预言能力最强的经济学家替你分析

Why the Meltdown Should Have Surprised No One
为什么我们不应对金融危机感到意外？

演讲者：彼得-希夫（Peter Schiff）

主持人约瑟夫-萨莱诺（Joseph Salerno，米塞斯研究院副院长）：

It is my great and distinct pleasure to introduce the Henry Hazlitt Lecturer, Peter Schiff.

我非常荣幸今天能够请到彼得-希夫先生。

Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital, is familiar to everyone who has watched financial coverage in the last year. He is famed for being the most vocal financial economist to have perfectly predicted the crash.

欧洲太平洋资本有限公司总裁--彼得-希夫，想必每一位在去年目睹金融危机的人都对他非常熟悉。他被认为是口头预测能力最准的经济学家之一，极其精准地预言了金融崩溃。

He also happens to be a dedicated student of the Austrian school. He is the author of the prophetic Crash Proof and, most recently, The Little Book of Bull Moves in Bear Markets. Whenever he speaks about finance and economics, he also seeks to teach sound economic theory, writing for publications such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. Today he will speak on the relationship between theory and practice in financial markets. Peter Schiff.

他也是奥地利经济学派的追随者，是两本书的作者：《美元大崩溃》，以及最新的《熊市下的投资之道》。他不只是金融与经济领域的评论家，而且还教授各种严谨的经济学理论。他的文章经常在《纽约时报》、《华盛顿邮报》这样的媒体上发表。今天，他将为我们做一次有关金融市场理论和实践方面的演讲。有请，彼得-希夫--

【掌声】

彼得-希夫：

I just looked at the topic for my speech about thirty seconds ago before I walked in the door. But apparently I'm talking about why is it that people didn't see this coming, or should people have known that this meltdown was coming.

我在30秒之前才认真看了一下今天演讲的标题是什么......【台下传来笑声】那么我就来谈一下为什么那么多人事先都没看出来会发生金融危机，而他们本来应该能看得出来。

Is there anyone in this room that was surprised by the economic meltdown? Does anybody think it's over? Anybody? Raise your hand if you think it's over.And does anybody think that the government solutions are going to work or that they're going to help? Is there anybody? One. All right. So, I guess there's really no reason for me to speak here. I don't know that I'm going to tell anybody anything they don't know. But, if you want to indulge me, I guess I could talk about it a little bit anyway.

我想先问一下在座的各位，有没有谁对这次经济危机感到意外的？......没有？好，那么有谁觉得危机已经结束了？您可以举手，让我看一下；或者......有谁认为政府的解决方案能奏效，或对我们有所帮助？......什么？只有一个人举手？--哦，天哪！看来今天我其实没必要来这里演讲。【台下大笑】实际上我很想告诉那些什么也不知道的人。不过无所谓，只要台下的你们不觉得厌倦，那我就随便说说好了。

But I don't know why so few people seem to understand what was going to happen. I guess when you're living inside a bubble, it's very difficult to actually see what's going on, from your point. But I lived through two of them, because I'm a stockbroker. I lived through the NASDAQ bubble.And to me, at that point in time, it seemed pretty obvious what was going on, in 1997, '98, '99. It seemed obvious to me that these companies that people were touting couldn't possibly be worth the prices that people were paying. Yet nobody seemed to be able to figure that out back then.Everybody seemed to be living in this new era, and the Internet had captured everybody's imagination. To me, I couldn't see the difference between the Internet, really, and a catalog or a telephone.People were saying that everybody's going to buy everything on the Internet. Why? Why aren't people just shopping by telephone? Or why aren't they just buying everything in a Spiegel catalog? It didn't seem that it was any different.

其实我也不明白为什么别人就看不出来。我想可能当一个人身处泡沫之中的时候，就很难发现究竟是怎么回事。就我个人而言，我经历了两次泡沫。在纳斯达克泡沫时期，我是一个股票经纪人，我很清楚那时在发生些什么，1997、1998、1999－－在我看来，那些股票被高估了许多倍，远不值投资者所付出的价钱，这是显而易见的。但当时却没人这样想，每个人都以为我们进入了"新经济时代"，互联网给了人们充足的想象空间。而那时的我却没看出互联网购物与电话购物或清单邮购有什么实质区别，他们说不久以后所有的人都会用互联网来购物了，我想不通为什么人们一定要去互联网上买东西，难道就不能通过电话采购？二者有那么大区别吗？

And I knew that the valuations they were putting on a lot of these companies, I knew they'd come out with a company, maybe it'd be Doorknobs.com, or whatever it was.And you'd say, "Well, gee, even if they sold every doorknob in the world, they couldn't possibly be worth the multiples that they're trading at." And of course they didn't even make any money selling them.And the whole idea behind so much of the e-commerce was just nonsense. The idea that it was more cost effective to individually FedEx items to people, as opposed to letting them show up and buy them and put them in their cars and leave. There's no way.There are certain items that lend themselves to online sales, but most items didn't, but it didn't matter. Everybody was going public.And people were getting rich, but none of the people were getting rich because the businesses were successful. The people were getting rich because suckers were buying their stock.The guy that started eToys lived in my apartment building in downtown Los Angeles. And I started my company, Euro Pacific Capital, about the same time he started his. He made a lot more money than I did, but he didn't make a profit.He never made a profit. But he made a lot of money because he found people to buy into his idea. And at one point, eToys was worth more than Toys "R" Us.

我知道人们在互联网公司上下了很大的赌注。记得似乎有一家做门把手（doorknob）的公司doorknob.com，就算他们能把自己生产的门把手卖给全世界所有的人，也无法让自己股票的市盈率看上去合理【台下笑】，他们不可能通过在互联网上卖这些东西来盈利。那时有如此多的电子商务支持者，他们都信奉这样一种理念：向客户邮寄东西要比直接开店更为经济，这样客户也用不着光顾店面、用不着找地方停车了。但事实并不是这样，只有少数东西是可以邮寄的，而大多数东西却不行。不过当时谁会在意这些细节，只要能找个借口上市就行了。很多人都一夜暴富，但没有人是通过成功经营一夜暴富的，他们暴富是因为投资者争先购买他们的股票。我有一个邻居在洛杉矶市区开了一家E-Toy（玩具电子商务--译者注）公司，几乎和我所在的欧洲太平洋资本公司建立于同一时间。他比我赚的钱要多得多，但他却没有盈利，他从来没有盈利过！他之所以能赚到钱是因为他成功地让人们相信他“能赚钱”。E-Toy市值最高的时候比我的公司市值的两倍还高。

I remember when I was trying to get clients, back when I was starting out at Euro Pacific Capital, and I was trying to get people to buy foreign stocks.And I remember one country I was active in was New Zealand, and I remember trying to convince people who owned shares of stocks, like Yahoo, why they should sell their Yahoo and buy a stock in New Zealand.I would point out that Yahoo was worth twice the entire country of New Zealand; every stock they had, all the real estate.I'd say, "What would you rather own, this entire country?" The dividend yield on the New Zealand stock market was over a billion dollars a year. That was the dividend yield. Yet Yahoo was trading for more than twice the value of that whole stock market.I said, "What would you rather own, this company that just got started a couple years ago, or this whole country? And you could take all the dividends." No. No one cared; they wanted Yahoo. But it was just all nonsense, but nobody saw it.Of course, after the Internet bubble burst, everybody was talking about how crazy it was. And the politicians were ready to throw people in jail and they vilified Wall Street. But it didn't last very long.

我记得在欧洲太平洋公司刚成立不久，我推荐客户购买国外公司的股票。我试图说服一位想买雅虎公司股票的客户，让他不要买雅虎，而应转买新西兰的股票。我这样对他说：“雅虎的市值相当于新西兰整个国家财富的两倍【台下笑】，包括新西兰所有的股票、所有的地产……你想拥有什么？想要新西兰整个国家-- 要知道单分红受益一项每年就有超过10亿美元，还是要雅虎这个才成立了几年的公司？投资新西兰的话你可以得到所有的红利。”但没办法，他们还是想要雅虎，不要新西兰。这当然非常荒谬，可当时却没有人意识到。互联网泡沫破灭后，所有的人都在谈论那时市场多么多么不理性、多么疯狂，一些人被送进监狱，华尔街被千夫所指。

The whole thing was, in a year or two, we just moved right from that stock-market bubble, almost seamlessly, into the real-estate bubble, and nobody could see that there was any similarities.There was one. Somebody recently put together another one of those Peter Schiff videos. There was one that somebody made, this "Peter Schiff Was Right" video that was on YouTube that I know about a million three hundred thousand people have seen.But someone else put together a CNBC version of that recently and I happened to watch it. And there was one particular clip he put on with me and Mark Haynes, and I'm talking to him about this impending collapse and the economy and the real-estate market.And Mark Haynes just says to me, he says, "Peter, bubbles are like a once in a lifetime occurrence, we just had one." He said, "Do you expect me to believe that we have another one within ten years?"

但是好景不长，几乎在同一时间，人们就从纳斯达克泡沫，迅速转向了房市泡沫，而没人看出两者的相似之处！有人剪辑制作了一部名为《彼得-希夫是对的》（Peter Schiff was right）的视频，放在了YouTube上，大约有130万左右的点击量，我无意中看见其中有一段我在CNBC电台的访谈，我说房市泡沫即将破灭，经济会遭遇崩溃，但主持人马肯（Marcaine）问我：“希夫，我常听说，一个人一生只会经历一次泡沫，我们才刚刚经历过一次！难道在不到十年的时间里我们会再经历一次？【台下笑】”