【时代周刊 20160512】美国的资本主义危机
【中文标题】美国的资本主义危机
【原文标题】American Capitalism’s Great Crisis
【登载媒体】时代周刊
【原文作者】Rana Foroohar
【原文链接】http://time.com/4327419/american-capitalisms-great-crisis/
华尔街在扼杀我们的经济，我们该如何应对？
几个星期之前，哈佛政治学院进行了一项调查，结果令人震惊。18岁到29岁的美国人群中，只有19％认为自己是“资本主义者”。在世界上最富有、市场化经济最发达的国家中，这个年龄层的人群中只有42％“支持资本主义制度”。年长一些的人群中这个比例稍高，但也只有26％的人说自己是资本主义者，支持资本主义制度的人勉强超过一半。
这个结果不仅仅表明零零后不在乎被贴上“社会主义”标签，以及心怀不满的美国中年人厌倦了经济复苏的乏力，而是证明大部分公民对于这个国家的经济基础——一个维系了数百年的经济制度，把一个大部分人从事农业的采矿工作的国家变成了人类历史上最繁荣的国家——并不满意。当然，民意调查揭示的是感性的现象，并不是客观的市场数据。但民众的情绪反映了日常经济现状，而且的确有一些数据（后文会提到）显示美国人有足够的理由来质疑他们的制度。
这种信仰危机在2016年总统大选中被表露无遗，大选最核心的问题是，这个制度究竟为谁服务？反对谁？为什么自从金融危机发生之后的8年时间和数万亿经济刺激资金让我们的经济增长如此缓慢？几乎所有的候选人都有他们的处方：桑德斯号称要打破大银行的垄断；特朗普说对冲基金经理人应该承担更高的税负；克林顿想要加强现有的金融管理制度。在国会里，共和党众议员议长保罗•莱恩依然承诺放松管制。
这些人都未能对症下药。美国的经济问题已经远远超越了富有的银行家、大而不倒的金融机构、对冲基金亿万富翁、海外避税天堂等令人发指的具体问题。实际上，这些问题都是一个极为恶劣的根本原因的表象，它对于那些中产阶级的富人和食不果腹的穷人、共和党和民主党产生了同样的威胁。美国的资本主义市场经济制度已经崩溃。这个问题，以及应对的方法，是我在《给予者和索取者：金融的崛起和美国商业的陷落》这本书中的主题，这篇文章也是在这经过三年研究形成的报告性文字中萃取的内容。
想要知道为什么我们会落得如此下场，就必须了解资本市场——也就是金融制度——与商业之间的关系。从18世纪90年代末国家成立、银行制度兴起，到20世纪70年代初，金融把个人和企业的储蓄投入到生产型企业中，创造就业岗位和财富，最终实现经济的增长。当然，这条道路并非一帆风顺。（令人印象最深的是投机活动引发的大萧条，之后被严苛的管理制度所遏制。）但总体来说，金融——今天的金融无所不包，银行、对冲基金、共有基金、保险公司、商行——是为商业服务的。这是极为重要的一点，但并不是核心问题所在。
在过去的几十年里，金融已经背离了它的传统角色。学术界的研究结果显示，当今金融市场里流转的资金中，只有很小一部分进入了主流商业渠道。长期致力于金融研究的学者奥斯卡•乔达、艾伦•泰勒和莫里兹•舒拉里克说：“居民储蓄用于商业领域投资的中位数——也就是教科书上对金融行业的定义——仅占银行业中很小的一部分业务比例。”据估算，今天只有15％来自金融机构的资金被用来投资商业，而在20世纪初，这本是银行的主流资金流向。
艾达尔•特纳说：“不同国家的曲线稍有区别，但大方向很明显。”他曾经就任英国银行监管部门，现任由乔治•索罗斯出资组建的智囊机构新经济思维研究所主席。“纵观所有发达的经济体，尤其是美国和英国，资本市场和银行业的新投资金额都在下降。”体制中的大部分资金都被用来借贷，抵押物包括房产、股票和债券等。
如果想形象地了解转变的规模，可以看到，金融产业目前占美国整体经济的7％，1980年这个数字是4％。尽管它的盈利占据了所有企业盈利金额的25％，但它只创造了4％的就业岗位。问题在于，多家学术机构和研究所——包括国际清算银行和国际货币基金组织——的研究结果显示，当金融产业发展到这样的规模，它会抽走经济良性发展的空气。实际上，当金融业的规模还只有目前规模的一半时，这种负面效果就已经出现了。在其影响下，我们的经济已经逐渐变成——用前高盛银行家、目前在纽约运作多个有关金融业崛起案例研究的华莱士•特贝维尔的话来说——“一个金融财富的持有者和其余美国产业的零和游戏。”
这不仅仅是美国的问题，世界上很多领先市场经济体也在遭受同样的困扰。从全球角度来看，自由市场的资本主义制度饱受抨击，欧洲各个国家都在质疑它的优势究竟在哪里，而巴西、中国和新加坡等新兴市场用它们自己的政府引导资本主义制度取得了迅猛的发展态势。一大批具有意识形态思想的金融家和商业领袖——沃伦•巴菲特、黑岩公司的拉里•芬克、先锋集团的约翰•博格、麦肯锡公司的鲍达民、安联的穆罕默德•埃里安等人——开始公开提出，是否需要一种崭新的、更加具有包容性的资本主义制度，它可以帮助企业做出更好的长远决策，而不仅仅关注下一个季度。教皇曾经公开批判当代的市场资本主义制度，痛斥“金钱崇拜和冷漠的经济独裁”，“人们被消费需求奴役。”
在我23年的商业和经济记者生涯中，我一直在思考，为什么我们的市场经济制度不能更好地服务于公司、工人和消费者。近年来，金融业被很多人看作是经济等级金字塔的顶端，是从农业和制造业进化而来的先进的服务性经济模式。但是研究结果让我们看到这种误导的概念所带来的意外结果，它威胁到了美国人引以为荣并且努力向全世界输出的体制。
美国的经济痼疾有一个名字，叫做“金融化”。这个专业名词被用来描述一种趋势，华尔街和它采用的那些手段逐渐霸占了美国至高无上的地位，其影响力不仅仅限于金融产业，还侵蚀到美国大部分的商业体。它无所不包，从整体经济中金融产业和金融活动的规模膨胀，到放弃生产信贷转投债务投机，到股权价值成为公司掌控公司的唯一标准，到私有企业和公共事业中冒险、自私思维的扩张、到金融家和他们滋养出的富有CEO政治地位的提升、到“市场了解一切”思想在当前的统治地位。“金融化”是一个庞大、不友好的词语，它有着广阔、令人不安的影响力。
密歇根大学教授杰罗德•戴维斯是研究金融趋势的著名学者，他把金融化比作“哥白尼革命”，商业运作沿着围绕金融机构的轨道运行。银行业不接受这种理论，但它得到了公共政治变化的印证，无论是共和党还是民主党的政策，而且由政府领导人、政策制定者和管理者策划，同时他们还要维持市场的良好运作。密歇根大学的另一位学者格雷塔•克里普纳曾经写过有关金融化最全面的著作之一，他认为，金融化在70年代末之后的十年有了迅速的发展。据他所说，这种变化来自于里根时代的去监管政策、华尔街自由化趋势和所谓的所有权社会的崛起，也就是崇尚财产私有，把个人医疗和养老与证券市场捆绑在一起。
这样的改变来自于70年代，美国在二战后开始享受的经济增长逐渐放缓。当时政府并没有做出强硬的决定来拉升经济（这必然意味着在不同的利益团体中做出选择），而是决定把责任推给金融市场。大萧条时期为美国服务的监管政策逐渐发生了倒退，金融业逐渐成为今天主导一切的力量。这种改变是两党一致的行动，公平地说，他们应该可以做出英明的决定，但结果出乎医疗。卡特时期对利率监管的放松——如同今天左翼和右翼阵营异口同声的平民论，得到了一大批利益共同体的拥护，包括前花旗银行的总裁拉尔夫•纳德和沃尔特•李斯顿——为一系列金融“创新”打开了大门，让银行的职能从借贷转向贸易。人所共知，里根的经济政策带来了一系列有利于华尔街的经济政策。克林顿时代的去监管化似乎是一条走出80年代末经济疲软的道路，但趋势没有改变。从艾伦•格林斯潘时代开始的宽松财政政策创造了一个让低息贷款掩盖深层次经济问题的环境。如此众多的因素逐渐形成了现在对于接近零利率政策的依赖，以免陷入经济衰退。
这种痼疾——其实也不能说是政府和私有企业长久以来演化过程中的肮脏利益——目前通过各种方式表露出来：房地产市场的分化以及对政府扶持的依赖、养老制度让数百万人老无所依、向债权人倾斜的税收制度。债务是金融的生命线，当整体产业中的证券交易部分持续上涨，债务比例也随之上升。这并不是一个好消息，诸多学术研究结果显示，债务和信用级别的上升会破坏金融的稳定性。而且，金融在整体经济中的占比越来越大，债务倔强地成为所有发达经济体增长不可或缺的因素。比如美国，70％的GDP来自居民消费。由债务所拉动的金融成为了挤掉真正产业的糖精，对它的依赖性越来越高。（从80年代到现在，美国消费者的信用额度增加了一倍，他们付给银行的费用也同比例增长。）
经济学家拉古拉姆•拉杨是预见到2008年金融危机的著名学者之一，他认为，信用是治疗中产阶级生活质量下降疾病的保守疗法。用他的话来说，“让他们吃信用果腹吧”可以完美地阐释金融危机之前经济狂欢的状态。当信用额度从2007年到现在增长了57万亿美元之后，一切都在急转直下。
金融业的崛起扭曲了本土经济的良性趋势，这就是为什么有些地方的房屋租金不断上涨，失业率同时居高不下。美国的房地产市场现在青睐现金买家，因为与传统的借贷储蓄给个人和企业，寻求长期的投资回报（比如购买房屋）相比，银行更喜欢利用交易获利，以确保年轻人群不会被上沉重的房贷负担。一个无可争辩的结果是，私有证券公司黑岩目前是美国最大的单亲家庭住宅房主，因为它在金融危机之后有能力大量购买廉价的房屋。这也是养老债券的核心问题所在，活跃的共有基金费用“差不多要占获利金额的65％，甚至更多……而投资者可以利用其它渠道轻松获取这笔利润”，先锋集团创始人博格2014年在国会听证会上如是说。
同样的原因造成从汽车到航空的各类产业都在试图进入金融领域。美国各类产业的公司今天从事金融活动所获取的收入——包括投资、对冲、税务优化和提供金融服务——是他们在1980年之前从事类似活动收入的5倍。例如，能源和运输企业的传统对冲交易，已经被获利丰厚的原油期货投机所取代，这种变化实际上削弱了他们的核心竞争力，因为原油价格飘忽不定。大型科技公司也在遵循高盛的模式授权企业债券。所有顶级MBA课程都在鼓励学生效仿这种做法，金融已经成为所有商业教育的核心内容。
华盛顿也与资本市场的代言人有千丝万缕的联系，今年大选中，10个最大的个人政治捐赠方中的6个是对冲基金大亨，就连敏锐的政治家和监管者也没有看到这个问题有多么严重。我在2013年曾经询问一位前奥巴马政府的财政高官，在磋商多德弗兰克金融改革法案时，为什么没有咨询更多的股东和银行家的建议。（在沃尔克法则的协商过程中，93％的讨论发生在金融业内部。）他说：“那我们还能去找谁呢？”这个问题的答案——对于那些没有专业金融知识的人来说——或许就是银行的贷款对象，或者是那些研究资本市场的人，还或许是被金融危机扼杀的民权领袖。
当然，美国的经济增长迟缓还有其它很多因素，包括我们熟悉的全球化趋势和科技类就业消亡。经济本身所面临的挑战无疑是严峻的，但是造成长期发展迟缓的最大一个未预料到的原因，是金融体制不再为真正的经济服务，而是服务于它自身。政客们没有采取真正的财政措施，导致联邦政府在2008年之后注入了4.5万亿刺激资金。说明这个制度已经不可救药，中央银行唯一的贡献是让股价达到历史新高（但主要受益者是占人口总数10％的那些持有80％股份的人），但依然有2％的人收入没有任何增长。
目前，很多顶级经济学家和投资者预测，未来30年是一个极低资产价格收益率的时期。美国呈现增长态势的能力——也就是采取一些类如低利率、越来越高的消费信用、商业税收递延融资策略，以及让人们感觉到比实际上更富有的资产泡沫——已经不复存在了。
这种痛苦在很多美国企业所面临的混乱形势上体现得更加明显。对小企业的借贷额显著下降，新兴公司的数量也在迅速减少。在80年代初，新公司占美国商业一半的比例，而目前硅谷新公司数量在迅速萎缩。从1978年到2012年，新公司数量减少了44％，很多研究人员，甚至投资者和公司管理人员，把这种现象归结为金融产业从借贷向投机的转型。商业行为的衰退意味着经济活力的降低，因为新公司是一个国家最重要的就业岗位和GDP增长来源。巴菲特用他自己的方式做出总结：“现在有一帮人，他们宁可去赌场也不去光顾资本主义的餐厅。”
在管理公司股价短期上扬的策略上，金融对于美国公司大幅削减研发投入的行为也负有主要的责任，这方面的投资相当于为未来的繁荣播下种子。让我们用股票回购来举例，一个往往是发展形势不错的公司进入股市，购买自己的股份，通常是在股价较高的时机，以此来人为推高股价，以回馈投资者和持有大量股份的公司高管。实际上，如果你记录下回购股票的金额上升和公司对于研发活动投入资金下降的趋势图，两条线会形成一个完美的X形。前者从80年代开始上升，现在标准普尔指数500的企业每年斥资1万亿美元用于股票回购和红利发放，相当于他们净收入的95％，而并没有把这笔钱投入在有利于公司长远发展的科研、生产和其它领域。所有行业无一例外，甚至那些我们认为最具创新意识的公司。例如，很多科技企业在提升股价上的投入远远超过科研投入，他们必将遭到市场的惩罚。微软在2006年3月宣布了一项新的科技投资，之后两个月股价持续下降。但是在同年7月，它投入200亿美元回购股票，股价立即上涨了7％。这种扭曲的现象让CEO和企业高管的行为愈加嚣张。
作为经济发展根基的企业活力因此遭受损失。首次公开募股数量比20年前下降了三分之二。的确，首次公开募股的金额从1996年的471亿美元上升到2014年的744亿美元（首次公开募股的中位数也在同时期从3000万美元上升到9600万美元），但这或许仅仅表示投资者在选择更稳健的投资方案，并不是市场活力的表现。这里还有一个更加令人不安的原因，公司根本就不想上市，唯恐他们的生意受华尔街游戏规则摆布而不能创造真正的价值。
首次公开募股原本的目的在于为创新筹集资金，今天它代表的不是一个伟大公司的开始，而是它的结束。根据斯坦福大学的一项研究，科技公司上市之后，创新项目平均减少40％，原因通常是华尔街压迫股价上升，即使这意味着遏制那些最初让企业成功上市的创新活力。
一条平坦的股价趋势会招致灾难，CEO会被解雇，公司沦为被收购对象。毫无疑问，企业的乐观情绪和创新力比30年前下降了很多，薪资也基本没有增长。高管的总收入有82％来自股权收益，他们自然会做出短期的商业决策，给公司的长远发展招致灾难。
公司股票回购、企业薪酬和贫富差距三个数字在过去四十年里同时上升，这并不是一个偶然现象。有一系列研究结果揭示了金融化与不平等趋势的交叉问题，最著名的理论是经济学家詹姆斯•加尔布雷斯特和拉维斯•黑尔提出的。他们的研究结果显示，在90年代末，收入不平等曲线与狂热的纳斯达克股市曲线完美贴合。
近期，这种模式在一些美国著名公司身上体现得更加明显。用苹果公司举例，它是过去50年里最成功的公司之一。苹果在银行存有2,000亿美元现金，但过去几年中它向银行借贷了数十亿美元，这要感谢低水平的利率（这本身也是对金融危机的回应），来回报投资者，以提升股价。为什么要贷款呢？部分原因在于贷款的成本低于调集现金和支付税收的成本。这样的金融运作帮助这家加利福尼亚公司股价在短期内上扬。但是曾经狂热宣扬借贷和回购的投资客卡尔•伊坎在4月底股价刚刚回落之际，大量抛售手中的股票。
这或许是一个极大的讽刺，像苹果这样规模庞大、富得流油的公司，在根本不需要任何金融运作的情况下大规模进入金融市场。美国的顶级公司从来都不需要金融资源，他们的资产负债表上闲置着2万亿美元现金，足以让他们成为世界上最大的十家公司。但是在古怪的金融秩序引导下，他们依然利用贷款大规模回购股票，吹起一个或许马上要破裂的泡沫。
不管你是否承认，你和我也是导致短期商业思维的不良生态系统中的一部分。管理我们的退休金的那些人——也就是为资产管理公司服务的资金经理，他们的薪酬往往取决于一年或者更短时间内的资金回报率。因此他们会用这笔钱（也就是我们的 钱）来推动公司取得快速的盈利结果，而不是去执行长期的战略计划。有时候，退休金的投资计划会导致我们自己所在的公司被并购，为了实现短期盈利，成本削减甚至裁员是必不可少的手段。
毫无疑问，这一切都令人沮丧。但美国现在还有一线希望，这是一个不多见的机会，可以重新调整金融业的布局和规模，这本来应该是在2008年金融危机之后立即着手的工作。曙光依然存在。
尽管金融业的游说力量依然存在，尽管华盛顿和华尔街有大量的既得利益群体，但还有一股力量在努力让金融体制回归到它本来的位置，作为商业的仆人，而不是它的主人。民意调查显示大部分美国人希望看到税制改革，政府采取更直接的措施来提供就业、减少贫困，更有效地回应不平等现象。各个总统候选人都在围绕这个话题做文章，至少在11月之前，这依然是最热门的话题。
美国民众深刻地了解到，经济秩序并没有为大多数人服务。美国制度的改革的关键之处在于了解制度究竟出了什么问题。
让金融在经济领域中回归本位，并不像是分割大银行那么简单（当然让大银行分解不失为一个好的起始措施）。它关乎消除根植于美国各个企业角落的金融主导思维；关乎改革商业教育模式，依然有很多学者拒绝挑战当前的市场运作模式，就像中世纪的教士拒绝接受挑战上帝存在的证据一样；关乎改变把一年投资收益率与长远收益率平等对待的税收制度；关乎改变让金融机构诱使过度消费和投机举措，而不是给小企业和就业岗位提供者提供良性借贷的税务体制；关乎重新思考退休制度，制定更英明的房地产政策，遏制金钱至上的文化，赶走那些违背美国核心经济准则的说客。
它还关乎营造一个更广泛的讨论环境，要有更多的利益体参与。美国的资本市场结构，以及它是否为商业服务，是“专家”群体内部的一个传统话题。所谓专家，是指那些金融家和政策制定者们，他们都会维护自身的利益，用复杂的语言把外人拒之门外。一提到金融这种民主社会里的重要问题，复杂性必然导致排外性。
寻求答案的过程不会是一帆风顺。我们没有“银弹”，没有人知道21世纪先进市场体系的完美、高效模式是什么。但是资本主义制度的遗产极为坚固，太多人的福祉危如累卵，我们不能对破碎的现状坐视不管。精心策划的技术手段无能为力，现在需要的是拯救式的干涉行动。
美国资本主义所遭受的信仰危机或许是一件好事，如果它能带领我们重新审视我们最重要的原则。实际上，最简单，也是最重要的一个问题是：金融机构是否为真实的经济体提供清晰、可量化的服务？遗憾的是，目前对这个问题的回答是不。但是我们可以做出一些改变，我们的市场资本主义制度没有完美地传承下来，我们书写了规则，我们之后破坏了规则。现在我们需要修复这个规则。
原文：
How Wall Street is choking our economy and how to fix it
A couple of weeks ago, a poll conducted by the Harvard Institute of Politics found something startling: only 19% of Americans ages 18 to 29 identified themselves as “capitalists.” In the richest and most market-oriented country in the world, only 42% of that group said they “supported capitalism.” The numbers were higher among older people; still, only 26% considered themselves capitalists. A little over half supported the system as a whole.
This represents more than just millennials not minding the label “socialist” or disaffected middle-aged Americans tiring of an anemic recovery. This is a majority of citizens being uncomfortable with the country’s economic foundation—a system that over hundreds of years turned a fledgling society of farmers and prospectors into the most prosperous nation in human history. To be sure, polls measure feelings, not hard market data. But public sentiment reflects day-to-day economic reality. And the data (more on that later) shows Americans have plenty of concrete reasons to question their system.
This crisis of faith has had no more severe expression than the 2016 presidential campaign, which has turned on the questions of who, exactly, the system is working for and against, as well as why eight years and several trillions of dollars of stimulus on from the financial crisis, the economy is still growing so slowly. All the candidates have prescriptions: Sanders talks of breaking up big banks; Trump says hedge funders should pay higher taxes; Clinton wants to strengthen existing financial regulation. In Congress, Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan remains committed to less regulation.
All of them are missing the point. America’s economic problems go far beyond rich bankers, too-big-to-fail financial institutions, hedge-fund billionaires, offshore tax avoidance or any particular outrage of the moment. In fact, each of these is symptomatic of a more nefarious condition that threatens, in equal measure, the very well-off and the very poor, the red and the blue. The U.S. system of market capitalism itself is broken. That problem, and what to do about it, is at the center of my book Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business, a three-year research and reporting effort from which this piece is adapted.
To understand how we got here, you have to understand the relationship between capital markets—meaning the financial system—and businesses. From the creation of a unified national bond and banking system in the U.S. in the late 1790s to the early 1970s, finance took individual and corporate savings and funneled them into productive enterprises, creating new jobs, new wealth and, ultimately, economic growth. Of course, there were plenty of blips along the way (most memorably the speculation leading up to the Great Depression, which was later curbed by regulation). But for the most part, finance—which today includes everything from banks and hedge funds to mutual funds, insurance firms, trading houses and such—essentially served business. It was a vital organ but not, for the most part, the central one.
Over the past few decades, finance has turned away from this traditional role. Academic research shows that only a fraction of all the money washing around the financial markets these days actually makes it to Main Street businesses. “The intermediation of household savings for productive investment in the business sector—the textbook description of the financial sector—constitutes only a minor share of the business of banking today,” according to academics Oscar Jorda, Alan Taylor and Moritz Schularick, who’ve studied the issue in detail. By their estimates and others, around 15% of capital coming from financial institutions today is used to fund business investments, whereas it would have been the majority of what banks did earlier in the 20th century.
“The trend varies slightly country by country, but the broad direction is clear,” says Adair Turner, a former British banking regulator and now chairman of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, a think tank backed by George Soros, among others. “Across all advanced economies, and the United States and the U.K. in particular, the role of the capital markets and the banking sector in funding new investment is decreasing.” Most of the money in the system is being used for lending against existing assets such as housing, stocks and bonds.
To get a sense of the size of this shift, consider that the financial sector now represents around 7% of the U.S. economy, up from about 4% in 1980. Despite currently taking around 25% of all corporate profits, it creates a mere 4% of all jobs. Trouble is, research by numerous academics as well as institutions like the Bank for International Settlements and the International Monetary Fund shows that when finance gets that big, it starts to suck the economic air out of the room. In fact, finance starts having this adverse effect when it’s only half the size that it currently is in the U.S. Thanks to these changes, our economy is gradually becoming “a zero-sum game between financial wealth holders and the rest of America,” says former Goldman Sachs banker Wallace Turbeville, who runs a multiyear project on the rise of finance at the New York City—based nonprofit Demos.
It’s not just an American problem, either. Most of the world’s leading market economies are grappling with aspects of the same disease. Globally, free-market capitalism is coming under fire, as countries across Europe question its merits and emerging markets like Brazil, China and Singapore run their own forms of state-directed capitalism. An ideologically broad range of financiers and elite business managers—Warren Buffett, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Vanguard’s John Bogle, McKinsey’s Dominic Barton, Allianz’s Mohamed El-Erian and others—have started to speak out publicly about the need for a new and more inclusive type of capitalism, one that also helps businesses make better long-term decisions rather than focusing only on the next quarter. The Pope has become a vocal critic of modern market capitalism, lambasting the “idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy” in which “man is reduced to one of his needs alone: consumption.”
During my 23 years in business and economic journalism, I’ve long wondered why our market system doesn’t serve companies, workers and consumers better than it does. For some time now, finance has been thought by most to be at the very top of the economic hierarchy, the most aspirational part of an advanced service economy that graduated from agriculture and manufacturing. But research shows just how the unintended consequences of this misguided belief have endangered the very system America has prided itself on exporting around the world.
America’s economic illness has a name: financialization. It’s an academic term for the trend by which Wall Street and its methods have come to reign supreme in America, permeating not just the financial industry but also much of American business. It includes everything from the growth in size and scope of finance and financial activity in the economy; to the rise of debt-fueled speculation over productive lending; to the ascendancy of shareholder value as the sole model for corporate governance; to the proliferation of risky, selfish thinking in both the private and public sectors; to the increasing political power of financiers and the CEOs they enrich; to the way in which a “markets know best” ideology remains the status quo. Financialization is a big, unfriendly word with broad, disconcerting implications.
University of Michigan professor Gerald Davis, one of the pre-eminent scholars of the trend, likens financialization to a “Copernican revolution” in which business has reoriented its orbit around the financial sector. This revolution is often blamed on bankers. But it was facilitated by shifts in public policy, from both sides of the aisle, and crafted by the government leaders, policymakers and regulators entrusted with keeping markets operating smoothly. Greta Krippner, another University of Michigan scholar, who has written one of the most comprehensive books on financialization, believes this was the case when financialization began its fastest growth, in the decades from the late 1970s onward. According to Krippner, that shift encompasses Reagan-era deregulation, the unleashing of Wall Street and the rise of the so-called ownership society that promoted owning property and further tied individual health care and retirement to the stock market.
The changes were driven by the fact that in the 1970s, the growth that America had enjoyed following World War II began to slow. Rather than make tough decisions about how to bolster it (which would inevitably mean choosing among various interest groups), politicians decided to pass that responsibility to the financial markets. Little by little, the Depression-era regulation that had served America so well was rolled back, and finance grew to become the dominant force that it is today. The shifts were bipartisan, and to be fair they often seemed like good ideas at the time; but they also came with unintended consequences. The Carter-era deregulation of interest rates—something that was, in an echo of today’s overlapping left-and right-wing populism, supported by an assortment of odd political bedfellows from Ralph Nader to Walter Wriston, then head of Citibank—opened the door to a spate of financial “innovations” and a shift in bank function from lending to trading. Reaganomics famously led to a number of other economic policies that favored Wall Street. Clinton-era deregulation, which seemed a path out of the economic doldrums of the late 1980s, continued the trend. Loose monetary policy from the Alan Greenspan era onward created an environment in which easy money papered over underlying problems in the economy, so much so that it is now chronically dependent on near-zero interest rates to keep from falling back into recession.
This sickness, not so much the product of venal interests as of a complex and long-term web of changes in government and private industry, now manifests itself in myriad ways: a housing market that is bifurcated and dependent on government life support, a retirement system that has left millions insecure in their old age, a tax code that favors debt over equity. Debt is the lifeblood of finance; with the rise of the securities-and-trading portion of the industry came a rise in debt of all kinds, public and private. That’s bad news, since a wide range of academic research shows that rising debt and credit levels stoke financial instability. And yet, as finance has captured a greater and greater piece of the national pie, it has, perversely, all but ensured that debt is indispensable to maintaining any growth at all in an advanced economy like the U.S., where 70% of output is consumer spending. Debt-fueled finance has become a saccharine substitute for the real thing, an addiction that just gets worse. (The amount of credit offered to American consumers has doubled in real dollars since the 1980s, as have the fees they pay to their banks.)
As the economist Raghuram Rajan, one of the most prescient seers of the 2008 financial crisis, argues, credit has become a palliative to address the deeper anxieties of downward mobility in the middle class. In his words, “let them eat credit” could well summarize the mantra of the go-go years before the economic meltdown. And things have only deteriorated since, with global debt levels $57 trillion higher than they were in 2007.
The rise of finance has also distorted local economies. It’s the reason rents are rising in some communities where unemployment is still high. America’s housing market now favors cash buyers, since banks are still more interested in making profits by trading than by the traditional role of lending out our savings to people and businesses looking to make longterm investments (like buying a house), ensuring that younger people can’t get on the housing ladder. One perverse result: Blackstone, a private-equity firm, is currently the largest single-family-home landlord in America, since it had the money to buy properties up cheap in bulk following the financial crisis. It’s at the heart of retirement insecurity, since fees from actively managed mutual funds “are likely to confiscate as much as 65% or more of the wealth that … investors could otherwise easily earn,” as Vanguard founder Bogle testified to Congress in 2014.
It’s even the reason companies in industries from autos to airlines are trying to move into the business of finance themselves. American companies across every sector today earn five times the revenue from financial activities—investing, hedging, tax optimizing and offering financial services, for example—that they did before 1980. Traditional hedging by energy and transport firms, for example, has been overtaken by profit-boosting speculation in oil futures, a shift that actually undermines their core business by creating more price volatility. Big tech companies have begun underwriting corporate bonds the way Goldman Sachs does. And top M.B.A. programs would likely encourage them to do just that; finance has become the center of all business education.
Washington, too, is so deeply tied to the ambassadors of the capital markets—six of the 10 biggest individual political donors this year are hedge-fund barons—that even well-meaning politicians and regulators don’t see how deep the problems are. When I asked one former high-level Obama Administration Treasury official back in 2013 why more stakeholders aside from bankers hadn’t been consulted about crafting the particulars of Dodd-Frank financial reform (93% of consultation on the Volcker Rule, for example, was taken with the financial industry itself), he said, “Who else should we have talked to?” The answer—to anybody not profoundly influenced by the way finance thinks—might have been the people banks are supposed to lend to, or the scholars who study the capital markets, or the civic leaders in communities decimated by the financial crisis.
Of course, there are other elements to the story of America’s slow-growth economy, including familiar trends from globalization to technology-related job destruction. These are clearly massive challenges in their own right. But the single biggest unexplored reason for long-term slower growth is that the financial system has stopped serving the real economy and now serves mainly itself. A lack of real fiscal action on the part of politicians forced the Fed to pump $4.5 trillion in monetary stimulus into the economy after 2008. This shows just how broken the model is, since the central bank’s best efforts have resulted in record stock prices (which enrich mainly the wealthiest 10% of the population that owns more than 80% of all stocks) but also a lackluster 2% economy with almost no income growth.
Now, as many top economists and investors predict an era of much lower asset-price returns over the next 30 years, America’s ability to offer up even the appearance of growth—via financially oriented strategies like low interest rates, more and more consumer credit, tax-deferred debt financing for businesses, and asset bubbles that make people feel richer than we really are, until they burst—is at an end.
This pinch is particularly evident in the tumult many American businesses face. Lending to small business has fallen particularly sharply, as has the number of startup firms. In the early 1980s, new companies made up half of all U.S. businesses. For all the talk of Silicon Valley startups, the number of new firms as a share of all businesses has actually shrunk. From 1978 to 2012 it declined by 44%, a trend that numerous researchers and even many investors and businesspeople link to the financial industry’s change in focus from lending to speculation. The wane in entrepreneurship means less economic vibrancy, given that new businesses are the nation’s foremost source of job creation and GDP growth. Buffett summed it up in his folksy way: “You’ve now got a body of people who’ve decided they’d rather go to the casino than the restaurant” of capitalism.
In lobbying for short-term share-boosting management, finance is also largely responsible for the drastic cutback in research-and-development outlays in corporate America, investments that are seed corn for future prosperity. Take share buybacks, in which a company—usually with some fanfare—goes to the stock market to purchase its own shares, usually at the top of the market, and often as a way of artificially bolstering share prices in order to enrich investors and executives paid largely in stock options. Indeed, if you were to chart the rise in money spent on share buybacks and the fall in corporate spending on productive investments like R&D, the two lines make a perfect X. The former has been going up since the 1980s, with S&P 500 firms now spending $1 trillion a year on buybacks and dividends—equal to about 95% of their net earnings—rather than investing that money back into research, product development or anything that could contribute to long-term company growth. No sector has been immune, not even the ones we think of as the most innovative. Many tech firms, for example, spend far more on share-price boosting than on R&D as a whole. The markets penalize them when they don’t. One case in point: back in March 2006, Microsoft announced major new technology investments, and its stock fell for two months. But in July of that same year, it embarked on $20 billion worth of stock buying, and the share price promptly rose by 7%. This kind of twisted incentive for CEOs and corporate officers has only grown since.
As a result, business dynamism, which is at the root of economic growth, has suffered. The number of new initial public offerings (IPOs) is about a third of what it was 20 years ago. True, the dollar value of IPOs in 2014 was $74.4 billion, up from $47.1 billion in 1996. (The median IPO rose to $96 million from $30 million during the same period.) This may show investors want to make only the surest of bets, which is not necessarily the sign of a vibrant market. But there’s another, more disturbing reason: firms simply don’t want to go public, lest their work become dominated by playing by Wall Street’s rules rather than creating real value.
An IPO—a mechanism that once meant raising capital to fund new investment—is likely today to mark not the beginning of a new company’s greatness, but the end of it. According to a Stanford University study, innovation tails off by 40% at tech companies after they go public, often because of Wall Street pressure to keep jacking up the stock price, even if it means curbing the entrepreneurial verve that made the company hot in the first place.
A flat stock price can spell doom. It can get CEOs canned and turn companies into acquisition fodder, which often saps once innovative firms. Little wonder, then, that business optimism, as well as business creation, is lower than it was 30 years ago, or that wages are flat and inequality growing. Executives who receive as much as 82% of their compensation in stock naturally make shorter-term business decisions that might undermine growth in their companies even as they raise the value of their own options.
It’s no accident that corporate stock buybacks, corporate pay and the wealth gap have risen concurrently over the past four decades. There are any number of studies that illustrate this type of intersection between financialization and inequality. One of the most striking was by economists James Galbraith and Travis Hale, who showed how during the late 1990s, changing income inequality tracked the go-go Nasdaq stock index to a remarkable degree.
Recently, this pattern has become evident at a number of well-known U.S. companies. Take Apple, one of the most successful over the past 50 years. Apple has around $200 billion sitting in the bank, yet it has borrowed billions of dollars cheaply over the past several years, thanks to superlow interest rates (themselves a response to the financial crisis) to pay back investors in order to bolster its share price. Why borrow? In part because it’s cheaper than repatriating cash and paying U.S. taxes. All the financial engineering helped boost the California firm’s share price for a while. But it didn’t stop activist investor Carl Icahn, who had manically advocated for borrowing and buybacks, from dumping the stock the minute revenue growth took a turn for the worse in late April.
It is perhaps the ultimate irony that large, rich companies like Apple are most involved with financial markets at times when they don’t need any financing. Top-tier U.S. businesses have never enjoyed greater financial resources. They have a record $2 trillion in cash on their balance sheets—enough money combined to make them the 10th largest economy in the world. Yet in the bizarre order that finance has created, they are also taking on record amounts of debt to buy back their own stock, creating what may be the next debt bubble to burst.
You and I, whether we recognize it or not, are also part of a dysfunctional ecosystem that fuels short-term thinking in business. The people who manage our retirement money—fund managers working for asset-management firms—are typically compensated for delivering returns over a year or less. That means they use their financial clout (which is really our financial clout in aggregate) to push companies to produce quick-hit results rather than execute long-term strategies. Sometimes pension funds even invest with the activists who are buying up the companies we might work for—and those same activists look for quick cost cuts and potentially demand layoffs.
It’s a depressing state of affairs, no doubt. Yet America faces an opportunity right now: a rare second chance to do the work of refocusing and right-sizing the financial sector that should have been done in the years immediately following the 2008 crisis. And there are bright spots on the horizon.
Despite the lobbying power of the financial industry and the vested interests both in Washington and on Wall Street, there’s a growing push to put the financial system back in its rightful place, as a servant of business rather than its master. Surveys show that the majority of Americans would like to see the tax system reformed and the government take more direct action on job creation and poverty reduction, and address inequality in a meaningful way. Each candidate is crafting a message around this, which will keep the issue front and center through November.
The American public understands just how deeply and profoundly the economic order isn’t working for the majority of people. The key to reforming the U.S. system is comprehending why it isn’t working.
Remooring finance in the real economy isn’t as simple as splitting up the biggest banks (although that would be a good start). It’s about dismantling the hold of financial-oriented thinking in every corner of corporate America. It’s about reforming business education, which is still permeated with academics who resist challenges to the gospel of efficient markets in the same way that medieval clergy dismissed scientific evidence that might challenge the existence of God. It’s about changing a tax system that treats one-year investment gains the same as longer-term ones, and induces financial institutions to push overconsumption and speculation rather than healthy lending to small businesses and job creators. It’s about rethinking retirement, crafting smarter housing policy and restraining a money culture filled with lobbyists who violate America’s essential economic principles.
It’s also about starting a bigger conversation about all this, with a broader group of stakeholders. The structure of American capital markets and whether or not they are serving business is a topic that has traditionally been the sole domain of “experts”—the financiers and policymakers who often have a self-interested perspective to push, and who do so in complicated language that keeps outsiders out of the debate. When it comes to finance, as with so many issues in a democratic society, complexity breeds exclusion.
Finding solutions won’t be easy. There are no silver bullets, and nobody really knows the perfect model for a high-functioning, advanced market system in the 21st century. But capitalism’s legacy is too long, and the well-being of too many people is at stake, to do nothing in the face of our broken status quo. Neatly packaged technocratic tweaks cannot fix it. What is required now is lifesaving intervention.
Crises of faith like the one American capitalism is currently suffering can be a good thing if they lead to re-examination and reaffirmation of first principles. The right question here is in fact the simplest one: Are financial institutions doing things that provide a clear, measurable benefit to the real economy? Sadly, the answer at the moment is mostly no. But we can change things. Our system of market capitalism wasn’t handed down, in perfect form, on stone tablets. We wrote the rules. We broke them. And we can fix them.
虽然号称社会主义，中国不也周期性经济危机吗。
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