经济学人下载:科技股:重获信息泡沫时代高点(1)

Finance and Economics
财经

Buttonwood: Hope rebooted
梧桐树专栏：重燃希望

Tech stocks have regained their dotcom-era highs.
科技股已经重获了信息泡沫时代的高点。

Cast your mind back to when Bill Clinton was president, Tony Blair and Vladimir Putin were fresh-faced new leaders and tweeting was strictly for the birds.
回想一下克林顿当美国总统，布莱尔和普京还是稚嫩的新领导人，tweeting只是用来形容鸟儿叫声的词语的时代。

That was when technology stocks, as measured by the S&P 500 tech index, last traded at their current levels.
以标准普尔500指数来计算，那时候的科技股交易量和现在差不多。

The horrendous decline in share prices that followed the peak in 2000 was the first financial calamity of this millennium.
新世纪的第一次经济灾难是2000年股票价格从顶点疯狂下跌。

The dotcom crash had much less impact on the broader economy than the mortgage and banking crisis of 2007-08.
互联网股票市场的崩溃对整个经济的影响远没有像2007-08年房贷款和银行业危机对经济造成的影响严重。

Nevertheless, the tech revival has caused some twitchiness among investors.
然而，科技复兴还是引起一些投资者的警惕。

Might history be repeating itself?
那么历史还会重演吗？

In the intervening years the world, and the tech industry, have changed a lot.
在这些年间，世界和科技行业都发生了很大的变化。

In the late 1990s enthusiasm for tech shares was so great that the sector's market value rose far faster than its earnings.
二十世纪90年代，人们对科技股的投资热情空前高涨，以至于科技股的行业市值远远超过了它带来的收益。

The gap is nothing like as great today.
今天两者差距远没有当时那么大。

Back then, leading firms like Microsoft and Oracle were valued at more than 20 times their annual revenues, let alone earnings.
当时，像微软和甲骨文这些主要的公司市值被估算为其年收入的20倍以上，更不用说它的利润了。

This time around, with the exception of Facebook, price-to-revenue ratios are much less stretched.
而现在除了Facebook，股价收入比率并不是很大。

What boosted tech businesses in the late 1990s was that everyone was discovering the internet at the same time.
二十世纪90年代末期促进高科技企业发展的原因是当时所有人都在探索互联网。

Both companies and consumers were buying computers and associated items like modems.
公司和消费者都在买电脑和如调节调制器这样的关联件。

That led to rapid revenue growth.
这就导致收入的快速增长。

But the sudden enthusiasm for tech was also its greatest weakness; every college graduate seemed to have a plan to start a dotcom company.
但是对科技的突然热情也是最大的弱点；每一个大学毕业生都计划开一家网络公司。

The market became overcrowded.
市场变得异常拥挤。

Investors struggled to tell the long-term winners from the losers.
投资人也在努力辨别长期的赢家和输家。