英语小文章

THE casualty list from the credit crisis does not stop at investment banks and Iceland. The idea of the international bank is also coming under pressure. The argument that being in lots of countries diversifies risk looks thinner now that the downturn has the world economy in its grip. A brace of regulatory initiatives also suggests that national authorities have become much more focused on their own interests. The Swiss Federal Banking Commission has released details of its beefed-up capital regime, which will help to restrain growth in assets when times are good. The biggest Swiss banks, UBS and Credit Suisse, will be subject to higher risk-weighted capital requirements and to a new leverage ratio of at least 3%, which caps the amount of total assets that a bank can hold regardless of the risk they entail. These measures are striking for at least two reasons. The first is that they foreshadow an emerging international orthodoxy.

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Once upon a time...
Caliph Chasid, of Bagdad, was resting comfortably on his divan one fine afternoon. He was smoking a long pipe, and from time to time he sipped a little coffee which a slave handed to him, and after each sip he stroked his long beard with an air of enjoyment. In short, anyone could see that the Caliph was in an excellent humour. This was, in fact, the best time of day in which to approach him, for just now he was pretty sure to be both affable and in good spirits, and for this reason the Grand Vizier Mansor always chose this hour in which to pay his daily visit.

He arrived as usual this afternoon, but, contrary to his usual custom, with an anxious face. The Caliph withdrew his pipe for a moment from his lips and asked, 'Why do you look so anxious, Grand Vizier?'

The Grand Vizier crossed his arms on his breast and bent low before his master as he answered:

'Oh, my Lord! whether my countenance be anxious or not I know not, but down below, in the court of the palace, is a pedlar with such beautiful things that I cannot help feeling annoyed at having so little money to spare.'

Once upon a time...
Caliph Chasid, of Bagdad, was resting comfortably on his divan one fine afternoon. He was smoking a long pipe, and from time to time he sipped a little coffee which a slave handed to him, and after each sip he stroked his long beard with an air of enjoyment. In short, anyone could see that the Caliph was in an excellent humour. This was, in fact, the best time of day in which to approach him, for just now he was pretty sure to be both affable and in good spirits, and for this reason the Grand Vizier Mansor always chose this hour in which to pay his daily visit.

He arrived as usual this afternoon, but, contrary to his usual custom, with an anxious face. The Caliph withdrew his pipe for a moment from his lips and asked, 'Why do you look so anxious, Grand Vizier?'

The Grand Vizier crossed his arms on his breast and bent low before his master as he answered:

'Oh, my Lord! whether my countenance be anxious or not I know not, but down below, in the court of the palace, is a pedlar with such beautiful things that I cannot help feeling annoyed at having so little money to spare.'

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Your wealth, fame and temporal power will shrivel to irrelevance. It will not matter what you owned or what you were owed. Your grudges, resentments, frustrations, and jealousies will finally disappear. So, too, your hopes, ambitions, plans, and to-do lists will all expire. The wins and losses that once seemed so important will fade away. It won't matter where you came from, or on what side of the tracks you lived. It won't matter whether you were beautiful or brilliant. Your gender, skin color, ethnicity will be irrelevant. So what will matter? How will the value of your days be measured? What will matter is not what you bought, but what you built; not what you got, but what you gave.

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“We are reading the first 1)verse of the first chapter of a book whose pages are 2)infinite...”

I do not know who wrote those words, but I have always liked them as a 3)reminder that the future can be anything we want to make it. We can take the mysterious, 4)hazy future and carve out of it anything that we can imagine, just as a 5)sculptor carves a statue from a shapeless stone.

We are all in the position of the farmer. If we plant a good seed, we reap a good harvest. If our seed is poor and full of 6)weeds, we reap a useless crop. If we plant nothing at all, we harvest nothing at all.

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