Public companies succeed because of __...

单项选择题Public companies have been the locomotives of capitalism since they were invented in the mid-19th century. They have installed themselves at the heart of the world’s largest economy, the United States. In the 1990s they looked as if they would spread round the world, shunting aside older forms of corporate organisation such as partnerships, and newer rivals such as state-owned enterprises (SOEs). China’s former president, Jiang Zemin, described NASDAQ as "the crown jewel of all that is great about America". Russia rejected five-year plans in favour of stockmarket listings and Wall Street banks abandoned cosy partnerships in favour of public equity: Goldman Sachs, the last big holdout, went public as the decade came to an end.
Public companies triumphed because they provided three things that make for durable success: limited liability, which encourages the public to invest, professional management, which boosts productivity, and "corporate personhood", which means businesses can survive the removal of a founder. In 1997 the number of American companies reached an all-time high of 7,888. Even now, American listed companies are as profitable as they have been for 60 years.
But during the past decade, the title of a 1989 essay, "Eclipse of the Public Corporation", by Michael Jensen of Harvard Business School, has turned out to be prescient. In 2001-2002 some of America’s most prominent public companies imploded. They included Enron, Tyco, WorldCom and Global Crossing, which, before their demise, were admired. Six years later Lehman Brothers collapsed and Citigroup and General Motors turned to the government for salvation. Meanwhile, SOEs were growing in emerging markets, challenging the idea that public companies are the biggest fishes in the sea. Private-equity firms flourished in the West, challenging the idea that public companies are the best managed. And the rise of the Asian economies, with their legions of family-owned conglomerates, challenged the idea that they are best equipped to advance capitalism’s geographical frontier.
So, even though public companies are flush with cash (American firms are sitting on $2.23 trillion, see Free Exchange) and even though the world’s most talked-about entrepreneur, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, is due to take his company public on May 18th, the signs of health are misleading. Public companies are in danger of becoming like a fading London club. Their membership is falling. They spend their time fussing over club rules. And, as they peer out of the window, they see the bright young things heading elsewhere.
The number of public companies has dropped dramatically in the Anglo-Saxon world—by 38% since 1997 in America and by 48% in Britain’s main markets. The number of initial public offerings (IPOs) in America dropped from an average of 311 a year in 1980-2000 to just 81 in 2011.
Going public no longer has the glamour it once had. Entrepreneurs have to wait longer—an average of ten years for companies backed by venture capital, compared with four in 1985—and must jump through more hoops. Lawyers and accountants are increasingly specialized and expensive; bankers are less willing to take them public; qualified directors are harder to find, since even "non-execs" can go to prison if they sign false accounts.Public companies succeed because of ______.

A. limited liability, professional management and corporate personhood
B. the galloping science and technology
C. their abandoning cozy partnerships
D. their outmatching state-owned enterprises

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你可能感兴趣的试题

1.单项选择题
COMMON CAUSE, a left-leaning advocacy non-profit, has filed a lawsuit against the Senate on the grounds that the filibuster (用冗长的发言妨碍会议的议员或行为) defies the constitution. Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, a leading anti-filibuster opinion-maker, lays out the Common Cause case as it has been articulated by Emmett Bondurant:
Between 1840 and 1900, there were 16 filibusters. Between 2009 and 2010, there were more than 130. But that’s changed. Today, Majority Leader Harry Reid says that "60 votes are required for just about everything."
At the core of Bondurant’s argument is a very simple claim: This isn’t what the Founders intended. The historical record is clear on that fact. The framers debated requiring a supermajority in Congress to pass anything. But they rejected that idea.
The constitution sets out six cases in which a supermajority is required in the senate, and passing ordinary legislation isn’t one of them. Mr Bondurant’s basic claim is that the upshot of this omission is that the majority vote is the mandatory default for decision-making about legislation. That is to say, the use of anything other than majority voting is prohibited, except for those cases in which another voting rule is explicitly prescribed. If the constitution doesn’t outright say this, that’s only because the framers thought it was too obvious to mention.
Mr Klein thinks Mr Bondurant "makes a strong case". Gregory Koger, a political scientist at the University of Miami seems not to agree. "I am very excited that Common Cause has filed a lawsuit against the Senate filibuster", Mr Koger confesses at the Monkey Cage biog. "Excited in a John Stuart Mill, isn’t-it-great-when-bad-arguments-get-aired-and-demolished kind of way." In a 2009 post, Mr Koger systematically reviewed the arguments against the proposition that the filibuster is unconstitutional. In his more recent post he responds specifically to the Common Cause/Bondurant brief:
The central argument of the brief is that the use of supermajority procedures in the US Congress is inherently unconstitutional. It states, "The principle of majority was so basic to the concept of a democratically elected legislative body that it did not need to be expressly stated in the Constitution." Of course, too-important-to-be-written looks exactly like not-important-enough-to-include, so affirming this claim would invite a series of lawsuits claiming other "obvious but unwritten" principles.
Mr Koger goes on to observe that the principle that "every supermajority procedure used by Congress is prohibited" if not explicitly required would take down a number of longstanding and uncontested practices in both houses.
Constitutional questions aside, Mr Koger is sceptical that ditching the filibuster would make the Senate significantly more functional. Here’s the real problem, as he sees it:
The Republicans generally don’t want anything to pass, and when legislation does come to the floor the Republican often demands roll call votes on "message" amendments that provide fodder for the current news cycle and the next campaign. The Democrats, whose majority is based on winning seats in red states, don’t want to vote on these amendments. And so there is a stalemate in which must-pass legislation is put off until the final moment while they wait for each other to blink and nothing else gets done
Changing the voting threshold would have the small benefit of removing an excuse for this dysfunction, but it would not solve the more fundamental problem that many legislators find it in their electoral interests to disagree.What is the author’s attitude towards filibuster

A. Objective.
B. Supportive.
C. Negative.
D. Not mentioned.

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2.单项选择题"What though I am a man of firmness and vigour, fortune is mutable and either my enemies will do me or my friends."
So muses narrator Thomas Cromwell in Hilary Mantel’s thrilling new historical novel Bring Up the Bodies, the sequel to her Booker Prize-winning hit, Wolf Halt. That book, too, came through the eyes of Cromwell, close advisor to King Henry VIII and chief architect of his first divorce, from Katherine of Aragon, and later of his far bloodier separation from Anne Boleyn. In Mantel’s care, Cromwell is a sensitive storyteller, as conscious of his own motivations as he is of other’s perceptions, accepting that history may paint him as more of a villain than a man of vigor. It is a prescient realization—Henry will later turn against Cromwell and order him executed for treason—but in the world of Bring Up the Bodies, he is still at the height of his powers, shaping the destiny of the king and the women who buzz around the monarch like hungry flies.
Before Wolf Hall was published, those who followed the bloody Tudor saga could muster little sympathy for Cromwell. He was, after all, the mastermind behind the dissolution of the Catholic church in England and the gory death of Henry’s second queen, all to satiate Henry’s carnal desires and hot pursuit of a male heir. It was Henry who wanted out, but it was Cromwell who found the way. Mantel brilliantly manages to find the humanity in his story; beyond power-grabbing and a killer instinct lies a man of deep complexity and reason, trying to do the best for his sovereign and his family at the same time.
Bring Up the Bodies continues from where Wolf Hall ended; Henry has married the wily, mysterious Anne Boleyn, who has given birth to baby Elizabeth, but no male child. As he has no way of knowing that his daughter will go on to become one of the great English monarchs, Henry is in despair. He is also infatuated, with the young Jane Seymour, a fair girl of gentle breeding who serves as Anne’s lady-in-waiting and first flirts with Henry during his visit to her family’s home at Wolf Hall. Once besotted, the impetuous king wastes no time in making his desires known to his advisors, and it is up to Cromwell to concoct a clever plan to overthrow Anne. Cromwell and his cronies devise a way to accuse Anne of adultery and high treason; where she was once the most powerful woman m England, "she is tainted now," Cromwell remarks. "She is dead meat."
Anne’s fate is an old and familiar tale, but in Mantel’s hands, the tragedy of the Boleyn girl becomes something new. Mantel flushes out the ambiguities, the dark corners of doubt where Cromwell questions his own actions. In his world, nothing is clear, nothing is certain. When Katherine, Henry’s former bride, finally dies after years of being shoved aside, Cromwell realizes how very close England came to war and ruin on her account. "How close we hold our enemies[" he muses. "They are our families, our other selves."People would not sympathize Cromwell because

A. he was obedient to the king
B. he was responsible for the dissolution of the Catholic Church
C. he deserved to be beheaded
D. he was a coward

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3.单项选择题They barely dare say it, but the doctors are strangely confident: after a long illness, the euro may be recovering. This week’s all-night surgery by finance ministers to excise a festering lump of Greek debt went better than expected. "We have put in place almost all of the elements we need to make the crisis gradually go away," says one. "We may be beyond the acute phase, and could be making the transition to normalisation." It is the optimism of despair: the patient has not died, so must be improving.
Many are sceptical. But consider the evidence. Greece may now stabilise. It must meet conditions to get its money and will endure pain for years. But the risk of chaotic default and exit from the euro has receded. Private creditors have taken a big loss, yet the markets are muted. Elsewhere the signs are good. Italy is reforming, as is Spain. Most European Union countries have agreed to a new fiscal compact that will strengthen budget discipline. The European Central Bank (ECB) has averted a credit crunch by injecting liquidity into banks. And the defences against contagion may soon be boosted. On March 1 EU leaders will debate calls to enlarge their rescue fund by half. This could prompt others to pay more into the IMF, which would also help.
The recession this year is now forecast to be short-lived and mild. The euro zone’s temperature chart—the spread of bond yields over German bunds—is gradually narrowing. For the first time in six months, a week has passed without the ECB making emergency bond purchases.
So is the crisis over Not so fast, say critics.
Start, again, with Greece. Far from curing the patient, the medicine is coming close to killing it. Its slump (a cumulative contraction of 16% of GDP and shrinking) may enter the record books. The pressure to chase an ever-receding deficit target has created a death spiral. Success will be slow and take a generation; failure will be an ever-present risk. The programme is "accident-prone", says a leaked assessment by EU and IMF experts. Any number of problems—deeper recession, slower privatisation, fewer structural reforms—could bust the forecast that Greek debt should drop to 120% of GDP by 2020. This threshold was chosen for political reasons: it is roughly Italy’s debt ratio. Yet Italy is hardly healthy; it too struggles to convince investors that its debt is sustainable.
In several countries, fiscal and structural reforms are still at a fragile stage. They could provoke stronger opposition, particularly if they are seen to be imposed by foreigners. Greek newspapers’ depiction of German leaders in Nazi uniform, and German tabloid calls to throw Greece out of the euro, show how tempers can fray. Better market sentiment may be down to nothing more than the aspirin from the ECB. Liquidity is more like a painkiller than a cure, and the ECB is itself worried about creating an addiction to cheap money. Creditor countries have criticised, with reason, the fecklessness of those they have rescued. But they have been slow to admit their own errors, not least delay and excessive austerity as the cure for excessive deficits. They have yet to fix the instability of a currency union built on an incompatible triad: no bail-out, no default and no exit.
The second bail-out for Greece implicitly recognises some of the errors in the first one. It softens the deficit target for 2012 and puts more emphasis on overhauling the sclerotic economy through structural reforms. It is striking that, even after this, the "tough" IMF wants to ease up on budget cuts whereas the "soft" EU remains mulish about sticking to austerity. Conversely, it has taken the EU too long to accept standard IMF practice: when a country is bust its debt must be restructured. The euro zone has vacillated between ineffective bail-out and ineffective bail-in. Its first Greek rescue was too short-term and exacted punitive interest rates. Loose talk of future debt-restructuring ("private sector involvement") at a Franco-German summit in Deauville in October 2010 served only to alarm markets.
The ECB’s former president, Jean-Claude Trichet, resisted all attempts to make Greece’s creditors take a hit. When he finally yielded a bit last summer, the euro zone negotiated a timid 21% loss in the lifetime of the bonds, for fear of triggering a "credit event". Tougher negotiation has now made creditors take a more realistic 75% loss. The ECB, now led by Mario Draghi, has even chipped in some money, indirectly, by surrendering profits it would have made on Greek bonds it bought at a discount. The euro zone has also softened the terms of its loans to Greece.
An end to quack remedies is welcome, though it may have come too late for Greece. Had today’s policies been adopted from the outset, the Greek crisis might have been controlled sooner, the adjustment for debtors might have been less onerous, and the cost to creditors might have been lower. That said, mistakes were to be expected, particularly when the euro zone was both badly designed and ill-prepared for a crisis.
Fear of catastrophe has forced EU leaders to think more clearly. Debtors know they must reform, and creditors know they must help. The first hints of stabilisation, if that is what is happening, may even bring new problems. Will a reduction of market pressure slow weaker countries’ long and painful march to reform Will stronger ones ignore the design flaws that make the single currency needlessly unstable
A hopeful prognosis makes sense only if leaders use a moment of relief to push through structural reforms, remove barriers to the single market, enhance the firewall against contagion and move towards greater fiscal union. One lesson of this week is that, faced with market meltdown, politicians from both debtors and creditors will compromise. But another is that the euro crisis is still far from being resolved for good.According to the passage, which of the following statements is NOT true

A. The second bail-out for Greece made differences from the first one.
B. The recent decision lends optimism to Greek debt.
C. Liquidity bettered the condition but it may create an addiction to cheap money.
D. Politicians from neither debtors nor creditors will compromise.

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4.单项选择题Public companies have been the locomotives of capitalism since they were invented in the mid-19th century. They have installed themselves at the heart of the world’s largest economy, the United States. In the 1990s they looked as if they would spread round the world, shunting aside older forms of corporate organisation such as partnerships, and newer rivals such as state-owned enterprises (SOEs). China’s former president, Jiang Zemin, described NASDAQ as "the crown jewel of all that is great about America". Russia rejected five-year plans in favour of stockmarket listings and Wall Street banks abandoned cosy partnerships in favour of public equity: Goldman Sachs, the last big holdout, went public as the decade came to an end.
Public companies triumphed because they provided three things that make for durable success: limited liability, which encourages the public to invest, professional management, which boosts productivity, and "corporate personhood", which means businesses can survive the removal of a founder. In 1997 the number of American companies reached an all-time high of 7,888. Even now, American listed companies are as profitable as they have been for 60 years.
But during the past decade, the title of a 1989 essay, "Eclipse of the Public Corporation", by Michael Jensen of Harvard Business School, has turned out to be prescient. In 2001-2002 some of America’s most prominent public companies imploded. They included Enron, Tyco, WorldCom and Global Crossing, which, before their demise, were admired. Six years later Lehman Brothers collapsed and Citigroup and General Motors turned to the government for salvation. Meanwhile, SOEs were growing in emerging markets, challenging the idea that public companies are the biggest fishes in the sea. Private-equity firms flourished in the West, challenging the idea that public companies are the best managed. And the rise of the Asian economies, with their legions of family-owned conglomerates, challenged the idea that they are best equipped to advance capitalism’s geographical frontier.
So, even though public companies are flush with cash (American firms are sitting on $2.23 trillion, see Free Exchange) and even though the world’s most talked-about entrepreneur, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, is due to take his company public on May 18th, the signs of health are misleading. Public companies are in danger of becoming like a fading London club. Their membership is falling. They spend their time fussing over club rules. And, as they peer out of the window, they see the bright young things heading elsewhere.
The number of public companies has dropped dramatically in the Anglo-Saxon world—by 38% since 1997 in America and by 48% in Britain’s main markets. The number of initial public offerings (IPOs) in America dropped from an average of 311 a year in 1980-2000 to just 81 in 2011.
Going public no longer has the glamour it once had. Entrepreneurs have to wait longer—an average of ten years for companies backed by venture capital, compared with four in 1985—and must jump through more hoops. Lawyers and accountants are increasingly specialized and expensive; bankers are less willing to take them public; qualified directors are harder to find, since even "non-execs" can go to prison if they sign false accounts.Which of the following statements is NOT true

A. Public companies are no longer as successful as 60 years ago.
B. Michael Jensen’s essay seems to be prophetic.
C. Public companies are still ascending safely.
D. Companies find going public more challenging.

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5.单项选择题
COMMON CAUSE, a left-leaning advocacy non-profit, has filed a lawsuit against the Senate on the grounds that the filibuster (用冗长的发言妨碍会议的议员或行为) defies the constitution. Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, a leading anti-filibuster opinion-maker, lays out the Common Cause case as it has been articulated by Emmett Bondurant:
Between 1840 and 1900, there were 16 filibusters. Between 2009 and 2010, there were more than 130. But that’s changed. Today, Majority Leader Harry Reid says that "60 votes are required for just about everything."
At the core of Bondurant’s argument is a very simple claim: This isn’t what the Founders intended. The historical record is clear on that fact. The framers debated requiring a supermajority in Congress to pass anything. But they rejected that idea.
The constitution sets out six cases in which a supermajority is required in the senate, and passing ordinary legislation isn’t one of them. Mr Bondurant’s basic claim is that the upshot of this omission is that the majority vote is the mandatory default for decision-making about legislation. That is to say, the use of anything other than majority voting is prohibited, except for those cases in which another voting rule is explicitly prescribed. If the constitution doesn’t outright say this, that’s only because the framers thought it was too obvious to mention.
Mr Klein thinks Mr Bondurant "makes a strong case". Gregory Koger, a political scientist at the University of Miami seems not to agree. "I am very excited that Common Cause has filed a lawsuit against the Senate filibuster", Mr Koger confesses at the Monkey Cage biog. "Excited in a John Stuart Mill, isn’t-it-great-when-bad-arguments-get-aired-and-demolished kind of way." In a 2009 post, Mr Koger systematically reviewed the arguments against the proposition that the filibuster is unconstitutional. In his more recent post he responds specifically to the Common Cause/Bondurant brief:
The central argument of the brief is that the use of supermajority procedures in the US Congress is inherently unconstitutional. It states, "The principle of majority was so basic to the concept of a democratically elected legislative body that it did not need to be expressly stated in the Constitution." Of course, too-important-to-be-written looks exactly like not-important-enough-to-include, so affirming this claim would invite a series of lawsuits claiming other "obvious but unwritten" principles.
Mr Koger goes on to observe that the principle that "every supermajority procedure used by Congress is prohibited" if not explicitly required would take down a number of longstanding and uncontested practices in both houses.
Constitutional questions aside, Mr Koger is sceptical that ditching the filibuster would make the Senate significantly more functional. Here’s the real problem, as he sees it:
The Republicans generally don’t want anything to pass, and when legislation does come to the floor the Republican often demands roll call votes on "message" amendments that provide fodder for the current news cycle and the next campaign. The Democrats, whose majority is based on winning seats in red states, don’t want to vote on these amendments. And so there is a stalemate in which must-pass legislation is put off until the final moment while they wait for each other to blink and nothing else gets done
Changing the voting threshold would have the small benefit of removing an excuse for this dysfunction, but it would not solve the more fundamental problem that many legislators find it in their electoral interests to disagree.Mr Koge thinks the real problem in the congress lies in ______.

A. the supermajority
B. filibuster
C. partisan polarization
D. senators’ electoral parochialism

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6.单项选择题"What though I am a man of firmness and vigour, fortune is mutable and either my enemies will do me or my friends."
So muses narrator Thomas Cromwell in Hilary Mantel’s thrilling new historical novel Bring Up the Bodies, the sequel to her Booker Prize-winning hit, Wolf Halt. That book, too, came through the eyes of Cromwell, close advisor to King Henry VIII and chief architect of his first divorce, from Katherine of Aragon, and later of his far bloodier separation from Anne Boleyn. In Mantel’s care, Cromwell is a sensitive storyteller, as conscious of his own motivations as he is of other’s perceptions, accepting that history may paint him as more of a villain than a man of vigor. It is a prescient realization—Henry will later turn against Cromwell and order him executed for treason—but in the world of Bring Up the Bodies, he is still at the height of his powers, shaping the destiny of the king and the women who buzz around the monarch like hungry flies.
Before Wolf Hall was published, those who followed the bloody Tudor saga could muster little sympathy for Cromwell. He was, after all, the mastermind behind the dissolution of the Catholic church in England and the gory death of Henry’s second queen, all to satiate Henry’s carnal desires and hot pursuit of a male heir. It was Henry who wanted out, but it was Cromwell who found the way. Mantel brilliantly manages to find the humanity in his story; beyond power-grabbing and a killer instinct lies a man of deep complexity and reason, trying to do the best for his sovereign and his family at the same time.
Bring Up the Bodies continues from where Wolf Hall ended; Henry has married the wily, mysterious Anne Boleyn, who has given birth to baby Elizabeth, but no male child. As he has no way of knowing that his daughter will go on to become one of the great English monarchs, Henry is in despair. He is also infatuated, with the young Jane Seymour, a fair girl of gentle breeding who serves as Anne’s lady-in-waiting and first flirts with Henry during his visit to her family’s home at Wolf Hall. Once besotted, the impetuous king wastes no time in making his desires known to his advisors, and it is up to Cromwell to concoct a clever plan to overthrow Anne. Cromwell and his cronies devise a way to accuse Anne of adultery and high treason; where she was once the most powerful woman m England, "she is tainted now," Cromwell remarks. "She is dead meat."
Anne’s fate is an old and familiar tale, but in Mantel’s hands, the tragedy of the Boleyn girl becomes something new. Mantel flushes out the ambiguities, the dark corners of doubt where Cromwell questions his own actions. In his world, nothing is clear, nothing is certain. When Katherine, Henry’s former bride, finally dies after years of being shoved aside, Cromwell realizes how very close England came to war and ruin on her account. "How close we hold our enemies[" he muses. "They are our families, our other selves."What are Hilary’s previous works about

A. Bloody Tudor saga.
B. Historical documents.
C. Suspense fictions.
D. Romance story.

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7.单项选择题They barely dare say it, but the doctors are strangely confident: after a long illness, the euro may be recovering. This week’s all-night surgery by finance ministers to excise a festering lump of Greek debt went better than expected. "We have put in place almost all of the elements we need to make the crisis gradually go away," says one. "We may be beyond the acute phase, and could be making the transition to normalisation." It is the optimism of despair: the patient has not died, so must be improving.
Many are sceptical. But consider the evidence. Greece may now stabilise. It must meet conditions to get its money and will endure pain for years. But the risk of chaotic default and exit from the euro has receded. Private creditors have taken a big loss, yet the markets are muted. Elsewhere the signs are good. Italy is reforming, as is Spain. Most European Union countries have agreed to a new fiscal compact that will strengthen budget discipline. The European Central Bank (ECB) has averted a credit crunch by injecting liquidity into banks. And the defences against contagion may soon be boosted. On March 1 EU leaders will debate calls to enlarge their rescue fund by half. This could prompt others to pay more into the IMF, which would also help.
The recession this year is now forecast to be short-lived and mild. The euro zone’s temperature chart—the spread of bond yields over German bunds—is gradually narrowing. For the first time in six months, a week has passed without the ECB making emergency bond purchases.
So is the crisis over Not so fast, say critics.
Start, again, with Greece. Far from curing the patient, the medicine is coming close to killing it. Its slump (a cumulative contraction of 16% of GDP and shrinking) may enter the record books. The pressure to chase an ever-receding deficit target has created a death spiral. Success will be slow and take a generation; failure will be an ever-present risk. The programme is "accident-prone", says a leaked assessment by EU and IMF experts. Any number of problems—deeper recession, slower privatisation, fewer structural reforms—could bust the forecast that Greek debt should drop to 120% of GDP by 2020. This threshold was chosen for political reasons: it is roughly Italy’s debt ratio. Yet Italy is hardly healthy; it too struggles to convince investors that its debt is sustainable.
In several countries, fiscal and structural reforms are still at a fragile stage. They could provoke stronger opposition, particularly if they are seen to be imposed by foreigners. Greek newspapers’ depiction of German leaders in Nazi uniform, and German tabloid calls to throw Greece out of the euro, show how tempers can fray. Better market sentiment may be down to nothing more than the aspirin from the ECB. Liquidity is more like a painkiller than a cure, and the ECB is itself worried about creating an addiction to cheap money. Creditor countries have criticised, with reason, the fecklessness of those they have rescued. But they have been slow to admit their own errors, not least delay and excessive austerity as the cure for excessive deficits. They have yet to fix the instability of a currency union built on an incompatible triad: no bail-out, no default and no exit.
The second bail-out for Greece implicitly recognises some of the errors in the first one. It softens the deficit target for 2012 and puts more emphasis on overhauling the sclerotic economy through structural reforms. It is striking that, even after this, the "tough" IMF wants to ease up on budget cuts whereas the "soft" EU remains mulish about sticking to austerity. Conversely, it has taken the EU too long to accept standard IMF practice: when a country is bust its debt must be restructured. The euro zone has vacillated between ineffective bail-out and ineffective bail-in. Its first Greek rescue was too short-term and exacted punitive interest rates. Loose talk of future debt-restructuring ("private sector involvement") at a Franco-German summit in Deauville in October 2010 served only to alarm markets.
The ECB’s former president, Jean-Claude Trichet, resisted all attempts to make Greece’s creditors take a hit. When he finally yielded a bit last summer, the euro zone negotiated a timid 21% loss in the lifetime of the bonds, for fear of triggering a "credit event". Tougher negotiation has now made creditors take a more realistic 75% loss. The ECB, now led by Mario Draghi, has even chipped in some money, indirectly, by surrendering profits it would have made on Greek bonds it bought at a discount. The euro zone has also softened the terms of its loans to Greece.
An end to quack remedies is welcome, though it may have come too late for Greece. Had today’s policies been adopted from the outset, the Greek crisis might have been controlled sooner, the adjustment for debtors might have been less onerous, and the cost to creditors might have been lower. That said, mistakes were to be expected, particularly when the euro zone was both badly designed and ill-prepared for a crisis.
Fear of catastrophe has forced EU leaders to think more clearly. Debtors know they must reform, and creditors know they must help. The first hints of stabilisation, if that is what is happening, may even bring new problems. Will a reduction of market pressure slow weaker countries’ long and painful march to reform Will stronger ones ignore the design flaws that make the single currency needlessly unstable
A hopeful prognosis makes sense only if leaders use a moment of relief to push through structural reforms, remove barriers to the single market, enhance the firewall against contagion and move towards greater fiscal union. One lesson of this week is that, faced with market meltdown, politicians from both debtors and creditors will compromise. But another is that the euro crisis is still far from being resolved for good.What does the word "fecklessness" in Paragraph 6 mean

A. Without mercy or pity.
B. Actively or fully engaged or occupied.
C. Worthlessness due to being feeble and ineffectual.
D. Incongruous; inviting ridicule.

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8.单项选择题Public companies have been the locomotives of capitalism since they were invented in the mid-19th century. They have installed themselves at the heart of the world’s largest economy, the United States. In the 1990s they looked as if they would spread round the world, shunting aside older forms of corporate organisation such as partnerships, and newer rivals such as state-owned enterprises (SOEs). China’s former president, Jiang Zemin, described NASDAQ as "the crown jewel of all that is great about America". Russia rejected five-year plans in favour of stockmarket listings and Wall Street banks abandoned cosy partnerships in favour of public equity: Goldman Sachs, the last big holdout, went public as the decade came to an end.
Public companies triumphed because they provided three things that make for durable success: limited liability, which encourages the public to invest, professional management, which boosts productivity, and "corporate personhood", which means businesses can survive the removal of a founder. In 1997 the number of American companies reached an all-time high of 7,888. Even now, American listed companies are as profitable as they have been for 60 years.
But during the past decade, the title of a 1989 essay, "Eclipse of the Public Corporation", by Michael Jensen of Harvard Business School, has turned out to be prescient. In 2001-2002 some of America’s most prominent public companies imploded. They included Enron, Tyco, WorldCom and Global Crossing, which, before their demise, were admired. Six years later Lehman Brothers collapsed and Citigroup and General Motors turned to the government for salvation. Meanwhile, SOEs were growing in emerging markets, challenging the idea that public companies are the biggest fishes in the sea. Private-equity firms flourished in the West, challenging the idea that public companies are the best managed. And the rise of the Asian economies, with their legions of family-owned conglomerates, challenged the idea that they are best equipped to advance capitalism’s geographical frontier.
So, even though public companies are flush with cash (American firms are sitting on $2.23 trillion, see Free Exchange) and even though the world’s most talked-about entrepreneur, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, is due to take his company public on May 18th, the signs of health are misleading. Public companies are in danger of becoming like a fading London club. Their membership is falling. They spend their time fussing over club rules. And, as they peer out of the window, they see the bright young things heading elsewhere.
The number of public companies has dropped dramatically in the Anglo-Saxon world—by 38% since 1997 in America and by 48% in Britain’s main markets. The number of initial public offerings (IPOs) in America dropped from an average of 311 a year in 1980-2000 to just 81 in 2011.
Going public no longer has the glamour it once had. Entrepreneurs have to wait longer—an average of ten years for companies backed by venture capital, compared with four in 1985—and must jump through more hoops. Lawyers and accountants are increasingly specialized and expensive; bankers are less willing to take them public; qualified directors are harder to find, since even "non-execs" can go to prison if they sign false accounts.What’s the main idea of this article

A. The public companies are the locomotives of capitalism.
B. The public company is endangered now.
C. Facebook is changing the outlook of the public companies.
D. Many companies are reluctant to go public.

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9.单项选择题
COMMON CAUSE, a left-leaning advocacy non-profit, has filed a lawsuit against the Senate on the grounds that the filibuster (用冗长的发言妨碍会议的议员或行为) defies the constitution. Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, a leading anti-filibuster opinion-maker, lays out the Common Cause case as it has been articulated by Emmett Bondurant:
Between 1840 and 1900, there were 16 filibusters. Between 2009 and 2010, there were more than 130. But that’s changed. Today, Majority Leader Harry Reid says that "60 votes are required for just about everything."
At the core of Bondurant’s argument is a very simple claim: This isn’t what the Founders intended. The historical record is clear on that fact. The framers debated requiring a supermajority in Congress to pass anything. But they rejected that idea.
The constitution sets out six cases in which a supermajority is required in the senate, and passing ordinary legislation isn’t one of them. Mr Bondurant’s basic claim is that the upshot of this omission is that the majority vote is the mandatory default for decision-making about legislation. That is to say, the use of anything other than majority voting is prohibited, except for those cases in which another voting rule is explicitly prescribed. If the constitution doesn’t outright say this, that’s only because the framers thought it was too obvious to mention.
Mr Klein thinks Mr Bondurant "makes a strong case". Gregory Koger, a political scientist at the University of Miami seems not to agree. "I am very excited that Common Cause has filed a lawsuit against the Senate filibuster", Mr Koger confesses at the Monkey Cage biog. "Excited in a John Stuart Mill, isn’t-it-great-when-bad-arguments-get-aired-and-demolished kind of way." In a 2009 post, Mr Koger systematically reviewed the arguments against the proposition that the filibuster is unconstitutional. In his more recent post he responds specifically to the Common Cause/Bondurant brief:
The central argument of the brief is that the use of supermajority procedures in the US Congress is inherently unconstitutional. It states, "The principle of majority was so basic to the concept of a democratically elected legislative body that it did not need to be expressly stated in the Constitution." Of course, too-important-to-be-written looks exactly like not-important-enough-to-include, so affirming this claim would invite a series of lawsuits claiming other "obvious but unwritten" principles.
Mr Koger goes on to observe that the principle that "every supermajority procedure used by Congress is prohibited" if not explicitly required would take down a number of longstanding and uncontested practices in both houses.
Constitutional questions aside, Mr Koger is sceptical that ditching the filibuster would make the Senate significantly more functional. Here’s the real problem, as he sees it:
The Republicans generally don’t want anything to pass, and when legislation does come to the floor the Republican often demands roll call votes on "message" amendments that provide fodder for the current news cycle and the next campaign. The Democrats, whose majority is based on winning seats in red states, don’t want to vote on these amendments. And so there is a stalemate in which must-pass legislation is put off until the final moment while they wait for each other to blink and nothing else gets done
Changing the voting threshold would have the small benefit of removing an excuse for this dysfunction, but it would not solve the more fundamental problem that many legislators find it in their electoral interests to disagree.Ezra Klein seems to agree with Emmett Bondurant that ______.

A. senators can take flexibility in reaching an agreement
B. majority voting is the basis of democracy which needs not to be mentioned
C. filibuster is inevitable in the senate debating
D. there is no need to debate on the topic of supermajority

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10.单项选择题"What though I am a man of firmness and vigour, fortune is mutable and either my enemies will do me or my friends."
So muses narrator Thomas Cromwell in Hilary Mantel’s thrilling new historical novel Bring Up the Bodies, the sequel to her Booker Prize-winning hit, Wolf Halt. That book, too, came through the eyes of Cromwell, close advisor to King Henry VIII and chief architect of his first divorce, from Katherine of Aragon, and later of his far bloodier separation from Anne Boleyn. In Mantel’s care, Cromwell is a sensitive storyteller, as conscious of his own motivations as he is of other’s perceptions, accepting that history may paint him as more of a villain than a man of vigor. It is a prescient realization—Henry will later turn against Cromwell and order him executed for treason—but in the world of Bring Up the Bodies, he is still at the height of his powers, shaping the destiny of the king and the women who buzz around the monarch like hungry flies.
Before Wolf Hall was published, those who followed the bloody Tudor saga could muster little sympathy for Cromwell. He was, after all, the mastermind behind the dissolution of the Catholic church in England and the gory death of Henry’s second queen, all to satiate Henry’s carnal desires and hot pursuit of a male heir. It was Henry who wanted out, but it was Cromwell who found the way. Mantel brilliantly manages to find the humanity in his story; beyond power-grabbing and a killer instinct lies a man of deep complexity and reason, trying to do the best for his sovereign and his family at the same time.
Bring Up the Bodies continues from where Wolf Hall ended; Henry has married the wily, mysterious Anne Boleyn, who has given birth to baby Elizabeth, but no male child. As he has no way of knowing that his daughter will go on to become one of the great English monarchs, Henry is in despair. He is also infatuated, with the young Jane Seymour, a fair girl of gentle breeding who serves as Anne’s lady-in-waiting and first flirts with Henry during his visit to her family’s home at Wolf Hall. Once besotted, the impetuous king wastes no time in making his desires known to his advisors, and it is up to Cromwell to concoct a clever plan to overthrow Anne. Cromwell and his cronies devise a way to accuse Anne of adultery and high treason; where she was once the most powerful woman m England, "she is tainted now," Cromwell remarks. "She is dead meat."
Anne’s fate is an old and familiar tale, but in Mantel’s hands, the tragedy of the Boleyn girl becomes something new. Mantel flushes out the ambiguities, the dark corners of doubt where Cromwell questions his own actions. In his world, nothing is clear, nothing is certain. When Katherine, Henry’s former bride, finally dies after years of being shoved aside, Cromwell realizes how very close England came to war and ruin on her account. "How close we hold our enemies[" he muses. "They are our families, our other selves."What is the meaning of "mutable" in Paragraph 1

A. Whimsical.
B. Destined.
C. Unpredictable.
D. Impossible.

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