聪明人搞砸金融 The clever marketeers who crashed the economy

When I was a schoolboy in Edinburgh in the 1960s, the head office of the Bank of Scotland was an imposing building on the Mound, the street that leads from Princes Street to Edinburgh Castle and the Royal Mile. The Royal Bank of Scotland, its arch-rival, occupied Dundas House, the finest property in the city’s Georgian New Town.

上世纪60年代我还是爱丁堡一名小男生的时候，苏格兰银行(Bank of Scotland)总部大楼坐落于Mound（从普林西斯街延伸至爱丁堡城堡和皇家英里大道的街道），气势宏伟。其主要竞争对手苏格兰皇家银行(Royal Bank of Scotland)则坐落于登打士大厦，是苏格兰乔治亚新城区最精美的建筑物。

Banking was then a career for those who did not quite make the grades required by the good universities. If they joined either of these two institutions, they might with diligence become branch managers after 20 years. The bank manager was a community figure who would base his (they were all men) lending decisions as much on his local knowledge and the character of the borrower as on figures. He expected to spend his career at the bank and retire with a generous pension to spend more time on the golf links where he had schmoozed his clients. It never crossed his mind, or those of his customers, that the bank he had joined would not continue forever in broadly its existing form.

那时，银行业是那些进不了好大学的年轻人所从事的职业。如果他们加入这两家银行中的任何一家，勤勤恳恳地干上20年，就有望当上分行行长。银行经理是社区人物，他（他们全都是男的）的放贷决定不仅取决于数字，还取决于他对当地的了解和借款人的品性。他预计在这家银行干上一辈子，然后拿上丰厚的养老金退休，在他从前招待客户的高尔夫球场花上更多时间。他或者他的客户从未想过，他加入的银行将不会一成不变地永远存续。

By the time both banks failed in 2008, the financial world had changed beyond recognition. The causes included globalisation, deregulation, technological and product innovation and new ideologies, as well as shifts in social and cultural norms.

到2008年这两家银行都濒临倒闭的时候，金融世界已经面目全非。它们陷入困境的原因包括全球化、放松管制、技术和产品创新以及新思想，同时还有社会和文化规则的转变。

Lawrence Summers (the former US Treasury secretary who experienced the transformation variously as academic, politician, university administrator and would-be central banker) described it thus: “In the last 30 years the field of investment banking had been transformed from a field that was dominated by people who were good at meeting clients at the 19th hole, to people who were good at solving very difficult mathematical problems that were involved in pricing derivative securities.” Professor Summers reported this shift with evident approval.

美国前财长劳伦斯萨默斯(Lawrence Summers)以不同的身份（学者、政客、大学管理人员，以及央行行长候选人）经历了这一转变。他这样描述道：“在过去30年里，投资银行领域发生了巨大变化，从由擅长在第19洞（标准的高尔夫只有18洞，第19洞指的是球场的酒吧或餐厅，球手们进行社交活动的地方——译者注）与客户会晤的人主导，转向由擅长解决衍生品定价中的艰深数学问题的人主导。”萨默斯明显赞同这种转变。

Yet these cleverer people managed things much less well than had their less intellectually distinguished predecessors. They were rarely as clever as they thought they were — or sufficiently clever to handle the complexities of the environment they had created.

然而，这些更聪明的人在管理方面远远不如才智并不出众的前辈。他们很少像自己认为的那么聪明，至少没有聪明到能够解决他们所制造的环境的复杂性。

The growth in the size of the financial sector, the explosion of remuneration and the changes in the nature of financial activity were not to any large degree driven by changes in the needs of the non-commercial economy for financial services. These needs — the operation of the payments utility, the management of personal wealth across lifetimes and between generations, the allocation of capital between different forms of productive investment, and the pooling of risks — have changed very little.

金融业规模增长、薪资爆炸式增长以及金融活动本质的改变，在很大程度上并非是受到非金融经济对金融服务需求改变的推动。这些需求——支付设施操作、一生乃至跨代的理财、不同形式的生产性投资之间的资本分配，以及风险分担——几乎没有改变。

In fact, the growth of wholesale financial markets is the result principally of a massive increase in secondary market trading of existing assets; and the focus of innovation has been the management (or mismanagement) of risks created in the financial system itself. In the self-referential world of modern finance, the primary activity of financial institutions is trade with other financial institutions.

实际上，批发金融市场的增长主要是二级市场现有资产交易大规模增加的结果；创新焦点一直是对金融体系本身制造的风险进行管理（或不当管理）。在自我参照的现代金融世界里，金融机构的主要活动是与其他金融机构进行交易。

There may be less need today for the networker, the individual who knows whom rather than what; technology helps make connections, although it cannot displace personal relationships. But efficient capital allocation requires above all the knowledge and experience to assess the quality of the underlying assets, and the capabilities of those who manage them.

如今对人脉构建者（这些人懂的不多，但善于和人打交道）的需求下降；技术帮助构建联系，尽管它不能取代个人关系。但要想高效率地配置资本，首先需要拥有知识和经验，以评估基础资产的质量以及资产管理者的能力。

Yet the ability most valued in the finance sector in the first decade of the 21st century was a keen appreciation of asset markets themselves. The deployment of such abilities by people with an exaggerated idea of the relevance of these skills, and an overblown sense of their own competence, plunged the global economy into the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Perhaps those nice boys with low golf handicaps had something to offer after all.

然而，本世纪头10年期间金融业最看重的能力是对资产市场本身的敏锐把握。有人夸大这些技能的相关性，过度看好并运用自己的这些能力，最终让全球经济陷入自“大萧条”(Great Depression)以来最严重的金融危机。或许那些在高尔夫上有些天赋的礼貌年轻人终究还是有些可取之处的。