Вариант № 4

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SAVINGS ACCOUNT

To open a savings account at a bank a small initial deposit is needed. If you open your account with 500 dollars or more and keep that much at all times, there is no service charge. If you fall below the 500-dollar limit, you will be charged 5 dollars a month.

A bank computer adds all the daily figures and then devides by the number of days in your statement period. That's called your average daily balance.

When you open an account, you'll be in touch with your money thanks to bank machine services. These machines can handle most regular teller transactions. You can make deposits, cash withdrawals, and balance inquiries with your automatic teller card. The machine is at work 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

If, for example, you want to open a savings account with a deposit of 1000 dollars, you are supposed to fill in (A.E. — out) an application. Besides you need to write a deposit ticket for 1000 dollars. After filling in the application you are given a pass­book. Once you place your money in a savings account, interest on the money begins to accrue. The bank will pay you 4 or 5% interest.

CHECKING ACCOUNT

If you want to open a checking account, you are supposed to maintain an average daily balance of 1000 dollars. As long as you keep this average balance you won't be charged for banking ser­vices. Should you fall below the 1000-dollar limit, you would have to pay a service charge of 6 dollars a month, and each of your transactions would be charged separately.

A transaction charge means that you'll have to pay 25 cents for each check made by you or your spouse and also 25 cents for each cash withdrawal. But you can easily avoid paying these charges by maintaining 1000 dollars or more on your account.

Interest is paid if your average daily balance is over 2500 dol­lars. Unless you fall below 2500 dollars, you'll be paid 6,5% in­terest. The bank credits the interest you've earned automatically to your account.

You can order your checkbooks after having filled in (out — A.E.) an application and your deposit ticket.

For getting a credit card you must have an income of 15 000 dollars or more. This income must be proved by your last pay stub or a copy of your tax return. As soon as the bank has this information, credit cards will be given to you and your wife.

CREDIT CARDS

Credit cards are accepted by millions of businessmen in the United States and abroad. They can be used at hotels, restau­rants, department stores, theatres, and airline ticket offices — just about anywhere. They even entitle owners to instant cash. The card holder simply asks a teller to charge a cash advance, or loan, rather than a purchase to his or her account. The transac­tion is approved by phone and the money handed over almost immediately.

VISA and Master Card are the best-known bank cards. They are also most established, having been first offered to consumers more than 25 years ago. The Discovery Card is the newest. Con­sumers have been drawn up to the Discovery Card by attractive discounts up to $ 150 on certain purchases and an annual rebate 1 % of the amount charged against the card.

TRAVELLER'S CHECKS

One more possibility of making payments without using your cash are traveller’s checks. Traveler’s checks can provide you a safe and convenient way of traveling with large amounts of money. They come in twenty dollar, fifty dollar and one hun­dred dollar denominations. Traveler’s checks are insured against loss and theft and are treated as cash by most businesses. You may purchase traveler’s checks at most banks.

TEXT

Crashes are generally said to be salutary reminders of the old wisdom that markets can fall as well as rise. Mar­ket commentators habitually berate investors for forget­ting this "lesson" later on. But the lesson many people learnt from 1987 is not, in truth, that markets can fall. It is rather that the consequences of a crash do not need to be calamitous, and will probably be only temporary. As the folk memory of 1987 displaces the folk memory of 1929, the popular fear of shares seems therefore to be fading.

The trouble is that the apparent lesson of 1987 - that crashes can be free of pain - is not the only thing that has added to equities' lustre in the decade. That lesson has absorbed at the same time as two other big changed have helped boost demand.

One change is demographic: the large bulge in the number of affluent people in the rich world who are now between the ages of 40 and 60, and who possess a vast pool of personal savings looking for a profitable home. In the past decade, millions of people who had never before done so have invested in the stockmarket through mutual funds and other instruments, instead of in cash or bonds, and have profited mightily from their decision. The other change is globalization, and the opportunity this has given to the rich world's savers to spread their risk and increase their returns by investing in the fast-gowing economies of Latin America, Asia and Eastern Europe. There could hardly be a happier coincidence. Or could there?

One reason to feel less sanguine about this week's anniversary is the growing misunderstanding of the real benefits of globalization. Instead of being seen as an opportunity to diversify investment and therefore to spread risk, globalization has lately become muddled up with the so-called "new paradigm" in America - the seductive doctrine, verging on clap-trap, that says that inflation is dead, that old economic laws have been repealed and that America's stockmarkets can therefore keep on growing indefinitely at their present rate. On this view, emerging markets are being seen less as attractive in­vestment opportunities, more as a reason to believe that the globalization of labour and product markets can fore­ver stop workers and firms from raising wages and prices.

It is hardly surprising that emerging markets have recently lost some of their appeal as means of diversifying risk. Since their peak in 1993, when their share prices jumped by an average of 75%, bad news has marched through most of these new markets. In 1994-95 the collapse of the Mexican peso lowered returns from most of Latin America, and recent months have toppled one currency after another in East Asia. Several of Eastern Europe's cur­rencies now look vulnerable too. As a group, over the past dozen years, emerging stockmarkets have under-performed Wall Street. In principle, this does invalidate the case for investing in these markets in order to reduce overall risk. In practice, it is yet another reason why, having digested what they think is the lesson from a decade ago, investors are now in grave danger of driving Wall Street far too high.

For a second, bigger, reason to worry is that the apparent lesson of 1987 is wrong: crashes are hardly ever benign. It is true that the crash of 1987 did little lasting damage. But a stock-market slump in Japan in 1990 knocked the stuffing out of its banks and led to a period of stagnation from which it has still to emerge. The crash of 1987 was relatively painless because, unlike the Bank of Japan, the American Fed moved quickly to reassure banks and stave off a slump in investment and demand by easing monetary policy.

At today's valuations a similar drop in New York would destroy some $2 trillion of wealth. There is no guarantee, if this happened, that the Fed would be able to repeat its damage-averting trick in the present looser mo­netary conditions without setting fire to inflation. In that case, history would repeat itself as tragedy, and plumme­ting investors would find no helpful coil of elastic wrapped around their feet.