МИНИСТЕРСТВО ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ И НАУКИ РФ
ФЕДЕРАЛЬНОЕ ГОСУДАРСТВЕННОЕ БЮДЖЕТНОЕ
ОБРАЗОВАТЕЛЬНОЕ УЧРЕЖДЕНИЕ
ВЫСШЕГО ПРОФЕССИОНАЛЬНОГО ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ
«ВОРОНЕЖСКИЙ ГОСУДАРСТВЕННЫЙ
УНИВЕРСИТЕТ»
ФАКУЛЬТЕТ РОМАНО-ГЕРМАНСКОЙ ФИЛОЛОГИИ
КАФЕДРА АНГЛИЙСКОГО ЯЗЫКА ГУМАНИТАРНЫХ
ФАКУЛЬТЕТОВ
ИНДИВИДУАЛЬНОЕ ЧТЕНИЕ
по английскому языку
20 тысяч знаков
Студентки 1 курса И.А.Фурсовой
Экономического факультета
Форма обучения: очная,
Ступень образования бакалавриат
Специальность /направление подготовки:
«Экономика» 080100
Ст.преподаватель к.ф.н Т.Н.Панкова
ВОРОНЕЖ
Contents
I. Playing with fire. 3
II. History of The Coca-Cola Company. 5
Creation of a Brand Legend. 5
1891-1919: Rapid Growth Under the Candlers. 6
1919-55: The Woodruff Era. 7
Continuing Struggles in the Early 2000s. 8
Vocabulary. 11
References. 12
I. Playing with fire.
About financial innovation.
- special report "The Economist" -
Financial innovation can do a lot of good. In the first place, it is its tendency to excess that must be curbed.
However, financial innovation has a dreadful image these days. Paul Volcker, a former chairman of America's Federal Reserve, once said that none of the financial inventions of the past 25 years matches up to the ATM. Paul Krugman, a Nobel prize-winning economist-polemicist, has written that it is hard to think of any big recent financial breakthroughs that have aided society.
Most of these critics have market-based innovation in their sights. There is an enormous amount of innovation going on in other areas, such as retail payments, that has the potential to change the way people carry and spend money.
We have a simple question: is financial innovation good or bad? But quantifying the benefits of innovation is almost impossible. And like most things, it depends. Are credit cards bad? Or mortgages? It is true that some instruments—for example, highly leveraged ones—are inherently more dangerous than others. But even innovations that are directed to unimpeachably “good” ends often bear substantial resemblances to those that are now vilified.
For a demonstration, look at Peterborough. The cathedral city in England's Cambridgeshire is known for its railway station and an underachieving football club nicknamed “the Posh”. But it is also the site of a financial experiment that its backers hope will have big ramifications for the way public services are funded.
Peterborough is where the proceeds of the world's first “social-impact bond” are being spent. This instrument is not really a bond at all but behaves more like equity. In September 2010 an organisation called Social Finance raised £5m ($7.8m) from 17 investors, both individuals and charities. The money is being used to pay for a programme to help prevent ex-prisoners in Peterborough from reoffending. Reconviction rates among the prisoners recruited to the scheme will be measured against a national database of prisoners with a similar profile, and investors will get payouts from the Ministry of Justice if the Peterborough cohort does better than the rest. If all goes well, the first payouts will be made in 2013.
The scheme is getting lots of attention, and not just in Britain. A mixture of social and financial returns is central to a burgeoning asset class known as “impact investing”. Linking payouts to outcomes is attractive to governments keen to husband scarce resources. And if service providers like the people running the Peterborough prisoner-rehabilitation scheme can get a lump sum up front, they can plan ahead without bearing any financial risk. There is talk of introducing social-impact bonds in Australia, Canada and the United States.
Here, surely, is a financial innovation that even the industry's critics would agree is worth trying. Yet in fundamental ways an ostensibly “good” instrument like a social-impact bond is not so different from its despised cousins. First, at its root the social-impact bond is about creating a set of cashflows to suit the needs of the sponsor, the provider and the investor. True, the investors in the Peterborough scheme may be more willing than the average individual or pension fund to sacrifice financial returns for social benefits. But as Franklin Allen of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and Glenn Yago of the Milken Institute, a think-tank, argue in their useful book, “Financing the Future”, the thread that runs through much wholesale financial innovation is the creation of new capital structures that align the interests of lots of different parties.
Second, the social-impact bond is based on the concept of risk transfer, in this case from the government to financial investors who will get paid only if the scheme is successful.
Third, even at this early stage the social-impact bond is grappling with the difficulties of measurement and standardisation. An obvious example is the need to create defined sets of measurements in order to work out what triggers a payout—in this case, the comparison between the Peterborough prisoners and a control group of other prisoners in a national database. Across finance, standardisation—around contracts, reporting, performance measures and the like—is what enables buyers and sellers to come together quickly and new markets to take off.
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