马斯克天下无敌？ | 经济学人财经

Finance and economics | Free exchange

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英文部分选自经济学人20230812财经版块

Finance and economics | Free exchange

财经板块

Elon Musk’s plans could hinder Twitternomics

埃隆·马斯克的如意算盘或将阻碍推特经济学

The site now known as X is extremely helpful to researchers

现已更名为X的推特网站对研究人员大有裨益

Elon musk is no fan of the Federal Reserve. At least a dozen times over the past year the owner of X (a firm until recently known as Twitter) has savaged America’s central bank for raising interest rates. Last December, for instance, he tweeted that its hikes might go down as the “most damaging ever”. But Mr Musk’s disdain for the Fed is not mirrored by the Fed’s attitude towards X. On the contrary, the central bank’s researchers rather like the website, treating it as a compelling barometer of the economy.

埃隆·马斯克绝非美联储的拥趸。这位X公司（此前名为推特）的老板在过去一年曾三番五次地猛烈抨击美国央行加息。比如，去年12月，他曾发帖称，美联储的加息或将成为有史以来“最具破坏力的”。然而，尽管马斯克对美联储充满鄙夷，美联储对X公司的态度却截然相反。美国央行的研究人员颇为喜欢X网站，并将其当作预测经济的可靠“晴雨表”。

注释：

1.Savage v./adj./n.

做动词时：to criticize someone or something very severely 猛烈抨击、炮轰

if an animal such as a dog savages someone, it attacks them and injures them badly 攻击、撕咬

2.Go down: to be recorded or remembered in a particular way 以特殊的方式被纪录、铭记

3.Disdain: Vt./n. If you feel disdain for someone or something, you dislike them because you think that they are inferior or unimportant 蔑视、鄙视

4.Mirror: Vt. If something mirrors something else, it has similar features to it, and therefore seems like a copy or representation of it 反映

This puts X in a peculiar position. Its value as a business remains dubious, which is why Mr Musk has been scrambling to remake it, with changes including (but not limited to) the company’s name. But its value to the economy is a different story altogether. The firm can serve as a timely indicator of both fundamental trends and market sentiment.

如此一来，X网站的地位变得颇为特殊。其商业价值令人心存疑虑，这也是马斯克急于重塑品牌的原因，他推出了一系列变革措施，包括（但不限于）变更公司名称。尽管如此，X网站对美国经济的价值完全是另一回事，其不仅能够及时反映基本经济趋势，也可以及时反映市场情绪。

注释：

1.Dubious： sth不可信、不可靠；sb be dubious about 某人对某事有疑虑

2.Scramble: to try to do something difficult very quickly; 急于完成某件很难完成的事；~ to do/for sth 争夺、抢夺

3.Market sentiment: 市场情绪，经济学术语，指所有市场参与人士观点的综合展现

There is a large, growing literature on how to decode economic signals from social-media sites, ranging from Facebook to Reddit. Yet even in the sea of online information and commentary, Mr Musk’s stands out. Others simply cannot match its volume and frequency. By 2013 Twitter users were already producing more than 5,700 posts in a second. By 2016 Instagram’s larger user base was producing only 1,000. Three papers recently published by the Fed explore the platform’s economic contributions.

从Facebook到Reddit，关于如何根据社交媒体网站解读经济信号的文章数量庞大，且仍在不断涌现。但在海量的在线信息和评论中，马斯克的X平台脱颖而出，因为无论是发文数量还是频率，该平台都无人能敌。截至2013年，推特用户每秒发布超过5700篇推文。2016年，虽然Instagram用户群体已超过Twitter，每秒也仅有1000条新增内容。最近，美联储发表了三篇文章，研究推特的经济贡献。

The first is as a predictor of markets. Sentiment gleaned from tweets seems to be rather good at presaging short-term movements in both share prices and bond yields. In one paper a group of economists including Francisco Vazquez-Grande sifted 4.4m finance-related tweets posted between 2007 and April 2023 to create a Twitter Financial Sentiment Index. They used a machine-learning model to measure each tweet’s sentiments: a message about stocks going to the Moon would be positive; Mr Musk’s quips about the Fed would presumably count as negative.

第一个用途是预测市场。从推文中提取的情绪信息似乎能有效预测股价和债券收益率的短期波动。弗朗西斯科·瓦斯克斯-格兰德（Francisco Vazquez-Grande）等经济学家在一篇文章中筛选了2007年至2023年4月间发布的与金融相关的440万条推文，创建了“推特金融情绪指数”。他们利用机器学习模型衡量每条推文的情绪，比如：“股指起飞，直奔月球”的推文算是积极信息；马斯克打趣美联储则算是消极信息。

注释：

1.Glean: to collect or gather gradually and bit by bit; to extract or obtain information or data with effort or diligence 搜集

2.Presage: to be a sign that something is going to happen, especially something bad 预示

3.sift: examined and sorted carefully 筛选

4.go to the moon: (of a stock or cryptocurrency) to rise rapidly in value.激增

5.Twitter Financial Sentiment Index：推特金融情绪指数 文章链接： https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2023034pap.pdf 

The index, they find, correlates tightly with corporate-bond spreads (the difference between yields on corporate and government bonds, which usually widens as investors turn pessimistic). More than merely shadowing financial movements, posts can even foreshadow them. The overnight index before the stockmarket’s open dovetails with the coming day’s equity returns. A separate paper by Clara Vega and colleagues finds that the website’s sentiment also closely tracks Treasury yields. Indeed, the correlation is stronger with tweets than with sentiment measures gleaned from the Fed’s own official communications.

他们发现，该指数与公司债券利差（公司债券和政府债券的收益率之差，通常随着投资者变得悲观而扩大）紧密相关。推文不仅可以跟踪，甚至还可以预测金融走势。股市开盘前的隔夜推特金融情绪指数与第二天的股票回报率高度吻合。克拉拉·维加（Clara Vega）及其同事的另一篇论文表明，推特上人们的情绪也和国债收益率密切相关。实际上，这一数据比从美联储官方通讯中收集的情绪得出的相关度更高。

A second use of tweets is as a gauge of economic conditions. Posts about job losses in particular seem to offer timely information about the labour market. Tomaz Cajner and co-authors construct a separate machine-learning model to digest posts with keywords such as “lost job” or “pink slip”. Their measure of job losses mirrors official data on employment levels from 2015 to 2023. This correlation is potentially powerful because most government statistics appear with a lag, whereas the tweets are available immediately. Twitter, for example, would have provided a ten-day advantage in detecting the collapse in employment at the height of the covid-19 pandemic in 2020.

推文的第二个用途是衡量经济状况。尤其是关于失业的帖子似乎能及时反应劳动力市场的相关信息。托马斯·卡杰纳 （Tomaz Cajner）及其合著者构建了另一个机器学习模型，分析带有“失业”或“解雇通知书”等关键词的帖子，在其研究的2015-2023区间，以此方法分析的失业数据与官方数据高度吻合。这种相关性有望发挥大作用，因为大多数政府统计数据有滞后性，而推文具有即时性。例如，2020年疫情最严峻的时候，借助推特本可以提前10天预测就业市场崩溃。

注释：

pink slip:(北美，非正式)解雇通知（a notice of dismissal from employment）

The Fed papers also see a third use for tweets: as a bellwether of sorts for monetary policy. Ms Vega and colleagues find that the social-media site fares better than changes in bond yields in predicting monetary-policy decisions on the day of their announcement. The Twitter sentiment index, meanwhile, is good at anticipating shocks from tighter policy such as rate increases. Tweets tend to turn sour just ahead of these moves. (That the website wastes no time in turning bitter will come as little surprise to regular users.)

美联储的研究还发现了推文的第三种用途：多多少少称得上是货币政策的“风向标”。维加女士及其同事发现，在货币政策公布当天，推特这家社交媒体网站甚至比债券收益率波动更能准确预测货币政策的走向。同时，推特情绪指数也善于预测加息等紧缩性政策带来的冲击。往往在政策收紧前，推特上的负面情绪就已经弥散开来。（在这个网站上，用户情绪突然急转直下，这对老用户不是啥新鲜事）。

注释：

1.fare: v. if you say that someone or something fares well or badly, you are referring to the degree of success they achieve in a particular situation or activity. (Collins Dictionary)

2.克拉拉·维加等人研究了FOMC公告期间美联储官方声明、新闻媒体报道和推特帖子这三种不同来源的文本对货币政策的情绪。联邦公开市场委员会（FOMC）每年举办8次会议，即常说的美联储“议息会议”，每次持续2天，并将在结束日东部时间下午2点发布政策声明。

参考资料：

Fed Communication, News, Twitter, and Echo Chambers

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4458545

When Is the Next Fed Meeting?

https://www.kiplinger.com/investing/when-is-the-next-fed-meeting

No one is about to ascribe powers of causation to X. The social-media posts instead reflect broader feelings that are already coursing through financial markets. Still, the cornucopia of tweets does provide an additional way of measuring such sentiment, which, if proved valid over time, would be highly valuable.

我们不能就此认为是推文情绪左右了市场动向。相反，社交媒体的发帖反映出金融市场已弥漫的普遍情绪。不过，大量的推文确实为衡量市场情绪提供了一种额外方法，如果随着时间的推移这一方法被证明有效，那将会有极高的价值。

注释：

cornucopia:源自希腊神话，丰饶之角，象征丰富和富饶的角形容器，如今用来表示大量的东西。

Beyond the Fed, some analysts are also finding other potential applications. Agustín Indaco of Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar calculates that the volume of tweeting alone can account for about three-quarters of cross-country variation in gdp. Rather like satellite images of night lights, tweets may therefore be a way of observing economic health without relying so heavily on tardy official statistics. This metric may work best in poorer countries, where heavy posting on social media would be a proxy for the state of telecommunications and use of smartphones.

除了美联储，还有分析师发现了（推特的）其他潜在用处。根据卡内基·梅隆大学卡塔尔分校（Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar）的奥古斯丁·因达科（Agustín Indaco）教授计算，仅推文的数量就能解释大约75%的国家间国内生产总值（GDP）的差异。因此，推文就像夜间灯光卫星图一样，可以作为一种观察经济健康状况的方法，而不必过于依赖滞后的官方数据。因达科的评估指标在贫困国家可能最有效，因为在这些国家，在社交媒体上大量发帖可以代表电信状况和智能手机的使用情况。

注释：拓展资料，因达科的论文

From twitter to GDP: Estimating economic activity from social media

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344845418_From_twitter_to_GDP_Estimating_economic_activity_from_social_media

Marking the spot

做好标记

If X is so economically useful, why is it not more lucrative? The various papers do not venture so far as to examine the gulf between Twitter’s struggle for profitability and its evident utility—not just as an economic tool but as a platform for sharing information, opinions, jokes and more. Mr Musk was onto something when he described the firm as a “common digital town square”. The problem in economic terms is that a town square falls into the category of public goods such as parks and clean water. Although public goods can be privately owned, it is notoriously hard to extract profits from them given that, by definition, it is difficult to charge people for all the benefits they confer.

如果X网站在经济上如此有用，为何它没能创造更多利润呢？各类文章都没有深入探讨推特的盈利不佳和其显而易见的功能性（它不仅仅是一个经济工具，更是一个分享信息、观点、笑话等内容的平台）之间的鸿沟。当马斯克将公司描述为“大众的数字市镇广场”时，他说到点子上了。从经济角度来看，问题在于市镇广场属于公共产品的范畴，如公园和净水。尽管公共产品可以私有化，但是由于公共产品的（非排他性）本质，对其效用进行收费可谓难于登天。

注释：

1.Mark the spot 此梗在化用X marks the spot的固定表达，可联想《阿里巴巴与四十大盗》中的故事情节。例句：

Idrew an elaborate treasure map for my daughter's birthday, with X marking the spot where I've hidden her presents.

2. lucrative：A lucrative activity, job, or business deal is very profitable. 获利丰厚的

3. notoriously：众所周知地，声名狼藉地

Mr Musk is doing his darnedest to shift the economic equation at X by giving additional privileges to users who pay $8 a month for the site’s blue-check verification. Tweets by users who cough up now receive extra promotion, among other benefits, showing up more often in the feeds of other people on the website. That, however, sets up a trade-off. Paid-for tweets may start crowding out better-informed posts from users who would rather not subscribe to the website. Over time, a website that prioritises payment over credibility will function less well as a town square and, by extension, as an economic indicator. The gain to X’s finances would be a loss to the Fed’s economists.

马斯克先生正在尽最大的努力转换X网站的盈利模式，他推出了每月支付8美元的蓝标认证服务。认证用户享有额外特权，这其中就包括更多的推文推广——他们的推文会更频繁地出现在网站其他人的推送中。然而，这其中存在权衡利弊。付费推文可能会开始挤出那些不愿付费用户发布的更优质推文。随着时间的推移，一个将付费置于可信度之上的网站，其作为市镇广场的功能将大打折扣，进而影响其经济风向标的作用。这厢X网站财务受益，那厢美联储经济学家却很受伤。

注释：

1.do one’s darnedest：If you say that you will do your damnedest to achieve something, you mean that you willtry as hard as you can to do it, even though you think that it will take a lot of effort.

2. cough up：If youcough up an amount of money, you pay or spend that amount, usually when you would prefer not to. 勉强支付

3. trade-off：Atrade-off is a situation where you make a compromise between two things, or where you exchange all or part of one thing for another. 妥协; 交换

4.crowd out：排挤：指在竞争中使其他人或事物无法获得足够的空间、资源或注意力。