1、 外文翻译 原文 Life is a ponzi scheme Material Source: Material Source:Genome Biology 2009, Volume 10, Issue 1, Article 101; Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02454-9110 Author: Gregory A Petsko Unless youve spent the last month on a spacecraft returning from Mars, youve probably heard of Bernard Madoff,th
2、e American financier who stands accused of perpetrating what may be the greatest investment fraud in history. Estimates of the amount of money lost by investors in the investment fund managed by Madoff, a former chairman of the NASDAQ Stock Market, range up to US$50 billion. One of Madoffs biggest i
3、nvestors, Ren-Thierr Magon de la Villehuchet, committed suicide on 23 December 2008 following the disclosure of the scheme. Villehuchet is thought to have lost as much as $1.4 billion in Madoffs fund. A number of charitable foundations, several of which provide funding for disease-related biomedical
4、 research, lost huge percentages of their endowments. Several universities have been significantly harmed as well, since either some of their own money or the savings of some of their biggest regular donors turned out to have been invested with Madoff. The particular type of con game that Bernard Ma
5、doff practiced is surprisingly simple for someone whose web of deceit appears to have been so tangled. Its called a Ponzi scheme. The fraud takes its name from Charles Ponzi, who was one of the greatest swindlers in history. Born Carlo Ponzi in 1882 in Parma, Italy, he emigrated to the United States
6、 in 1903. After working at a series of low-paying jobs for several years, he moved to Montreal in 1907 and became an assistant in a bank that had been set up to serve the needs of Italian immigrants to Canada. The bank eventually failed because of bad real-estate loans - sounds familiar? - but Ponzi
7、 stayed on in Canada where eventually he was jailed for three years for check forgery. On his release in 1911 he joined a scheme to smuggle illegal aliens across the border to the United States, was caught, and served a further two years in prison, this time in Atlanta, Georgia. There he met Charles
8、 W Morse, a financier who had been convicted of violating federal banking laws. Morse became a sort of guru to Ponzi, who began to see the possibilities in white-collar crime. After his release, Ponzi made his way to Boston, Massachusetts, where he set up the investment scheme that was to make him f
9、amous - and notorious. To call his pitch to prospective pigeons attractive would be to understate the case. He promised clients a 50% profit within 45 days, or 100% profit within 90 days, by buying discounted postal reply coupons in other countries and redeeming them at face value in the United Stat
10、es, a form of what we currently call arbitrage (the practice of taking advantage of a difference in price between two or more markets). A simple, and classic, example of arbitrage would be to collect discarded soda cans in Massachusetts, where they are sold with a deposit of $0.05 each, and truck th
11、em to Michigan, where the returned deposit is $0.10 per can. (Fo r those of you thinking of funding your research this way, forget it: the cost of collecting and transporting the cans eliminates the profit. However, about $10 million worth of empty bottles and cans do get smuggled into Michigan from
12、 neighboring Ohio and Indiana, which do not require a deposit on beverage containers. Returning those out-of-state bottles and cans in Michigan does make a small profit. Michigan lawmakers have proposed requiring that beverage manufacturers put a code on all bottles and cans that are sold in Michiga
13、n, and that automated bottle return machines be programmed to read the code so they accept only containers originally sold in Michigan.) Ponzi wasnt arbitraging soda cans, though. The commodity he claimed to be buying and selling was international postal reply coupons. A postal reply coupon is a pie
14、ce of paper included in a message sent by someone in one country to a correspondent in another country, so the recipient can use the coupon to pay the postage for a reply - the modern equivalent, within one country, is the stamped, self- addressed envelope. What made them attractive for arbitrage is
15、 that the coupons were priced at the cost of postage in the country of purchase, but were exchanged for stamps to cover the cost of postage in the country where redeemed; if these values were different, there was a potential profit. Inflation after the First World War had reduced the cost of postage
16、 in Italy as expressed in US dollars, so an international postal reply coupon bought in Rome could, in theory, be exchanged in Boston for stamps with a much higher dollar value. As explained by Ponzi, investors would give him money; he would send that money abroad, where his agents would purchase re
17、ply coupons; the agents would send the coupons to the US, where Ponzi would redeem them for stamps of a higher value; and he would then sell the stamps. Ponzi claimed that the net profit on these perfectly legal transactions, after expenses and exchange rates, was in excess of 400%. In the first two
18、 months of 1920, some people invested and were paid large returns (100% profit in a few weeks). Word spread, and investment came in at an ever-increasing rate. Ponzi hired agents to drum up new business and paid them generous commissions for every dollar they brought in. At that time all investors w
19、ere being paid impressive rates, which encouraged others to invest. By May 1920, Ponzi had made $420,000 (over $4.5 million in 2008 dollars). By July 1920, he had made millions. People were mortgaging their homes and investing their life savings in his company. Most did not take their profits out, b
20、ut reinvested them, believing that the enormous returns would continue forever. What none of them knew was that Charles Ponzi wasnt buying and selling postal reply coupons. In fact, he wasnt arbitraging anything. What he was actually doing was running what is called a pyramid scheme: as long as mone
21、y kept flowing in at a greater rate than people were withdrawing it, existing investors (the top of the pyramid) could be paid with a portion of the money brought in from the larger horde of new investors (the pyramid bottom). By 24 July 1920, the pyramid scheme was returning for Ponzis firm, The Se
22、curities Exchange Company, the astounding sum of $250,000 a day. Well, my father, who was trained as an economist, always said that if something seems too good to be true, it probably isnt either good or true. Clarence Barron, the financial analyst who founded the financial magazine Barrons, started
23、 to examine Ponzis outrageous returns. Barron first noted that Ponzi hadnt invested his own money with his own company - always a red flag. Then he calculated that, to cover the investments made with the Securities Exchange Company, about 160,000,000 postal reply coupons would have to be in circulat
24、ion. However, only about 27,000 coupons were actually circulating worldwide. He checked with the US Post Office, who confirmed that postal reply coupons were not being bought or redeemed in large quantities, either at home or abroad. Finally, Barron crunched the numbers, and found the same thing for
25、 arbitraging postal reply coupons that you would find if you tried to redeem Massachusetts soda cans in Michigan: the gross profit margin in percent on each item was huge, but the actual return per item was very small, and the overhead required to handle the purchase and redemption of the necessaril
26、y huge number of items, which were sold individually, would have far exceeded the gross profit. The Boston Post published the results of Barrons investigation, and ran a headline on 2 August 1920, declaring Ponzi hopelessly insolvent. On 10 August federal agents raided the Securities Exchange Compan
27、y and shut it down. Of course, they found no large stock of postal reply coupons. On 12 August 1920, Ponzi was arrested. Seventeen thousand people had invested millions, maybe tens of millions, with him over a period of less than nine months. Most lost everything. After serving years in prison on bo
28、th federal and state charges, Charles Ponzi was deported to Italy in 1934. He died a pauper in a charity hospital in Rio de Janeiro on 18 January 1949. It now appears that Bernard Madoff was running a similar pyramid scheme, on a colossal scale. He was cleverer about it, of course, since he had Ponz
29、is mistakes to learn from. Rather than offer suspiciously high returns to all comers, Madoff instead offered modest, but steady returns (about 10-15% per year). Furthermore, Madoff didnt solicit business; instead, he deliberately made it difficult to invest. By catering to an exclusive clientele, on
30、e that had to be both super-rich and selected by him, he drove up the demand for his services through their scarcity. The scheme also differed from Ponzis in that a number of other investment funds invested much or all of their holdings in Madoffs fund, which meant that many individual investors, wh
31、o believed they were diversified, unknowingly had all their eggs in the Madoff basket. There were a number of red flags that should have alerted both financial analysts and government regulators to the probably fraudulent nature of Madoffs business (to be fair, a small number, such as Boston financi
32、al specialist Harry Markopolos, did sound warnings about Madoff for years, but were ignored). For one, almost identical returns were produced in both up and down markets - an impossibility with honest trading. Another red flag is that the investment method was stated to be a proprietary secret. The
33、slow pace and insider marketing enabled the scheme to survive for an unusually long time and also to grow far larger than would be expected of a common Ponzi scheme. What caused it to collapse? The general market downturn of 2008 caused new investments to decrease and forced a larger than usual numb
34、er of existing investors to cash out their positions. Thats what usually brings down a pyramid scheme: when the top of the pyramid demands more money back than the bottom is putting in (illiquidity in finance-speak). Now, the reason youre reading about this here, is that I just realized that life it
35、self is basically a gigantic Ponzi scheme, and the pyramid is dangerously close to collapsing. In the developed world, we have evolved a society in which a relatively small number of old people have many of their needs cared for through the financial contributions of a larger number of much younger
36、people. And that made sense, because for over 12,000 years the age distribution of the human population was, in fact, in the shape of a pyramid, with a huge base of young children rising to a smaller number of teenagers and a still smaller number of young adults, and so on up to a tiny tip of the el
37、derly. But sometime in the 1950s, as the birthrate declined and life expectancy continued to increase, the pyramid started to be shaped more like a column. Within the next 40 years it will become one, and then it will slowly invert. Worldwide, the average life expectancy at birth in 1955 was just 48
38、 years; in 1995 it was 65 years; in 2025 it will reach 73 years. By the year 2025, it is expected that no country on Earth will have a life expectancy of less than 50 years. That has never happened before in human history. Globally, the population of children under 5 will grow by just 0.25% annually
39、 between 1995-2025, while the population over 65 years will grow by 2.6%. The average number of babies per woman of child-bearing age was 5.0 in 1955, falling to 2.9 in 1995; it will reach 2.3 in 2025. While only 3 countries were below the population replacement level of 2.1 babies in 1955, there wi
40、ll be 102 such countries by 2025. The World Health Organization has estimated that the proportion of older people requiring support from adults of working age will increase globally from 10.5% in 1955 and 12.3% in 1995 to 17.2% in 2025. In 1955, there were 12 people aged over 65 for every 100 aged u
41、nder 20. By 1995, the old/young ratio was 16/100; by 2025 it will be 31/100. By the end of the century it will approach unity. Eventually - and eventually isnt that far off - we will live in world where a smaller number of young people will be asked to support a larger number of the very old. No Pon
42、zi scheme can survive that. 译文 生活就是一个庞式骗局 资料来源 : 基因组生物学：生活就是个庞氏骗局 J.2009 年 (10)第 1 期。 作者： 格雷戈里 A帕特斯科 除非你刚刚 坐着 上月的航天 飞船 从火星回来 ， 不然你不可能没听说过伯纳德 麦道夫 ，他是一位被美国金融家代表指责 犯下了可能是迄今为止最大的投资欺诈 罪犯。 投资者失去了在麦道夫投资基金的 资金，这位 前纳斯达克股票市场管理主席 ， 所涉及的资金可达 50亿美元 。 麦道夫的一个最大的投资者 ，瑞 ，于当年 23日自杀身亡 。 2008年 12月后 ， 该计划的披露 。威尔 认为自己已经失
43、去了高达 14亿美元麦道夫投资 基金 。包括很多 慈善基金会 ， 其中 有几个 提供资金有关 疾病的生物医学研究中 ， 失去了巨大的捐赠 。 以及有几所大学已经大大受到 没钱尴尬，因为无论是自己的 钱或别人的 钱 他们最大的定期捐助者已经变成了投资给麦道夫基金 。 这些 特定类型的骗局 ， 麦道夫 只是 做的是令人惊讶的简单网页欺骗 ，似乎已经弄不清楚 原理 。 它 就是 被称为庞氏计划 。这种 欺诈行为需要从查尔斯庞氏开始说起 ， 这个名称是历史上最 伟大 的骗子之一 。 1882年他生于在意大利帕尔马 的卡罗庞齐 ， 他于 1903年移居到美国后 。 在 经过 一系列的低报酬工作几年后 ，
44、他移居到蒙特利尔 ， 在 1907年 ， 成为一个 移民 助手 ， 它可以在银行设立了需要意大利移民到加拿大的服务 。 该银行最终未能生存下来 是 由于不良房地产贷款 -是不是 听起来很熟悉 ？ 但庞式住在加拿大的 地方 最终因为他伪造支票被判处入狱三年 。 他在 1911年 被 释放 并且 计划走私横跨边境非法移民到美国 ，但是 被抓住了 ， 并在监狱里呆了了两年时间 ， 他在美国佐治亚州亚特兰大的 时候。 在那里 ， 他会见了查尔斯 W莫尔斯一个已被定罪的金融家违反联邦银行法的人 。 莫尔斯只所以成为一名大师 ， 也开始看到高级经济犯罪的可能性 。 后来他的释放 ，使他的庞氏骗局的 计划
45、成功实施在马萨诸塞州的波士顿 ， 在那里他成立了投资计划 ， 也是使他成名和最后臭名昭著 的原因。 通过 莫尔斯来招揽潜在的 具有 吸引力的 各种顾客。 他答应的美国客户 允诺他们能获得 50的利润在 45天 之内，或者 90天之内 100利润 ，通过 买在其他国家的邮政折扣券及答复赎回来 实现利润，这 一种形式就是我们目前所说的 套利（ 以价格优势在两个或两个以上的区别市场 获利）。 一个简单的套利 ， 以及收集在马萨诸塞州的 饮料罐头， 在那里丢弃的饮料罐他们出售了 0.05元每罐 ， 他们通过卡车到密歇根州 ， 在那里返回的存款每罐 能到 0.10元 。（ 对于你们研究这些资金 而去用
46、这种方式思考 ， 忘了它吧 ： 收集和运输罐成本消除了利润 。 然而 ，约 1， 000万元空瓶子和易拉罐做交易让走私到美国密歇根州从邻近的俄亥俄州和印第安纳州 ， 它不要求存款 ， 饮料容器 。 遣返那些外地的状态瓶罐并在密歇根州能获得一个小的利润 。 密歇根州国会议员已经提出要求的饮料厂家把所有瓶瓶罐罐的人一起在密歇根州出售 ， 而通过自动返回瓶机编程读取代码 ， 以便它们只接受原本在密歇根州销售的容器 。） 虽然庞兹并没有套利做苏打罐 。 他自称自己方法是买卖国际 邮政答复券 。一个邮政答复券 就 一张纸在 他们的宣传 中包括一个国家发送到另一个国家 ， 这样收件人可以使用优惠券来支付邮
47、资的答复 ， 相当于 现代， 在一个国家内 ， 是盖章 ， 自邮信封 。 让他们有吸引力的套利是 ， 优惠券是按成本定价运费在购买国 ， 但被换邮票以弥补该国的运费哪里赎回 ;如果这些 价 值是不同的 ， 有一 定 潜在利润 。 通货膨胀后 ，因为 第一次世界大战降低了运费成本在意大利 通过使用美国美元 ，从而 国际邮政券买 卖在 罗马理论上 是可以实行通过 在波士顿进行交换邮票以 获得 更高的价值 。 正如庞兹解释 ， 投资者将钱给他 ， 他会派钱在国外 ，他的代理人将购买回邮 券 。 代理人将发出优惠券到美国 ， 庞奇将换取较高面额邮票 给 他们 ，然后出售 邮票 。 庞兹声称 ， 获得净
48、利润这些完全是合法交易 ， 拿到的费用和汇率 ， 是在 400以上 。 在 1920年 前 两月 ， 一些投资 人收到 了大量的回报 （ 100 ， 在几个星期后的利润 ）。 过后 不停延伸， 自 那 年 1月投资不断增加的速率 。庞兹雇请代理人来招徕新的业务和向他们支付 在他们带来丰厚佣金美元当时所有的投资者被支付可观的速度 ， 其中鼓励他人投资 。 到 1920年 5月 ， 庞氏曾使 42万美元 （ 超过 2008年的 4.5亿美元 ）。到了 1920年 7月 ， 他 拿出 百万美元 。 抵押 出 他们的家园 ， 在他的公司投资了一生的积蓄 。 多数没有取得他们的利润 ， 但是 投资人 再
49、投资 ， 因为相信 ， 巨大的回报将继续直到永远 。 投资人 什么都不知道的是 ， 查尔斯庞氏不买卖邮政邮券 。 事实上 ， 他并没有套利什么 。 他实际上是在做什么运行 其实 就是做传销 ：只要钱保持在较高的流动 率 没 人撤回 ， 现有投资者 （ 金字塔的顶端 ） 能够和部分已缴纳的钱从引进对 （ 金字塔底部 ） 新的投资者更大的 收入。 到了 20年 7月 24日 ， 金字塔计划退耕还林 出了 庞兹的公司 ， 证券交易公司 ， 令人惊叹 的是尽然每日 获取金额达 25万美元。 我的父亲 ， 作为一个经济学家 ， 总是说 ： 如果有些事情似 乎好得是真实的 ，那么它可能不是好 的。 克拉伦斯巴伦 ，一位 金融分析师成立了金融杂志巴伦的 ，开始研究庞兹的离谱的回报率 。 巴伦首先指出 ， 庞兹没有自己的公司 没有 投资没有 他自己的钱 ，这 是一个危险的标志 。 然后他计算 出 以支付投资作出与证券交易公司 ， 约 160， 000， 000邮政邮券都必须在流通 。 然而 ， 只有约 27， 000券事实上在世界各地流通 。 他与美国邮政检查办公室
