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Finance & economics
财经版块
Buttonwood
梧桐树专栏
Crossed wires
线路交错
New technology does more than just speed up financial panics.
新技术不只是加速了金融恐慌。
The banking turmoil that has sent a handful of American and European lenders to the wall in recent weeks has a new feature.
最近几周，银行业的动荡让几家美国和欧洲银行陷入绝境，这种动荡有一个新的特点。
Use of social media and messaging apps, which spread information at lightning pace to an ever-larger group of panickers, marks a break from past crises.
社交媒体和即时通讯应用以闪电般的速度向越来越多的惊慌失措的人传播信息，这标志着现今情况已不同于过去的危机。
Meanwhile, new digital-finance tools let nervous depositors withdraw funds as soon as the notion strikes them, whether from offices in San Francisco or ski slopes in Saint Moritz.
与此同时，新的数字金融工具让紧张不安的储户一得到消息就取出资金，无论他们是在旧金山的办公室还是圣莫里茨的滑雪场。
After the fall of Silicon Valley Bank, the idea of faster bank runs is understandably causing concern among analysts and legislators.
硅谷银行倒闭后，银行挤兑速度加快引起了分析师和立法者的担忧，这是可以理解的。
Yet the wave of new tech in the past decade and a bit is by no means the first to change behaviour.
然而，过去十几年的新技术浪潮绝不是第一次改变人们的行为。
Previous examples suggest something of a pattern:
以前的例子显示了一种模式：
innovations initially help facilitate a boom, contributing to exuberance based on a sense of futuristic possibility, before speeding up and magnifying the eventual bust.
创新最初有助于促进繁荣，在未来有无限可能这一感觉的基础上激发人们的昂扬情绪，然后再加速并放大最终的崩溃。
History also suggests that recent technological changes may have a deeper impact, reshaping markets in the long run, too.
历史还表明，最近的技术变革可能会产生更深层次的影响，从长远来看也会重塑市场。
From the 1840s onwards, America was blanketed by the electric telegraph, which transmitted messages by overhead wires, connecting previously disparate financial markets in Boston, Chicago, New York and Philadelphia.
从19世纪40年代起，美国被电报覆盖，电报通过架空电线传输信息，连接了此前各不相干的波士顿、芝加哥、纽约和费城金融市场。
In 1866 reliable communication became possible between America and Europe as well, thanks to an undersea telegraph cable.
1866年，得益于海底电报电缆，美国和欧洲之间的可靠通信也成为可能。
Historians credit these new methods of transmitting financial information with smoothing out pricing inefficiencies.
历史学家将消除定价低效问题归功于这些传递金融信息的新方法。
The gap between American and British cotton prices dropped by a third, for example, and volatility also declined.
例如，美国和英国棉花价格之间的差距下降了三分之一，价格波动性也降低了。
The new form of communication was significant enough to have left a legacy.
这种新的交流方式意义重大，足以留下某种遗产。
Among currency traders, the sterling-dollar exchange rate is still known informally as “cable”.
在外汇交易员中，英镑兑美元汇率仍被非正式地称为“电缆”。
But efficiency often comes at a cost.
但效率往往是有代价的。
In the 19th century, communication by cable was expensive and limited, and the information received at risk of manipulation by those transmitting it.
在19世纪，通过电缆进行通信既昂贵又有限，而且接收到的信息有被传送者操纵的风险。
During the panic of 1873, correspondents at The Economist went back and forth about whether the debilitating effects of new technologies, spreading panic from one market to another, outweighed the positives.
在1873年的金融恐慌期间，《经济学人》的记者们反复讨论新技术的削弱作用--将恐慌从一个市场传播到另一个市场--是否超过了其积极作用。
A century later, new technology again provoked worries during a market crash in October 1987.
一个世纪后，新技术在1987年10月的一次市场崩盘中再次引发担忧。
The Brady Commission, which later investigated the slump in America, found that electronic communication across borders exacerbated problems.
布雷迪委员会后来调查了美国的经济衰退，发现跨境电子通信使问题更加严重。
Traders and regulators believed they were in the more insulated, national markets of the past.
交易员和监管者认为，他们处于过去的更为封闭的全国性市场。
They were not.
但事实并非如此。
The effect that technological breakthroughs have on banking crises is just one way they transform financial markets, however.
然而，技术突破对银行业危机的影响只是它们改变金融市场的一种方式。
John Handel, an economic historian at the University of Virginia, notes that increasingly widespread use of ticker tape—a more advanced form of telegraph-transmitted messaging—in late-19th-century finance enhanced the power of the institutions that monopolised it.
弗吉尼亚大学经济史学家约翰·汉德尔指出，在19世纪末的金融行业，自动收报机日益广泛的使用增强了垄断这种机器的机构的权力，自动收报机是一种更先进的电报传输信息形式。
The London Stock Exchange and the Exchange Telegraph Company, which was licensed to transmit data from the exchange, were beneficiaries.
伦敦证券交易所和交易所电报公司都是受益者，后者获得了从交易所传输数据的许可。
This helped formalise the role of the stock exchanges in global financial markets.
这有助于正式确定证交所在全球金融市场中的角色。
Historically, banks have benefited from high transaction costs and the low financial literacy of customers, which together have kept depositors from moving too much money into higher-yielding money-market funds.
一直以来，银行受益于较高的交易成本和客户较低的金融素养，这两个因素共同阻止储户将太多资金转移到收益率更高的货币市场基金。
Today new communications tech and digital finance mean the investing populace is both more aware of the alternatives to bank deposits and has more opportunity to invest in them.
如今，新的通信技术和数字金融意味着，投资大众对银行存款的替代选择有了更多认识，也有更多机会使用这些替代选择进行投资。
Recent research by academics at Columbia, Peking and Stanford universities notes that Chinese banks where depositors have more exposure to Yu’ebao, an online investment platform offering money-market-fund investments, see more withdrawals from customers.
哥伦比亚大学、北京大学和斯坦福大学的学者最近的研究指出，在中国，储户对余额宝接触更多的银行，其客户取出的资金也更多，余额宝是一个提供货币市场基金投资的在线投资平台。
New tech might have helped facilitate the surge of almost $300bn into American money-market funds in March, further destabilising banks.
新技术可能推动了近3000亿美元在3月份涌入美国货币市场基金，从而进一步破坏了银行的稳定。
Innovation has sped up sudden market wobbles, truncating panics that would have taken months in the 19th century to weeks.
创新加速了突发市场震荡，在19世纪需要数月才会发生的恐慌，如今发生的时间被缩短为几周。
In the modern era, timelines have contracted further, from weeks to days or even hours.
在现代，时间线进一步缩短，从几周缩短到几天甚至几个小时。
Yet this may turn out to be just one of the ways in which frictionless trading and freely available information, of varying quality, affect finance in years to come.
然而，这可能只是无摩擦交易和可自由获取的质量参差的信息在未来几年影响金融的方式之一。
The profits banks have enjoyed for decades—or centuries—thanks to high transactions costs and low financial literacy might also become harder to sustain.
银行由于高交易成本和低金融素养而享受了几十年或几个世纪的利润，这种利润也可能变得更难持续。
