2020年商务英语中级翻译模拟试题（3）

　　Capital bonanzas

　　财源滚滚

　　Sep 25th 2008

　　From The Economist print edition

　　Does Wall Street’s meltdown show financial globalisation itself is part of the problem?

　　这次华尔街的灾难意味着金融全球化本身就是问题的一部分吗?

　　“THANK God,” said one Latin American finance minister earlier this year. “At least this time it isn’t our fault.”

　　“谢天谢地，”一位拉丁美洲的财政部长在今年早些时候说，”至少这次不是我们的错。”

　　The meltdown of America’s financial system may look very different from the emerging-market crises that overwhelmed Thailand in 1997 or Russia in 1998. This time there has been no currency collapse, no government default. Then, there were no collateralised-debt obligations or credit-default swaps.

　　美国金融体系的灾难跟在1997，98年横扫泰国和俄罗斯的新兴市场危机有所不同。这次没有货币崩溃，没有政府失职。而上次却没有担保抵押债务，或者信用违约互换。

　　Yet the minister was justified in seeing parallels between America’s crisis and the emerging-market episodes. In all of them vast current-account deficits were financed by huge capital inflows. The afflicted countries saw housing speculation, asset bubbles and cheap loans followed by a credit crunch and the seizing up of the financial system. And Wall Street’s meltdown raises the same questions as the crises of a decade ago: what will the direct effects on emerging markets be? If the world’s richest economies are vulnerable to global financial turmoil, should developing countries not seek to insulate themselves from it?

　　然而上面那位财政部长将美国的金融危机和新兴市场的金融危机看作一致也是恰如其分的。所有这些国家都以大量的资本流入为经常账户赤字融资。于是这些国家便首先出现房地产投机，资产泡沫和低廉的贷款，随之而来的是信贷紧缩和金融体系的停滞。这让上述国家深受折磨、痛苦不堪。而华尔街的灾难提出了与十年前金融危机相同的问题：这场灾难将会给新兴市场带来什么直接影响?如果世界最富裕的经济体还在全球金融动荡面前还脆弱不堪，为何新兴市场不寻求与之隔绝呢?

　　Beware markets bearing gifts

　　当心市场带来的木马

　　Most emerging markets see their ability to attract foreign money as proof of good management. From this point of view, it should be a blessing that private capital flows to developing countries rose, according to the World Bank, to $1 trillion in 2007, the highest ever. Yet if the study by Carmen and Vincent Reinhart is anything to go by, this should be little cause for celebration.

　　绝大多数新兴市场将他们吸引外资的能力看作其良好管理的证明。基于这样的观点，根据世界银行数据，2007年流入发展中国家的资金达到有史以来最高的1万亿美元，这应该看作一件非常幸运的事了。然而如果依据Carmen和Vincent Reinhart的研究结论的话，这没什么值得庆贺的。

　　Taking the experience of 181 countries since 1980, the authors reckon that middle- and low-income countries had a roughly 20% chance of suffering a banking crisis and a 30% chance of a currency crisis, external-debt default or inflation spike (to more than 20% a year) if they experienced what the authors call a “capital-flow bonanza” in the three years beforehand. (They define such a bonanza as an unusual shift of the current account into the red, using that as a proxy for capital inflows since the capital and current accounts mirror each other.) These seem unenviable odds.

　　So why would countries seek out foreign money at all, if its impact is so malign? The answer is that it is not so much the amount of investment that is the trouble; it is its volatility, and especially its tendency to dry up. That makes today’s climate worrying. Mansoor Dailami, the World Bank’s manager of international finance, says private inflows to emerging markets may fall from $1 trillion to only $800 billion-850 billion this year. That may be particularly troublesome because of another difference between this crisis and the Asian one: in 1997-98, more debt was sovereign. Now, much of it is corporate, taken out by Indian, Chinese and other emerging-market companies. That implies a global credit tightening could have as big an impact on emerging markets as slowing import demand in the rich world.

　　那么即使这么有害，为何这些国家还想积极获取外资呢?因为并不是大量投资是麻烦，而是其波动性，特别是其即将耗尽的趋势。这造成了今天忧虑的气氛。世界银行国际金融经理Mansoor Dailami说，私人资本涌入新兴市场会从1万亿美元下降到今年的8千亿到8千5百亿美元。这是非常糟糕的。因为这场金融危机与上次亚洲金融危机另一个不同之处在于，在1997到98年，更多的债务是政府所有的。而现在，这些大部分是公司所有的，会被印度，中国和其它新兴市场的公司获得。这意味着，全球信贷紧缩对新兴市场的影响与发达国家和地区进口需求放缓对新兴市场的影响一样大。

　　Critics of financial globalisation argue that these problems are so great that emerging markets ought to be insulating themselves through capital controls. Many have been doing so. Yet even setting aside doubts about how far this is desirable (it is hard to believe growth in India or Brazil would have reached today’s levels without foreign capital), the studies raise questions about whether capital controls are really the right response.

　　金融全球化的批评者认为，这些问题太大，因此新兴市场国家必须采取资本监管从而使其免遭其害。许多新兴市场国家也就是这么做的。然而即使抛开对资本监管到何种程度合适的质疑(印度和巴西如果没有外资投入的话，其增长率很难能够达到今天的水平)，这两篇论文也提出了这个问题：资本监管是否是个正确的应对方法?

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