在我进入资金管理行业的第一天，我的新老板邀请我到她那间宽敞、视野开阔的角落办公室。她是宏观研究部总监，她开朗、亲切、睿智的举止是我接受亚洲（日本除外）宏观分析师这份工作的重要因素，尽管我从未去过亚洲、研究过宏观经济、投资过股票或债券。我渴望得到她的任何指导。那天，她给了我一份应该见的人的名单，然后递给我一个厚厚的包裹，详细说明了我的福利待遇。然后，她给了我一个建议：
最后一条建议让我觉得很奇怪。一方面，她好心地指导我，为我的财务状况着想。但另一方面，我在那里不就是为了弄清市场是涨还是跌吗？在过去的十几年里，我曾在不太光彩的环境中了解一些组织、城市、市场和整个国家是如何以及为什么会出大问题的。我想，这些经验对我的同事和公司的客户都会有用。但是，如果市场无论如何都会上涨，那我在那里做什么呢？这种 "一切都会好起来 "的乐观态度令人费解。这似乎好得不像真的，但我又知道什么呢？那是 1999 年，我感觉自己刚刚参加了一个不错的聚会，里面的人都喝了一两杯。
在以后的日子里，我逐渐明白，这句个人建议不仅对我供职的公司，而且对 20 世纪 90 年代以来美国资金管理行业的思维模式和商业模式，都是一个有力的启示：股市无论如何都会上涨，但你可以通过努力让好日子变得更好而获得巨额财富。
我最近一直在重温这个时代，因为我对未来非常担忧，而且注意到金融市场并不如此。金融业本应是社会中少数几个完全关注未来的行业之一，但如果人们、该行业的机构、产品和法规，尤其是其文化都偏向于一切都会好起来的假设，那么等待市场发出未来危险的信号就是一个糟糕的策略。指望只经历过好运的人预见不幸是不明智的。
25 年来，我一直庆幸自己听从了老板的建议：股市确实上涨了，我的财富也随之上涨。但所有这些好运气都是建立在稳定的气候、温和的政治环境和固有的乐观体制结构之上的。现在呢？是时候进行更具批判性和想象力的思考了。我有一些故事，或许能帮到你。
轨道的另一侧
The first time I went to Russia, I had to bribe my way in.
From 1987 to 1991, I researched the declining state of American manufacturing, worked in two dysfunctional factories, and walked through and studied the histories of some of the worst public housing in Chicago. Those experiences sent me on a quest to find places where life was orderly instead of chaotic, manufactured goods were reliable, and everyone could expect to join a robust middle class. So I learned German and applied for a research grant. In Germany, I made friends with Paul and Josh, two similarly restless Americans who had also received research grants (Paul to study the German Romantics; Josh to learn how Germans taught their children about the Holocaust). After a few months of German predictability, we were tempted to experience Russia as the Soviet Union transmuted into something unpredictable. We just needed visas and train tickets.
Visas required a formal invitation from a Russian citizen who would vouch for the applicants and be responsible for their good behavior when in Russia. We didn’t know any such Russian citizens, but Josh’s stepfather was volunteering in Moscow helping Jewish people brutally suppressed under Soviet rule to reestablish synagogues. He was happy to write a letter of invitation but made no promise that it would do the trick. I lived nearest to the Russian embassy in Bonn, so Paul and Josh mailed me their passports and the letter of invitation. I was nervous as I walked up to the embassy counter when my number was called.
In hindsight, I feel great sympathy for the man behind that counter. It must have been a bewildering time for him. He had been educated and trained in the USSR, had joined the Soviet diplomatic corps to serve the state, had been a gatekeeper on the front lines of the Cold War, and now was doing what exactly? Representing a country that wasn’t sure what it stood for or who was really in charge? What was his mission? Whom should he keep out, and whom should he let in? More fundamentally, would the nearly bankrupt Russian state be able to pay for him to keep living in Bonn? I can’t imagine how trivial he would have found my anxiety.
At that time, however, I doubt that I had very emotionally intelligent thoughts about his interior life. I was a 22-year-old American bringing three U.S. passports and a dubious letter to a Russian authority behind bulletproof glass. I explained in my best formal German that my friends and I wanted to visit Russia for a month and that we had a letter of invitation. He silently pointed to the opening in the glass, and I slid the four documents through to the other side. He looked at the passports, looked at the letter (which was written in English), and looked at me with what I interpreted as bureaucratic disinterest. “Is everything in order?” I asked. He shook his head. I then discreetly revealed the 200 Deutschmarks (about $120) I had hidden in my left hand and asked if there was anything I could do to make it in order. He pointed to the opening in the glass. Ten minutes later I had the visas and felt about as cool as I ever had. I was a grownup. I was doing something dangerous. I had bribed a Russian diplomat! In my self-congratulatory state, I accidentally left the case containing our passports on the train when I disembarked, only to be saved by a trustworthy German who gave them to a train official, who put them in what was probably the world’s best-run lost and found. I retrieved them a couple of hours later, humiliated both by having screwed up and by the reminder that my most distinguishing characteristic was not courage but good fortune.
We bought tickets as far as Warsaw because tickets to Poland were inexpensive. Understandably, the cash-strapped Russian rail system was charging high prices to German buyers, but Josh had heard a rumor that every Russian railcar had a kind of steward who managed the car and could be bribed to give passage much more cheaply. Given the success of my first bribe, this sounded great to me. (I didn’t tell either of them about the lost passport snafu.)
In the Warsaw station, we found a train bound for Moscow and, after one or two unsuccessful attempts, seemed to reach an understanding with a kind woman standing next to a railcar entrance who spoke none of the languages that we spoke. Looking over both shoulders, she quickly led us into a sleeper compartment, took our money, and made signals that we understood to mean “stay quiet and keep the door closed.” A little while later, the train started rolling. We were giddy with a sense of adventure.
Around 2 a.m., when the train stopped at the Poland-Belarus border, armed Russian soldiers came to our cabin and took our passports, closed the door, and left. Shortly thereafter, our car was hoisted up about 10 feet so that the undercarriage could be changed from the 4’8½” European gauge to the 5’ gauge that the Russian Tsar chose in 1842 on the recommendation of American engineer George Washington Whistler. We dangled in the air, and from that vantage point we could see that there was some kind of unruly commerce going on outside. People were buying, selling, and shouting at each other in the dim light of the border railyard. We surmised that it was a kind of informal night market to avoid customs duties. We worried that we would soon be kicked off the train into this scene, possibly without our passports.
Paul, Josh, and I were not kicked off the train; the soldiers came back to our cabin and gave us our documents; and we wound up having an amazing, memorable adventure thanks to people who were clearly taking risks by offering us hospitality. Russia taught me that the spectrum of hardship, confusion, anxiety, and bewilderment was far wider than any recent American experience. I hadn’t yet read any Tolstoy, but this trip would be my first exposure to the opening line of Anna Karenina, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
This experience was crucial to my understanding of the world as it is and, more importantly, as it could be. One of the most valuable skills a person can have is the ability to imagine how things can go badly. Optimism is a winning strategy during good times, but when we assume that they’ll keep rolling, we grow complacent, unimaginative, and vulnerable to lean futures.
箱内生活
年少时在俄罗斯的冒险经历促使我扩大自己的兴趣范围，将悲剧、腐败和邪恶也纳入其中。但当我在 21 世纪初进入投资行业时，我意识到人们的兴趣是片面的：他们几乎只对会涨价的东西感兴趣。有一件小事让我记忆犹新。2002 年左右，公司周围出现了几十本精装书。我一直不知道这些书是从哪里来的，但多年来我都会在一些奇怪的地方注意到它们，就好像一个金融界的约翰尼-阿普利西德（Johnny Appleseed）把它们到处乱扔一样。这本书的名字叫《乐观主义者的胜利》：101 年全球投资回报》。
书中充斥着各种表格、图表和图形，将金融市场切割成各种子成分、驱动因素和相关性。大量的数字似乎提供了压倒性的证据，证明历史的弧线是向财富弯曲的。如果我没有进入金融市场，我可能只会把这看作是一本无聊的书，但在 20 世纪 90 年代末到 20 世纪 20 年代中期，投资管理行业经历了一场奇特而神奇的变革：它变得像这本书一样。资本市场及其从业者沦为图表的集合，被分割成越来越窄的基准，然后被 "产品化 "为特定的 "赌注"--无论是计算机还是人类分析师，都没有动力跳出这个框框去思考。在顾问和数字工具的引领下，投资世界变得越来越自我推断--投资业绩不再主要以风险和收益来衡量，而是以相对于基准和竞争对手的业绩来衡量。随着市场上涨成为一种假设，随着乐观主义者取得胜利，业务的驱动力变成了金融 FOMO。
伴随着行业的这些变化，负责人的文化和心态也发生了变化。不断上涨的市场将乐观主义者推上了行业的顶峰，而忧虑者和对未来充满想象力的人则被挤到了边缘。全球最大的资产管理公司贝莱德（Blackrock）、先锋（Vanguard）和富达（Fidelity）通过提供越来越多的金融产品，为客户打包出乐观的资产，从而实现了增长。我曾经对贝莱德的首席执行官拉里-芬克说过："恭喜你在人类历史上最容易发财的时期发财了"。
我在投资公司的前任受雇于当时被称为东南亚奇迹的时期。从印尼到韩国，股市一路高歌猛进，他也成了股市持续上涨的啦啦队长。
，当亚洲金融危机爆发时，他告诉公司不要卖出股票。泰铢暴跌时，他说这只是短暂的恐慌，亚洲四小龙很快就会重新崛起。情况越来越糟。他很早就来上班，关上门，整天呆在办公室里，偶尔发几封邮件，坚称危机并没有真正发生，直到所有人都回家后才离开办公室。他将乐观主义发挥到了极致，达到了不合逻辑的地步：彻底否认现实。最近，当我看到其他乐观主义者面对多年来不断增长的风险时，我一直在想他。
按理说，金融业是一个客观、不带感情色彩的行业，会权衡风险和收益，但不断上涨的市场会对人产生奇怪的影响。与价格上涨的股票、资产类别或世界上的整个地区联系在一起，会让这些地区的投资者觉得自己与众不同。这让其他人对它们另眼相看。吸引新的人加入他们。即使在他们的领域之外，也能给他们一种权威的感觉。这往往会让他们更加关注自己在其他财富上升的投资者中的地位。即使在逆境显现之后，也更难预见逆境。几十年来，美国市场持续上涨，高风险的赌注看起来越来越聪明，人们越来越关注那些与最大赢家有关的所谓天才。新人们涌入金融业也就不足为奇了，因为有什么能比把别人的钱押在一个总能产生回报的游戏上发财更好呢？
堆积如山的金色面包屑
It wasn’t always so. Before that first day in my new office as Asia ex-Japan Macroanalyst, most of what I knew about the bond market came from Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, a tale of 1980s New York City finance, social stratification, justice, and injustice. Recently, I reread it. It’s juicy and brash, full of broad stereotypes and sharp observations about human nature. But the thing that strikes me now is the looming sense of peril in society in general and the financial markets in particular. Wolfe’s wealthy characters are keenly aware of the surrounding risks posed by a New York City full of poverty and crime, and the bond market looks like a wild game of chance.
The main character is Sherman McCoy, a bond salesman at fictional New York investment bank Pierce & Pierce. Bond salespeople make money by helping investors who own bonds sell them to another investor or by buying bonds speculatively and selling them quickly at a higher price. At one point Pierce & Pierce buys $6 billion worth of U.S. government bonds at $99.62643 per $100 and sells $2.4 billion of them at $99.75062 later the same day. The $0.12419 difference made them a fortune.
To Pierce & Pierce, it meant a profit of almost $3 million for an afternoon’s work. And it wouldn’t stop there. The market was holding firm and edging up. Within the next week, they might easily make another $5 to $10 million on the 3.6 billion bonds remaining.
By five o’clock, Sherman was surging on adrenaline. He was part of the pulverizing might of Pierce & Pierce, Masters of the Universe.
Squeezing out those 12.419 cents on the dollar is interpreted on the trading floor as an act of skill and daring. Yet “the market was holding firm and edging up” is finance speak for “interest rates are going down,” which is a technical way of saying that virtually every asset is rising in value. Wolfe, his fictional characters, and all of the actual people in finance had no idea that interest rates would fall for the next 40 years. 40 years! The market was essentially a one-way bet for entire careers. Starting in the early 1980s, people in finance kept experiencing one windfall after another, only briefly interrupted by what gradually became known as “dips.” Even the so-called Global Financial Crisis of 2008 proved to be a buying opportunity once the government bailed out the banks and insurance companies. Over and over again, the investors who bet on the upside were rewarded—and promoted.
The feeling of power, might, and superiority that Sherman and the other members of this group’s real-life inspiration felt at this time has had a lasting impact on our society. When we meet Sherman, he has started referring to himself as a “Master of the Universe” because of the large sums of money he makes in commissions. In truth, though, the job of bond salesman is a mix of middleman and short-term speculator dealing in decimal places. During a family outing on a beautiful day in the Hamptons, Sherman’s six-year-old daughter Campbell asks him a pointed question, “Daddy, what do you do?” She has just learned that the daddy of her playmate MacKenzie makes books and employs 80 people (he runs a publishing house), which causes Campbell to realize that she doesn’t know what her daddy does. She is eager to learn so that she can have the same daughterly pride as MacKenzie.
What follows is painful for both Sherman and Campbell. He’s not sure where to begin and immediately uses arcane terminology. Campbell starts to get the uneasy impression that her father’s employment doesn’t make any sense. Eventually, he manages to say:
“A bond is a way of loaning people money. Let’s say you want to build a road, and it’s not a little road but a big highway, like the highway we took up to Maine last summer. Or you want to build a big hospital. Well, that requires a lot of money, more money than you could ever get by just going to a bank. So what you do is, you issue what are called bonds.”
“You build roads and hospitals, Daddy? That’s what you do?”
“Well, in a way.”
“Which ones?”
“Which ones?”
To calm her increasingly distraught daughter, Sherman’s wife, Judy, steps in.
“Darling, Daddy doesn’t build roads or hospitals, and he doesn’t help build them, but he does handle the bonds for the people who raise the money.”
“Bonds?”
“Yes. Just imagine that a bond is a slice of cake, and you didn’t bake the cake, but every time you hand somebody a slice of the cake a tiny little bit comes off, like a little crumb, and you can keep that… If you pass around enough slices of cake, then pretty soon you have enough crumbs to make a gigantic cake.”
As interest rates fell, communism collapsed, markets expanded, and the Baby Boomers plowed their money into markets, the golden cake grew so huge that the millions that excited Sherman McCoy stopped being so impressive. Blackrock now manages about $12 trillion, Vanguard $10T, and Fidelity $5T. One would think, with assets in the trillions, these companies must have a lot of power. But those numbers are deceptive. As the cake grew, the slices got more orthodox and precise, and the clients (the people whose money the firms invest) changed their behavior. Instead of handing over their money to a guy in a suit and saying, “Invest as you see fit,” most chose to diversify and focus on fees. The big winners in the asset management industry excelled at technology, marketing, and product innovation, selling index funds, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and thematic funds. Many people look to these companies’ leaders for guidance, but their companies sell market access, not insight, and certainly not foresight. To them, the market—its investors, its companies, its risks—is a set of statistics housed in databases, expressed in spreadsheets, and informed by the recent past. It’s all very orderly, logical, and sterile.
电子表格和果戈理
The second time I went to Russia, it was because someone else had accepted a bribe.
After my year in orderly Germany, I moved back to Chicago and looked for opportunities to work with people who were trying to turn around urban decline. I was exceptionally lucky to get a job at the South Shore Bank as a credit analyst. The bank had served a largely Jewish community in the South Shore neighborhood for decades, following traditional bank practices: open only from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekdays with a half day on Wednesday. After Black families started moving into the South Shore in the 1970s and ’80s and the Jewish families moved out, the owners of the bank put it up for sale. A private equity firm offered to buy the bank on the condition that they could move it to downtown Chicago. In a surprising move, the U.S. Federal Reserve, the regulator of American banks, rejected the application. Black people in Chicago had been denied access to financial services for decades due to explicit discrimination (e.g., redlining) and implicit discrimination (e.g., ATMs in Black neighborhoods tended to only dispense cash, not accept deposits), and the regulator, recognizing the risk of this happening again, ruled that any buyer would have to keep the bank in the neighborhood. A group of bankers and socially minded investors seized the opportunity and bought the bank.
My job at the bank was to help commercial loan applicants get their paperwork together and prepare forms for the loan committee. Every week I would meet people who wanted to build or grow a business: Owners of restaurants, muffler shops, used car dealerships, and small manufacturing operations came in with their plans, their ledgers and accounts, and their hopes and dreams. Some were organized and crisp, others were more enthusiastic and impressionistic, and still others were fantastical. No matter how they came in, my job was to translate their story into spreadsheets for U.S. Small Business Association loan applications.
Shortly before I was hired at the bank, it started getting media attention. Bill Clinton and others pointed to it as a model of how business could provide vital social services. It was an inspiring story, and there was a good amount of truth to it, especially in the real estate department, but the commercial lending operations revealed a key challenge of modern business: Spreadsheets leave out—indeed often rule out—the unruly.
I worked with applicants who wanted loans to finance everything from new shops to new hot sauces, but the loans that were approved were almost always for fast-food franchises. McDonald’s, Hardee’s, Domino’s, and the rest provided orderly forms to potential franchise owners that made it easier to start a business. Better yet, the risk to the lender was minimized. The trade-off was that the resulting businesses were not very good for the neighborhood—or even located in the neighborhood at all.
The bank’s positive story kept growing, however, and one day, people from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) called and asked, “Could you set up a program like this in Russia?” My boss’s boss’s boss, the head of lending, a man named Dick, absolutely should have said no. But if things have been going well, if people are coming your way, it’s easy to be optimistic, to wonder how things could get even better. And so, instead of saying no, Dick asked, “Could I get an all-expenses paid trip to Russia out of this?”
I worked for the loan officers, smart Black bankers who were dedicated to the neighborhood. When Dick asked them if they’d like to move to Russia in a month’s time, they all said no. Instead of going back to EBRD and admitting that this neighborhood Chicago bank wouldn’t be able to kick-start small business lending in Russia, Dick asked me if I would be interested in moving to Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. The job started in three weeks.
The first few years of Russia’s transition away from Soviet life had been bumpy. In hopes of spurring commercial activity and prosperity in former Soviet lands, the EU and G7 had created the EBRD. But after a few years, the only obvious money-making investments in Russia—the ones that made sense on spreadsheets—were in oil and minerals, so by 1994, the money that had been raised to convince formerly communist people of the merits of capitalism had all gone to big corporations and their owners who were becoming known as oligarchs. The EBRD was desperate to demonstrate that it could raise the fortunes of everyday Russians, for which their best strategy, apparently, was calling a small bank in Chicago that rewarded their confidence by sending me—a 24-year-old who had never made a loan but had learned the language of American investors: the spreadsheet.
If I was finding it hard to communicate the potential of non-franchise small businesses in the Chicagoland area, imagine trying to do it in 1994 for brand-new small businesses in a Russian city far from Moscow where the high on an average January day was -20°F. My colleagues and I would say to the business owners who came in to apply, “Fill out what you expect your revenues and itemized costs to be over the next five years on this form.” Many of the applicants would take the papers, give an earnest nod, and go fill them out. Some, however, would stare at the rectangular spreadsheet with its orderly rows and columns, its crisp lines and right angles, and look at us with a weary, wry smile that captured how foolish our request was. Their lives had already included radical changes in authority, safety, and political ideology, on top of hard economic times. It wasn’t clear if they even legally owned their businesses or if the state could seize them at a moment’s notice. How could they possibly predict what would happen to anything five years from now? Some of them simply handed back the form and said, “You should just put whatever numbers you want in those boxes. I have no idea.”
I don’t think it’s possible to overstate how much spreadsheets and simple databases have shaped the world, especially American business culture. To a modern investor, the purpose of a corporation is to generate earnings, and earnings are captured on spreadsheets. Therefore, in essence, businesses exist to populate spreadsheets. A friend of mine who used to run a construction company and now teaches at a business school offered me a perfect illustration of this. He explained that there are two kinds of real estate courses at business schools: ones that teach about actual, physical buildings, and ones that only discuss financial models of buildings. The latter course is the more popular one.
A couple of years ago, I was invited by the chief risk officer of one of the world’s largest banks to give a talk about the impacts of climate change on financial markets. He had assembled the heads of each asset class at his bank. I detailed how risks would rise in low-lying places, in hot, humid places, in places that would become more prone to drought or fire or both, and in global financial systems like insurance, sovereign bonds, municipal bonds, and securitized lending. I explained that these risks were unprecedented because the climate had been so stable for the past several millennia and that every asset class would face new challenges. The people on the Zoom call nodded along, asked good questions, and were clearly concerned. Then we got to the crux of the matter. The head of mortgage-backed securities said, “This is all interesting, but I need to know what to put into my spreadsheets.” I explained that there was no one number, no one special column to add to capture climate risk, that it would require thinking in scenarios and dealing with genuine uncertainty. I had lost him. “If I can’t put it in the spreadsheet, it doesn’t exist,” he said.
In the winter of 1994, snow was piled so high that many of Nizhny Novgorod’s roads felt like canyons, which meant that come spring everything would be covered in slippery mud. One April day, my Russian colleagues and I set out to see an applicant who ran a brick factory. The driver, an enormous man whom I had often seen carrying a huge gun at the bank (this local bank was openly run by the mafia), drove the black, rear wheel drive Volga sedan with astonishing speed and control over roads that would have left Americans in Range Rovers calling for a tow truck. The owner of the factory, a clearly bright man in his mid-40s, gave us a tour of the rough but functional facility and answered our questions. As we got ready to leave, I asked him if there was anything else he wanted us to know. He smiled a smile I now associate with Russian spreadsheets and said, “Your decision is very simple. It’s like Gogol said, ‘Russia only has two problems: fools and bad roads.’ You have seen that my road is shit, so you only have to decide if I’m a fool.” We approved his loan.
糟糕的对比
Our financial institutions are run by extraordinarily fortunate people. During their careers, the best strategy has almost always been to take the risk, buy on the dips, and be optimistic. Yes, they still monitor risk, but the concept of risk grew ever more abstract, expressed in correlation matrices and deviations from a benchmark (what’s called tracking risk). In essence, virtually all of the risk in finance is now career risk: It’s not your money, and your investment is only a part of your clients’ assets, and you’re sticking close to the benchmark, so the big risk if you’re wrong about something is losing your bonus or maybe your job. In a setting like that, talking about the likelihood of mass extinction or even rising seas is akin to starting a watercooler conversation about death: The other person is either going to walk away or things are going to get deep. Indeed, the more I talked in investment meetings about climate change, the more colleagues and clients would come to me privately to talk about their kids, the farm in upstate New York that they were rewilding, their childhood memories, or their acceptance that their place on Cape Cod would be taken over by the ocean, not their descendants. Climate change was on their minds, but it wasn’t in portfolios they managed or sold to clients.
I finally gave up on finance in 2015 after I heard former Goldman Sachs Managing Partner and U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson passionately tell a group of investors that “climate change could be as bad as the 2008 Great Financial Crisis.” He was comparing the likely death of hundreds of millions or billions of people, the dislocation of billions more, the death of trillions of other living organisms, and a very real risk that the changing climate will radically reshape all life on earth with an episode of excessive issuance of mortgages and collateralized bonds. Statements like these so dilute our sense of extremes (“crisis”) that every comparison is flattened. Also, the people in that room were certainly richer in 2015 than they were in 2007. For them, 2008 had presented yet another great buying opportunity.
I recently participated in a good conference put on by a climate-focused investment firm whose managing director set the tone with a series of dramatic PowerPoint slides. He made references to drought and fire, but the audience was a bunch of investors. They wanted numbers. And the number he offered them was $200B. The digits must have been 10 feet high on the huge screen next to the stage. The small print explained that this was an estimate of annual GDP losses if the atmosphere warmed to 3.0°C above the preindustrial average. But global GDP is already over $100 trillion. $200B in a few decades barely counts as a pile of prospective crumbs. The recent Los Angeles fires cost $200B. Numbers like these are the dangerous result of a well-meaning, dutiful effort to portray the future in spreadsheets and simple databases. I wish I could offer a more precise, insightful, realistic estimate of future economic costs of climate change, but the past offers scant statistical insight into the future we now face.
Virtually all investment decisions and economic analyses are based on two-dimensional models. An analyst, investor, or economist creating such a model takes estimates from what he or she deems to be a comparable situation (a comp) in the recent past and applies those estimates into a slightly different context. Then comes the spreadsheet magic: Almost all such models take Year 1’s estimates of revenues and itemized costs and project them out into the future with the equation: [This year’s value] = [Last year’s value] x 1.02. In other words, every category of revenue and expenditure is expected to grow gradually, by about the level that inflation stayed during the glory years of falling interest rates. Some analysts might use 1.025 or 1.03 instead of 1.02, but the future of every variable in the spreadsheet is always smooth.
This means that a cash flow model of a portfolio of assisted living facilities across coastal Texas, Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina that was created in 2020 took insurance costs from 2019 and projected them out to 2049 with small annual increases that remained proportional to all the other costs. What happens to that spreadsheet when insurance simply isn’t available any longer in those places? We are starting to find out. After I made a presentation to investors, the CEO of a company that managed exactly that kind of portfolio asked me, “Is climate change why I have to go to Lloyd’s of London in person to get insurance now?”
Climate science tells us that the future will be very different from the past. Thanks to paleo climate science, we know that from about 10000 BCE until about 2012, the global atmosphere was in a stable, narrow temperature range around what is known as the preindustrial average. This range was bounded on the bottom by -1.0°C and on the top by +1.0°C, and its stability and narrowness made forecasting easy. Climate stability is the reason that the same plants grew in the same places for thousands of years and that we have bond markets. In essence, all the past economic and financial data, all those upward trends in prices, were enabled by the low volatility of the climate.
A little more than a decade ago, we broke out of that range, and climate volatility began rising. Last year we crossed 1.5°C, and we can already see how natural and human systems are straining. The next 0.5°C of warming—which we should expect over the coming 10 to 15 years—will bring substantially more disruption and suffering. The probability of drought and deluge will rise substantially; it will be too hot and humid to be outside in places where hundreds of millions of people currently live; pests will be on the move, and plants will be struggling. It’s easy to foresee that these changes will eventually wreck many beautiful, smooth spreadsheets. I’ve talked to hundreds of investors who shake their heads when they see maps of these phenomena and nod their heads when I say it will have massive financial implications, but almost without exception investors then say that it’s not in their universe.
我的宇宙
我认为，我们不应该向投资者寻求对未来的警告的最大原因是，现代投资行业扭曲了投资专业人士看待世界的方式和他们所担心的事情。回顾我近 20 年的投资生涯，我无法确定我所做的任何分析或建议是否真的重要。不过，我可以肯定的是，我每天醒来都会查看新闻和市场，生怕自己在睡梦中（经常是不安稳的）出了差错。如果我向同事们提出的投资建议出了差错，我就会苦恼不已。有一次，我还半开玩笑地把我未能预见台湾大选的财务影响比作 1954 年奠边府战役。
我的错误很少，也很少被注意到，因为我报道中国时，中国刚刚成为全球市场回报的主要推动力。我有点超前，主要是因为我的老板把我安排在那里。但不管是什么原因，我都得到了赞美和赏识，"中国通 "也变得很酷。你可能以为我的好运气会让我心安理得，但在随后的几年里，随着利率下降、市场上涨和薪酬增加，我和我的同事们一如既往地焦虑不安。原因很简单：人类可以给任何事情赋予高风险。任何领域都不会过于狭窄或孤立，都不会让人觉得是一个完整的世界。汤姆-沃尔夫很可能不知道现实世界中的投资行业会如何使用 "宇宙 "这个词。
尽管 "宇宙"（universe）一词被创造出来的目的很明确，就是为了涵盖不仅是地球上，而且是世界各地所有存在的事物的整体，但现代投资者通常会说，"我的宇宙就是小盘成长股"，或者 "在我的宇宙里，所有债券的定价都过高了"。多年来，我一直在想，为什么用 "太阳系 "或 "银河系 "这样不那么宏大的词来形容他们的现实感就不够呢？他们每时每刻都沉迷于罗素 200 指数、标准普尔 500 指数或摩根士丹利资本国际公司全球指数中的股票。当英伟达的股票从 3 美元/股涨到 140 美元/股时，如果不持有足够的英伟达股票，就会感觉像世界末日一样。
这几乎是所有金融领域的无聊小秘密：绝大多数现代投资者都不是什么高手。他们把时间都花在了狭小的视野上，但对他们来说，这却像是整个宇宙。他们的战斗、挣扎、胜利和失败都会让他们付出情感代价。要复制（或做得略好于或略差于）计算机可以不带感情地生成的指数，同时又要少吃很多面包屑，这可能会非常耗费精力。不断面试风险投资申请者是一项艰苦的工作，因为不知道哪家公司会成为 "下一个 Airbnb"，哪家公司会彻底失败。现在，40 年的利率下降期已经结束，预测利率会上升还是下降也令人抓狂。难怪投资者很难想象地球会处于危险之中。这种事情超出了他们的想象。
有钱和有权不是一回事
我上次去俄罗斯时，寡头们富得流油，贿赂无处不在，人人自危。
，随着中国经济的繁荣推动了对石油、镍和其他矿产等大宗商品的需求--以及价格的飙升，俄罗斯的财富也随之增长。到 2007 年，我在公司的研究范围扩大了，我很好奇现金的涌入对这个我 15 年前通过贿赂进入的国家产生了怎样的影响。
我和我的团队发放的第一笔贷款大部分都还清了，但是要找到能够应对俄罗斯经济和政治动荡所带来的动荡和不确定性的借款人却越来越难，因此欧洲复兴开发银行关闭了该项目。俄罗斯新寡头经营的垄断商品企业是唯一安全的赌注。然而，当我抵达莫斯科时，寡头们显然也没有掌握多少主动权。米哈伊尔-霍多尔科夫斯基成功地走过了从列宁主义青年组织者到大型油田所有者的道路，但当他建议应该有一个健康的反对党，或许弗拉基米尔-普京应该拥有有限的权力时，他被关进了监狱。其他寡头注意到了这一点，纷纷倒戈。
今年 1 月的就职典礼上，当我看到美国科技寡头们在唐纳德-特朗普身后列队时，我想，"我真希望这些技术乐观主义者能少受无限诱惑的迷惑，多关心一下其他地方的事情是如何出错的"。一旦进入贿赂行业，争抢蛋糕通常比做更大的蛋糕更有利可图。美国的掮客们各自行贿，希望为自己的公司获得个别好处，而不是倡导更好的治理、更好的规则、更好的监管。
气候变化愈演愈烈，我们更加迫切需要领导力和制约力，以防止我们陷入甚至是可见的危险之中。但是，我们的领导者对糟糕的结果毫无经验和想象力。有几年，金融公司热衷于谈论气候变化，因为他们有一个乐观的故事，可以向客户提供新的 "绿色 "产品。但是，面对政治压力的威胁，面对气候变化是一个风险问题，而不是一个双赢商机的现实，几乎所有的金融公司都迅速退却了。
我一直在回想我离开投资行业前几个月的一次下班后工作活动。公司的一位投资组合经理向我走来，他被认为比同事们更接地气、更有耐心、更开朗。他显然喝了不止两杯。他离我很近，深情地注视着我，说："我在听你说气候变化的事，但这很难。如果这是真的，那我们就是在为我们的孩子毁掉这个星球"。我说他没有听错，这确实是利害关系。他摇了摇头说："我这辈子还从来没有做过真正困难的决定。我告诉他，"我知道你的感受"。
精算想象力
当金融学对风险的定义越来越狭隘时，另一批专家却始终关注这个词的真正含义。这些专家并没有因为利率下降而致富，他们也从未被称为 "宇宙大师"，但他们和他们的前辈们几个世纪以来一直肩负着弄清坏结果的可能性有多大、其影响可能有多大，以及组织和社会如何才能避免它们的任务。这些人就是精算师。
今年 1 月，精算师协会和学院发布了一份气候风险评估报告。在这份评估中，他们不仅评估了风险，还评估了经济学家和金融建模人员提供的评估。
对于气候变化，尽管它将产生一系列社会影响，但人们通常把重点放在经济后果上，试图回答这个问题：
不幸的是，许多高调公开的气候变化风险评估大大低估了风险，因为它们排除了气候变化在现实世界中的许多影响。
这些风险评估恰恰是错误的，而不是大致正确的。
这种方法不符合风险管理原则的要求......[因为它从模型中排除了]不确定的高严重性事件，而不是做出最佳估计和采取预防原则。
他们认为合理的经济损失估算起点是全球 GDP 的 50% 到 67%。不过，他们更强调的是那些无法纳入电子表格的结果，包括大规模移民、大规模死亡、大规模灭绝事件和政治动荡，所有这些都被排除在气候影响的经济和金融模型之外。精算师们用令人惊讶的色彩语言将金融和经济学中使用的模型描述为：
类似于对泰坦尼克号撞上冰山的影响进行风险评估，但模型中排除了船可能沉没、救生艇短缺以及溺水或体温过低导致死亡的可能性。
我强烈推荐这份报告，不仅仅是因为它对气候变化的论述。它是一本关于如何成为一名有效的风险思考者的入门读物。其核心是考虑可能发生的事情、想象其潜在后果并制定计划的重要性。这不是一个电子表格或金融产品，而是一个过程。
更好的模式、更好的做法和更好的计划
The main thing I learned in my nearly 20 years in the investment business is that everyone has a model of the world, including you, right now. Each of us takes in information about the world and translates it into a set of feelings, intuitions, and reasoning to inform our decisions. Some people may have more predictive models and other people have less predictive ones; some people have complex analytics and huge databases, while others have gut feelings. But having a better model is of limited value. What matters most is how you plan. I don’t think the 2008 Financial Crisis is a useful analogy for the kinds of damage that climate change will cause, but a particular investment story from 2008 illustrates what I mean. I wish it were about me, but it’s about a competitor.
Mohamed El-Arian was born in 1958 in New York City to Egyptian parents, and as a child lived in Egypt, Europe, New York, and England. His father was an international lawyer and diplomat, and El-Arian worked at the International Monetary Fund before going into the investment business in 1998. By that time, he had seen many ways things could go wrong. He joined Pacific Investment Management Company, more commonly known as PIMCO, and helped its clients avoid Argentina’s debt default in 2001. PIMCO distinguished itself in the 2008 financial crisis, and the word on the street and in the press was that PIMCO had better models, understood the world better, and could see what was coming. They predicted that Lehman Brothers was going to fail. El-Arian, the company’s CEO, and its CIO, Bill Gross, were geniuses.
Except that’s not true. Here are El-Arian’s own words from a recent interview:
So on the weekend in which Lehman Brothers failed, we were sitting in the investment committee room, and we were trying to predict what was going to happen. The history books keep on saying that PIMCO predicted the disorderly failure of Lehman because most of PIMCO’s clients made money after the financial crisis… That is simply the wrong interpretation. We never predicted a financial crisis. Let me explain to you what happened.
We had three scenarios on the board, and we had voted on the probabilities that we individually attach to each of those scenarios.
Scenario A, 85 percent probability. That’s the combined probability given that Lehman would not fail, that Lehman would be a repeat of Bear Stearns. A stronger bank would come in, take over the weak Lehman Brothers, and there would be no counterparty risk on Monday morning...
Scenario B, 12 percent probability, Lehman fails but fails in an orderly fashion. Why? Because no regulator would put the payments and settlement system in play. That is paralyzing to the real economy. That is destructive to livelihoods. Surely, if they allow Lehman to fail, it will fail in an orderly fashion.
3 percent was the probability we gave to Lehman failing in a disorderly fashion—the outcome.
So the notion that we predicted Lehman was completely wrong.
But why is it that we were able to completely reposition ourselves? Because we had a very detailed action plan for each of these scenarios. We knew who would be doing what when. Simple things like delivering the notice of failure so that you can re-establish positions, to other things like informing clients and trying to change your portfolio postures before others work out their own action plan.
And I say this because when you face unusual uncertainty, it doesn’t mean you get paralyzed. Nor does it mean you stick to one outcome that may happen, but you ignore everything else. It means that you do the hard work of saying, here are possible scenarios, and let me try and figure out what I would do if these scenarios materialized. And let me keep open-minded and know what data I’m supposed to follow, rather than get stuck to a baseline that ends up to be wrong.
It’s a lot of work, yes. But the cost of that work pales in comparison to the cost of not being ready for an outcome that you did not plan for.
I felt pretty lousy when I heard El-Arian say this. I had been in a senior leadership position at a competitor of PIMCO’s. I had gone with colleagues to the US Federal Reserve to warn the Fed about the bad things that were likely to happen. In fact, I think my colleagues and I had a better estimate of the likelihood of a disruptive outcome, a better model. And yet I didn’t push for a plan. The firm did okay, but we could have done better for our clients.
Some earnest people are trying to create better models to precisely predict how climate change will affect the economy and markets so that they can convince the markets to convince the public to convince politicians to steer us away from danger, much like how people in the past few months have waited for markets to tell us whether random tariffs that undermine international relations are going to raise or lower next year’s corporate earnings. I think this focus on models and market signals is mostly a waste of time and often counterproductive. Instead, we can think in scenarios and assess which outcomes we most want to avoid then figure out what work we can do to achieve that goal. What we must not do is trust the optimists.
我为什么写作
五年多以前，我开始撰写关于日至和日分的文章。我并没有试图在经济学期刊、财经媒体或气候科学刊物上发表文章。我坚信，任何人都能理解气候科学的基础知识，而前进的道路是每个人都开始规划，而不是等待金融部门来指明方向。自从我发表第一篇文章以来，世界上政治和专业不确定性的范围已经扩大，而可能出现的气候结果的范围也变得更糟。我们现在的气温是 1.5°C，再过十年左右就可能达到 2.0°C。2024 年的排放量比以往任何时候都高。而投资者却被大量信息所困扰，他们的模型几乎无法处理这些信息。
在最近举行的气候大会上，在我上台介绍 2,000 亿美元的气候价格标签之前，我与一位将在我发言之后参加小组讨论的男士聊了几句。他曾为世界各地的企业和政府工作，担任过石油工程师以及铁路和风电场等大型基础设施项目的经理。现在，他负责监督一个经合组织国家的核潜艇建造。他非常了解风险和情景规划。他问我要对这群投资者说些什么。我向他介绍了要点，并向他展示了我手机上的一些 "Probable Futures "地图。他印象深刻，对我和我的合作者表示感谢，然后露出一个狡黠的微笑，把头转向观众，说："你真的认为这些人会听吗？这群人只关心如何最大限度地利用一切"。我回答说，我绝对相信这值得一试。他们选择邀请我们两个人，也许是一个信号，表明乐观主义者正在重新考虑。
继续前进、
邓小平