【英语生活】国有化不是万能药

Four months is a very long time in financial markets.In mid-September, as the credit crisis swirled around Wall Street, I wrote a column recommending that Hank Paulson, the former US Treasury secretary, refrain from bailing out Lehman Brothers. He did indeed let the investment bank go under, and the rest is history.

Looking back, I still think Lehman should have been allowed to fail, but I was wrong not to grasp that it had to be done in an orderly way. Once the chances of a private sector takeover were exhausted, intervention was required to prevent chaos.

Now we are back where we started, this time with large commercial banks instead of Wall Street brokers.

Both the UK and US governments face pressure not merely to bail out these banks, which they have already attempted, but to nationalise them. This episode of nerves broke out after investors were told by Royal Bank of Scotland on Monday that it faces a £28bn (€30bn, $40bn) loss for 2008.

Share prices in UK high street banks have fallen so sharply – leaving RBS with a market capitalisation of about £4bn and Barclays worth £6bn – that some financiers and politicians are calling for the UK government to end the uncertainty and take them into public ownership.

There have been similar calls in the US, after Citigroup and Bank of America disclosed big write-downs and large banks including State Street appeared not to have enough equity to ride out a big recession. It is now extremely hard for such institutions to raise common equity, which is what they need, on stock markets or by private placement.

Unlike in the Lehman case, I do not think governments should allow big banks that are cornerstones of their economies to go under. If the UK government has to follow the example of the Irish government in the case of Anglo Irish Bank and take over at least one big bank, so be it.

But I do not believe any country should be eager to nationalise its banks, except in extremis.

My argument for letting Lehman go was that the US government, if it kept stepping in to rescue investment banks, would strain its finances and could face currency weakness.

In fact, those problems struck home most painfully in the UK. Gordon Brown, the prime minister, won plaudits from the world in October for intervening more radically and expensively than the US to bail out banks. Three months later, Mr Brown faces the triple threat of a banking, currency and fiscal crisis.

The lesson is that, while dramatic interventions are satisfying at the time, they do not necessarily solve matters. Nationalisation could be needed, but it is not a panacea.

There are arguments for it, beyond the moral hazard point that it hurts shareholders for allowing dangerous risk-taking. Some were advanced by Willem Buiter on his FT.com blog last week and by John McFall and Jon Moulton on this page on Tuesday.

Probably the best is that it provides clear backing for financial institutions that struggling economies depend on to keep lending. There is a danger that privately owned banks with weak balance sheets “have enough capital to stay on their feet and stumble around a bit” but are afraid of doing the job, as Professor Buiter put it.

Furthermore, if a government thinks it will eventually have to nationalise, there are merits in getting on with it. Japan took until 1998 to inject public funds into its banks during its 1990s crisis, while Sweden achieved more by briskly insisting on banks writing off their equity and recapitalising them.

The fact remains that governments are bad owners for banks, as anyone who has followed the history of Germany's regional state-owned banks can attest. They are heavily conflicted because, although politicians like to castigate bankers for risk-taking, they also push them to lend freely in order to make the voters happy.

More specifically, the costs of a full public recapitalisation of banks in the US or UK, in addition to the public ring-fencing of their troubled assets into state-controlled “bad banks”, would be enormous.

This is particularly true of the US, which cannot just acquire a few large banks, like the UK or Sweden, and be satisfied that it has dealt with most of the banking market.

The plan being mulled by Barack Obama's new administration and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to corral bad assets into a vehicle like the Resolution Trust Corporation, which took Savings and Loan assets in 1989, could cost $1,000bn.

Then consider that the top 10 US banks, which are now regarded as short of capital, have equity of about $800bn. Nationalisation of only these banks, complete with recapitalisation, could bring the bill to the taxpayer to more than $2,000bn, which puts the $350bn left in the Treasury's $700bn troubled assets relief programme into a very sobering perspective.

Prof Buiter argues that one clear benefit of nationalisation is that it would eliminate the uncertainty over how to value troubled assets taken from the balance sheets of banks. Any government that owned both “good bank” and “bad bank” could value them as it wished.

In practice, that would only be true if the entire global banking system, complete with all mortgage and asset-backed securities, were nationalised. Sweden could value Swedish property loans as it saw fit in the 1990s, but global finance has taken that luxury away.

If the British banking market in particular continues with its relentless decline, Mr Brown may have no choice but, in traditional Labour party style, to seize the UK economy's commanding heights. But, if the prime minister becomes banker-in-chief, his problems will just be beginning.

在金融市场上，4个月是一段很长的时间。9月中旬，当信贷危机环绕着华尔街的时候，我写了一个专栏建议美国前财长汉克•保尔森(Hank Paulson)不要纾困雷曼兄弟(Lehman Brothers)。他确实让这家投行倒闭了，而此后的一切大家都知道了，无须赘言。

回想起来，我还是认为政府应该让雷曼倒闭，但我错在没有领悟到这需要以一种有序的方式来进行。一旦私人部门接管的可能性完全没有了，政府必须出手干预以防止混乱。

现在我们又重新回到了起点，只不过这次是大型商业银行，而不是华尔街经纪商。

美英政府现在所面临的压力都不仅仅是纾困这些银行（它们已经尝试过），而是对它们实施国有化。这一紧张插曲之所以爆发，是由于苏格兰皇家银行(Royal Bank of Scotland)最近告诉投资者，其2008年业务面临280亿英镑（合400亿美元）的亏损。

英国零售银行的股价已经下跌得如此厉害——苏格兰皇家银行的市值只剩下大约40亿英镑，而巴克莱(Barclays)为60亿英镑——以至一些金融家和政界人士在呼吁英国政府结束这种不确定性，对它们实行国有化。

美国也出现了类似的呼吁，此前，花旗集团(Citigroup)和美国银行(Bank of America)披露了大额的资产减记，包括道富银行(State Street)在内的许多大型银行，似乎没有足够的股本可供安全渡过一场严重的衰退。对于这些机构而言，在股市或通过私募筹集它们所需要的普通股本已经变得极其困难。

与雷曼的情况不同，我不认为政府应该让作为经济基石的大型银行倒闭。如果英国政府不得不仿效爱尔兰政府对Anglo Irish Bank的处理，接管至少一家大型银行，那么就做吧。

但我并不认为哪个国家应该急于对银行实施国有化，除非迫不得已。

我支持任由雷曼倒闭的理由是，如果美国政府不断插手拯救投行，那么它的财政状况将会紧张，并且它可能会面临美元走软。

事实上，这些问题对英国的打击最为严重。去年10月份，英国首相戈登•布朗(Gordon Brown)因为在纾困银行方面做得比美国更彻底、投入更大而赢得了全世界的喝彩。而3个月后，布朗面临着银行业、英镑汇率和财政危机这三重威胁。

我们得到的教训是，尽管引人瞩目的干预在当时是令人满意的，但它们不一定能解决问题。国有化可能是需要的，但它不是万能药。

除了道德风险的观点，即放任危险性的风险承担会损害股东利益外，还有其他支持这一主张的理由。最近，威廉姆•比特(Willem Buiter)在他的FT.com博客上提出了一些观点；接着，约翰•麦克福(John McFall)和乔恩•摩尔顿(Jon Moulton)也在这个页面上给出了自己的观点。

或许最好的理由是，这为金融机构提供了明确的支持，而挣扎着的经济体需要这些机构继续放贷。正如比特指出的，目前的一个危险是，资产负债状况较差的私有银行“有足够的资金支撑，并能稍稍有所作为，”但它们害怕这么做。

此外，如果一个政府觉得最终将不得不付诸国有化，那么它应该果断出手。上世纪90年代危机期间，日本直到1998年才把公共资金注入银行，而瑞典通过坚决要求银行减记自身的股本，然后调整它们的资本结构，获得了更好的效果。

不变的事实是，对于银行而言，政府是糟糕的所有者，任何了解德国政府所有的地方银行历史的人都可以证明。他们存在严重冲突的地方在于，尽管政客喜欢谴责银行家承担风险的行为，但为了让选民高兴，他们也会推动银行家自由放贷。

更具体地说，美国或英国银行完全由政府调整资本结构的成本，以及让它们的问题资产进入由政府控制的“坏银行”的保护成本，将会十分巨大。

尤其是美国，它无法像英国或瑞典一样，仅仅接管几家大型银行，就能放心地认为，它已经处理了银行业市场上的绝大部分问题。

巴拉克•奥巴马(Barack Obama)新政府和美国联邦存款保险公司(Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation)正在酝酿的计划将会花费1万亿美元，该计划的内容是把不良资产聚集到一个像清债信托公司(Resolution Trust Corporation)那样的工具中。1989年成立的清债信托公司负责处置美国储蓄及贷款机构(Savings and Loan)的问题资产。

接着让我们想想美国拥有约8000亿美元股本的前10大银行，它们现在都被认为缺乏资金。单对这些银行实施国有化，连同调整资本结构，就会使纳税人的账单超过2万亿美元，这一数字使财政部7000亿美元问题资产救助计划(Tarp)中剩下的3500亿美元显得微不足道。

比特争辩称，国有化最明显的一个好处是，它将在估价从银行资产负债表上移走的问题资产方面消除不确定性。任何既拥有“好银行”，又拥有“坏银行”的政府，都可以按照自己的意愿对它们进行估价。

在实际操作中，只有整个全球银行体系，以及所有的抵押贷款和资产支持型证券都被国有化了，这一点才能成为现实。瑞典在上世纪90年代可以随心所欲地对本国的房地产贷款进行估值，但全球金融已经把这种奢侈的权利给带走了。

如果英国银行业市场继续无情地下跌，布朗可能别无选择，只能以传统的工党风格夺取英国经济的制高点。但如果首相成了首席银行家，他的问题将只是刚刚开始。

译者/董琴