评论
打印
One of the great ironies of business today is that the richest and most powerful companies in the world are more involved than ever before in the capital markets at a time when they do not actually need any capital. Take Apple, which has around $200bn sitting in the bank, yet has borrowed billions of dollars in recent years to buy back shares in order to bolster its stock price, which has lagged recently.
当今商业最具讽刺意味的事情之一是，世界上最富有、最强大的公司在实际上不需要资本的时候，对资本市场的参与程度之深反而超过以往任何时候。以苹果(Apple)为例。苹果的银行账户上有大约2000亿美元资金，但苹果近年来借入了数十亿美元，用于回购股票，以支撑最近萎靡不振的股价。
Why borrow? Because it is cheaper than repatriating cash and paying US taxes, of course. The financial engineering helped boost the California company’s share price for a while. But it did not stop activist investor Carl Icahn — who had manically advocated borrowing and buybacks — from dumping the stock the minute revenue growth took a turn for the worse in late April.
为何借钱？当然是因为这样比把资金汇回美国、并在美国缴税要便宜。在一段时间内，金融工程帮助这家加州公司提振了股价。但这并未能阻止维权投资者卡尔•伊卡恩(Carl Icahn)在4月末苹果营收增速急剧恶化时，抛售苹果股票。他曾狂热地鼓吹借款回购股票。
Apple is not alone in eschewing real engineering for the financial kind. Top-tier US businesses have never enjoyed greater financial resources. They have $2tn in cash on their balance sheets — enough money combined to make them the tenth largest economy in the world. Yet they are also taking on record amounts of debt to buy back their own stock, creating a corporate debt bubble that has already begun to burst (witness Exxon’s recent downgrade).
苹果并非唯一不做真正的工程、而大搞金融工程的公司。美国顶级公司从未享有过比如今更大的金融资源。它们资产负债表上的现金达到2万亿美元——这么多的钱加在一起相当于世界第十大经济体。不过，它们也借入了创纪录的债务用于回购自己的股票，制造了一场公司债泡沫。这场泡沫已开始破灭（看看埃克森美孚(Exxon)的评级近日遭到调降的事例）。
The buyback bubble is only one part of a larger trend, which is that the business of corporate America is no longer business — it is finance. American firms today make more money than ever before by simply moving money around, getting about five times the revenue from purely financial activities, such as trading, hedging, tax optimisation and selling financial services, than they did in the immediate postwar period. No wonder share buybacks and corporate investment into research and development have moved inversely in recent years. It is easier for chief executives with a shelf life of three years to try to please investors by jacking up short-term share prices than to invest in things that will grow a company over the long haul.
回购泡沫只是一个更大趋势的一部分——美国企业不再着眼于商业。如今，美国公司仅仅依靠挪动资金赚到的利润比以往任何时候都多，金融交易、对冲、税务优化以及销售金融服务等纯金融活动产生的收入大约为战后时期的5倍。近些年来，企业的股票回购与研发投资呈反向变动，也就不足为奇了。对于“保鲜期”3年的首席执行官而言，通过在短期内推高股价来取悦投资人，比投资于让公司获得长期发展的项目要容易得多。
It is telling that private firms invest twice as much in things like new technology, worker training, factory upgrades and R&D as public firms of similar size — they simply do not have to deal with market pressure not to.
很能说明问题的是，在新科技、员工培训、工厂升级以及研发方面的投资上，非上市公司是同等规模上市公司的两倍，因为它们根本无需应对市场压力而不去投资。
Indeed, the financialisation of business has grown in tandem with the rise of the capital markets and the financial industry itself, which has roughly doubled in size as a percentage of gross domestic product over the past 40 years (even the financial crisis did not keep finance down; the industry itself shrank only marginally and the largest institutions that remained became even bigger). As finance grew, so did its profits — the industry creates only 4 per cent of US jobs yet takes around 25 per cent of the corporate profit share.
实际上，企业的金融化是随着资本市场和金融业本身的崛起而同步发展的。过去40年里，金融业占国内生产总值(GDP)的比例提高了大约1倍（就连金融危机也没有把金融业打压下去；金融业的规模仅仅略微收缩，活下来的最大金融机构变得更大了）。随着金融业的增长，金融业利润也在增长——金融业仅为美国提供了4%的就业岗位，但占美国企业利润总额的约25%。
Not surprisingly, non-financial businesses wanted a piece of that action. Airlines, for instance, often make more money from hedging on oil prices than on selling seats — even though it undermines their core business by increasing commodities volatility, and bad bets can leave them with millions of dollars in sudden losses. GE, America’s original innovator, only recently stopped being a “too big to fail” bank.
并不让人意外的是，非金融企业也想从事金融活动。比如，航空公司在油价套期保值上赚到的利润经常高于机票销售利润——尽管这样增加了大宗商品的波动性，从而损害其核心业务，而且押注失败可能导致它们突然蒙受巨额损失。直到最近，美国的创新企业通用电气(GE)才不再是一家“大到不能倒的”银行。
The pharmaceuticals industry, perhaps the most financialised of all, has cut nearly 150,000 jobs since 2008, most in R&D, as companies focus instead on outsourcing, tax optimisation, inversions and “creative” accounting in ways that make them look suspiciously like portfolio management companies — a group of disparate firms operating separately and trying to make as much money as quickly as possible, with little thought to the long-term impact of their decisions.
制药业的金融化程度或许是最高的，自2008年以来，该行业已裁员近15万人，其中主要是研发岗位，制药企业反而集中精力去做外包、税务优化、税收倒置和“创造性”会计处理，这让它们看起来像是资产管理公司——一群独立经营、努力尽可能快、尽可能多地赚钱的完全不同的公司，基本不去思考自身决策的长期影响。
Even Silicon Valley is not immune. Apple and other tech behemoths now anchor new corporate bond offerings as investment banks do, which is not surprising considering how much cash they hold. If Big Tech decided at any point to dump those bonds, it could become a market-moving event, an issue that is already raising concern among experts at the US Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Research.
甚至硅谷都未能免疫。如今，苹果和其他科技巨头像投行一样，在新的公司债发行中充当锚定投资者，考虑到它们持有的现金量那么大，这也在意料之中。如果大型科技公司在任何时点决定抛售这些债券，都可能构成影响市场的事件，这个问题已引起美国财政部金融研究办公室(Office of Financial Research)里专家们的关注。
None of this is good for the real economy; a wealth of academic research shows that not only has finance become an obstacle to growth, but also that financial engineering is destroying long-term value within companies. Buyback booms of the sort we have seen in the past couple of years tend to happen at the top of the market, when financially manufactured growth is tapped out. With corporate earnings under pressure, US businesses that have not been investing in real, underlying growth and innovation may be in for a fall. The result will be more economic stagnation — and more political populism.
这些全都对实体经济不利；大量的学术研究显示，不但金融变成了增长的障碍，而且金融工程正在摧毁企业内部的长期价值。我们在过去20年里看到的股票回购热潮，经常发生在市场见顶时，于是就产生了由金融制造的增长。由于企业利润承压，那些一直未投资于真正的基本增长和创新的美国企业可能面临衰落的命运。结果将是更严重的经济停滞——以及更严重的政治民粹主义。
