Tyler Cowen has a big piece about income inequality in The American Interest that's well worth reading. However, it's not really about the growth of inequality. It's about Wall Street. In particular, it's about this question: why do financial professionals make so damn much money?
在《美国利益》（American Interest）刊物上有一篇署名Tyler Cowen的关于收入不公平的文章，很值得一读。但是，它实际上不是关于不公平现象的增长，而是关于华尔街的。特别是关于这样一个问题：为什么金融专业人士能挣那么多钱。
The answer, of course, is that they work in an industry that's become ungodly profitable. But how? Tyler attributes it to the practice of "going short on volatility." That is, modern finance professionals mostly gamble that what happened in the past will keep happening in the future, and disasters will never happen. In most years this makes them a lot of money (because, in fact, disasters rarely happen).
当然，答案就是他们所工作的行业变得不可思议地赚钱。但是如何赚呢？Tyler 将它归因于“做空波动性”的操作。那就是，现代的金融专业人士大多数赌的是，过去发生过的将来还会发生，灾难将永不发生。在大多数年份，这使他们赚了许多钱（因为事实上，灾难极少发生）。
But this is mysterious. After all, not everyone is going short on volatility. In fact, by definition, only half of the punters on Wall Street are doing it. The other half are taking the other side of the bet. Tyler explains this with an analogy to a bet that the Washington Wizards, one of the worst teams in basketball, won't win the NBA championship. If you make that bet year after year, you'll keep making money year after year.
但是这是难以理解的。毕竟，并不是所有人都做空波动性。事实上，根据定义，华尔街下赌注的人只有一半这样做。另一半人赌的是另一个方向。Tyler 用一个比喻来解释，华盛顿奇才队是最差的篮球队之一，在NBA中不会夺冠。如果你每年都赌这个，你会每年都赚钱。
This is a useful analogy precisely because it wouldn't work. After all, to make that bet, you have to find someone willing to take the other side and bet that disaster will strike and the Wizards will win. But they know just how unlikely that is, so they're going to require very long odds. On a hundred dollar bet, they'll want $100 if they win but will only be willing to pay off one dollar if you win. That won't make you rich.
很清楚这是一个有用的的比喻。毕竟你要是这样赌即需要找到其他人愿意赌另一个方向，赌灾难会发生，奇才队会赢。但是他们知道，这是多么的不可能，所以他们就取非常长期的可能性。赌注是100美元，如果他们赢，他们就想要100美元，但是如果你赢，他们只想付1美元。这样你不可能致富。
So how can you make money doing this? Answer: find someone who doesn't know much about basketball and pays off two dollars on this bet instead of one. Additionally, you need to borrow money so you can make lots of bets. So instead of placing a $100 bet and making a dollar, you borrow a million dollars, make lots of bets on lots of teams, and make $20,000. It's the road to riches.
那么你这样做怎么能赚钱呢？答案是：找到不太懂篮球的人，付给他2美元而不是1美元。再者，你需要借钱，你就可以下许多赌注。所以你不用放进去100美元而只挣1美元，你借100万美元，对不同的篮球队下许多赌注，可以挣20,000美元。这就是致富的路子。
The questions this raises should be obvious. First, why would anyone be dumb enough to offer you such mistaken odds? Second, shouldn't the interest on the loan wipe out the profit from such a tiny betting margin? Third, why would anyone loan you this money in the first place, knowing that you have no chance of paying it back if disaster strikes, one of your teams wins, and you lose your entire stake?
这里显然有问题。第一，有谁那么傻会给你出那么错误的赌注？第二，借款的利息是否会抵消掉你挣的这点小利？第三，如果知道一旦灾难发生你就不可能还款的情况下，谁还会在第一时间借给你钱，你赌的其中一个队赢，可你输掉了全部赌注。
As near as I can tell, the answer to #1 is that Wall Street traders are bad at pricing tail risk. The answer to #2 is that Wall Street hedge funds, using techniques pioneered in the mid-90s by Long Term Capital Management, have figured out ways to borrow large sums of money at virtually no cost. And the answer to #3 is that Wall Street lenders are also bad at pricing tail risk.
我可以解释的是，第一个问题，华尔街的交易员们不善于为尾部风险定价。第二个问题的答案是， 华尔街的对冲基金运用90年代中期长期资本管理公司开发的技术，计算出借大笔的钱而成本几乎可以不计的方法。第三个问题的答案是，华尔街的贷款人也同样不善于为尾部风险定价。
Or are they? Tyler argues that, in fact, both sides are betting that as long as everyone is doing this, the occasional disasters will be so epically disastrous that central banks will bail them out. They have no choice, after all, if the alternative is the destruction of the global economic system. So the tail risk is smaller than you think. Borrowers will make money in good years and default in bad years. Lenders, meanwhile, will also make money in good years, secure in the knowledge that on the rare occasions when everything goes pear shaped and borrowers can't pay back their loans, the government will make them whole. As Tyler reminds us, "Neither the Treasury nor the Fed allowed creditors to take any losses from the collapse of the major banks during the financial crisis."
他们是这样的吗？Tyler辩称，事实上，两方面的人都在赌，只要每个人都这样做，那么偶然性的灾难将成为巨大的灾难，中央银行一定会出来解救。总之，如果有选择的话那将是全球经济系统被毁，所以他们没有选择。所以尾部风险比你想象的要小。借款人在好的年头会赚钱，在不好的年头会违约。同时，贷款人也会在好的年头赚钱，而担保是，他们知道如果发生偶然性事件，所有的事情都很糟糕，借款人无法偿还贷款，政府将全部埋单。如Tyler提醒我们的，在金融危机期间，财政部和联邦储备委员会在主要的银行破产时都没有让贷款人承受任何损失。
But I don't find this persuasive as a behavioral explanation. The problem is that there's simply no evidence I'm aware of that Wall Street executives ever thought about this or priced it into their models. Sure, they may have been reckless or stupid. However, they weren't setting prices for financial instruments based on the idea that, yes, they were taking a genuine risk of going bust, but they could price that away because they'd get bailed out by Uncle Sugar when it happened. Rather, they really, truly, believed that they weren't exposed to very much risk. As near as I can tell, this was true on both the buy side and the sell side.
但是我并不认为这是行为学上的有说服力的解释。问题是，没有证据，我也不了解，华尔街的操盘手们曾经想到过或者在他们的定价模型中加入这些。当然，他们也许不在乎或者很傻。但是他们不会以承担真正的可能崩盘的风险为基础对金融产品定价，但是，他们可以不考虑这些风险，因为一旦发生灾难性事件，美国政府（Uncle Sugar）会埋单。然而，他们真正、确实相信，他们不会暴露在非常大的风险中。我几乎可以肯定地说，无论对买方还是卖方来说，这都是真实的。
Tyler's story of private gains and socialized losses is surely true as an explanation for how the finance industry stayed highly profitable even while undergoing an epic meltdown. But I'm not sure it adequately explains why the industry became so stratospherically profitable before the meltdown. Because the problem in the pre-meltdown era wasn't that banks were taking on more and more risk, the problem was increased leverage and mispriced risk. For some reason, as Tyler puts it, "It's as if the major banks have tapped a hole in the social till and they are drinking from it with a straw."
Tyler 关于个人挣钱社会承担损失的故事对于在经历了巨大的灾难之后金融业如何能够仍然是高利润率的行业的解释是真实的。但是我不肯定的是，这是否也能够恰当地解释，在金融危机之前这个行业为什么变得那么赚钱。因为，在危机之前的问题不是银行承担越来越多的风险，问题是增加的杠杆和错误定价的风险。由于某种原因，如Tyler 所说，好像主要银行已经在社会钱柜中钻了个洞，他们正用吸管吸钱。
This has always been one of the central mysteries of modern finance: Why is it so damn profitable? We're talking about an industry that's global, largely commoditized, and highly competitive. Profits should have been under extreme pressure for the past few decades. And yet, somehow, just the opposite was true. Against all theory, banks were able to consistently charge excessive prices; consistently take the better side of financial bets; and consistently persuade every other actor in the business that mispriced risk was, in fact, correctly priced. The result has been wild profitability and huge bonuses.
这一直是现代金融的核心神秘性之一。为什么它能那么赚钱？我们在谈论的是一个全球化、高度商品化和高度竞争的行业。在过去的几十年中，获得利润是要承受很大压力的。不知为何，事情恰恰相反。与所有理论相悖，银行可以始终高额收费；始终在金融赌局中抽到好签；并且，在交易中始终能说服所有其他各方，错误的定价其实是正确的。结果是，高额利润和巨额的奖金。
And where did this insane gusher of money come from? There are three possibilities: (1) banks created it, (2) their activities caused the economy to grow faster than it otherwise would have, and they reaped the benefit of that extra growth, or (3) it was somehow skimmed away from the rest of society. Possibility #1 is unlikely: banks certainly created mountains of debt, but mountains of money would show in skyrocketing monetary aggregates and high inflation, neither of which happened. Possibility #2 also seems unlikely. There's simply no evidence, either in comparisons over time or comparisons between countries, that economic growth over the past two or three decades has benefited from financial rocket science. So that leaves possibility #3: somehow, all this financial engineering was based on skimming money away from everyone else.
这些疯狂喷涌的钱是从哪来的？有三种可能：(1)银行创造的，(2)他们的行为使经济更快地发展，他们从额外的发展中获取利益，或者(3)以某些方式从社会的其他地方搜刮出来的。可能性1是不可能的：银行肯定是创造了大量的贷款，但是大量的钱将表现为快速增加的货币总量和高通胀，这些都没有发生。可能性2看起来也不可能。没有证据证明，在过去的二、三十年中，从时间上比较还是在各个国家之间比较，经济的发展是获益于金融技术。那么剩下了可能性3：不管怎样，所有的金融工程都是基于从其他任何人那里搜刮钱财。
So, in the end, Tyler's piece really is about income inequality. The incomes of the vast middle class have lagged productivity growth by a small amount each year, and that small amount has accumulated into a gigantic pool of cash that gets funneled to a tiny number of the super rich, many of them in the finance industry.
最终，Tyler的文章实际上还是关于收入不公平。庞大的中产阶级的收入每年只增长很少，落后于生产力的增长，而这一小部分的增长被累积到一个巨大的现金池内，而后汇聚到极少数非常富的人手中，他们中的许多人就在金融业中。
But how? There's still a mystery here that no one has ever adequately explained. But it's important. As I've mentioned before, the primary metric for determining if financial reform is effective is the profitability of the financial industry. If it goes down a lot — by about half, I'd say — then it will have been successful. If not, then not. So far, the signs don't look good.
这又是如何形成的呢？仍然是个谜，没有人给出恰当的解释。但是这很重要。如我前面提到的，决定金融改革是否有效的主要标准就是金融业的利润。如果利润下降许多，比如说大约一半，那么改革就是成功的。如果不是，那么就不是成功的。至少目前形势看起来并不大好。
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