What Do Banks Do?
Some people want to save and invest; others want to borrow. Sometimes, these people – they interact directly – say, you borrow money from your parents. But typically, savers and borrowers – they don’t even know one another. So a variety of institutions act as bridges to link savers to borrowers. In this video, we’ll cover banks.
一些人想要存钱以及投资，另一些人想要借钱。有时候这些人他们直接地互动，比方说你向你的父母借钱。但是典型的存钱的人和借款的人，他们彼此并不认识。因此大量的机构充当着接连存钱人和借钱人之间的桥梁。在这个视频里，我们将会谈论到银行。
Banks attract savings from many different depositors by paying interest on deposits. And the banks make loans for which they charge interest. Banks earn a profit by charging a higher interest rate on the money that they lend than they pay on the deposits that they receive. They earn this money by being a valuable middleman.
银行通过支付存款利息来吸引来自不同储户的存款。银行通过贷款来收取利息。银行通过向它们借出的钱收取比支付给收到的存款更高的利率来赚取利润。他们作为有价值的中间商来盈利。
Not only do the banks link savers with borrowers, they evaluate the quality of the borrowers, so that the loans are productive. Imagine that Howard Schultz came looking for a loan of a million dollars to buy a coffee company called Starbucks and transform it into something new. Now maybe you’re rich and you can afford to lend him all the money. But if his venture failed and he couldn’t repay the loan, it’s going to be a pretty big hit on your wallet. So instead, perhaps you and 99 of your friends decide to share the risk, and you each lend him $10,000.
银行不仅将储户和借款者联系起来，而且他们评估借款者的质量（能力），使得这些借贷是多产的有活力的。想象一下：Howard Schultz在寻求100万美元的贷款来买下叫星巴克的咖啡公司，然后使它转变成一个新的事物。现在，你是富裕的而且你能够把钱借给他。但是如果他的事业失败了，他也偿还不了贷款，这对你来说将会是一场资金方面的打击。因此，取而代之的是：你以及你99个朋友决定承担这个奉献，你们每一个人借给他一万美元。
Well, it would be extremely time-consuming and costly for all 100 of you to investigate the Starbucks business plan and decide whether to lend your $10,000. It would make more sense to appoint a single person to do the due diligence to evaluate the business on behalf of everyone. And maybe you’d appoint someone who already was an expert in, say, the market for coffee. That’s exactly what a bank does. It coordinates the lending of everyone’s deposits, and a bank has specialized people and systems to evaluate loan applications. The bank scans the landscape, looking for the most qualified businesses and individuals to receive loans.
然而，让你们每一个人都去调查星巴克的商业计划然后决定是否借出你的一万美元，这将会变得极其耗费时间和成本。任命一个人来代表所有人去尽责地评估其商业更加地说得通。也许你可能找到了一个专家，也就是精通咖啡的市场。那刚好是银行所要做的事情。它协调每个人的存款，而且银行有专门的人员和系统来评估贷款的申请。银行环视了整个行业，寻找最有资格获得贷款的企业和个人。
By pooling the savings of many different individuals, the bank can make large loans, and also spread the risk across a whole portfolio of loans. That means that even if a few loans go bad, it won’t bankrupt the bank. So instead of one person lending Schultz a million dollars, it’s more like a 100,000 people lending Schultz $10 each, and also lending a similar amount to thousands of other entrepreneurs.
通过汇集不同个体的资金，银行能够发行大额的贷款并且将风险分散到整个贷款组合中。这意味着即使一部分的贷款变得糟糕了，这也不会让银行破产。因此，不是一个人借给舒尔茨100万美元，而是10万人每人借给舒尔茨10美元，而且借给其他数千名企业家的数额也差不多。
Notice that since deposits are being lent out, that means that your savings doesn’t just sit in the vault waiting for the day that you want to make a withdrawal. Bank managers pay careful attention to reserve enough cash on hand to fund those depositors that do come calling, while lending out the rest of the deposits to make productive loans.
请注意，由于存款被借出，这意味着你的存款并不只是坐在保险库里等待被你取款的那一天。银行经理们非常注意，在把剩余的存款用于生产贷款的同时，手头要储备足够的现金，为那些确实来电话的储户提供资金。
The cash that banks keep on hand – that’s called reserves, and as we’ll see in a later video, things can fall apart pretty quickly if banks don’t have enough reserves to pay back depositors when they do come calling.
银行持有的现金叫做准备金，我们在后面的视频中会看到，如果银行没有足够的准备金来偿还储户的存款，情况会很快崩溃。
So, let’s sum up. Banks provide valuable middleman services to make our lives simpler. We deposit money in the bank, and we earn interest without having to worry very much about risk, and without having to give much thought to how our savings are flowing into productive loans and helping to boost economic growth throughout the economy.
所以让我们总结一下。银行提供有价值的中介服务让我们的生活更加简单。我们把钱存在银行并且获得利息，不用担心太多的风险，也不用考虑太多我们的储蓄是如何流入生产性贷款的以及是如何促进整个经济的增长的。
Next up, we’ll turn to another financial intermediary: stock markets. And we’ll explain how stock markets turn savings into investment.
接下来我们将会转向另外一个金融中介：股票市场。我们会解释股票市场是怎样将存款转变为投资的。