds 14 basis points (hundredths of a percent) to real long-term interest rates. Indeed, the imf suggests that higher government borrowing explains as much as four-fifths of the increase in real interest rates between the 1960s and now.
Supersavers
Will this savings shortfall increase? This depends upon two factors: how fast developing countries grow and what governments do about their borrowing.
Countries that save more tend to grow faster. Over the past ten years, 14 of the 20 fastest-growing economies had savings rates of more than 25% of GDP. In contrast, 14 of the 20 slowest-growing economies had savings rates below 15%. But which way does the causality run?
Higher savings clearly boost growth by spurring investment. But, intriguingly, the IMF argues that there is also evidence that faster growth itself causes savings rates to rise. Many East Asian economies, for example, enjoyed rapid growth before they began saving more. South Korea was one of the world’s least thrifty countries in the early 1960s; now it is one of its biggest savers. This suggests that a vicious circle connects growth and savings, with faster growth spurring higher savings and higher savings boosting growth. The reason this matters is that it implies that most of the savings needed to finance the investment of fast-growing developing countries will be self-generated.
Saving in developing countries should also rise because of their demographic structures. As more young people reach working age, more will become savers. The IMF estimates that this could boost developing countries’ savings rates by three percentage points of gdp over the next 20 years, roughly cancelling out the expected fall in private savings in industrial countries.
Whether a lack of savings will cramp future investment will in the end turn mainly on the fiscal policies of governments in developed countries. In that case, says the IMF, real interest rates could fall by up to two percentage points.
If, on the other hand, growth in developing countries is sluggish and industrial countries continue to run big budget deficits, global savings could drop by 2-3% of GDP, and real interest rates would increase. The IMF'S model suggests that a rise in real interest rates of one percentage point would, in the long run, lead to a 12% reduction in the world’s capital stock. This, in turn, would lower the sustainable level of consumption by 2%.
And the moral of the tale? Global capital markets may have weakened the ability of governments to steer their economies in many ways. But governments do still have the power to boost national savings, by eliminating budget deficits. Doing so will have a much bigger impact on future growth than any amount of fiscal or monetary fine-tuning.
VOCABULARY
| 1. to run short of capital | испытать нехватку капитала |
| 2. savings shortfall | низкий уровень (нехватка) сбережений |
| 3. total supply of savings | общий объем (сумма) сбережений |
| 4. average rate of return on productive capital | средний уровень доходности производительного капитала (чаще инвестиций в производстве) |
| 5. private savings | частные сбережения |
| 6. dissaving | превышение расходов над доходами («проедание» доходов) |
| 7. percentage point | стат. - процентный пункт |
| 8. ratio of government debt to GDP | доля государственного долга в ВВП (валовой внутренний продукт) |
| 9. basis point | базисный пункт |
| 10. capital stock | основные фонды |
| 11. level of consumption | уровень потребления |
2. Переведите отрывок «Supersavers».
3. Напишите реферат и аннотацию данного текста.
«Banks and banking. Saving»
Topics for discussion
1. Banking goes global.
2. Banks are taking greater risks than they used to.
3. Central banks and price stability.
4. Lloyds Bank TSB: the best way to advance was to retreat (Lloyds vs. globalization).