THE FINANCIAL CRISES OF CAPITALISM

THE FINANCIAL CRISES OF CAPITALISM


By Samuel Brittan
Thursday, June 05, 2008


“He believed in individual choice exercised through the market place, and that people must accept the consequences of the choices they made . . . At the same time he was well aware that there were many people who needed protection from the unintended but indisputable negative aspects of a market economy” such as unemployment, financial hardship in illness, and lack of access to the essentials of life if certain market prices rose to unaffordable levels.
This was the belief of Peter Thorneycroft, an unjustly forgotten UK Conservative party politician prominent in the 1950s and 1960s, summarised by Stanley Crooks in a belated and well merited biography (George Mann Publications, £25), enlivened by some of Thorneycroft's own engaging sketches and watercolours.
The simple creed just stated served Thorneycroft well enough as president of the board of trade in Winston Churchill's first postwar cabinet. But it required supplementation when, as chancellor of the exchequer in 1957, he was hit by a run on the pound; a badly divided official Treasury was in no position to give it. The resulting confusion and lack of support from Harold Macmillan, the prime minister, led to his resignation.


Today there is more of a consensus on what might be called, to coin a phrase, “steering the economy”, focusing on ideas such as central bank independence, inflation targets, long-term budgetary guidelines and floating exchange rates. The consensus may not be all it is cracked up to be. But the embarrassment to supporters of a market economy now lies in a different direction, namely the instability of credit and banking.
It does not matter how many times the more sensible economic liberals have stressed the importance of stable monetary and financial conditions as part of the background conditions necessary for markets and prices to work satisfactorily. Any failures on the financial side are sure to bring the opponents of capitalism out of their burrows. Pundits who until recently conceded that “capitalism is the only game in town” are now rejoicing at what they hope is the longed-for death agony of the system.
Recent events have also caught many mainstream economists with their pants down. They have too readily assumed that central banks can make at least short-term nominal interest rates what they like and have concentrated on esoteric exercises on the path they should follow.
The beginning of wisdom is to recognise that financial booms and busts have been a feature of capitalism from the very start. Indeed they are as deep-rooted as human gullibility and greed. This is impressively documented in Charles Kindleberger's Manias, Panics and Crashes, the last edition of which appeared in 1989. He has a table listing more than 30 such events, starting with the South Sea bubble of 1720 and ending with the New York Stock Exchange crash of 1987. Although some analysts have tried to discern a periodicity in their occurrence, I can only see an irregular succession with some crises succeeding each other at intervals of about a decade so beloved by old-fashioned business cycle theorists, but others coming hot on the heels of their predecessors after only a couple of years. Their frequency tempts one to parody Churchill: capitalism is a bad system, but the others are worse.
Kindleberger does not claim to have a rigorous theory of such crises, but he does discern a pattern. Basically some event – or events – changes the economic outlook. New opportunities for profit are seized and overdone “in ways so closely resembling irrationality as to constitute a mania”. Once the excess is realised “the financial system experiences a sort of distress, in the course of which the rush to reverse the expansion process may become so precipitous as to resemble panic”. In a panic the reverse movement takes place “with a crash in the prices of commodities, houses, buildings, lands, stocks, bonds – in short whatever has been the subject of the mania”.
The mention of commodities alerts us to what is different about the present panic, perhaps ominously so. The author has no panacea; nor does he claim that these crises are harmless. But he does not believe that policy is impotent and he strongly supports central bank lender of last resort operations, if possible at an international level. He does not discuss regulatory reform very much: perhaps he suspects that it is mostly an attempt to bolt the stable door after all the horses have fled.
One striking feature of recent events is how slow they have been to hit the real economy. Although the credit crunch was first discerned last August no major area has yet recorded a downturn in activity, as distinct from a growth slowdown. This suggests not that the crisis is coming to an end but that it is slow-burning. The ominous feature is the one I have already hinted at in my reference to the continued trend rise in commodity prices, which could well be part of a long-term shift in the terms of trade against the industrial west, as well perhaps as part of a shift in political and economic power. Here is an area where it will be necessary to adapt to market movements rather than to attempt to reverse them by ill-considered intervention.



没有金融危机 就没有资本主义


作者：英国《金融时报》专栏作家塞缪尔·布里坦(Samuel Brittan)
2008年6月5日 星期四


“
他相信通过市场进行的个人选择，相信人们必须接受自己选择的后果……与此同时，他非常清楚，有很多人需要保护，以免遭受市场经济无可否认的非故意负面因素的影响”，比如说失业，疾病导致的财务窘境，以及某些市场价格升至无法承受的水平时，无法获得生活必需品。
这是斯坦利•库鲁克斯(Stanley Crooks)在一本姗姗来迟、评价中肯的传记（乔治•曼恩出版社出版，售价25英镑）中对彼得•霍尼戈夫(Peter Thorneycroft)信仰的总结。霍尼戈夫是一位不幸被遗忘的活跃于上世纪五、六十年代的英国保守党政治人物。霍尼戈夫亲手绘制的一些素描和水彩画增加了本书的生气。
上述简单信条在霍尼戈夫出任温斯顿•丘吉尔(Winston Churchill)战后首任内阁的贸易委员会主席期间颇有裨益。


但需要补充的是，在1957年出任财政大臣期间，霍尼戈夫遭遇了英镑贬值；意见严重分歧的英国财政部无力解决危机。由此产生的混乱以及缺乏首相哈罗德•麦克米伦的支持(Harold Macmillan)，最终导致了霍尼戈夫辞职。
时至今日，人们已经对所谓的“调控经济”有了更多共识，专注于央行独立、通胀目标、长期预算方针和浮动汇率等理念。
这种共识或许没有它所标榜的那样好。不过，市场经济支持者如今面临的窘境出自不同方向，即信贷和银行体系的不稳定。
比较明智的经济自由派人士多次强调，作为市场和价格满意运行必需的背景条件，货币政策和金融状况的稳定至关重要。但这一切都无济于事。金融层面的任何偏差，都必将令资本主义的反对者卷土重来。那些不久以前还承认“资本主义是城里唯一游戏”的批评人士如今都在欢呼雀跃，希望这是自己所期盼的资本主义制度的垂死挣扎。
近期事件也让很多主流经济学家颇为尴尬。他们过于轻易地就假定，央行至少能将短期利率维持在自己乐见的水平，并在他们应走的路线上进行秘密操作。
智慧之起源，就在于认识到金融盛衰从一开始就是资本主义的特色。的确，它们和人类轻信与贪婪的本性一样根深蒂固。查尔斯•金德尔伯格(Charles Kindleberger)的《癫狂、恐慌与崩溃》(Manias, Panics and Crashes)对此作了出色的记载。该书的最后一个版本在1989年出版。金德尔伯格在一份表格中列出了30多起次类事件，从1720年的南海泡沫开始，到1987年纽约证交所(New York Stock Exchange)的崩盘结束。虽然一些分析师试图找到这些事件发生的周期性，但我看到的只是无规律的周而复始，一些危机彼此之间的间隔约为10年——传统商业周期理论家最喜欢的周期，而另一些危机在上一次危机过后短短几年就接踵而至。这种频率让人不由得想借用丘吉尔的话：资本主义是个差劲的体制，但其它体制更糟。
金德尔伯格并未声称建立了关于此类危机的严格理论，但他确实发现了一种模式。大体而言，某个事件——或某些事件——会改变经济前景。人们抓住获取利润的新机会，“以一种近乎无理性的方式”过度利用，“以至于形成了一种癫狂”。过度一旦成为现实，“金融系统就会遭遇危难，在此过程中，匆忙扭转扩张进程的行动可能会变得过急，以至类似于恐慌”。在恐慌中，逆转行动的发生“伴随着价格的暴跌，涉及大宗商品、住房、建筑、土地、股票及债券——简言之，任何容易受到癫狂的事物”。
对大宗商品的提及，就当前恐慌的不同之处向我们发出了警告，也许这是不祥之兆。作者没有万能药，也没有宣称这些危机无害。但他的确相信，政策对此无能为力，并强烈支持央行作为最终贷款人的操作，如有可能，最好在国际层面上进行。他没有过多探讨监管改革：也许他怀疑那多半属于亡羊补牢之举。
最近这些事件的一个显著特点是，它们对实体经济的影响极其缓慢。尽管信贷危机早在去年8月就已为人所察觉，但迄今尚未出现主要经济领域活动的下滑——下滑与增长放缓是有区别的。这并不意味着危机即将结束，而是意味着这是一场“慢热型”的危机。而不祥的一面是我曾经提到的大宗商品价格持续上涨趋势，它很可能是西方工业国贸易条件长期恶化的组成部分，可能也是政治和经济实力转移的一部分。在这个领域，我们必须适应市场变动，而不是进行考虑欠佳的干预，企图逆转市场走向。
译者/管自力 管婧
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