新兴市场面临债务风险 Debt burdens weigh on the emerging markets

Warren Buffett’s magisterial dictum about the aftermath of financial booms has now become conventional wisdom: only when the tide has receded can you see who has been swimming naked.

沃伦巴菲特(Warren Buffett)有关金融热潮后果的权威名言现在已经变成了普遍看法：只有当潮水退去，你才能看到谁在裸泳。

In the case of emerging market countries who have spent years wallowing in cheap money, however, the issue is complicated by the changing identity of the bathers in the water.

然而，就多年来一直享受着廉价资金的新兴市场国家而言，这个问题因为游泳者身份的变化而变得复杂。

Traditional debt busts in emerging markets, from the Latin American crisis of the 1980s to the Asian financial turmoil of the late 1990s, generally used to be centred on sovereign bonds, usually contracted in dollars and often linked to the collapse of a currency peg. But the build-up of debt in emerging markets over the past decade has been disproportionately concentrated in the corporate sector , often in local currency. Total private sector debt in emerging markets is now equal to more than 100 per cent of annual gross domestic product, higher even than it was in developed economies on the brink of the global financial crisis in 2008.

从上世纪80年代的拉美危机到90年代后期的亚洲金融危机，传统上新兴市场的债务危机基本集中于通常以美元计价的主权债务，并且往往与盯住汇率制的崩溃有关。但过去10年，新兴市场的债务积累过多集中在企业部门，且通常是本币债务。新兴市场私人部门的债务总额现在已经超过了年度国内生产总值(GDP)的100%，甚至比处于2008年全球金融危机边缘时的发达经济体还高。

In fact the problem may be even bigger, given that data on private sector emerging market debt are imperfect. Some of the cheap money created by the US Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing that found its way to emerging markets came via the “shadow banking” system, where flows are harder to record. Many emerging markets have also borrowed from China’s opaque development banks to a substantial but unknown degree.

事实上，考虑到新兴市场私人部门的债务数据并不完备，问题可能更为严重。一些由美联储(Fed)量化宽松计划创造并进入新兴市场的廉价资金是通过影子银行体系流入的，这种资金流动更难记录。许多新兴市场还从中国不透明的发展银行借入数量庞大但数额不明的资金。

The classic emerging market crisis ends with a sudden shock and a severe economic adjustment — often including a debt writedown — that clears the way for countries to grow again. The risk today, particularly in countries such as China with deep-pocketed governments, is of a different denouement: a series of partial short-term fixes via state interventions such as bailouts and regulatory forbearance to keep the show on the road. This risks the kind of prolonged malaise that afflicted Japan after the bursting of the 1980s bubble: banks weakened by bad loans clogging up their balance sheets; failing companies kept afloat; excess industrial capacity creating gluts and threatening chronic deflation.

新兴市场的危机一般以突然的强烈冲击和严重的经济调整收尾——通常包括债务减记——这为国家的再次增长扫清了道路。现在，尤其是在中国等政府财力雄厚的国家，债务风险的结局与过去不同：政府通过纾困和监管上的宽容等国家干预手段进行一系列短期部分修正，以保证经济的继续运行。这样的做法可能会导致日本在上世纪80年代泡沫破裂后遭遇的那种长期经济不振：银行因为资产负债表中充斥的不良贷款而被削弱；濒临破产的企业苟延残喘；过剩的工业产能导致过量供应并带来长期通缩的威胁。

It is easy to see why the Chinese and other authorities might prefer avoiding the debt nettle to grasping it. Although falling short of the official growth target would undoubtedly weaken Beijing’s credibility, a full-blown debt crisis and recession, with swaths of banks and companies going bust, would have more severe political consequences.

很容易看出为何中国和其他一些国家的当局更宁愿避开债务问题，而非进行果断处理。虽然达不到官方增长目标无疑会削弱中国政府的信誉，但全面爆发的债务危机和衰退，以及银行和企业大批破产，会带来更为严重的政治后果。

It is already evident from China’s management of its exchange rate — and more generally its painful transition from an export-oriented manufacturing model to a domestic demand-driven service economy — that Beijing has a habit of trying to make large moves in a series of small steps, reversing them to avoid short-term dislocations. It would hardly be a surprise if that mode of behaviour were to emerge again in the face of a debt crunch. If it did, long-term growth prospects for China and emerging markets as a whole would suffer.

中国对汇率的管理，以及更大范围内由出口导向型制造业经济模式向国内需求拉动的服务业经济模式的艰难转型，明显表明中国政府习惯将大动作分解为一连串的小步子，有时还通过撤消动作以避免短期经济扰乱。在债务危机面前，中国如果再次采用这种行为模式也算不上什么意外。如果事实的确如此，中国和新兴市场整体的长期增长前景将会变得更为黯淡。

The euphoria surrounding emerging markets as an asset class started before the global financial crisis and was rapidly resurrected afterwards. That excessive enthusiasm has now, fortunately, very largely dissipated. But it was in place long enough to create a misallocation of capital that could take several years and many billions of dollars of losses to sort out.

对作为一个资产类别的新兴市场的狂热始于全球金融危机之前，并在危机后快速卷土重来。幸运的是，这种过度热情现在大体上已经消散。但这种狂热持续了较长时间，其造成的资本错配可能需要花上几年的时间和数十亿美元的损失才能厘清。

Many emerging market policymakers have a difficult and uncertain future. They can start by recognising that they are facing a potentially very serious problem. The easy good times have gone; the hard work lies ahead.

许多新兴市场政策制定者都面临着艰难和不确定的未来。他们可以从认清自己正面临一个可能十分严重的问题开始。轻松的好日子结束了；等待着他们的是艰苦的工作。