企业的现金属于谁?

Depositors of banks in Cyprus now fear they have less money than they thought while US corporations have plenty of cash to hand – $1.45tn and rising, according to Moody’s. But whose money is it, anyway?
塞浦路斯银行的储户现在担心他们手里的现金将缩水，而根据穆迪(Moody’s)的数据，美国企业手头现金充裕，为1.45万亿美元，而且还在增加。可是，这笔钱属于谁呢？

Michael Dell clearly thinks it is his. The Dell founder wants to repatriate up to $7.4bn of his company’s overseas cash hoard in order to help finance his bid to take it private with Silver Lake, the private equity firm. Activist investors such as Carl Icahn and David Einhorn think more should be given to shareholders, to prevent executives wasting it.
迈克尔??戴尔(Michael Dell，见上图)显然认为这笔钱是属于他的。这位戴尔(Dell)创始人希望将该公司的海外现金储备汇回至多74亿美元，帮助为他与私人股本公司银湖(Silver Lake)联合将戴尔私有化的计划融资。卡尔??伊卡恩(Carl Icahn)和大卫??艾因霍恩(David Einhorn)等维权股东则认为，应当把更多现金返还给股东，以阻止高管浪费这笔钱。

This in turn outrages Martin Lipton, the lawyer who invented the poison-pill defence. He believes they are “sacrificing the future for a quick buck” and compares pressure on US technology enterprises to share cash to the “bootstrap, bust-up, junk-bond takeovers” of the past, which “laid waste to the future of many great companies”.
这进而激怒了当初发明“毒丸”(poison-pill)防御计划的律师马丁??利普顿(Martin Lipton)。他认为，他们正“为了迅速捞取横财而牺牲未来”，他还把美国科技企业现在面临的分配现金的压力，与当年的“自主融资收购(bootstrap takeover)、破产式收购(bust-up takeover)、垃圾债券型收购(junk-bond takeover)”相提并论，那些交易“糟蹋了很多伟大公司的未来”。

The truth is, it does not belong to any of them. Corporate cash is no more the property of shareholders than a rainy-day fund of executives, hoarded in case something comes up. It is the product of companies such as Apple, which held $137bn in cash at the end of 2012, having done well. It belongs to the enterprise, not to either party.
事实是，它不属于上述任何一方。企业现金不是股东的财产，也不是企业高管的小金库，存起来以备不时之需。它是苹果(Apple)等公司优秀业绩的产物，2012年底，该公司持有1370亿美元的现金。它属于企业，而非任何一方。

A company, being inanimate, can’t decide what to do with its cash. That is the task of managers, overseen by a board of directors and monitored by shareholders when they go astray. The kind of arguments we are now seeing are not evidence of chaotic dysfunction, as Mr Lipton argues. They are a sign of the system working as designed.
公司没有生命，无法决定如何处置现金。这是管理者的任务，并得到董事会的管控，在他们误入歧途时还受到股东的监督。我们现在看到的这些争论，并不是像利普顿所辩称的那样，表明出现了混乱和失调，而是表明这个制度正按照设计宗旨发挥作用。

The point is that neither side can be trusted, any more than the public could be trusted if someone placed an enormous pile of cash in the middle of the street as people walked by. They are there to watch each other, and to raise the alarm if the other makes off with it.
关键问题是，任何一方都不能被信任，就像当有人在熙熙攘攘的街头放置大笔现金时、公众不可信赖一样。他们会互相看着对方，一旦对方把钱抢走，就会报警。

This safeguard is working better than at any time in the past few decades, as the examples of Apple and Dell illustrate. Neither a chief executive involved in self-interested financial engineering nor a hedge fund manager seeking a short-term return is immune to challenge.
这种保护机制的效果比过去几十年任何时候都要好，正如苹果和戴尔的例子所表明的那样。参与自私的金融工程(financial engineering)的首席执行官和寻求短期收益的对冲基金经理都不能避免挑战。

The balance of power has slowly shifted, from the postwar era of entrenched management to a period in the 2000s when corporations readily handed out cash to shareholders under pressure from activists. The amount distributed by Standard and Poor’s 500 companies using share buybacks increased 18-fold between 1987 and 2007.
实力平衡已慢慢发生变化，从二战后管理层“说了算”的时代，变为本世纪初企业在维权者压力之下愿意将现金分配给股东的局面。自1987年至2007年，标准普尔500指数(Standard and Poor’s 500)成分股企业利用股票回购返还给股东的金额增加了18倍。

It arguably went too far. William Bratton and Michael Wachter, two US law professors, have argued that the shareholder pressure to raise short-term return on equity was one reason why banks over-leveraged their balance sheets in the run-up to the 2008 crisis – and then collapsed. They cite this disaster as a good reason for companies to beware shareholder empowerment.
可以说，这有些极端了。两位美国法学教授威廉??布拉顿(William Bratton)和迈克尔??沃特尔(Michael Wachter)辩称，股东要求提高短期股本回报率的压力，是银行在2008年金融危机爆发以前过度扩张资产负债表、最后崩溃的一个原因。他们将这场灾难列为企业要警惕“股东赋权”的良好理由。