索罗斯眼中的信贷危机（中）

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)
Soros's most famous – or infamous – speculative play as an investor was his bet against sterling in 1992, a wager which won him more than $1bn and earned him the epithet from the British press of “the man who broke the Bank of England”. That bet also turns out to be a perfect illustration of the specific talent which his past and present fund managers agree has been central to his investing success.
Soros's best-known investment was not, in actual fact, his own idea. According to both Soros and Druckenmiller, who was managing Quantum at the time, it was Druckenmiller who came up with the plan to short the pound. But when Druckenmiller went through his rationale with Soros, in one of their twice- or thrice-daily conversations, Soros told his protégé to be bolder: “I said, ‘Go for the jugular!'.” Druckenmiller duly raised their stake – Quantum and several related funds wagered nearly $10bn, according to interviews Soros gave afterwards – and Soros earned both a fortune and an international reputation.
Druckenmiller, who spent 12 years at Quantum, says that conversation exemplifies Soros's singular financial gift: “He's extremely good at using the balance sheet – probably the best ever. He is able to use leverage when he likes it, but he is also able to walk away. He has no emotional attachment to a position. I think that is an unusual characteristic in our industry.”
Chanos agrees: “One thing that I've both wrestled with and admired, that [Soros] conquered many years ago, is the ability to go from long to short, the ability to turn on a dime when confronted with the evidence. Emotionally, that is really hard.”
Soros denies any great degree of emotional self-control. “That's not true, that's not true,” he told me, shaking his head and smiling. “I am very emotional. I am as moody as the market, so I'm basically a manic depressive personality.” (His market-linked moodiness extends to psychosomatic ailments, especially backaches, which he treats as valuable investment tips.)
Instead, Soros attributes his effectiveness as an investor to his philosophical views about the contingent nature of human knowledge: “I think that my conceptual framework, which basically emphasises the importance of misconceptions, makes me extremely critical of my own decisions … I know that I am bound to be wrong, and therefore am more likely to correct my own mistakes.”
Soros's radar for revolution is the second key to his investing style. He looks for “game-changing moments, not incremental ones”, according to Sebastian Mallaby, the Washington Post columnist and author who is writing a history of hedge funds. As examples, Mallaby cites Quantum's shorting of the pound and Soros's 1985 “Plaza Accord” bet that the dollar would fall against the yen – his two most famous currency trades – as well as a lesser-known 1973 bet that, as a consequence of the Arab-Israeli war, defence stocks would soar. “It's not that reflexivity tells you what to do, but it tells you to be on the look-out for turn-around situations,” Mallaby said. “It's an attitude of mind.”
Some Soros-watchers intimate that his vast network of international contacts might be an important source of his market prescience. But it was in the one part of the world where Soros really did have an inside track – the former Soviet bloc – that he made his most disastrous deal. In Russia, as in much of the former Soviet Union, he was intensely engaged with the country's political and economic transformation. In June 1997, as the Kremlin struggled to pay overdue wages, Soros extended a bridge loan to the Russian government, acting as a one-man International Monetary Fund.
He came to believe in Russia's commitment to reforms, and to see himself as an insider – two convictions that were his financial undoing. He invested $980m with a consortium of oligarchs who acquired a 25 per cent stake in Svyazinvest, the national telecoms company, deciding to participate because “I thought that this is the transition from robber capitalism to legitimate capitalism”. But instead, the Svyazinvest privatisation turned out to be the moment when the oligarchs redirected their energies from fleecing the state to fleecing one another. Soros, as an outsider, was an obvious casualty. “Never have I been screwed so much since Russia. For them, they get a satisfaction out of doing it.
“It was the biggest mistake of my investment career. I was deceived by my own hope.” In his most recent book he dismisses Russia with a single sentence, further diminished by parenthesis: “(I don't discuss Russia, because I don't want to invest there.)”
. . .
On a chilly Monday night in December, Soros took the hour-long drive from Manhattan to the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut. He was due to speak at a benefit for the Scholar Rescue Fund, a programme he has partly financed and which, since 2002, has provided safe havens for 266 persecuted academics from 40 countries. After his talk (on the global financial crisis, of course), Soros filed out of the auditorium chatting with Stanley Bergman, a founding partner of the law firm that had sponsored the evening.
“You like the game?” Soros asked his host with a smile.
“Yes,” the white-haired Bergman replied.
Then, in a flash of the competitive spirit that makes Soros an avid skier and player of tennis and chess, Soros asked: “And how old are you?”
“75.”
“I'm 78,” Soros replied. “But what's the use of good health if it doesn't buy you money?” The vigorous septuagenarians flashed each other a complicit smile.
According to Wien, Soros likes the game, too: “George loves to be able to show from time to time that he can do it.” But while he loves to play, he is disdainful of a life lived purely to accumulate more chips. His epiphany came in 1981, when he had to scramble to raise money to pay for an investment in bonds. “I thought I would have a heart attack,” he told me. “And then I realised that to die just for the sake of getting rich, I would be a loser.”
For Soros, the solution was philanthropy. “To do something really that would make a significant difference to the world, that would be worth dying for,” he said. “The Foundation enabled me to get out of myself and to somehow be concerned with other people than myself.” Soros's fortune has given his causes enormous firepower: according to Aryeh Neier, the human rights activist who has been running the Open Society Foundation since 1993, its budget was $550m in 2008 and will increase to $600m this year. By his own calculation, Soros has donated a total of more than $5bn to his causes, primarily directing his giving through his foundation.
“No philanthropist in the second half of the 20th century has done better in deploying resources strategically to change the world,” Larry Summers, the newly appointed head of Barack Obama's National Economic Council, told me in a conversation early last autumn. Talbott compares Soros's impact to that of a sovereign nation. In the 1990s, says Talbott, “when I got word that George Soros wanted to talk, I would drop everything and treat him pretty much like a visiting head of state. He was literally putting more money into some of the former colonies of the former Soviet empire than the US government, so that merited treating him as someone with a very high impact.”
Soros's philanthropic lieutenants report an approach remarkably similar to the investing style observed by his fund managers: he knows how to make big, original bets, and he isn't afraid to cut his losses when a project isn't working out. Anders Aslund, an economist who has studied Russia and Ukraine and who has worked with Soros on various projects, believes his philanthropic style “is very much formed by the money markets, which are always changing. He assumes any idea he has now will be wrong in a few years. He is always asking himself, when he has a wonderful project going, ‘When should I stop this project?'.”
Soros's war chest, and his determination to deploy it beyond the usual blue-chip charities of hospitals, universities, museums or even poverty in Africa, had long made him an occasionally controversial figure outside the US. He was among the western culprits accused by the Kremlin of inciting Ukraine's 2004 Orange Revolution; his foundation's offices have been raided in Russia and he was forced to close them down in authoritarian Uzbekistan.
America, it turns out, can also be sensitive to plutocrats using their wealth to address socially contentious subjects. In recent years, his foundation became more active in the US, taking on issues including drug policy. His engagement became more intense during the George W. Bush presidency, when Soros decided that the open society he had worked to foster in repressive regimes abroad was imperilled in his adopted home.
Some admired his chutzpah. The famously independent-minded Paul Volcker, who was appointed to lead the Fed by Jimmy Carter and reappointed by Ronald Reagan, said: “The drug thing is a perfect example that he doesn't adopt a conventional view. I think drug policy needs a new look and he's been one of the people who say that.”
Soros's money has been crucial in enabling him to voice maverick views: “That's what led me to oppose Bush very publicly, because I was in a position that I could afford to do it,” he said. But he also believes his fortune and the automatic credibility it gives him in America has drawn the fire of conservative pundits such as Fox's Bill O'Reilly and extremist pamphleteer Lyndon LaRouche. “Given the excessive esteem in which people who make money are held in America, I had to be demonised,” he said.
Their attacks worked. So much so that last year, as the Obama bandwagon gained speed and American financiers, along with much of the rest of the country, clamoured to jump on, his earliest heavyweight Wall Street backer kept a low profile. “Obama seeks to be a unifier,” Soros said. “And I have been a divisive figure because I've been demonised by the right. I thought my vocal support for him would not necessarily benefit him.”
Chrystia Freeland is the FT's US managing editor

索罗斯眼中的信贷危机（中）
作者：英国《金融时报》美国版主编克里斯蒂娅•弗里兰(Chrystia Freeland)
作为投资者，索罗斯最著名的（或者说是最臭名昭著的）投机行为，是他在1992年攻击英镑的豪赌。这场赌博让他赢得了10多亿美元，英国媒体因此也给了他一个恶名——“让英格兰银行破产的人”。后来的结果表明，那次打赌也是对他特殊才干的完美诠释。很多过去和现在的基金经理都认为，这种特殊才干是他成功投资事迹的核心因素。
事实上，索罗斯最著名的投资并不是他自己的主意。据索罗斯和当时量子基金经理德鲁肯米勒说，想出做空英镑这一点子的人是德鲁肯米勒。但是当德鲁肯米勒在和索罗斯第二或者第三次检查这项计划时，索罗斯告诉他的这名得意手下，胆子要大些：“我对他说：‘直扑要害！'。”于是，德鲁肯米勒恰当地加大赌注——后来，索罗斯在采访中称，量子基金和好几只相关的基金，把赌注金额加到了接近100亿美元——索罗斯不仅赚到了巨大的财富，而且在国际上声名鹊起。
非凡的金融天赋
在量子基金工作了12年的德鲁肯米勒说，那场谈话展现了索罗斯非凡的金融天赋：“他非常善于利用资产负债表——或许是历史上最善于此道的一个人。他还能在觉得有必要的时候充分利用杠杆，但是也能做到弃之不用。他对工作岗位毫不掺杂情感因素。我认为，这在我们这一行中，这是非常与众不同的性格。”
夏诺斯表示同意：“（索罗斯）多年前就已做到，我一直在为之努力并钦佩不已的是，他能够从多头转为空头，能够在事实证据面前迅速转变做法。从感情上来说，这相当困难。”
对于情感自控能力，索罗斯全盘否认。“不，不是这样的。”他摇头笑着跟我说，“我非常情绪化，和市场一样喜怒无常。所以，基本上，我是一个躁狂抑郁的人。”(他那与市场挂钩的情绪会导致他身体不适，尤其是背痛，而他则将之视为宝贵的投资提示。)
相反，索罗斯将其作为投资者的效率归功于他对于人类认知偶然性的哲学观点，他说：“我认为，我的那个主要强调错误观点重要性的基本理念框架，让我对自己的决定变得非常苛刻……我知道我肯定要失败，但只有这样我才更有可能纠正自己的错误。”
敏锐的政治嗅觉
索罗斯对于大变革的敏锐嗅觉，是他投资风格的第二个关键点。《华盛顿邮报》专栏作家塞巴斯蒂安•马拉贝(Sebastian Mallaby)正在写一本关于对冲基金历史的书，他表示，索罗斯寻找的是“大局转变的时刻，而不是渐进式改变的时候”。马拉贝引用了索罗斯的一些事例作为案例：索罗斯最闻名的两次货币交易——量子基金卖空英镑，和在1985年的“广场协议”(Plaza Accord)签订时，索罗斯打赌美元兑日圆将会贬值；以及那个并不那么广为人知的1973赌局，即他相信由于阿以战争的爆发，国防股会上涨。“反身理论并不是告诉你该做什么，它告诉你的是要密切注意变局时刻。马贝拉说，“这是一种思想方法。”
一些索罗斯的观察者宣称，索罗斯巨大的国际关系网络或许是他市场先见之明的一个重要消息来源。然而，索罗斯就是在他的确拥有内幕消息的地方——前苏联做出了最失败的交易。在俄罗斯和许多前苏联地区，他非常积极地参与国家的政治和经济改革。1997年6月，由于俄罗斯政府难以支付拖欠的工资，索罗斯向其提供了一笔过桥贷款，充当起个人“国际货币基金组织”的作用。
他相信俄罗斯对改革的承诺，并将自己视为一个局内人，正是这两大信条导致了他的投机失败。他出资9.8亿美元协助一位财团寡头完成了对国家电信公司Svyazinvest 25%股权的收购。他决定加入是因为“我认为这是从强盗资本主义向合法资本主义的转变。”但事与愿违，Svyazinvest电信一私有化，寡头们就从欺诈政府转向互相欺诈。作为一个局外人，索罗斯显然成为了受害者。“在俄罗斯之前，我从未有过如此大的失败。对他们来说，他们通过欺骗达到了目的。”
“这是我投资生涯中最大的败笔。我自己满怀希望，结果被它骗了。”他的最新著作中，仅用了一句话提及俄罗斯，而且还是用括号插入的：“（我不谈俄罗斯，因为我不想在那儿投资。）”
好胜的竞争意识
12月某个寒冷的周一晚上，索罗斯驱车一个小时，从曼哈顿赶到康涅狄格州的格林威治布鲁斯博物馆(Bruce Museum)。他要为学者救助基金(Scholar Rescue Fund)募集资金而演讲。他已为学者救助基金提供了部分资金。从2002年起，该计划已向来自40个国家的266位受迫害的学者提供了安全庇护。演讲（自然是关于全球金融危机的）结束后，索罗斯一边走出演讲厅，一边与斯坦利·博格曼(Stanley Bergman)进行交谈。博格曼是一家律师事务所的创始合伙人，该事务所为当晚的活动提供了赞助。
“你喜欢运动吗？”索罗斯微笑着问这位主办人。
“喜欢”，白发苍苍的博格曼答道。
接着，争强好胜的念头突然闪过，正是这种竞争精神，使索罗斯热衷于滑雪、打网球、下国际象棋。索罗斯问道：“你高寿？”
“75。”
“我78，”索罗斯回答说。“可如果身体好不能为你赚钱，又有什么用呢？”两位古稀老人会心一笑。
据维恩说，索罗斯也喜欢运动：“乔治喜欢时不时秀一下他能行。”但是，虽然他好玩，却不屑于过着纯粹累积筹码的生活。他是在1981年顿悟的，当时他正为投资债券疯狂集资。“我当时觉得自己要得心脏病了，”他对我说。“接着我意识到，如果只是为了变得富有而死去，我将是失败者。”
对索罗斯来说，解决办法就是投身于慈善事业。“做一些对这个世界真正有意义的事情，这才是值得为之献身的，”他说道。“基金会使我可以抽身出来，可以关心别人多过自己。”索罗斯的财富为其慈善事业提供了强大的后援：自1993年起，人权活动家阿里·奈尔(Aryeh Neier)就开始运作开放社会基金会，据他说，2008年基金会预算为5.5亿美元，今年将增至6亿美元。据他的计算，索罗斯向其慈善事业捐助的总额已超过50亿美元，主要通过其基金会进行捐助。
“20世纪下半叶，在战略部署资源以改变世界这方面，没有一位慈善家比索罗斯做得更好”，最近被任命为巴拉克·奥巴马政府国家经济委员会主任的拉里·萨默斯(Larry Summers)在去年初秋的一次谈话中对我说。塔尔博特将索罗斯的影响力与一个主权国家相提并论。塔尔伯特说，20世纪90年代，“一听说乔治·索罗斯要和我谈话，我会扔下手头所有的事情，几乎把他当作来访的国家元首对待。他在前苏联一些殖民地投入的钱确实比美国政府还多，因此视他为极具影响力的人物是应当的。”
独到的基金会管理
打理索罗斯慈善事业的干将们说，他的慈善运营策略和其基金经理所观察到的投资风格惊人的相似：他知道如何下大注，如何具有原创性，而且当一个项目不行了时，他不怕斩仓。研究苏联和乌克兰问题的经济学家安德斯·阿斯伦德(Anders Aslund)曾与索罗斯在许多项目上共事过，他认为，索罗斯的慈善风格“多由货币市场形成，这些总是变幻莫测的。他假定，他现有的任何想法，数年后会是错误的。每当一个项目在完美地进行时，他就会问自己：‘我何时应该终止这个项目？'”
长期以来，索罗斯的慈善资金，再加上他决定将其投入到医院、大学、博物馆甚或非洲贫困人口等传统慈善领域之外的地方，使得他在美国之外成为偶尔有争议的人物。他被俄罗斯指控为煽动乌克兰2004年橙色革命的西方肇事者之一；他在俄罗斯的基金会办公室突遭搜查，被迫关闭了在威权统治的乌兹别克斯坦的办公室。
结果证明，如果财阀们用财富来解决社会争议话题，美国对此也非常敏感。近年来，索罗斯的基金会在美国越发活跃，着手于包括药品政策在内的各种问题。在乔治·W·布什(George W. Bush)总统任职期间，他的参与热情越来越高，他认为，他致力于在国外高压政权下培育的开放社会，却在收养他的祖国本土摇摇欲坠。
有些人欣赏他的不羁。著名的独立思想家保罗·沃尔克(Paul Volcker)说：“药品一事是个极佳的例子，说明他完全不采纳传统观点。我想，药品政策需要重新考虑，而他就是说出来的人之一。”沃尔克被吉米·卡特(Jimmy Carter)任命为联邦储备委员会(Fed)主席，罗纳德·里根(Ronald Reagan)政府时期再度获任。
索罗斯的钱是他可以标新立异的关键：“有这个钱，我可以公然反对布什政府，因为我付得起钱”，他说。但他也认为，他的财富，以及由此自然而然带来的在美国的信誉，却遭到了保守人士的攻击，如福克斯(Fox)的比尔·奥雷利(Bill O'Reilly)和极端主义评论家林登·拉罗奇(Lyndon LaRouche)。他说：“在美国，人们给予赚钱能人过度的尊重，我不得不被妖魔化。”
他们的攻击富有成效。甚至在去年奥巴马的竞选活动声势愈来愈浩大、美国金融家和国内其他人一起争相支持之时，他这位最早的华尔街重量级赞助商却保持低调。“奥巴马试图成为一个消除分歧的人，”索罗斯说。“而我是一个引起分歧的人，因为我被右派妖魔化了。我觉得，我声援他对他不一定有利。”
(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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