Day 1 原文文本
【翻译划线段落】
Dollars will find buyers hard to find in 2017
With the US Federal Reserve raising interest rates, and President Mario Draghi of the European Central Bank seemingly unable to escape his addiction to quantitative easing policy, many investors are questioning who wants to buy the euro. The answer is simple. The whole world is eager to buy the euro. The problem in 2017 is more likely to be finding anyone who wants to buy the US dollar.
随着美联储一直上升的利率，同时欧洲中央银行行长马里奥•德拉吉看来似乎不能摆脱（放弃）对量化宽松政策的热衷，许多投资者开始质疑还会有谁去买欧元。答案很简单，全世界的人都想要买欧元。2017年的问题在于是否还有人去买美元。
The Middle East is a good example of a region of avid euro buyers. Even with the recent rally in the oil price, most Middle Eastern countries are expected to run sizeable fiscal deficits. The IMF expects Saudi Arabia to run a fiscal deficit of almost 10 per cent of GDP next year. To fund their budget deficits, the Gulf countries are selling central bank reserves and pools of assets held by their sovereign wealth funds.中东地区是热衷购买欧元的一个地区，与最近油价恢复一样，多数中东国家期望摆脱数额巨大的财政赤字。国际货币基金组织希望沙特阿拉伯国家明年能够减少其GDP近10%的财政赤字。为了解决财政赤字（筹集财政预算所需资金），海湾国家开始出售中央银行储备金以及主权财富基金持有的资金池。
Imagine Saudi Arabia sells US Treasuries, and uses the dollars it receives to pay its civil servants. Then imagine that a Saudi Arabian civil servant takes their pay and uses the money to buy a BMW car in euros. What is happening? Saudi Arabia is selling dollars and buying euros. It does not matter that there is an asset on one side of the transaction and a BMW on the other side of the transaction — the foreign exchange market implication is the same whether it is Bunds or BMWs that are bought.
If the Middle East buys assets, they like their assets to be made in America (central banks buy roughly twice as many US assets as other assets). If the Middle East buys products and services, they like their products and services to be made in Europe (the Middle East buys twice as much from Europe as from the US). Thus if the Middle East is selling assets to buy goods, it sells dollars to buy euros.
Of course this does not just apply to the Middle East. The world is eager to buy euros because the world wants European products (in preference to US products). The relative current account balances of the Euro area and the US alone tell us that. China, another economy inclined to divest itself of US assets of late, buys more euro area imports than US imports. The same is true of the APEC Asian economies as a bloc. Africa’s preference for Euro area products in comparison to American is overwhelming. Only Latin America exhibits any relative desire to buy “made in America”. The rest of the world clamours for euros to obtain goods and services from their preferred supplier.
So why is the euro not stronger with all this enthusiastic buying of BMWs and other euro area goods?
In 2016 the US basically pleaded with the rest of the world to lend it money. US interest rates are above those of the euro area (euro area interest rates are negative). US bond yields are above those of the euro area (many euro area bond yields are negative). US equities have outperformed those of the euro area (by about 15 per cent, and euro area equity performance is negative this year). The US basically did everything that it could to persuade investors to buy dollars — and at the end of all of that effort the euro still trades within 4 per cent of where it traded against the dollar at the start of the year.
The challenge for the US is that it needs foreigners to buy dollars every day to stop the dollar from falling. In the first nine months of 2016, foreigners had to purchase $2.7bn every day. That is more than the daily GDP of the Netherlands. Any day that foreigners were not inclined to buy $2.7bn, the dollar would weaken. This is important — if foreigners decide that they want to “wait and see” what Donald Trump’s policies are like before committing to buying more dollars, then the dollar will fall. “Wait and see” is not good enough for the US.
The question is not who wants to buy euros — the whole world wants to buy euros because the whole world wants to buy euro area products. The US had to offer considerable financial incentives to persuade foreigners to buy dollars.
笔记：
1.US Federal Reserve美国联邦储备委员会
2.European Central Bank欧洲中央银行
3.Questioning：
The policeman is questioning the thief.警察正在质问这个小偷。
By what authority were the priests and elders questioning Jesus?
又是谁给了这些牧师和老者权柄来质问耶稣的呢？
3. eager
Robert was eager to talk about life in the Army.
罗伯特渴望谈论军旅生活。
When my own son was five years old, I became eager for another baby.
当我儿子５岁的时候，我开始渴望要另一个宝宝。
4.fiscal deficit财政赤字
5. sovereign wealth fund
所谓主权财富（Sovereign Wealth），与私人财富相对应，是指一国政府通过特定税收与预算分配、可再生自然资源收入和国际收支盈余等方式积累形成的，由政府控制与支配的，通常以外币形式持有的公共财富。传统上，主权财富管理方式非常被动保守，对本国与国际金融市场影响也非常有限。随着近年来主权财富得利于国际油价飙升和国际贸易扩张而急剧增加，主权财富基金的管理成为一个日趋重要的议题。国际上最新的发展趋势是成立主权财富基金（Sovereign Wealth Funds，SWFs），并设立通常独立于央行和财政部的专业投资机构管理这些基金。
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