考研英语阅读例题：Firstmover先行者.doc

First mover 先行者[2010.10.07] The Economist SWISS banks’ reputation for safety is not just a piece of marketing. Historically their regulators have added a “Swiss finish” to international capital rules that required their big banks to carry thicker safety buffers than firms in other countries. Supervisors judged that Swiss banks needed extra safeguards to calm the nerves of clients of their huge private-banking arms. Given the banks’ size relative to Switzerland’s economy, taxpayers needed more protection, too. The crisis has only made those arguments stronger. UBS suffered one of the worst loss rates of any large bank in the world. The government was forced to inject capital into it; many of its clients fled. To augment the new Basel 3 capital rules, a government-created committee of experts this week recommended a new version of the Swiss finish for the two biggest firms, UBS and Credit Suisse. Whereas Basel 3 requires banks to carry core capital of 7% of risk-adjusted assets, the Swiss banks will need 10%. On top of this they will have to carry another nine percentage points’ worth of contingent-capital, or “CoCo”, bonds that convert into equity if core-capital ratios fall too far. The proposals are almost certain to be adopted, and the banks will have to comply by 2019. For the banks the immediate question is how easy it will be to issue the new instruments. Although a couple of CoCo bonds have been issued by firms elsewhere, the scale of fund-raising required is on an entirely new level, especially compared with Switzerland’s small corporate-bond market. The terms of the new bonds, which will convert into equity in two tranches with different trigger points, will make them fiddly to value. Still, claims that the bonds will be impossible to sell or more expensive to issue than equity look silly. Beyond the alternative universe of banking, creditors always carry a remote risk of extreme loss. The bonds can be viewed as a kind of catastrophe insurance for whic