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国庆长假，太奇考研小编为同学们收集整理了经典阅读资料并附有例句解析，希望太奇考研伴随同学们共度国庆，复习的更加顺利!
An educationin finance
Less well known is the increasing willingness of colleges to borrowin the markets, too. On May 15th, for example, Cornell University sold$250m-worth of bonds.In recent weeks both Harvard and the University of Texashave also raised hundreds of millions of dollars in this way.
Such debt-raising is becoming more common. There are abundantreasons to believe that the market will grow much bigger yet.
Largely this is because colleges are only belatedly becoming awareof how useful the financial markets can be. No doubt some of their hesitationhas been cultural: academics may have been reluctant to look at theiruniversities as businesses; or they may have misunderstood what was needed tohelp those businesses grow.
If they did look at their institutions in economic terms, people ineducation tended not to think that universities lacked capital. Rather, theythought that they had a structural inability to use capital and labour moreefficiently. Unlike the car industry, many schools felt that they mustmaintain, or even increase, the ratio of employees (teachers) to customers(students). Small class sizes are taken as a signal of high quality, soinvesting money to save on teachers’ salaries is not anattractive strategy.
Schools had other reservations as well. Poor schools were worriedabout being unable to service debt. Rich schools with huge endowments may haveseen no need.
So much for an academic perspective. A growing number of investorssaw things differently. Those lovely buildings on rolling campuses, the betteruniversities’ reputations, taxpayers’ backing of state-owned institutions: all this looked to them like adeep pool of assets against which lots of money could be borrowed. The moneyraised could be used to attract more customers, who are choosy about theproduct and whose demand varies little with the price (loudly though they maycomplain).
Some of the richest universities may be using another tactic too,although they would be loth to admit it. To understand this, it helps to knowthat America has three types of university-public ones; private, not-for-profitinstitutions; and private schools run for profit. Both public andnot-for-profit universities often issue tax-exempt debt. This tends to becheap. They can then invest the money they raise in the higheryielding taxablemarket but, because of their non-profit status, avoid taxes.
This is not quite a licence to print money, but it is not far off.Under a 1986 law, money has to be raised for a purpose, such as abuilding.However, this is a matter of substance rather than form. Money is fungible.As long as the tax authorities are happy that the promised sum is being spenton the stated projects, a university can borrow cheaply and, in effect, earn aspread. Reflecting just how complex this market has become, most universitiesborrow at variable rates and then hedge their interest-rate risk throughswaps.It is all pretty clever.
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发表于 2016-8-8 09:34:44