邵新明 - The Death of Trust

華爾街巨頭們從來就並非真的那樣聰明，而且肯定也不恪守道德，因為他們在唯一一次真正的考驗中集體不及格。他們領導的所有公司都陷於倒閉，只能依靠那些永遠也不可能在華爾街找到高級工作或到哈佛上學的人們的錢來挽救。不過這些華爾街驕子在某個方面的確聰明過人：他們成功地捲走了財富，而讓我們其他人收拾留下來爛攤子。 (中文摘譯版在後面)

Sin-ming Shaw - The Death of Trust
Sin-ming Shaw is a private investor and former visiting scholar at Princeton University.

1 Feb 2009

BANGKOK - A friend recently asked a seemingly naïve question: "What is money? How do I know I can trust that it is worth what it says it is worth?" We learn in introductory economics that money is a medium of exchange. But why do we accept that? Banknotes are just pieces of paper with a number attached to them.

We believe in banknotes because we collectively decide to trust the government when it says that 100 is 100, not 10 or 50. Money, therefore, is about trust, without which no society can function.

Just as we obey our leaders' orders to fight and die because we trust their judgment, we entrust our careers and our money to those who run Citigroup and Goldman Sachs and other such banks, because we believe their leaders will be fair to their employees and clients, and honorable in their business practices. We do not grow up wishing to work for crooks and liars.

Once that trust breaks, bad things happen. Money ceases to have credibility. Leaders become figures of contempt or worse.

As I write, inflation in Zimbabwe has reached an unimaginable (if not unpronounceable) level of more than 500 quintillion per cent. One quintillion is one million trillion. A year ago, inflation was "only" 100,000%. This is what happens when trust vanishes.

Fortunately, Zimbabwe is not a country of real consequence for world stability. But the Weimar Republic and China in the 1940's were. One opted for Hitler and the other for Mao Zedong to restore trust. So the risks are clear.

Are we now seeing an erosion of trust in America and in the United Kingdom?

The first warning sign surfaced in 2001, with the bankruptcy of Enron in the United States. Its fraudulent accounts were certified by Arthur Andersen. Now, India's Satyam, audited by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, is found to be missing billions in cash. If we cannot rely on the best auditors, can we continue to trust chartered accountants?

Bond rating agencies have issued misleading ratings on companies in questionable health. Will we ever again be able to trust a triple A rating issued by, say, Moody's?

Banks have been holding our money for safekeeping since the fourteenth century, when the Florentines invented the practice. The Royal Bank of Scotland, founded in 1727, when laissez-faire philosopher Adam Smith was only four years old, has just become a socialist state-owned-enterprise thanks to the bank's incompetent leaders, who acquired over-priced banks filled with toxic assets.

Citicorp, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and other symbols of "excellence" all would have collapsed but for public bailouts. And yet for decades we thought that the people who were managing those firms were much smarter than we were.

We grew up admiring leaders such as Robert Rubin, John Thain, and Henry Paulson. Rubin, a former US Treasury Secretary and ex-Chairman of Goldman Sachs, presided over the collapse of Citigroup while taking home $150 million in bonuses. Should he really have been rewarded at all for his "performance"? Just this week, the technically bankrupt Citigroup's senior executives were about to buy a new $50 million luxury French jet for themselves, until the White House stopped it.

Thain, also a former president of Goldman Sachs, helped himself and his Merrill Lynch staff to $4 billion in bonus payments even after he had to sell the firm to Bank of America to save it from bankruptcy. After he was caught spending $1.2 million, even as Merrill Lynch disintegrated, to decorate his new office, Bank of America had to fire him to placate growing revulsion over Wall Street's out-of-control culture of entitlement.

Paulson, the outgoing Treasury Secretary and another Goldman Sachs veteran, left a loophole in his rescue package big enough for a truck to drive through. That loophole allowed his former friends and colleagues on Wall Street to pay themselves billion-dollar bonuses while keeping those firms afloat with taxpayers' money.

The universities these men attended - Harvard and Yale for Rubin; MIT and Harvard for Thain; Dartmouth and Harvard for Paulson - have been magnets for the world's finest young minds. The rest of us thought that these institutions could instill the wisdom, insight, and character of which we all wished we had more.

Perhaps parents all over the world should re-examine their often obsessive craving for these "name-brand" universities, pushing their children as if an Ivy League degree was an end in itself. Now we know that Wall Street's titans were never all that smart, and certainly not very ethical, for they failed the only test that counts. All of the firms they led collapsed, and were saved only by money from those who could never get a senior job on Wall Street or a place at Harvard.

These Wall Street princes were smarter in one way, however: they managed to pocket a fortune while the rest of us are stuck with the mess they left behind. Bernard Madoff who hailed from down-market part of New York City and attended a middling university will spend time behind bars, but none of the titans of Wall Street with blue-chip pedigree will ever do so.

History has not been kind to societies that lose trust in the integrity of their leaders and institutions. We need to save our economic system from its abusers, or else.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009.

邵新明 - 信任的消亡

香港蘋果日報2009年2月5日

普林斯頓大學前訪問學者

一位朋友最近問了一個似乎很天真的問題：「甚麼是貨幣？我怎麼知道該不該相信它是否真抵得上票面價值？」我們在經濟學導論中學過貨幣是交換的介質。但我們為甚麼接受這種說法？紙幣充其量不過是上面標有數字的紙張而已。

我們相信紙幣，因為政府說一百是一百，而不是十或五十的時候我們所有人都決定信任政府。因此，貨幣的本質就是信任，缺少了這種信任，社會就將陷入癱瘓境地。

正如我們因為信任領袖的判斷而遵從他們的命令去作戰和獻身一樣，我們也把自己的前途和財富託付給了花旗集團、高盛和其他此類銀行的經營者，理由是我們相信它們的領導者能公平地對待員工和客戶，並能在自身的商業行為中遵從誠實守信的原則。

一旦這種信任被打破，就會出現問題。貨幣不再具有公信力。領導者成為被輕視的對象，甚至比這更低。

就在我寫這篇文章的時候，津巴布韋每年的通貨膨脹已經令人無法想像（如果不是無法表達）地超過了五百億億倍。而就在一年以前，通貨膨脹還「只有」百分之十萬。這就是信任消失所導致的惡果。

幸運的是，津巴布韋不能真正影響到世界的穩定。但二十世紀四十年代的魏瑪共和國和中國卻可以。它們一個選擇了希特拉、另一個選擇了毛澤東來重新恢復信任。這裡面的風險是顯而易見的。

我們現在是否看到美國和英國的信任正在遭受侵蝕？

如果不是公共援助計劃，花旗公司、美國銀行、高盛、美林和其他「傑出企業」的代表本來都應該破產倒閉。但幾十年來我們卻一直認為管理那些公司的人比我們聰明得多。

我們懷著對羅伯特魯賓、約翰塞恩和亨利保爾森等領導人物的崇敬之情長大。魯賓曾任職美國財政部長和高盛主席，花旗集團在他的管理下倒閉，而他卻把一億五千萬美元的獎金裝進自己的口袋裡。陷入技術破產的花旗集團高管們更要為自己購買一架新的價值五千萬美元的法國豪華噴氣飛機，直到這種做法被白宮制止。

塞恩也曾擔任高盛總裁一職，即使在他被迫把公司賣給美國銀行以避免破產的命運之後，他還幫助自己及其美林員工拿到了價值四十億美元的獎勵。他在美林陷入解體的時候仍被爆耗費一百二十萬美元裝修自己的新辦公室，致使美國銀行不得不將其開除。

卸任財長保爾森也曾經在高盛供職，他在救援計劃中留下的漏洞大得足以讓卡車通過。那個漏洞允許他以前在華爾街的同事和密友可以為自己發放十億美元獎金，同時用納稅人的錢維持公司繼續運營下去。

這些人上過的大學──魯賓的哈佛和耶魯、塞恩的麻省理工和哈佛、保爾森的達特茅斯和哈佛──一直以來都扮演著吸引世界頂尖青年的磁石角色。我們都相信這些大學能賦予學生洞察力和智慧。

也許全世界的家長應該重新審視自己對這些「名牌」大學的迷戀。現在我們知道華爾街巨頭們從來就並非真的那樣聰明，而且肯定也不恪守道德，因為他們在唯一一次真正的考驗中集體不及格。他們領導的所有公司都陷於倒閉，只能依靠那些永遠也不可能在華爾街找到高級工作或到哈佛上學的人們的錢來挽救。

不過這些華爾街驕子在某個方面的確聰明過人：他們成功地捲走了財富，而讓我們其他人收拾留下來爛攤子。

歷史對那些領袖和機構已經失去民眾信任的社會歷來是無情的。我們需要從擅權者手中挽救經濟體系，否則必定會自食其果。
ProjectSyndicate，2009