富人：人人喊打？

编者按：本文选自4月2日出版的《经济学人》杂志，本刊稍微加以扩充。受金融危机影响，许多问题暴露出来，似乎全世界人民都在憎恨富人。文章认为一味抨击富人无济于事，制度会自我更正，增税应谨慎，但应加强监管，堵住制度漏洞，让人无机可乘。加强监管也是诺贝尔经济学奖得主保罗•克鲁格曼在本期《财经评论》中的观点。

Stones thrown through a banker's windows in Edinburgh, workers 'bossnapping' executives in France, retrospective 90% tax rates proposed in Washington, and now a riot in London as G20 leaders arrived for their summit. Bankers who were once courted by politicans and businessmen find themselves scorned at parties, and financial workers in the City of London are advised by their companies to dress more casually to avoid angry crowds. A sea change in social attitudes that could have profound effects on politics and the world economy is under way.

在爱丁堡，一名银行家的窗玻璃被石头砸碎了；在法国，工人们“挟持”了公司主管；在华盛顿，有人提议实行有追溯力的90%税率；现在，二十国集团领导人纷至沓来出席峰会时，伦敦又发生了骚乱。银行家曾是政客与生意人的座上宾，如今在党内却遭到奚落，伦敦金融城的金融机构建议其员工穿着随意些，以免被激愤的群众盯上。社会态度正发生根本性转变，可能会对政治和世界经济产生深远影响。

The rich are certainly not the only targets in the current populist backlash. Frightened by the downturn, people are furious with politicians, central bankers and immigrants. But a rising wave of anger is directed against the new 'malefactors of great wealth'. Today's villains are a larger and more global bunch than the handful of American robber barons Teddy Roosevelt denounced a century ago; and most of them are bankers and fund managers, rather than owners of trusts and railroads. Yet the themes are similar to those at the end of that previous gilded age: rising inequality - the top 0.1% of Americans earned 20 times the income of the bottom 90% in 1979 and 77 times in 2006 - and a sense that the greedy rich have cheated decent working people of their rightful share of the pie.

老百姓反映如此强烈，针对的当然不只是富人。受经济危机惊吓，人们对政客、中央银行行长和移民怒不可遏。但怒火越来越烧向新的“为富不仁者”。同一个世纪前泰迪•罗斯福（西奥多•罗斯福）谴责的一小撮美国敛财大亨相比，现在的反面人物为数更众，更普遍；他们多为银行家和基金经理，而非托拉斯和铁路的老板。但现在跟上一个黄金年代末期相比，主旨大同小异：不平等在加剧——1979年，最富裕的0.1%美国人的收入是90%最低收入者收入的20倍，而2006年是77倍——人们感觉贪得无厌的富人诈取了规矩守法的劳动人民应得的财富。

The payment of banking executives have been a particular target for public opprobrium, especially given their complicity in the global crisis. The large bonuses paid out to workers in the financial sector have never been popular, and are doubly hated nowadays. For those who believe themselves to be working both hard and competently - as most of us do - it seems obscene that financial workers seem to believe themselves entitled to receive gigantic paychecks after their colossal failures. This is especially the case when companies are being propped up by public money, such as the former American giant AIG, whose staff not only attempted to continue receiving bonuses, but blew $440,000 on a spa retreat just after being bailed out by the Treasury. Some have publically complained about being 'cheated' of their bonuses, an self-indulgent and wilfully blind attitude that makes them seem the epitome of a system built to cheat regular folk out of their money.

银行主管的收入尤其受到公众的批评，特别是鉴于他们在全球金融危机中的共谋关系。金融从业人员的高额奖金向来不受民众喜欢，如今更是惹人厌。对于认为自己努力并胜任工作的人——我们大多数人就这样——金融从业人员严重失职却自认应该得到巨额回报似乎是可憎的。当靠公众血汗钱支撑的公司，如前保险业巨头美国国际集团，其主管不仅企图继续拿奖金，甚至在刚得到财政部纾救后就在一个温泉度假地挥霍了44万美元后，民众更加认为这些人可恨。某些人公开抱怨其奖金被“骗走”，这种自私自利且顽固不化的漠视态度，使之似乎成了一个哄骗普通老百姓血汗钱的制度的缩影。

Some of this cheating has been of an old familiar sort: building Ponzi schemes and bribing politicians to secure favourable deals. There are greyer areas, in which the rich hide their cash in tax havens and get tax law written to their advantage - witness the indefensible treatment of private-equity profits. But what makes the rich's behaviour so galling for many critics is that their two greatest crimes were committed in broad daylight, as they were part of the system itself.

一些欺诈手段并不新鲜：设下旁氏骗局，贿赂政客以达成利己交易。还有更灰色的地带，即富人把现金藏在避税天堂，使所编纂税法对己有利——且看税法对私募股权收益的规定是多么站不住脚。但富人的行为之所以令人如此恼怒，是因为他们的两大罪行是在光天化日之下所为，而它们是制度本身的一部分。

The Two Great Cheats

两大骗术

The first charge is that the rich created a new form of heads-I-win-tails-you-lose capitalism. Traders and fund managers got huge rewards for speculating with other people's money, but when they failed the parent company, the client and ultimately the taxpayer had to pay the bill. Monetary policy contributed to this asymmetry of risk: when markets faltered central banks usually rescued them by cutting interest rates.

第一项指控是富人创造了一种新形式的庄家通吃资本主义制度。证券经纪人和基金经理拿别人的钱进行投机而获得高额回报，但当他们把总公司搞垮后，客户和纳税人却要买账。货币政策导致了风险的不对称：市场动荡时，中央银行往往通过降息来拯救。

The second charge is that the bankers and fund managers were not doing anything useful. Unlike the 'deserving' rich entrepreneurs who set up Microsoft and Google, the 'undeserving' traders and brokers just shuffled money around the system to nobody's profit but their own. Yet they were receiving salaries far greater than qualified professionals in other fields, including far more vital tasks like medicine, education, and engineering. The faster the money went round, the larger the financial sector loomed in the rich countries' economies. At its peak it contributed 41% of domestic American corporate profits, more than double the rate two decades ago. As finance grew, the banks got ever bigger - too big to fail, eventually, so when they tottered taxpayers had to prop them up. Far from epitomising capitalism, the undeserving rich undermined it: it was socialism for the wealthy.

第二项指控是银行家和基金经理皆尸位素餐。有别于创立微软和谷歌的“名正言顺”的实业大亨，“言不正名不顺的”经纪人只是把钱在制度内东挪西转，中饱私囊。他们的收入远高于其他行业有真才实干的人，如医疗、教育和工程等更重要的行业。钱周转得越快，金融业在富国经济中的比重就越大。在其巅峰时期，金融业创造了美国国内公司总利润的41%，比二十年前不止翻了一番。随着金融业壮大，银行规模也越来越大——大到不能倒闭，最终，它们动摇时，纳税人就得去扶持。名不正言不顺的富人根本不是代表，而是破坏了资本主义制度：这是有钱人的社会主义。

These two charges run together, but the second has much less justification. Enormous though the cost of bailing out the banks has been, there is nothing inherently undeserving about finance; even in their flawed state, more liquid markets have brought huge benefits to the rest of the economy. The lower cost of capital has made it easier for industry to invest, innovate and protect itself against interest and exchange-rate risk. Trying to single out financiers from entrepreneurs is a fool's errand: you will end up hurting both.

这两项罪状紧密相连，但第二项有些牵强附会。虽然纾困银行的花费巨大，但金融本质上并非名不正言不顺；即使弊病丛生，流动性更强的市场也给经济其他部门带去了巨额收益。资本成本低使工业更容易进行投资、创新并规避利息和汇率风险。试图把金融家同实业家分开是枉费心机：会造成两败俱伤。

The heads-I-win charge is not entirely proven, either: some of the people who ran banks did lose when they went bust. Yet even a newspaper as inherently pro-business as this one has to admit that there was something rotten in finance: the basic capitalist bargain, under which genuine risktakers are allowed to garner huge rewards, seems a poor one if taxpayers are landed with a huge bill for it all. Hence the anger.

第二项庄家通吃的指控也并非证据十足：一些银行破产后其管理人员也有所损失。但即使是像我们这种以商为本的杂志也得承认，金融体系的确存在腐败：资本家之间进行交易，真正的冒险家能攫取巨额回报，但如果纳税人要为此买下高额账单，交易就是不足称道的。因此人们感到愤怒。

A Time for Correction and Brown Paper Bags

改正与低调的时期

Periods of excess, when inequality has grown, tend to be followed by eras of reform: Roosevelt bust the trusts and shortly afterwards Congress moved towards introducing a federal income tax. Part of the genius of capitalism is its ability to adjust to disruption from within and attacks from without.

无节制的时期，不平等加剧，之后往往伴随着改革的时代：罗斯福解散了托拉斯，不久后国会通过联邦所得税法。资本主义制度的特征之一就是面对内在干扰和外在攻击时能做出调整。

Indeed, the system is already beginning to correct itself. As our special report this week points out, the rich are not as rich as they were: some $10 trillion, around a quarter of the wealthy's assets, has been lost. Inequality will decline. Investment banks and hedge funds are shrinking; private-equity groups are struggling to finance takeovers. Having discovered how volatile markets can be, banks will be less keen on trading in the future. There is even a correction going on in conspicuous consumption: Net-a-porter, a pricey website, offers to deliver designer outfits to its customers in brown paper bags.

的确，制度已开始自我改正。本期《经济学人》的特别报道指出，富人不像以前那样有钱了：他们已损失约10万亿美元，即总财富的四分之一左右。贫富差距将减小。投资银行和对冲基金日渐萎缩；私募机构正为并购融资。发觉市场反复无常后，银行今后进行交易将更加审慎。甚至炫耀性消费也有所节制：奢侈品网站Net-a-porter 开始用牛皮纸袋给顾客寄名牌服装。

The market's self-correction will not be enough, however. Higher taxes will eventually be inevitable, since so many governments have lurched heavily into deficit. But politicians must tread carefully. Tax rises right away would be a rotten idea, since for the moment fiscal stimulus is needed. And even when governments raise the money, they should first get rid of deductions and reverse unmeritocratic measures (such as George Bush's repeal of America's death tax) rather than jacking up income-tax rates to punitive levels. Squeeze the rich until the pips squeak, and the juice goes out of the economy.

然而，市场的自我改正是不够的。由于许多政府赤字高筑，高额的税收最终将无法避免。但政治家们必须谨慎行事。立马增税是个馊主意，因为目前需要的是财政刺激。即使政府要筹资，首先也得废除减税政策，并撤销反精英主义的措施（如布什取消遗产税），而不是把个人所得税骤升至惩罚性水平。榨干富人，经济就失去了活力。

As for heads-I-win capitalism, the problem of asymmetric risk should shrink, because the rule changes needed to make the financial system safer will also remove unwarranted profits. Contra-cyclical capital requirements, forcing banks to build more reserves during good times, will leave them less cash to splurge on bonuses. Many of the sweetest sources of profit sprang up in the cracks between regulatory systems; governments are now filling in these gaps. If central banks focus on asset markets when they rise as well as when they fall, they will remove much of the froth. Treat a bank that becomes too big to fail like a utility, and it will make less money.

至于资本主义制度的庄家通吃，由于使金融体系更安全的规则变化也会消除来路不明的利润，风险不对称的问题将减弱。反周期性资本规定迫使银行在繁荣时期增加准备金，这将减少他们用于奖金的现钱。许多暴利都源于监管体系的漏洞；政府现在正填补漏洞。如果中央银行在资本市场上涨和下挫时期都严密监管，就会挤掉很多泡沫。把太大而不能倒闭的银行当成公共事业来对待，它的利润就会下降。

Curbing the excesses of wealth, then, will be a side effect of regulations designed to make capitalism work better. Such measures will not provide the lyrics to revolutionary anthems, but they are going to be better than going after the wealthy. The rich are an easy target. But when you try to bash them, you usually end up punching yourself in the nose.

旨在优化资本主义制度的监管措施同时也将遏制财富的过度膨胀。此类举措不会产生凯歌共谱的效果，但好于追着富人喊打的做法。树大易招风。可如果你想教训一下他们，往往会伤了自己。