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【五月信念】经典双语杂志区— 道德与投资（5）完 20080510

字体: 小中大 | 打印发表于: 2008-5-10 12:01 作者: 我爱英语来源: 恒星英语论坛

【五月信念】经典双语杂志区— 道德与投资（5） 20080510

Investing in Vices——道德与投资（5）

(发的是英文,大家回复后就可看到中文翻译了,认真看哦!)"

The Gambling Vice

[17] Anita Green, the director of social research at Pax World Fund, the third-largest social responsibility mutual fund, recently referred to gambling as "a vice that inflicts crushing social costs on American society". Noting that seven of the largest 20 mutual funds in the U . S. hold one or more gambling stocks, she suggests that investors pick a fund that has sworn to avoid them--namely, her own.

[18] Gambling, which Green opposes so strongly, is to me a pleasurable activity. I go to the racetrack, watch the pageantry of the horses, jockeys and silks, and enjoy the spectacle more because I have a $ 2 or $ bet on the outcome. I enjoy spending a day or two in Las Vegas or Atlantic City. But I go only once every year or two, and set myself a limit of $ 50 or $ 100 a day. When that's gone, I walk around and see the sights.

[19] For better or worse, it appears that America is still moving in the direction of more gambling. So I think that casino and lottery stocks--issues like Scientific Games Holdings Corp., Mirage Resorts Inc. and Mandalay Resort Group--are good bets.

[20] The impulse to invest ethically is praiseworthy, but I'm skeptical of "one size fits all" approaches to it. And I think anyone attempting to invest ethically should have respect for the complexity and difficulty of the task
Gap's problem

[21] For example, Pax World Fund, based in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, says it invests only in companies "that treat their employees, their environment, and their communities with respect". I'm sure it makes every effort to do so, but in an imperfect world, these decisions get mighty tricky.

[22] Pax World's largest stockholding is Gap Inc. Friday, Gap (along with some other retailers) lost in its attempt to dismiss a lawsuit accusing it of selling clothes made under sweatshop conditions in the U.S. territory of Saipan. In August, four other defendants in that suit, including Nordstrom Inc. and J. Crew Group Inc., agreed to settle the claims against them by establishing a $ 1.25 million fund to monitor working conditions of their Saipan workplaces.

[23] None of this necessarily means that Gap is a bad company, or culpable in the Saipan case. But it does illustrate the difficulty in making ethical investing decisions.

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