索罗斯眼中的信贷危机(上)

THE CREDIT CRUNCH ACCORDING TO SOROS
作者：英国《金融时报》美国版主编克里斯蒂娅•弗里兰(Chrystia Freeland)
On Friday, August 17 2007, 21 of Wall Street's most influential investors met for lunch at George Soros's Southampton estate on the eastern end of Long Island. The first tremors of what would become the global credit crunch had rippled out a week or so earlier, when the French bank BNP Paribas froze withdrawals from three of its funds, and in response, central bankers made a huge injection of liquidity into the money markets in an effort to keep the world's banks lending to one another.
Although it was a sultry summer Friday, as the group dined on striped bass, fruit salad and cookies, the tone was serious and rather formal. Soros's guests included Julian Robertson, founder of the Tiger Management hedge fund; Donald Marron, the former chief executive of PaineWebber and now boss of Lightyear Capital; James Chanos, president of Kynikos Associates, a hedge fund that specialised in shorting stocks; and Byron Wien, chief investment strategist at Pequot Capital and the convener of the annual gathering – known to its participants as the Benchmark Lunch.
The discussion focused on a single question: was a recession looming? We all know the answer today, but the consensus that overcast afternoon was different. In a memo written after the lunch, Wien, a longtime friend of Soros's, wrote: “The conclusion was that we were probably in an economic slowdown and a correction in the market, but we were not about to begin a recession or a bear market.” Only two men dissented. One of those was Soros, who finished the meal convinced that the global financial crisis he had been predicting – prematurely – for years had finally begun.
His conclusion had immediate consequences. Six years earlier, following the departure of Stan Druckenmiller from Quantum Funds, Soros's hedge fund, Soros converted the operation into a “less aggressively managed vehicle” and renamed it an “endowment fund”, which farmed most of its money out to external managers. Now Soros realised he had to get back into the game. “I did not want to see my accumulated wealth be severely impaired,” he said, during a two-hour conversation this winter in the conference room of his midtown Manhattan offices. “So I came back and set up a macro-account within which I counterbalanced what I thought was the exposure of the firm.”
Soros complained that his years of less active involvement at Quantum meant he didn't have the kind of “detailed knowledge of particular companies I used to have, so I'm not in a position to pick stocks”. Moreover, “even many of the macro instruments that have been recently invented were unfamiliar to me”. Even so, Quantum achieved a 32 per cent return in 2007, making the then 77-year-old the second-highest paid hedge fund manager in the world, according to Institutional Investor's Alpha magazine. He ended 2008, a year that saw global destruction of wealth on the most colossal scale since the second world war, with two out of three hedge funds losing money, up almost 10 per cent.
Soros's main goal was to preserve his fortune. But, as has been the case throughout his career, his timing and financial acumen enhanced his credibility as a thinker, and never more so than in 2008. In May and June, after more than two decades of writing, he hit bestseller lists in the US and in the UK with his ninth book, The New Paradigm for Financial Markets. In October, he received an invitation to testify before Congress about the financial crisis. In November, Barack Obama, whom he had long backed for the presidency, defeated John McCain.
“In the twilight of his life, he's achieved the recognition he has always wanted,” Wien said. “Everything is going for him. He's healthy, his candidate won, his business is on a solid footing.”
. . .
Many comparisons have been drawn between 2008 and earlier periods of turmoil, but the historical moment with most personal resonance for Soros is not one of the conventional choices. The parallel he sees is with 1944, when, as a 13-year-old Jewish boy in Nazi-occupied Budapest, he eluded the Holocaust.
Soros credits his beloved father, Tivadar, with teaching him how to respond to “far from equilibrium situations”. Captured by the Russians in the first world war, Tivadar was imprisoned in Siberia. He engineered his own escape and return home through a Russia convulsed by the Bolshevik revolution. That sojourn stripped him of his youthful ambition and left him wanting “nothing more from life than to enjoy it”. Yet on March 19 1944, the day the Germans occupied Hungary, the 50-year-old sprang into action, rescuing his immediate family and many others by arranging false identities for them.
Before the invasion, George was still enough of a child, his father thought, to need a bit of parental coddling. Yet the teenager who spent the war living apart from his parents under a false name found the danger exhilarating. “It was high adventure,” Soros wrote, “like living through Raiders of the Lost Ark.” And as the latest financial crisis gathered momentum, he admitted to the same thrill. “I think the same thing applies again. I feel the same kind of stimulation as I felt then,” he told me.
Part of the stimulation is intellectual. Soros's experiences in 1944 laid the groundwork for the conceptual framework he would spend the rest of his life elaborating and which, he believes, has found its validation in the events of 2008. His core idea is “reflexivity”, which he defines as a “two-way feedback loop, between the participants' views and the actual state of affairs. People base their decisions not on the actual situation that confronts them, but on their perception or interpretation of the situation. Their decisions make an impact on the situation and changes in the situation are liable to change their perceptions.”
It is, at its root, a case for frequent re-examination of one's assumptions about the world and for a readiness to spot and exploit moments of cataclysmic change – those times when our perceptions of events and events themselves are likely to interact most fiercely. It is also at odds with the rational expectations economic school, which has been the prevailing orthodoxy in recent decades. That approach assumed that economic players – from people buying homes to bankers buying subprime mortgages for their portfolios – were rational actors making, in aggregate, the best choices for themselves and that free markets were effective mechanisms for balancing supply and demand, setting prices correctly and tending towards equilibrium.
The rational expectations theory has taken a beating over the past 18 months: its intellectual nadir was probably October 23 2008, when Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, admitted to Congress that there was “a flaw in the model”. Soros argues that the “market fundamentalism” of Greenspan and his ilk, especially their assumption that “financial markets are self-correcting”, was an important cause of the current crisis. It befuddled policy-makers and was the intellectual basis for the “various synthetic instruments and valuation models” which contributed mightily to the crash.
By contrast, Soros sees the current crisis as a real-life illustration of reflexivity. Markets did not reflect an objective “truth”. Rather, the beliefs of market participants – that house prices would always rise, that an arcane financial instrument based on a subprime mortgage really could merit a triple-A rating – created a new reality. Ultimately, that “super-bubble” was unsustainable, hence the credit crunch of 2007 and the recession and financial crisis of 2008 and beyond.
As an investor and as a thinker, Soros has always thrived in times of upheaval. But he has also remained something of an outsider. He recalls how he “discovered loneliness” when he arrived to study at the London School of Economics in 1947. Later on, as he worked his way up from being a journeyman arbitrage trader in London and then New York, to running one of the world's most successful hedge funds, Soros remained, in the words of one private equity acquaintance, a bit of “an oddball”, both on Wall Street and in the academic world. He is frequently described as “charming”, yet few see the fit, tanned, twice-divorced billionaire as an emotional confidant. “If I had an idea about India-Pakistan, I would talk to him about it,” Wien said. “If I were having a problem in my marriage, I don't think I would go and talk to George about it.”
Strobe Talbott, now the president of the Brookings Institute and a former deputy secretary of state, said: “He likes to think of himself as an outsider who can come in from time to time, including to the Oval Office, where I took him on a couple of occasions. But simply hobnobbing with the powerful isn't important.”
That lack of clubbiness, and the associated trait of iconoclasm, may explain why, for all his worldly success, Soros has had a rather mixed public reputation. His speculative plays, which have often targeted currencies, have earned him the wrath of political leaders around the world. The ambitious, global reach of his richly funded Open Society foundation has prompted some critics to accuse him of suffering from a Messiah complex. He was so effectively demonised by the US right earlier this decade that he kept fairly quiet about his support of Obama, lest the association hurt his candidate. Probably most painfully, his forays into economics and philosophy often have met with considerable scepticism, especially from academia.
The one time and place where he instantly became a highly regarded insider was in the former Soviet Union and its satellites, at the moment the Berlin Wall came down. More completely and more swiftly than any other foreigner, Soros grasped and embraced the systemic transformation that was unfolding, and was rewarded with influence and respect. The question for Soros today is whether, as the west undergoes its own once-in-a-century systemic shock, this arch-outsider will finally find himself in the mainstream in the society which has been his main home for more than half a century.
Chrystia Freeland is the FT's US managing editor

索罗斯眼中的信贷危机(上)
作者：英国《金融时报》美国版主编克里斯蒂娅•弗里兰(Chrystia Freeland)
2007年8月17日，周五，21位华尔街上最具影响力的投资者在乔治•索罗斯(George Soros)位于纽约长岛(Long Island)东端南安普敦的家中会面吃饭。一周、甚至是更早之前，全球信贷危机的首轮冲击波已开始蔓延，当时，法国巴黎银行(BNP Paribas)冻结了其三只基金的赎回。作为回应，各大央行纷纷向货币市场注入巨大的流动资金，以期让全球的银行之间继续互相借贷。
金融危机的预言家
那是个闷热的夏天，客人们吃的是鲈鱼、水果沙拉和小甜饼，不过气氛颇为严肃，或许说正式更合适。索罗斯的客人包括：对冲基金老虎基金(Tiger Management)创始人朱利安•罗伯逊(Julian Robertson)；前普惠公司(PaineWebber)首席执行官、现Lightyear Capital公司创始人唐纳德•梅隆(Donald Marron)；专事做空股票的对冲基金Kynikos Associates公司总裁詹姆斯•夏诺斯(James Chanos)；对冲基金Pequot Capital首席投资策略师拜伦•韦恩(Byron Wien)，以及他这次年度聚会的召集人。参与这次聚会的人将之称为“基调午餐”(Benchmark Lunch)。
讨论聚焦在一个简单的问题上：经济衰退是否正在迫近？尽管我们现在已经知道答案，但是在那个天气阴沉的下午取得的共识却不是这样。在那天午餐后写下的一个备忘录中，索罗斯多年的好友韦恩写道：“结论是：我们很可能处于经济放缓和市场修正之中，但是，我们的经济不大可能陷入衰退，不会出现熊市。”只有两个人不同意这个观点。其中的一个就是索罗斯，午餐结束时他确信，多年来他一直预言的全球金融危机终于开始了。
重振量子基金
他的结论立即得到了印证。六年前，在索罗斯经营的对冲基金——量子基金(Quantum Funds)的首席交易员斯坦利•德鲁肯米勒(Stan Druckenmiller)离任后，索罗斯将这个基金转化为一个“投资不那么咄咄逼人的工具”，并将之重新命名为“捐赠基金”，这个基金会把大部分资金转让给外聘基金经理。现在，索罗斯意识到，他必须重新回到游戏中去。今年冬天，在他位于曼哈顿市中心的办事处会议室中，他在一个长达两小时的会谈中表示：“我不想看到我多年积累的财富遭到严重的破坏。所以，我回来了，建立了一个宏观账户，用以抵抗我所认为的公司风险敞口。”
索罗斯抱怨称，他多年来已经很少插手量子基金的事务了，这意味着他不再掌握“过去谙熟的特定公司的详情，所以，我没有资格挑选股票”。而且，“对于近期所采取的许多宏观调控手段，我也不是很了解”。即便如此，根据《机构投资者》杂志(Institutional Investor)《Alpha》专刊，量子基金还是在2007年实现了32%的回报率，使得在当时已经77岁的这位老人一举成为全球收入第二高的对冲基金经理。2008年是自二战后全球财富蒸发最为严重的一年。在这一年中，索罗斯的量子基金回报率依旧达到近10%，而同期有2/3的基金出现亏损。
索罗斯的主要目标是保住他的财富。但是，正如他在事业上一贯展现的，他对时机的把握和金融上的洞察力，使他的信誉提升到了思想家的高度，这一点在2008年体现得尤为淋漓尽致。2008年5月和6月，在他开始著书立作的20多年后，他的第9本书《The New Paradigm for Financial Markets》一举登上了美国和英国的畅销书榜单。10月，他收到邀请，请他就当前的金融危机到国会作证。11月，他长期支持的总统参选人巴拉克•奥巴马(Barack Obama)击败了约翰•麦凯恩(John McCain)，成功当选美国总统。
“在晚年，他博得了一直想要的认可，”韦恩说，“他事事如意。身体很健康，他支持的候选人获胜，他的生意也非常稳固。”
动荡的童年经历
人们给2008年和经济动荡早期做过很多对比，但是，最能让索罗斯对2008年的金融危机产生个人共鸣的历史时刻并不是他所做的那些平常的选择，而是1944年。当时，在纳粹占领的布达佩斯，这个年仅13岁的犹太男孩逃脱了德军的大屠杀。
索罗斯认为是他的父亲蒂瓦达(Tivadar)教会了他如何应对“严重失衡的形势”。一战时，蒂瓦达成了俄国的俘虏，被关在西伯利亚的监狱中。借助震动整个俄国的布尔什维克革命，他策划了一场越狱行动，并成功地回到了家中。那次短暂的入狱使他失去了年轻人的抱负，他“别无所求，只图享受人生”。但是，在1944年3月18日，德国人占领了匈牙利，年届50的蒂瓦达立即采取行动，通过为家人和其他一些人伪造假身份，把他们成功救出。
德军入侵前，蒂瓦达认为，乔治仍然需要父母的悉心照料。但是，这位在战争中同父母分居并用假身份生活的年轻人发现，战争的威胁非常刺激。“这太刺激了。”索罗斯写道：“这就像是生活在《夺宝奇兵》(Raiders of the Lost Ark)一样。”而随着最近这次金融危机的蓄势待发，他感受到了同样的刺激。他告诉我说：“我认为相同的事再次发生了。现在的感受简直和当时一模一样。”
这种刺激在某种程度上也激发了他的才能。索罗斯在1944年的经历为他穷毕生精力详细制定的基本概念奠定了基础。并且，他认为，他的概念在2008年所发生的事件中得到了验证。他的核心理念是“反身性”(reflexivity)，即一个“参与者的看法和真实事件之间的双向反馈回路。人们将他们的决定基于他们对于事件的认知和了解，而并不是基于他们所面临的真实事件。他们的决定对事件产生了影响，而事件的改变则很可能反过来改变他们的想法。”
从根本上说，在这种情形里，人们会对事件的假设进行频繁地再次检验，而且又会随时准备识别和利用发生巨大改变的时刻——在这些时候，我们对事件的看法和事件本身之间的影响最为剧烈。这个理论和近十年来十分盛行的理性预期经济学派相悖。那种方法假设：经济活动参与者——从购房的百姓到为自家的资产组合购买次级抵押贷款的银行——都是理性的，他们都为自己做出总体而言的最优选择；而自由市场则是一个能够实现平衡供给的有效机制，能够正确定价，使之趋于平衡状态。
反传统的“局外人”
在过去的18个月中，这种理性预期理论一直在受到打击：其学术上的最黑暗时刻或许是2008年10月23日，当时前美联储主席艾伦•格林斯潘(Alan Greenspan)向国会承认“模式存在缺陷”。索罗斯指出，格林斯潘和他的支持者所提出的“市场原教旨主义”(market fundamentalism)，尤其是他们对“金融市场会自我纠正”这一假设，是引发目前的这场危机的一个重要原因。这个理论蒙蔽了政策制定者，它也是要为这次经济破裂负巨大责任的“各种综合性金融工具和估值模型”的理论基础。
相反，索罗斯将这次危机视为“反身性”的一个活生生的说明。市场并未反映客观“真相”。市场参与者相信房价总是会上涨；基于次级抵押贷款的晦涩难解的金融工具，确实配得上“3A”评级，这些信念创造了一个新的现实。最终，“超级泡沫”无法再持续下去了，于是就出现了2007年的信贷危机、2008年的经济衰退和金融危机等等。
作为一个投资者和思想家，索罗斯总是能在乱世中兴旺发达。但他一直有点不合群。他回忆起他1947年去伦敦经济学院学习时是如何“发现孤独”的。后来，当他先是在伦敦，后是在纽约，从一个初出茅庐的套利交易员开始逐步开创局面，直到成为一个世界上最成功的对冲基金经理时，他在华尔街和学术界，用他的一个私人股份投资公司的熟人的话说，依然有点“怪人”的味道。人们常常用“有魅力”一词来形容他，但很少有人把这位身体健康、古铜色皮肤、曾离过两次婚的亿万富翁，视为知己。“如果我对印巴关系有想法，那么我会找他来讨论。”韦恩说，“但是如果我在婚姻上遇到问题，我想我是不会跟乔治去谈的。”
前美国副国务卿、现布鲁金斯学会(Brookings Institute)会长斯特罗布•塔尔博特(Strobe Talbott)说：“他喜欢将自己定格为一个局外人士，能够随时进场，包括总统办公室，我过去带他去过几次。但是单单和实权人物打交道并不重要。”
缺乏交际和与之相关的反传统、逆大流而动的个性，解释了为什么尽管他有多次举世皆知的成功，却有好坏参半的社会声誉。他的投机性行动——通常是针对各国的货币——激起了各国政治领导人的愤慨。他那雄心勃勃、覆盖全球而且资金雄厚的开放社会基金会(Open Society foundation)，引起了批评家对他的指责，被指患有“救世主情结”。21世纪初，美国人把索罗斯大大地妖魔化了，以至于他对于自己对奥巴马的支持一直秘而不宣，使免累及这名总统候选人。或许，最痛苦的是，他对经济学和哲学的研究通常会碰到不少的怀疑，尤其是在学术界。
柏林墙推倒后，他立即在前苏联以及附庸国家受到了高度尊敬，成为一个内部知情人士。较之于其他外国人，索罗斯更加全面、更加迅速地了解并大力欢迎逐渐展开的系统性转型，赢得了影响力和尊重。索罗斯今天面临的问题是：随着西方世界体系受到百年难得一遇的冲击，这位永远的局外人，是否会最终在这个他生活了大半辈子的家园里，发觉其实自己也置身于社会主流之中。
(待续)
克里斯蒂娅·弗里兰系英国《金融时报》美国版主编
译者/红岭
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