崛起的贝莱德

Investment management

投资管理

The rise of BlackRock
崛起的贝莱德

In 25 years, BlackRock has become the world's biggest investor. Is its dominance a problem?
经过25年的发展，贝莱德已成为全球最大的投资者。它那种呼风唤雨的能力是一个问题吗？

Dec 7th 2013 | From the print edition

ASK conspiracy theorists who they think really runs the world, and they will probably point to global banks, such as Citigroup, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase. Oil giants such as Exxon Mobil and Shell may also earn a mention. Or perhaps they would focus on the consumer-goods firms that hold billions in their thrall: Apple, McDonald's or Nestlé.

谁在真正地控制着这个世界？阴谋论者会说：是跨国银行，是石油巨头，或者是消费品公司中的巨无霸；是花旗、美银、摩根大通，是埃克森-美孚，是壳牌，是兜里揣着数十亿美元的苹果、麦当劳和雀巢。

One firm unlikely to feature on their list is BlackRock, an investment manager whose name rings few bells outside financial circles. Yet it is the single biggest shareholder in all the companies listed above. It owns a stake in almost every listed company not just in America but globally. (Indeed, it is the biggest shareholder in Pearson, in turn the biggest shareholder in The Economist.) Its reach extends further: to corporate bonds, sovereign debt, commodities, hedge funds and beyond. It is easily the biggest investor in the world, with $4.1 trillion of directly controlled assets (almost as much as all private-equity and hedge funds put together) and another $11 trillion it oversees through its trading platform, Aladdin (see article).

不过，有一家公司不会出现在他们的名单上，那就是：贝莱德。作为一家资产管理公司，贝莱德并不为金融圈之外的人所熟知。但它却是上述大公司的最大单一股东。它几乎在每一家上市公司中都有股份，不管它们是美国的还是别的国家的。实际上，它还是培生公司的第一大股东，因而也就是本刊的第一大股东。它的触角还伸向了更多领域，如企业债券、主权债务、商品期货、对冲基金，不一而足。它直接掌管的资产价值已达4.1万亿美元，几乎是对冲基金和私募股权基金的总和，另外它还通过自己的交易平台—— 阿拉丁间接掌控着11万亿美元的资产。贝莱德无疑是当今世界上最大的投资者。

Established in 1988 by a group of Wall Streeters led by Larry Fink, BlackRock succeeded in part by offering “passive” investment products, such as exchange-traded funds, which aim to track indices such as the S&P 500. These are cheap alternatives to traditional mutual funds, which often do more to enrich money managers than clients (though BlackRock offers plenty of those, too). The sector continues to grow fast, and BlackRock, partly through its iShares brand, is the largest competitor in an industry where scale brings benefits. Its clients, ranging from Arab sovereign-wealth funds to mom-and-pop investors, save billions in fees as a result.

这家由拉里·芬克牵头，数位华尔街金融家在1988年联合创建的公司之所以能有今天，其中一部分原因就在于他们给顾客提供了一种“被动型”的投资产品，这种产品类似于交易所交易基金，以跟踪像标普500这样的指数为投资目标。作为传统的共同基金的替代品，被动型投资产品的特点是费用低廉。而这一点也就决定了，常常是资金管理人而不是客户（虽然贝莱德也没少给客户挣钱）才是此类产品的受益者。这是一种规模带来利润的产业。借助于此类产品持续而快速的发展，并且还通过自己的iShare品牌，贝莱德已经成为这一行业中的最大竞争者，它已经为自己上至海湾国家主权财富基金下至缺乏经验的中小投资者的客户节省了数十亿美元的费用。

The other reason for its success is its management of risk in its actively managed portfolio. Early on, for instance, it was a leader in mortgage-backed securities. But because it analysed their riskiness zipcode by zipcode, it not only avoided a bail-out in the chaos that followed the collapse of Lehman, but also advised the American government and others on how to keep the financial system ticking in the darkest days of 2008, and picked up profitable money-management units from struggling financial institutions in the aftermath of the crisis.

贝莱德成功的另一个原因是：在对掌控的投资组合进行风险管理时实行“主动型”的模式。比如说，在危机爆发前，它曾一度是抵押贷款市场上的一个领头羊。但是，由于它对风险进行了拉链式的排查，结果不仅在雷曼兄弟破产后的混乱中，避免了被救助的命运，而且还为美国政府和其他人提供了如何在最黑暗的日子中保持金融系统正常运转的建议，同时还从正在危机中苦苦挣扎的金融机构手中捡的了具有盈利能力的资产管理部门。

Other people's money
别人的钱

Compared with the many banks which are flourishing only thanks to state largesse, BlackRock's success—based on providing value to customers and paying attention to detail—is well-deserved. Yet when taxpayers have spent billions rescuing financial institutions deemed too big to fail, a 25-year-old company that has grown so vast so quickly sets nerves jangling. American regulators are therefore thinking about designating BlackRock and some of its rivals as “systemically important”. The tag might land them with hefty regulatory requirements.

同众多仅靠国家慷慨救助才有今日兴盛的银行相比，贝莱德的成功源于在为顾客挣钱的同时，还将注意力集中的细节方面，因而这对它来说，是当之无愧的。然而，就在纳税人为拯救因“大到不能到”的金融机构而花费了数亿美元之际，一家只有25年历史的公司却在不断壮大，其规模之大速度之快，已经让人们绷紧了神经。美国的监管方正在考虑将贝莱德及其对手贴上“系统重要性”的标签，令他们接受严格的监管。

If the regulators' concern is to avoid a repeat of the last crisis, they are barking up the wrong tree. Unlike banks, whose loans and deposits go on their balance-sheets as assets and liabilities, BlackRock is a mere manager of other people's money. It has control over investments it holds on behalf of others—which gives it great influence—but it neither keeps the profits nor suffers the losses on them. Whereas banks tumble if their assets lose even a fraction of their value, BlackRock can pass on any shortfalls to its clients, and withstand far greater shocks. In fact, by being on hand to pick up assets cheaply from distressed sellers, an unleveraged asset manager arguably stabilises markets rather than disrupting them.

如果监管方的关切是避免危机重演，那么他们就是找错了攻击对象。贝莱德不同于将贷款和存款当做资产与负债而写入资产负债表的银行，它只是一个资金管理者，管理的是别人的资金。虽说它手中掌握着代表别人而持有的投资，并且还因此还对别人具有重大的影响力。但是，她既不能把盈利揣在自己的兜里，也不会因投资失败而代人承受损失。相比因资产价格稍有下跌即摇来晃去的银行来说，贝莱德能在投资失败时将损失传递给顾客，能经受住更大的冲击。实际上，通过持有从失意的卖家手里低价收购而来的资产，一个不使用杠杆的资产管理人的这种行为是在稳定市场而不是扰乱市场。

But for regulators that want not merely to prevent a repeat of the last blow-up but also to identify the sources of future systemic perils, BlackRock raises another, subtler issue, concerning not the ownership of assets but the way buying and selling decisions are made. The $15 trillion of assets managed on its Aladdin platform amount to around 7% of all the shares, bonds and loans in the world. As a result, those who oversee many of the world's biggest pools of money are looking at the financial world, at least in part, through a lens crafted by BlackRock. Some 17,000 traders in banks, insurance companies, sovereign-wealth funds and others rely in part on BlackRock's analytical models to guide their investing.

但是如果监管方的目的不只是防止危机重演，而且还想提前为将来的系统性危机确定根源，那么贝莱德就给他们提出了另一个问题，一个更加非常微妙的问题，一个不关乎资产所有权，只涉及做出买卖决定的方式的问题。鉴于“阿拉丁”交易平台所管理的15万亿美元资产大约相当于全球所有的股票、债券和债务的总和的7%，因此对于那些管理着世界上为数众多大型资金池的人来说，起码会有一部分人透过贝莱德提供的镜片来观察金融圈内的投资动向。也就是，目前全世界大约有17000名来自银行、保险公司、主权财富基金和其他行业的资金管理人依靠贝莱德的分析模型来指导他们的投资。

Aladdin's genius
阿拉丁之才

That is a tribute to BlackRock's elaborate risk-management models, but it is also discomfiting. A principle of healthy markets is that a cacophony of diverse actors come to different conclusions on the price of things, based on their own idiosyncratic analyses. The value of any asset is discovered by melding all these different opinions into a single price. An ecosystem which is dominated by a single line of thinking is not healthy, in politics, in nature or in markets. Such groupthink in finance is a recipe for booms (when everyone wants to buy the same thing) and busts (when they all rush to sell). Though Aladdin advises clients on investment decisions rather than making them, it inevitably frames how they think of market risk.

这是对贝莱德那种细致入微的风险管理模式的一种奖励，但是也正在毁掉这种风控模式。健康市场的原则是：市场上什么人都有，对于同一件物品的价格，个人有个人的想法，难于统一。所谓资产的价值发现，就是把所有这些不一样的观点融合成一个统一的价格。但是，如果一种生态系统被单独一种观点所主导，无论这种生态系统是有关政治的，还是自然的，亦或市场的，这种生态系统都是不健康的。此类群体意识是金融圈的一道“大餐”，无论是在人人都想着抢购同一件物品的繁荣期，还是在所有人都急于抛售的泡沫破裂期，都是如此。尽管“阿拉丁”的任务是给投资者提供投资建议而不是投资决定，但是它仍然会不可避免地破坏投资者对市场风险的判断。

The last crisis had many causes. One of them, which perhaps lay behind all the others, was that investors stopped thinking critically about what they were buying. Too many decided to trust credit-rating agencies, which assured them, for example, that packages of American subprime mortgages were extremely unlikely to default. BlackRock's models are no doubt better than the clunkers put out by Moody's or Standard & Poor's up to 2008: the firm's relative recent success has proved that. But too many investors relying on a single model spreads an unhealthy orthodoxy and is likely to make the markets more volatile than they otherwise would be.

造成2008年危机的原因有很多，但其中最有可能被忽视的一个原因就是，投资者已经不能再对他们正在购买的物品进行批判性的思考，太多的人决定相信给他们做出保证的评级公司。比如说，评级公司对投资者保证说，打包的次级抵押贷款绝对不可能违约。相比穆迪公司或者标普公司在2008年之前所设置的已经不合时宜的模型来说，贝莱德的模型无疑是更好的，而且它在最近的成功也相应地证明了这一点。但是，当投资者对某种模型产生过度的依赖时，就会传播一种不健康的血统论，而且还有可能让市场变得比原来更加脆弱。

That is probably not a serious systemic risk, for it will be self-limiting: the more money follows BlackRock, the more money there is to be made betting against it. The real danger is for investors. The more they rely on BlackRock's analysis, the smaller the upside when it gets things right and the greater the downside when it gets things wrong—as, one day, it eventually will. Until then BlackRock's single-minded focus on mastering risk is to be commended. If its peers in the financial world had taken the same approach in the run-up to 2008, much of the chaos of the past five years would have been averted.

这或许不是一种严重的系统性风险，因为它具有自我约束的性质。也就是说，跟风贝莱德的资金越多，对赌的资金也就越多。这对于投资者来说才是真正的风险。当他们对贝莱德的分析的依赖性越来越强时，如果贝莱德分析的对，价格会上涨，但上涨的幅度不会很大；如果贝莱德的分析不正确，价格就会大幅下跌，而且这一天早晚会出现。届时，人们才会把注意力放在贝莱德那种一心专注于掌控风险的做法上去。若贝莱德的同行能在2008年之前就采纳这样的做法，过去5年中的绝大多数混乱也就可以避免了。