[Economics focus] [2009.09.12] What if? 如果…… What

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Economics focus 经济聚焦 What if? 如果…… Sep 10th 2009 From The Economist print edition If Lehman had not failed, would the crisis have happened anyway? 如果雷曼兄弟没有破产，金融危机还会发生吗？ Illustration by Jac Depczyk IN AUGUST 2008 Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard University economist, briefly rocked world stockmarkets when he warned a conference in Singapore: “We’re not just going to see midsized banks go under in the next few months, we’re going to see a whopper, we’re going to see a big one—one of the big investment banks or big banks.” A month later, in the early hours of September 15th, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. 2008年8月，哈弗大学经济学家肯尼斯•若戈夫在新加坡举行一个会议上发出这样的警告：“在未来几个月中，我们不仅将看到很多中等规模银行走向破产，还将看到大型银行，一家大型投资银行或普通银行走向破产。”这番言论使世界股票市场产生动荡。一个月后，也就是9月15号早晨，雷曼兄弟申请了破产保护。 Harold James, an economic historian at Princeton University, says Lehman’s failure was analogous to the collapse of Creditanstalt, a big Austrian bank, in 1931. Austria and Germany had borrowed heavily from foreign creditors and the bank’s failure rippled around the world, vastly intensifying the Depression. Lehman’s failure is widely seen as a similar turning-point in the current financial crisis: an unexpected blunder that came close to turning a garden-variety recession into another Depression. 普林斯顿大学历史经济学家哈罗德•詹姆斯说，雷曼兄弟的破产跟1931年奥地利联合信贷银行的破产情况相似。奥地利和德国大量举借外债，加之银行破产，使得金融危机扩散至全世界，极大加深了那次经济大萧条。类似地，雷曼兄弟的破产被普遍看做是当前金融危机的转折点：一次意外的破产几乎使一次普通经济萎缩变成一场经济大萧条。 Mr Rogoff has a different view. He believes, as he did the month before Lehman’s collapse, that America had the classic preconditions of a massive financial crisis: trillions of dollars of debt secured by an inexorably deflating asset bubble. Bank write-downs already totalled more than $500 billion in August 2008. If Lehman had not been allowed to fail, some other firm would have, with similar results. 若戈夫对此持不同观点。正如他对雷曼兄弟破产的预测一样，他认为美国已经具备了发生大规模金融危机的先决条件：数以万亿美元由泡沫资产作为担保的债务，而这些资产必将发生通货紧缩。2008年8月，银行资产账面价值减低总额达5000多亿美元。如果雷曼兄弟不允许申请破产，那么也将会有其他银行申请破产，结果都一样。 The week before Lehman failed, futures markets predicted a 15% decline in the prices of homes in major metropolitan markets in America over the next nine months, on top of the 24% decline that had already occurred. Such a drop—which is quite close to what actually occurred—would, when combined with similar declines in commercial-property values, have pushed some big banks to the edge. That same week derivatives markets put the odds of default for Washington Mutual, a large thrift (or savings bank), at 85%. Many of the big financial institutions that received bail-outs in the wake of Lehman’s failure, such as American International Group (AIG) and UBS and Fortis in Europe, would probably have needed one sooner or later anyway. 雷曼兄弟破产前一周，期货市场预计，在未来九个月，美国主要大城市房价将下跌15%，这是在已经下跌24%的基础上继续下跌。这样的下跌，与实际下跌已经非常接近，如果商业用房房价也下跌这么多，那么许多大银行可能已经被推向破产边缘。同一周，衍生品市场宣布其在华盛顿互惠银行的贷款的85%都无力偿还。随着雷曼兄弟的破产，许多金融机构都接受了救助金的银行，如美国国际集团，欧洲的瑞士联合银行集团和富通银行，本来早晚会遭遇破产。 True, from a purely economic point of view, Lehman’s failure created enormous pain. It spawned a panic in the commercial-paper, credit-derivatives and bank-funding markets that dramatically worsened banks’ liquidity. Capital and trade flows collapsed. A vicious spiral of credit withdrawal, weakening growth and debt impairment ensued. In July 2008 the IMF thought the world economy would grow by 3.9% in 2009. It now thinks it will shrink by 1.4%. Moody’s Economy.com forecast in August 2008 that 2.9m first mortgages in America would default in 2009, itself a disastrous figure (less than a million defaulted in 2006). It now expects the tally to hit 3.8m, a result, says Mark Zandi, its chief economist, of a string of policy errors and the resulting financial panic that sapped employment and income. 从纯经济角度看，雷曼兄弟的破产确实导致很大麻烦。这次破产在商业票据市场，信用衍生品市场以及银行基金市场引起一片恐慌，使银行资产流动发生恶化。资本和贸易流通崩溃。随着信用市场的严重下滑停止，经济增长疲软和债务破坏随之而来。2008年7月，国际货币基金组织估计世界经济在2009年将增长%3.9. 而现在却估计将下降1.4%。穆迪经济网2008年8月预计美国2009年将有290万的第一按揭发生弃权，这个数据室灾难性的（2006年该项数据还不到一百万）。网站现在预计该记录将达380万美元，网站经济学家主管马克赞迪说，这是由一系列政策失误及其造成的减少就业率和收入的金融恐慌造成的。 But from a political point of view, it is harder to see how these missteps could have been avoided. When the Treasury and the Federal Reserve bailed out Bear Stearns in March 2008, they drew criticism in Congress and elsewhere for creating moral hazard. At the same time their intervention led other firms, including Lehman, to believe that when push came to shove, they too would be spared. Had Lehman been rescued the criticism would have intensified, as would firms’ expectations of future rescues. Mr Rogoff maintains that at some point political pressures would have required a big firm to go bust. “If you look at financial crises, the standard playbook is to let the fourth or fifth largest bank go under and you save everybody else,” says Mr Rogoff, who bases much of his analysis on extensive research done with Carmen Reinhart of the University of Maryland for a forthcoming book called “This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly” (see article). 但是从政治角度看，更难弄明白怎样避免这些失误。美国财政部和美联储在2008年3月出资援助贝尔斯登的时候，就遭到国会和其他人的反对，认为这样做有道德风险。同时，政府的介入让包括雷曼兄弟在内的其他一些公司相信，遇到困难的时候，他们也能新免于难。如果政府援救雷曼兄弟，将会遭致更多批评，也会增加企业对今后的继续援救抱更多期待。若戈夫坚持认为，从某种角度来看，政治压力会要求一个大公司破产。“看看金融危机，你会发现，标准剧本就是让一家第四或第五大的银行破产，然后再来拯救其他的，”若戈夫的大部分分析都是建立在大量调查基础上的，这份调查是他与马里兰大学的Carmen Reinhart一起为是一本即将出版的书所做的，书名为《这次不一样：八个世纪的荒唐经济》。 Wise after the fact 事后诸葛亮 In retrospect, the economically efficient solution would have been, soon after the Bear Stearns rescue, to propose a comprehensive, publicly financed recapitalisation of the banking system while creating a more orderly mechanism for winding up failed institutions (officials still claim they did not have the legal authority to save Lehman). The Treasury and the Fed drew up plans to do just that but worried that Congress would reject them. With good reason: history shows that bank bail-outs are intensely unpopular. Japan’s government dragged its feet on recapitalising its banks in the 1990s because its initial aid provoked such outrage. Some American economists who used to carp at Japan’s failings are more sympathetic now. “It is easier to be for more radical solutions when one lives thousands of miles away than when it is one’s own country,” Larry Summers, Barack Obama’s economic adviser, told the Financial Times earlier this year. 回过头来看，既经济又高效的解决方法，本应该是在援救贝尔斯登后，马上提出一个通过公共筹资对银行系统进行综合资本调整的方案，同时建立一个秩序更好的机制来结束破产的公司（政府官员仍然声称他们没有合法权利救援雷曼兄弟）。财政部和美联储正是起早了这样的计划，但是担心国会会反对。他们的担心是原因的：历史表明，银行救援计划非常不受欢迎。20世界90年代，日本政府在银行资本调整上就拖拖拉拉，因为其初始救援引起了这样的愤怒。一些曾经不停抱怨日本的失败的美国经济学家，如今更多的是赞同。奥巴马的经济顾问Larry Summers今年初告诉金融时报：“当事情不是发生在千里之外的国家，而是发生在自己国家时，人们更容易接受更加理性的解决办法。” If Mr Rogoff is right and more failures were inevitable, then Lehman’s collapse, though painful, may have been necessary. History suggests that systemic banking crises are usually resolved with large injections of public capital. Lehman’s failure galvanised policymakers. Only when faced with the post-Lehman, post-AIG chaos did Congress pass the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Programme (and even then, after an initial rejection). Other rich-country governments also moved to guarantee bank debts, raise deposit insurance and inject capital into their banks. 如果若戈夫估计正确的话，那么将会有更多的破产不可避免，而雷曼兄弟的破产虽然痛，但也许是必要的。历史表明，系统的银行业危机通常通过注入大量公共资本来解决。雷曼的破产刺激了制定政策的人。只有在面对后雷曼，后AIG混乱的时候，国会才会通过7000亿美元的不良资产救援计划（即使是这样，也是在第一次法案被拒绝之后）。其他发达国家政府也开始行动，担保银行债务，增加存款保险，向银行注入资金。 Mr James notes that when Creditanstalt went under in 1931, political tensions hampered international co-operation. The international response to Lehman’s collapse, reflecting in part the lessons of the 1930s, was much more effective—as exemplified by the Treasury’s willingness to bail out AIG, even though many of the main beneficiaries were European. Mr Rogoff concedes that if the Federal Reserve and Treasury had made flawless decisions unhindered by politics, the outcome would have been happier. But, he says, “it wasn’t humanly possible.” Lehman’s collapse may even have hastened the ultimate resolution of the crisis. 詹姆斯注意到，在奥地利联合信贷银行于1931年破产的时候，政治局势的紧张阻碍的国际间合作。国际上对于雷曼破产的反应，部分反映了国际上吸取了30年代的教训，更加有效—财政部愿意救助AIG就是一个很好的例子，尽管许多受益者都是欧洲的。若戈夫承认，如果美联储和财政部作出的决定完美无瑕，也没有遭遇政治障碍，结果会更好。但是，他说：“人是不可能不犯错的。”雷曼兄弟的破产可能加快了解决危机的杀手锏的出现。

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红字部分为很不确定的部分~~~请大家多多指教~~~

蓝冰

1 classic preconditions
典型先决条件
2 prices of homes
住宅价格
3 odds of default
违约概率
大意：85%的概率违约
4 A vicious spiral of credit withdrawal,
信贷退出的恶性循环
5 push came to shove
在最关键的时候，事态严重时

HanYU

拜读LZ的大作，有几点和老兄交流一下：

1、第一段的“briefly rocked worldstockmarkets when he warned a conference in Singapore”

貌似漏了这个词儿

2、第一段的“一家大型投资银行或普通银行走向破产”

个人感觉这两个字没必要，严格来说，投行不能算是银行

3、第二段的“普林斯顿大学历史经济学家哈罗德•詹姆斯说”

是经济史学家吧？

4、第三段的“而 这些资产必将发生通货紧缩”

资产和通货紧缩的关系应该不是通吧？这里的大概意思是：这些资产价值必将缩水

5、第三段的“银行资产账面价值减低总额达5000多亿美元”

是所谓的“减值准备”吧？

6、第四段的“thrift (or savings bank),”

貌似没翻出来

7、第四段的“许多金融机构都接受了救助金的银行”

没看明白，貌似不通？

8、第五段的“使银行资产流动发生恶化”

Liquidity是流动性的意思吧？

9、第五段的“国际货币基金组织估计世界经济在2009年将增长%3.9”

这个表示方法有点儿意思

10、第五段的“，这个数据室灾难性的”

貌似不对吧

11、第五段的“网站现在预计该记录将达380万美元”

有“美元”二字么？

12、第六段的“他们也能新免于难”

好像是错字

13、第七段的“财政部和美联储正是起早了这样的计划”

貌似不对吧

14、第七段的“奥巴马的经济顾问LarrySummers今年初告诉金融时报”

貌似这哥们还是挺有名的，流传奥巴马还想让他当美联储主席呢，怎么没翻哦？

15、第七段的“人们更容易接受更加理性的解决办法”

貌似文中的词是radical

16、第九段的“政治局势的紧张阻碍的国际间合作”

是“了”吧？

有提的不正确的地儿，请LZ海涵及指正