爲何借錢? 警惕企業金融化風險

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.

當今商業最具諷刺意味的事情之一是，世界上最富有、最強大的公司在實際上不需要資本的時候，對資本市場的參與程度之深反而超過以往任何時候。以蘋果(Apple)爲例。蘋果的銀行賬戶上有大約2000億美元資金，但蘋果近年來借入了數十億美元，用於回購股票，以支撐最近萎靡不振的股價。

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.

爲何借錢？當然是因爲這樣比把資金匯回美國、並在美國繳稅要便宜。在一段時間內，金融工程幫助這家加州公司提振了股價。但這並未能阻止維權投資者卡爾•伊卡恩(Carl Icahn)在4月末蘋果營收增速急劇惡化時，拋售蘋果股票。他曾狂熱地鼓吹借款回購股票。

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).

蘋果並非唯一不做真正的工程、而大搞金融工程的公司。美國頂級公司從未享有過比如今更大的金融資源。它們資產負債表上的現金達到2萬億美元——這麼多的錢加在一起相當於世界第十大經濟體。不過，它們也借入了創紀錄的債務用於回購自己的股票，製造了一場公司債泡沫。這場泡沫已開始破滅（看看埃克森美孚(Exxon)的評級近日遭到調降的事例）。

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.

回購泡沫只是一個更大趨勢的一部分——美國企業不再着眼於商業。如今，美國公司僅僅依靠挪動資金賺到的利潤比以往任何時候都多，金融交易、對衝、稅務優化以及銷售金融服務等純金融活動產生的收入大約爲戰後時期的5倍。近些年來，企業的股票回購與研發投資呈反向變動，也就不足爲奇了。對於“保鮮期”3年的首席執行官而言，通過在短期內推高股價來取悅投資人，比投資於讓公司獲得長期發展的項目要容易得多。

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.

很能說明問題的是，在新科技、員工培訓、工廠升級以及研發方面的投資上，非上市公司是同等規模上市公司的兩倍，因爲它們根本無需應對市場壓力而不去投資。

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.

實際上，企業的金融化是隨着資本市場和金融業本身的崛起而同步發展的。過去40年裏，金融業佔國內生產總值(GDP)的比例提高了大約1倍（就連金融危機也沒有把金融業打壓下去；金融業的規模僅僅略微收縮，活下來的最大金融機構變得更大了）。隨着金融業的增長，金融業利潤也在增長——金融業僅爲美國提供了4%的就業崗位，但佔美國企業利潤總額的約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.

並不讓人意外的是，非金融企業也想從事金融活動。比如，航空公司在油價套期保值上賺到的利潤經常高於機票銷售利潤——儘管這樣增加了大宗商品的波動性，從而損害其核心業務，而且押注失敗可能導致它們突然蒙受鉅額損失。直到最近，美國的創新企業通用電氣(GE)纔不再是一家“大到不能倒的”銀行。

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.

製藥業的金融化程度或許是最高的，自2008年以來，該行業已裁員近15萬人，其中主要是研發崗位，製藥企業反而集中精力去做外包、稅務優化、稅收倒置和“創造性”會計處理，這讓它們看起來像是資產管理公司——一羣獨立經營、努力盡可能快、儘可能多地賺錢的完全不同的公司，基本不去思考自身決策的長期影響。

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，蘋果和其他科技巨頭像投行一樣，在新的公司債發行中充當錨定投資者，考慮到它們持有的現金量那麼大，這也在意料之中。如果大型科技公司在任何時點決定拋售這些債券，都可能構成影響市場的事件，這個問題已引起美國財政部金融研究辦公室(Office of Financial Research)裏專家們的關注。

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.

這些全都對實體經濟不利；大量的學術研究顯示，不但金融變成了增長的障礙，而且金融工程正在摧毀企業內部的長期價值。我們在過去20年裏看到的股票回購熱潮，經常發生在市場見頂時，於是就產生了由金融製造的增長。由於企業利潤承壓，那些一直未投資於真正的基本增長和創新的美國企業可能面臨衰落的命運。結果將是更嚴重的經濟停滯——以及更嚴重的政治民粹主義。