Except for oil executives, no group of business leaders is now more resented than the titans of finance—the heads of banks, secu

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问题     Except for oil executives, no group of business leaders is now more resented than the titans of finance—the heads of banks, securities dealers, hedge funds. 46) It is these folks who are blamed for causing or aggravating the housing crisis that in turn has plunged global financial markets into turmoil and has brought the U. S. economy to the edge of recession or perhaps beyond.
    47) The paradox of finance is that its advantages and disadvantages are tightly commingled. What we call " financial services" —insurance and real estate, as well as banking and securities trading—has been a growth sector. In 1976, it was 15 percent of gross domestic product; now it’s 21 percent. The expansion has produced many benefits; more and often cheaper credit for families and businesses; more investment choices for people saving for retirement and anything else; more investment capital for startups and smaller firms. 48) Unfortunately, financial advances have also created periodic episodes of massive waste that threaten to destabilize the entire economy.
    The subprime-mortgage debacle is not a rare exception. Before that, there was the tech bubble of the late 1990s. From 1997 to 2000, the annual amount of American venture capital jumped from $ 18 billion to $ 107 billion. Earlier, the junk-bond mania of the late 1980s ended badly. According to finance professor Josh Lerner of the Harvard Business School, there seems to be a regular cycle of financial innovation (good) , imitation (good up to a point, because it provides competition) and finally suicidal excess. Herd psychology reigns: investors assume that whatever made money yesterday will make money today.
    The idea that enlightened government regulation can outlaw this cycle is at best an optimistic exaggeration. Just last week, in a major report, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson proposed a new framework of government oversight for the financial system. 49) Some ideas are worth adopting, but the basic problem is that as long as people are benefiting from innovation and investors are making money, it’s hard to impose restraints on the excesses. Only a crackup brings clarity.
    So modern finance has a split personality. Greed, shortsightedness and herd behavior compromise its fundamental usefulness. 50) But we cannot regulate our way out of this dilemma, because regulators can’t anticipate all the problems and hazards either. The best protection against human fallibility and the financial system’s self-inflicted wounds is to insist that major financial institutions have ample capital to absorb unexpected losses. The Paulson report did not focus much on that—Congress should.

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答案但不幸的是,金融业扩张也带来了周期性的大规模浪费,从而威胁到了整个经济的稳定。

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