聰明人搞砸金融 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.

上世紀60年代我還是愛丁堡一名小男生的時候，蘇格蘭銀行(Bank of Scotland)總部大樓坐落於Mound（從普林西斯街延伸至愛丁堡城堡和皇家英里大道的街道），氣勢宏偉。其主要競爭對手蘇格蘭皇家銀行(Royal Bank of Scotland)則坐落於登打士大廈，是蘇格蘭喬治亞新城區最精美的建築物。

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.

那時，銀行業是那些進不了好大學的年輕人所從事的職業。如果他們加入這兩家銀行中的任何一家，勤勤懇懇地幹上20年，就有望當上分行行長。銀行經理是社區人物，他（他們全都是男的）的放貸決定不僅取決於數字，還取決於他對當地的瞭解和借款人的品性。他預計在這家銀行幹上一輩子，然後拿上豐厚的養老金退休，在他從前招待客戶的高爾夫球場花上更多時間。他或者他的客戶從未想過，他加入的銀行將不會一成不變地永遠存續。

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年這兩家銀行都瀕臨倒閉的時候，金融世界已經面目全非。它們陷入困境的原因包括全球化、放松管制、技術和產品創新以及新思想，同時還有社會和文化規則的轉變。

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.

美國前財長勞倫斯薩默斯(Lawrence Summers)以不同的身份（學者、政客、大學管理人員，以及央行行長候選人）經歷了這一轉變。他這樣描述道：“在過去30年裏，投資銀行領域發生了巨大變化，從由擅長在第19洞（標準的高爾夫只有18洞，第19洞指的是球場的酒吧或餐廳，球手們進行社交活動的地方——譯者注）與客戶會晤的人主導，轉向由擅長解決衍生品定價中的艱深數學問題的人主導。”薩默斯明顯贊同這種轉變。

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，這些更聰明的人在管理方面遠遠不如才智並不出衆的前輩。他們很少像自己認爲的那麼聰明，至少沒有聰明到能夠解決他們所製造的環境的複雜性。

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.

金融業規模增長、薪資爆炸式增長以及金融活動本質的改變，在很大程度上並非是受到非金融經濟對金融服務需求改變的推動。這些需求——支付設施操作、一生乃至跨代的理財、不同形式的生產性投資之間的資本分配，以及風險分擔——幾乎沒有改變。

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.

實際上，批發金融市場的增長主要是二級市場現有資產交易大規模增加的結果；創新焦點一直是對金融體系本身製造的風險進行管理（或不當管理）。在自我參照的現代金融世界裏，金融機構的主要活動是與其他金融機構進行交易。

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.

如今對人脈構建者（這些人懂的不多，但善於和人打交道）的需求下降；技術幫助構建聯繫，儘管它不能取代個人關係。但要想高效率地配置資本，首先需要擁有知識和經驗，以評估基礎資產的質量以及資產管理者的能力。

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，本世紀頭10年期間金融業最看重的能力是對資產市場本身的敏銳把握。有人誇大這些技能的相關性，過度看好並運用自己的這些能力，最終讓全球經濟陷入自“大蕭條”(Great Depression)以來最嚴重的金融危機。或許那些在高爾夫上有些天賦的禮貌年輕人終究還是有些可取之處的。