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Michael Lewis, the author of Liar’s Poker, is the ideal writer to analyze the behavior that led to the current credit crisis. The bad news is that he is only the editor of this collection of articles. The good news is that he has not been constrained by false modesty and has chosen six of his own pieces for this book. As one would expect, they are witty, incisive and original. Mr. Lewis also contributes an introduction to each of the sections dealing with the four main panics of the last 21 years; the stock market crash of 1987, the Asian crisis of 1997-98 , the bursting of the dotcom bubble after 2000 and the current housing and banking bust. It is worth remembering, as we think the gloomy economic future, how each of the previous three crises was greeted with apocalyptic (天启的) headlines. "How many times does the end of the world as we know it needs to arrive before we realize that it’s not the end of the world as we know it" Mr. Lewis writes, in perhaps the most telling sentence of the book. The compiler’s contribution apart, the selection is a mixed bag. The aim was to give readers a flavor of sentiment before the bubbles burst, as well as analysis of the result. But the result is too much flat news stories and the book only really comes to life with the last two sections ,perhaps because the follies of dotcom valuations and subprime loans(次级抵押贷款) seem so fresh in the memory. It is hard not to miss days when Computer.com( a website for new users of technology) was able to spend 60% of its seed funding on a 90-second ad during the 2000 Super Bowl. Or when the shares of Books-A-Million, a retailer, rose tenfold within three days on the back of an upgrade to its existing website. It is commented by the author that the passages selected in the book is a ______.
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Yet with economies in free fall, managers also need up-to-date information about what is happening to their businesses, so that they can change course rapidly if necessary. Cisco, an American network-equipment giant, has invested over many years in the technology needed to generate such data. Frank Calderoni, the firm’s CFO, says that every day its senior executives can track exactly what orders are coming in from sales teams around the world, and identify emerging trends in each region and market segment. And at the end of each month, the firm can get reliable financial results within four hours of closing its books. Most firms have to wait days or even weeks for such certainty. Admittedly, Cisco’s financial results have not made happy reading recently because, in common with many other large technology companies, it has seen demand for its products decline in the downturn. In early February it announced that its fiscal second-quarter revenues of ＄9.1 billion were 7.5% lower than the same period in 2008 and that its profit had fallen by 27%, to ＄1.5 billion. In response to hard times, Cisco plans to cut ＄1billion of costs this year by, among other things, making use of its own video-conferencing and other communications technologies to reduce the amount its executives travel. It is also using these facilities to relay information from employees on the ground to its senior managers, and to get instructions from Cisco’s leaders back out to its 67,000 staff. A rapid exchange of information and instructions is especially valuable if the company wants to alter course in stormy times. If everybody in a company can rapidly grasp what they have to do and how it is changing, they are more likely to get the job done. But some firms are reluctant to share their goals with the wider world. Unilever, a big Anglo-Dutch consumer-goods group, has decided against issuing a 2009 financial forecast to investors, arguing that it is difficult to predict what is going to happen, given the dangerous state of the world economy. "We’re not just going to provide numbers for the sake of it," explains James Allison, the company’s head of investor relations. Other companies that have decided not to provide annual earnings estimates for 2009 include Costco, a big American retailer, and Union Pacific, an American railway company. Some firms, such as Intel, seem to have chosen to take things quarter by quarter. The giant chipmaker (芯片制造商) said in January that it would not issue an official forecast for the first quarter of 2009 after its fourth-quarter 2008 profit decreased by 90%. Several retail chains have also stopped providing monthly sales estimates because they cannot see what the future holds. Retailers, chipmakers and firms in many other industries may have a long wait before the economic fog finally lifts. According to the author, the staff can perform better by ______.
Lust for money and power ________________ (诱使他跳槽到了另一家公司).
Questions 19 to 21 are based on the conversation you have just heard.
Who’s Afraid of Google Rarely if ever has a company risen so fast in so many ways as Google, the world’s most popular search engine. This is true by just about any measure: the growth in its market value and revenues; the number of people clicking in search of news, the nearest pizza parlor or a satellite image of their neighbor’s garden; the volume of its advertisers; or the number of its lawyers and lobbyists. Such an ascent is enough to evoke concerns -- both paranoid(偏执的) and justified. The list of constituencies that hate or fear Google grows by the week. Television networks, book publishers and newspaper owners feel that Google has grown by using their content without paying for it. Telecoms firms such as America’s AT&T and Verizon are annoyed that Google prospers, in their eyes, by free-riding on the bandwidth that they provide; and it is about to bid against them in a forthcoming auction for radio spectrum. Many small firms hate Google because they relied on exploiting its search formulas to win prime positions in its rankings, but dropped to the Internet’s equivalent of Hades after Google modified these algorithms(运算法则). And now come the politicians. Libertarians dislike Google’s deal with China’s censors. Conservatives moan about its uncensored videos. But the big new fear is to do with the privacy of its users. Google’s business model assumes that people will entrust it with ever more information about their lives, to be stored in the company’s "cloud" of remote computers. Some users now keep their photos, blogs, videos, calendars, e-mail, news feeds, maps, contacts, social networks, documents, spreadsheets (电子数据表), presentations, and credit-card information -- in short, much of their lives -- on Google’s computers. But the privacy problem is much subtler than that. As Google compiles more information about individuals, it faces numerous trade-offs. At one extreme it could use a person’s search history and advertising responses in combination with, say, his location and the itinerary in his calendar, to serve increasingly useful and welcome search results and ads. This would also allow Google to make money from its many new services. But it could scare users away. As a warning, Privacy International, a human-rights organization in London, has berated Google, charging that its attitude to privacy "at its most blatant is hostile, and at its most benign is ambivalent". And Google could soon, if it wanted, compile files on specific individuals. This presents "perhaps the most difficult privacy issues in all of human history," says Edward Felten, a privacy expert at Princeton University. Speaking for many, John Battelle, the author of a book on Google and an early admirer, recently wrote on his blog that "I’ve found myself more and more wary" of Google "out of some primal, lizard-brain fear of giving too much control of my data to one source."More JP Morgan than Bill Gates Google is often compared to Microsoft; but its evolution is actually closer to that of the banking industry. Just as financial institutions grew to become repositories of people’s money, and thus guardians of private information about their finances, Google is now turning into a supervisor of a far wider and more intimate range of information about individuals. Yes, this applies also to rivals such as Yahoo! and Microsoft. But Google, through the sheer speed with which it accumulates the treasure of information, will be the one to test the limits of what society can tolerate. It does not help that Google is often seen as arrogant. Granted, this complaint often comes from sourgrapes rivals. But many others are put off by Google’s assertion of its own holiness, as if it merited unquestioning trust. This after all is the firm that chose "Don’t be evil" as its corporate motto and that explicitly intones that its goal is "not to make money", as its boss, Eric Schmidt, puts it, but "to change the world". Its ownership structure is set up to protect that vision. Ironically, there is something rather cloudlike about the multiple complaints surrounding Google. The issues are best parted into two cumuli: a set of "public" arguments about how to regulate Google; and a set of "private" ones for Google’s managers, to do with the strategy the firm needs to get through the coming storm. On both counts, Google -- contrary to its own propaganda -- is much better judged as being just like any other "evil" money-grabbing company.Grab the money That is because, from the public point of view, the main contribution of all companies to society comes from making profits, not giving things away. Google is a good example of this. Its "goodness" stems less from all that guff about corporate altruism than from Adam Smith’s invisible hand. It provides a service that others find very useful -- namely helping people to find information (at no charge) and letting advertisers promote their wares to those people in a finely targeted way. Given this, the onus of proof is with Google’s would-be prosecutors to prove it is doing something wrong. On antitrust, the price that Google charges its advertisers is set by auction, so its monopolistic clout is limited; and it has yet to use its" dominance in one market to muscle into others in the way Microsoft did. The same presumption of innocence goes for copyright and privacy. Google’s book-search product, for instance, arguably helps rather than hurts publishers and authors by rescuing books from obscurity and encouraging readers to buy copyrighted works. And, despite Big Brotherish talk about knowing what choices people will be making tomorrow, Google has not betrayed the trust of its users over their privacy. If anything, it has been better than its rivals in standing up to prying governments in both America and China. That said, conflicts of interest will become inevitable -- especially with privacy. Google in effect controls a dial that, as it sells ever more services to you, could move in two directions. Set to one side, Google could voluntarily destroy very quickly any user data that it collects. That would assure privacy, but it would limit Google’s profits from selling to advertisers information about what you are doing, and make those services less useful, ff the dial is set to the other side and Google hangs on to the information, the services will be more useful, but some dreadful intrusions into privacy could occur. The answer, as with banks in the past, must lie somewhere in the middle in that the right point for the dial is likely to change, as circumstances change. That will be the main public interest in Google. But, as the bankers (and Bill Gates) can attest, public scrutiny also creates a private challenge for Google’s managers: how should they present their case One obvious strategy is to allay concerns over Google’s trustworthiness by becoming more transparent and opening up more of its processes and plans to scrutiny. But it also needs a deeper change of heart. Pretending that just because your founders are nice young men and you give away lots of services, society has no right to question your motives no longer seems sensible. Google is a capitalist tool -- and a useful one. Better, surely, to face the coming storm on that foundation, than on a stale slogan that could be your undoing. What do the two sets of "public" and "private" arguments show
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