国际经贸高级英语14.ppt

Unit FourteenCan the U.S. FinancialGiant Gain Ground?—Jeremy Kahn TEXT Frederique Anzara, a 26-year-old French railway employee, is already worried about having enough money for retirement. “I think my parents are going to have a hard time getting a decent pension, so I don’t expect to get one from the government at all,” she says. Her concern is shared by Letizia Vergari, a 34-year-old architect from Rome. Vergari figures the state pension will barely be enough to survive on by the time he’s ready to stop working, so he plans to invest on his own. Reinald Meyers, a 45-year-old manager at Beermann Sanitary Heating Installations in Bonn, is also planning to take charge of his own financial security. “I don’t think the government will be able to pay me a decent pension,” he muses. Unit FourteenCan the U.S. FinancialGiant Gain Ground?—Jeremy Kahn Those kinds of rumblings are music to the ears of American asset managers. Fidelity, Vanguard, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Alliance, State Street, Putnam, you name it—are flocking to Europe to tap the worries, and wallets, of the burgeoning numbers who agree with Anzara, Vergari, and Meyers. Frightened that traditional state pension systems will weaken under the crush of an aging populace, Europeans are beginning to take control of their retirement savings in ways that would have been unimaginable just a decade ago. Savings accounts and low-yield government bonds—once the only sensible investment vehicles for risk-adverse Continentals—are out. Stocks, bonds, and mutual funds are in. In the 18 months from September 1996 to March 1998, three times as much money flowed into equity funds as into bond funds. And money market accounts actually saw $100 billion in outflows. Even in the European countries that have traditionally had the most conservative investment climates, Germany and France—each with 15％ of assets invested in stocks—equity holdings are expected to double in