.
这一期我们来看看世界银行和国际货币基金组织这对姐妹。考虑到有些朋友对这些不太了解，准备了一些资料，在回复可见里面。
这篇文章很长，考虑到篇幅，我们这里只节选了第一部分，余下的更精彩，在后面的资料里面。全都研读后，收获绝不仅仅是记住几个词和句。Let's go!!!

Kenneth Rogoff

The sisters at 60

Jul 22nd 2004
From The Economist print edition

The World Bank and the IMF are not in good health. Kenneth Rogoff, a former chief economist of the Fund, suggests a course of treatment

AS THE two Bretton Woods（布雷顿森林体系，具体资料回复可见） sisters turn 60, the tough love of the International Monetary Fund and even the free love of the World Bank go largely unrequited.（1--这里的tough love和free love表示The Fund 和The Bank有什么不同？） Nowadays the twins, never universally admired, are constantly attacked from the left, from the right, from the centre and, sometimes, by each other. For the Fund and the Bank, another birthday all too often means being the piñatas（现在一般指party上类似于蒙着眼睛贴鼻子的一种游戏） at their own party. Some of the criticism is （2--证明是对的。用一个词。）, some bogus. Both institutions still have a useful role to play and they remain a clear overall plus for the world—but they can and should be improved.

Start with the Bank, which is actually a complex hybrid of aid agency, long-term development lending bank and technical-assistance outsourcing centre.（3--这就是世界银行的定义。翻译一下。） Famously, the Bank was conceived mainly to help Europe rebuild after the second world war: hence the name of its main lending “window”, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, or IBRD.（国际复兴开发银行）

Without doubt, the most powerful leader the Bank ever had, at least until its current president, was Robert McNamara, a former secretary of defence of the United States. (By convention the Bank's president has always been an American.) During his time in charge, between 1968 and 1981, the Bank littered the developing world with pharaonic infrastructure projects that made it few friends among greens or budding anti-globalisation activists. Worse still, many developing countries began accumulating debts to the Bank which, whether originally granted on concessional terms or not, still grew a lot faster than their economies, some of which were actually shrinking.（4--很糟糕的情形，但确实是这样。中国其实也面临这个问题，尽管中国的经济是在增长。翻译这句话。） Small wonder, then, that the Bank also became unpopular in many developing countries.

Today, things are very much better on the public-relations front, albeit（=although） partly thanks to the Bank's gargantuan external-relations department (of more than 300 people). The Bank rightly gets a lot of credit for its growing recognition that （5--软件。 怎么说？很简单的，不要想复杂了。哈，当然不是software）such as governance and institutions are fundamental to economic growth and the reduction of poverty. The Bank's current president, James Wolfensohn, has spoken out early, often and boldly about the corrosive effects of corruption. Meanwhile, the Bank's lending priorities have changed over the past 20 years, with more support for health, governance, women and education, in addition to lending for traditional infrastructure projects. So far as technical assistance is concerned, country clients can tap the Bank's world-class experts in diverse areas such as education, nutrition, financial-sector regulation and the prevention of AIDS. Finally, under the rubric of “country ownership”, the Bank has tried to tailor its lending policies so that clients have more say in their design.

All of which is good. The bad news, though, is that the Bank still suffers from a couple of fundamental structural flaws. At the very least, these prevent it from realising its full potential. The first, and far more serious, of the flaws has to do with the Bank's ill-conceived financial structure.

In essence, the Bank is a “hedge fund with a heart”. The Bank's main branch for middle-income countries, the IBRD, has only a small amount of paid-in capital. It finances most of its lending activities, which amount to more than $100 billion, through borrowing. That is, the IBRD taps international capital markets using its triple-A rating, and then lends to developing countries and emerging markets at a mark-up of between ½% and ¾%, generally (but not always) far below the rate at which they could borrow on their own. The Bank uses the difference to help defray the Bank's $1.5 billion in operating expenses, including the cost of its 10,000-plus employees. If borrowers and lenders (holders of the Bank's bonds) are satisfied with these terms, the deal seems mutually beneficial: who could possibly object? Look a little more closely.

To begin with, the Bank's developing-country junk-bond （后保债券。指价格低、但风险大的债券。） portfolio is patently risky. The fact that the Bank has not yet seen mass defaults is partly just a matter of luck (the boom of the 1990s kept many junk-bond portfolios afloat). In addition, a complex maze of bilateral debt and aid deals has periodically helped extricate the World Bank from some tight spots, concealing what might otherwise have been default. Today, the Bank is heavily invested in Argentina, a country that has defaulted on private creditors and is openly voicing thoughts of defaulting on official ones. Of course, everyone believes that the G7 group of rich countries（西方七国集团，包括：美、英、法、德、意、加、日） and their friends would bail the Bank out in an emergency. Hence it retains its triple-A rating for now. But this means that there are hidden actuarial costs to taxpayers（6--翻译一下。）, as the Meltzer Commission reported to Congress in 2000, and as I had found in my own research published some ten years earlier.

1--这里的tough love和free love表示The Fund 和The Bank有什么不同？

2--证明是对的。用一个词。

3--这就是世界银行的定义。翻译一下。
which is actually a complex hybrid of aid agency, long-term development lending bank and technical-assistance outsourcing centre.

4--翻译这句话。Worse still, many developing countries began accumulating debts to the Bank which, whether originally granted on concessional terms or not, still grew a lot faster than their economies, some of which were actually shrinking.

5--软件。怎么说？很简单的，不要想复杂了。

6--翻译一下 hidden actuarial costs to taxpayers

1--The Fund is usually a bit strict with the country clients, while the Bank puts no so much restriction.

snowdj的回答更精确：世界银行的主要功能是提供贷款，因此该组织和各国之间的贷款存在较大的自主性，所以是free love;国际货币基金组织主要负责政策面上的事情，具有一定的强制性，因此是tough love

2--justified 这里我的理解是：some--justified; some--bogus，因此，又一真一伪的对比关系。

3--世界银行实际上是集援助机构、长期发展融资银行和技术援助采购中心于一身的一个集合体。

4--更糟糕的是，许多发展中国家欠世行的债务越积越多，不管是不是已经签订了优惠条款，其增速还是比经济增长的速度快，因为事实上有些国家的经济正在不断萎缩。

5--"soft" issues

6--隐性却实实在在的纳税人的支出

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