銀行業的真正危險 The real danger in banking

Poor Bernie Sanders. How can you expect to become US president if you are not familiar with the relative spheres of competence of the Federal Reserve and Treasury department in the supervision of the nation’s banks? If you are not au fait with the different roles of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency?

可憐的伯尼•桑德斯(Bernie Sanders)。如果你不瞭解負責監管全美銀行的美聯儲(Fed)和財政部(Treasury department)的相對勝任範圍，如果你不清楚證交會(SEC)、聯邦存款保險公司(FDIC)和貨幣監理署(OCC)的不同職能的話，你怎麼能夠當美國總統？

The senator from Vermont was part of the Congress that passed the Dodd-Frank Act extending financial regulation. Yet he has not even mastered the thousand pages or so of the act, far less the regulations and explanatory documents that have been published since.

這位佛蒙特州參議員是通過了實施金融監管的《多德-弗蘭克法》(Dodd-Frank Act)的國會的一份子。不過，他甚至看不懂該法大約1000頁的文本，自那以來發布的規定和解釋文件就更不必提了。

Mr Sanders’ recent stumbles illustrate a misdirection in his attack on the banking establishment. The central problem is not so much “too big to fail” but “too complex to fail”: Lehman was a systemically important financial institution but not an important financial institution. Nor was it a big one; it had fewer employees than Citigroup today has compliance staff. Lehman’s collapse created major problems for the global financial system because of the extent of its interactions, with more than 1m outstanding contracts at the time of its bankruptcy. Similarly, Long Term Capital Management was insignificant in size when it failed but capable of massive impact by virtue of the exposure of other institutions to its activities.

桑德斯最近的錯誤表明，他對銀行業現有體制發起的攻擊在方向上是錯誤的。核心問題不是“大到不能倒”，而是“複雜到不能倒”：雷曼(Lehman)曾經是一傢俱有系統重要性的金融機構，而並非一家重要的金融機構。雷曼也不是一家大機構；它的員工還沒有如今花旗集團(Citigroup)的合規人員多。雷曼倒閉給全球金融體系造成重大問題，是因爲它與其他機構的業務往來太廣，其破產時留下100多萬份未結合約。同樣，當年長期資本管理公司(LTCM)在倒閉時的規模也不大，但由於其他機構對其活動的敞口之大，該公司的倒閉造成了巨大沖擊。

There is some force in the claim that size in banking has actually been conducive to stability. Britain had no banking crisis in the Great Depression because the sector was highly concentrated. The US had many failures because the fragmentation imposed by restrictions on interstate banking meant that many banks lacked sufficient geographical or sectoral diversification to weather losses.

有種說法有一定的說服力，那就是銀行規模大實際上是有利於穩定的。英國在大蕭條時期(Great Depression)沒有發生銀行危機，因爲英國銀行業是高度集中的。美國有很多銀行倒閉，原因在於，限制跨州從事銀行業務帶來的分散化，意味着許多銀行在地理或行業方面缺乏多元化，無法抵禦虧損。

Ahead of the global financial crisis, it was argued that the growth of securitisation and other complex instruments similarly contributed to financial resilience. The reverse proved to be the case; trade between institutions represented concentration and multiplication of risks rather than diversification.

在全球金融危機之前，有人辯稱，證券化與其他複雜工具的發展同樣有利於增強金融彈性。事實證明情況恰好相反；機構之間的交易代表着風險的集中與倍增，而不是分散。

Complexity is the enemy of stability. Financial conglomerates have become too diverse and sprawling for their chief executives or boards to understand what they do. The same complexity creates endemic conflicts of interest and is associated with cross subsidy between activities. There are fundamental differences in the cultures required to trade derivatives, to give private financial advice to big corporations, to manage assets on behalf of savers and to provide an efficient retail banking service.

複雜是穩定的敵人。大型金融企業集團的業務變得太廣泛，規模變得太大，以至於它們的首席執行官或董事會都搞不懂公司在做什麼。這種複雜性還帶來普遍的利益衝突，並且與不同活動之間的交叉補貼有關。交易衍生品、向大企業提供專門金融建議、替儲戶管理資產和提供高效率的零售銀行服務所需要的文化存在根本差異。

And these conflicts and interdependencies undermine resilience. Vertical chains of intermediation, which channel funds directly from savers to the uses of capital, can break without inflicting much collateral damage. When intermediation is predominantly horizontal, with intermediaries mostly trading with each other, any failure cascades through the system, as happened with Lehman. Today the assets of major financial institutions are predominantly the liabilities of other financial institutions; and vice versa.

這些衝突和相互依賴削弱了彈性。垂直的中介鏈——把資金從儲戶直接輸送至資金的使用者——可能在不造成太大附帶損害的情況下斷裂。當中介鏈變成基本上水平的形態時——中介主要在相互之間交易——任何失靈都會傳導至整個系統，正如雷曼倒閉時的情況那樣。如今，大型金融機構的資產主要是其他金融機構的負債；反之亦然。

These issues are compounded by the regulatory complexity that follows from attempts to monitor behaviour in impossible detail. As the size of the Dodd-Frank legislation shows, we have locked ourselves into a spiral in which regulatory complexity gives rise to further organisational complexity and the construction of yet more esoteric instruments. Even if legislators had better motives than the present corrupting structure that US campaign finance seems to allow, they cannot hope to have more than a basic knowledge of the rules they promulgate or the workings of the regulatory institutions they have created.

監管者企圖以不可能達到的程度監視企業行爲，由此造成的複雜性使問題變得更糟糕。正如冗長的《多德-弗蘭克法》所顯示的那樣，我們把自己鎖進了一個螺旋：監管複雜性加劇了組織複雜性，並帶來更難懂的工具。相比美國競選資金募集似乎放任的現行腐敗體系，即便立法者有更好的動機，他們除了對自己頒佈的規則或創建的監管機構的運作有個基本瞭解，也不能指望具備更深入的知識了。

So should we break up banks? Bring it on, Bernie.

那麼，我們應該分拆銀行嗎？想試就試一試吧，桑德斯。