哈佛大学会计学 lecture1-4

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Which of those do you think represent the majority of companies in the world? Are there more sole proprietorships? Are there more partnerships? Are there more corporations? Anyone? By far, sole proprietorship. OK. In terms of command of economic resources, which category commands the most economic resources? Corporations! OK? Without a doubt, I mean, again, that's not a question.

So in this course we are going to say everything is a corporation. Corporation has common stock. The two go together. You can't be a corporation without a common stock. You can't have common stock if you are not a corporation. That's how corporations raise money to start out. They issue shares of common stock and people give them money. It's very nice of people. Why do people give them money? So why? Dividends are a necessity? Excuse me? OK. So why do you buy a share of stock of the company? Absolutely. You hope you would get more money back later somehow. Either through dividends or capital appreciation, or a combination or whatever. Sure. So it is not likely to be totally altruistic you. Now we give that money because we hope to get more money back later.

dividend：股息，红利

You can't be a corporation without a common stock. You can't have common stock if you are not a corporation. That's how corporations raise money to start out. 不发行股票则无所谓公司。如果不是公司则不能发行股票。这(发行股票)是公司的融资方式。
You hope you would get more money back later somehow. Either through dividends or capital appreciation, or a combination or whatever.
你希望能得到更多的钱，或者通过分红、或资本增值或它们的组合或者其他。

OK. The last thing under owners ' equity is retained earnings. This one is tough. So we have got common stock, common stock. And we have retained earnings. That's retained earnings. And that's a little bit blind, because a number of things go through there. So the first thing you have to understand is that it's not real. It's absolutely proof. But we talk about it as if it is real. So it's easy to confuse retained earnings with cash. Suppose that you have retained earning of 10 dollars, and coffee Starbucks costs 5 dollars for a Latte or whatever. How many cups of coffee can you buy with the 10 dollars of retained earnings? Not at all, zero, none. And if you don't believe me, try it. Walking to the Starbucks and tell you’ve got 10 dollars of retained earnings to see how many cups of coffee they'll sell you.

retained earnings：未分配利润

在这里，Professor. Hazel Cohen举了一个有趣的例子，用10美元的未分配利润去星巴克买拿铁咖啡，其结果是你根本买不到一杯咖啡。因为未分配利润在现实中并不能使用，只是帐面上所显示的权益，没有实际的购买力，且极容易与现金混淆。