红卷叶多肉:为何西方资本主义在崩溃？一个傻瓜的看法

        当我回想在研究120个国家以及记录其中的69个国家（也包括在世界银行和联合国机构）中的所见所闻时，我依靠的是常识来做判断。根据常识我得出的结论是：资本主义本身不是问题所在，出问题的是运行西方资本主义的短视愚蠢方式。

        现在我将详细论述这一观点。

        到20世纪70年代早期，真正有识的发展学方面的专家都在关注一个事实：我们的小星球被分成了两个世界——涵盖20%人口的富裕世界（发展学的术语称为北方），以及涵盖80%人口的贫困世界（发展学的术语成为南方）。

        在贫困世界，每年大概有1500万不到五岁的儿童死于营养不良或一些小病：腹泻、麻疹、百日咳。这些本容易预防的疾病却造成了死亡，只因为贫穷——赤贫。大约有不止3亿孩子一出生就脑损伤，因为在妈妈的子宫里就已经营养不良。但是，这些数据还只是一小部分。这个星球上的大多数人都生存在活命的边缘，没有或者常常不能保障所有基本的生存需要——躲避的棚子、充足的营养、清洁的淡水、卫生保健、教育或工作机会。在每个大陆，我都会问那些最贫穷的父母，他们最需要的一样东西是什么。当时还没到手机时代，我期望他们中有许多人能说需要的是一台电视或一些类似的小器具。所有人的答案都在本质上与一位贫穷的印度女人相同，她的答案是：“我的孩子能受到教育，这样他们就不必像我们一样活得像动物一样。”

        富有的国家通过出售商品和服务来创造财富。那么，如果这个财富创造过程是需要可持续的，如他们的政治家许诺的那样，富有世界居民的物质生活水平会越来越高，就要保证世界市场有越来越多的有能力购买富有世界国家要出售的商品的消费者。

        如果西方资本主义国家的管理者们（公司总裁、银行家和政治家）不是短视愚蠢的，那么他们应该会这样告诉自己：如果我们不对世界上穷人的发展进行投资，让他们成为市场上有购买力的消费者，那么我们将缺少需要买我们待出售商品的顾客，我们也将因此无法维系自己的体系。

        如果这项必要的投资已经持续了10年、15年甚至20年了（为了保证这些投资和提供的其他发展援助能够被消化并很少被贪污、发挥了最大用处，这么长的时间是必要的），那么全球对抗贫困和不发达的战争——唯一有关系的战争就会取得胜利了。举个例子，人口由农村向城市的灾难性漂流应该被叫停甚至应该颠倒过来，农村曾有这些人的前途，而对大部分漂流者而言，城市过去没有他们的前途，将来也不会有。

        让投资达到需要的规模意味着，投资的富裕世界国家发展得将不会如此迅速，他们的居民将被迫接受物质生活水平不那么丰富，但是相对于西方资本主义能有一个可持续的未来、我们的后代不论住在哪里都有一个值得憧憬的未来（而现在他们并没有一个值得期待的未来），这个代价并不算大，而且值得。

        西方制度的管理者没有让资本主义成为全世界都会受益的东西，反而选择任由信用卡充斥着富裕世界，而这些居民因此能够超越需求生活，并且越来越深地卷入债务。“我想要”代替了“我需要”。（我的中产阶级的把拔曾对我说：“孩子，如果我们买不起，那就不要向商店玻璃窗里张望。”）

        富裕世界居民没钱维持西方消费资本主义运行的那一天注定会到来。

        随后，为了一定程度上刺激债务驱动型消费和政府开支，那些贪婪而不负责任的银行家们使出了最后一招，他们利用杠杆投机，发明了一系列的看似价值数万亿美元却实际上没有实业资产进行支撑的债务工具，并最终使西方资本主义走向了坟墓。（我一个好朋友是一家总部位于伦敦的世界大型银行的高级风险管理师，她告诉我她和自己团队里的同事在过去五年中一直提醒公司高层，用米奇作为工具进行投机会引发巨大的灾难，但是他们根本不想听。大家的目光只集中在红利上。）

        如果杰里米?克拉克森以前就说，那些银行高管应该拉出去在他们家人面前给枪毙了，我肯定会微笑着然后对自己说“要是那样该多好”。

        我肯定不会用那些纳税人的钱去为银行纾困。我肯定让它们直接完蛋得了。（资本主义的首要规则就应该是，如果你走错了，那你就完蛋了）。但是在让那些决定成为公共政策之前，作为首相我肯定会对我的人民这么说：“不要恐慌。我们本来为那些不顾后果、不负责任的银行提供的纾困资金，现在要改为创立一个新的国家银行，这个银行跟之前那些‘高街银行’不同，它只为消费者的需要服务。”

        毫无疑问，那些银行高管都目光短浅、贪婪无度、愚蠢至极，但是。。。它们并不是造成未来历史学家口中的西方资本主义的崩溃的罪魁祸首。真正的罪魁祸首是那些解除银行和金融市场管制的政治家。而这中间最严重的就是英国的首相玛格丽特?撒切尔。1986年10月27日，她在伦敦发起了金融大改革，突然解除了对银行和金融市场的管制。受金融自由主义影响，她坚定地相信，如果解除了市场的规则和限制，市场就能够更加高效、更好地运行。在她看来，相对于那些在委员会的条条框框下做出的众多决策，自由市场上的交易者的日常决策对所有的人更有利。

        也许我为了表明自己的观点有些夸大其词，而且在一定程度上歪曲了她的说法，但是她好像认为：“我们不必为旧式产业和生产财富的方式操心，银行和市场已经为我们做了这些事儿。”

        而之后事实证明她好像过于单纯了，做出了错误的决策，但是在他们之前，里根及其之后的美国总统都追随了撒切尔夫人的政策。

        我对于现在形势的理解可以总结如下：西方国家的政府债务实在太重了，他们根本不可能刺激经济重新增长，也无法获得偿还债务的资金。基于这种观点，我认为未来西方只可能出现以下两种情形。

        一是，为了偿还债务，政府全面削减开支，减少、减少、再减少所有事务（包括国家退休金、社会福利和公共服务等）的预算支出。失业率高得不可思议，生活水平低到不可忍受。最后公民起来反抗，暴力冲突升级。假冒的民主也会被终止，取而代之的是军事管制。奥威尔书中的1984终将到来。（在爱德华?希思刚从首相之位上退下来时，我和妻子同他共进午餐。那时我问他对于未来最大的担心是什么。我本来以为得和世界贫困相关，因为他曾经是勃兰特委员会的成员。但他很平静地以一种阐述事实的口吻告诉我，是“英国将会成为民主世界中的第一个极权国家”。）

        另外一种情形是，所有的债务，包括房屋抵押贷款，都一笔勾销，然后我们重头再来。

        很明显，一个新的开端必须得基于维护公平的坚定不移的承诺，要真正地使资本主义为所有的人受益。

        和我这样的傻瓜持相同观点的还有很多。美国的马丁?维斯是维斯评级机构（WRA）的创始人。在他最新的演讲中，他对自己的机构成功预测过去四十年的经济灾难做出了一些声明，这个声明已经被所有美国主要的报纸和经济期刊所确认。

        WRA曾提前几个月预测到了80年代的储蓄借贷危机，90年代的大型保险公司的倒闭以及21世纪初的互联网泡沫。

        WRA是世界上唯一一个能够提前一年多预测到2008年金融危机的公司，特别值得一提的是，它还明确预测到了随后倒闭的几乎所有主要公司的名称。

        现在马丁?维斯这样说：

        除非出现奇迹，将会发生一次历史性的、改变世界的事件，它会终结我们所熟知的美国式的生活方式。这次非常事件将会使大量家庭陷入贫困的噩梦，还会使很多人无家可归，处于饥饿状态。而最糟糕的情况就是，犯罪率大增，财产被没收，民主权利被剥夺，甚至会引来美国军队强制实行军事管制。

        他所预测的改变世界的事件就是中国停止购买美国的债券。他说，这也就意味着美国再也无法借钱了，他还说，那样的话就可以看到美国的金融末日开始临近。

        多年来我私下里跟朋友所表明的最大的担心就是，经济危机的进一步演化最终会将我们带向第三次世界大战。它有可能发生，主要是由于一下两个相关的原因：一是政府需要借此将人民的注意力从国内的危机中转移出去，二是政府需要寻找一个外部因素对危机负责。有人说现在美国的政治家已经将中国作为谴责对象了。

        我们拭目以待……

        注脚：

        欧洲那种试图严格控制预算的计划是不合适的，甚至可以说是个闹剧。这些计划是为了阻止现在的愈演愈烈的灾难再次发生，但是它们对于解决现有的债务危机一点意义都没有。欧洲的领导人在马匹被拴住时，还要试图将马房的门也关上。
       
        艾伦?哈特曾经报道过中东的事件，是一位研究者，作家和ITN与BBC的通讯记者。阅读更多艾伦的文章，或者访问他的网址。

        此文发布于2011年12月7日，周三，上午8:00，归类于资本主义，经济与经济学，贫困。
 【原    文】
 The idiot of the headline is me in the sense that I am not an economist and have never had any formal association with study of the theory and practise of economics, but… I began to understand why what is today called Western capitalism was bound to crash way back in the early 1970’s when I was researching and producing an epic documentary on the everyday reality of global poverty and its implications for all.

 When I reflected on what I had witnessed and learned while researching in 120 countries (as well as at the World Bank and many UN agencies) and filming in 69 of them, I let commonsense be my guide. It led me to the conclusion that capitalism was not of itself the problem. It was the short-sighted and stupid way Western capitalism was managed.

 Now I’ll put some flesh on that bone.

 By the early 1970’s truly informed development experts were drawing attention to the fact that our one small planet was divided into two worlds – the Rich World containing about 20% of humankind (and known in development jargon as the North), and the Poor World containing about 80% of humankind (and known in development jargon as the South).

 In the Poor World an estimated 15 million children under five were dying each year from malnutrition and related and easily preventable diseases such as diahorrea, measles and whooping cough – in a word poverty, abject poverty. And an estimated 300 million more were born brain damaged because of malnutrition in the wombs of their mothers. But those statistics told only a part of the story. The majority of the human inhabitants of Planet Earth were living on the margins of life, without some and in many cases all of the basic necessities for life – shelter, adequate nutrition, clean water, health care, education and work/job opportunities. On each and every continent I asked the poorest parents what was the one thing they most wanted. This was before the age of the mobile telephone and I expected many of them to say a television or some such gadget. What they all said in their various ways echoed one of the poorest Indian women. Her answer was, “Education for my children so they don’t have to live like animals as we do.”

 The rich nations were creating their wealth by selling goods and services. It followed that if this wealth creating process was to have a sustainable future and Rich World citizens were to enjoy ever rising material standards of living as promised by their politicians, the global market place needed more and more consumers with the purchasing power to buy what the Rich World nations had to sell.

 If the managers of Western capitalism (corporate chiefs, bankers and politicians) had not been short-sighted and stupid, they would have said to themselves something like the following. “If we don’t now invest in the development of the poor of the world and bring them progressively into the market place with purchasing power, we are going to run out customers in the numbers needed to buy what we have to sell in order to sustain our system.”

 If the necessary investment had been made over 10, 15 and even 20 years, (it would have needed that amount of time in order to guarantee that the money and other development assistance provided could be absorbed and put to best use with minimum corruption), victory in the war against global poverty and underdevelopment – the only war that matters – would have been assured. To give just one example… The disastrous population drift from the rural areas where there was a future to the urban centres where there was not and is not a future for many of the drifters could have been halted and even reversed.

 Making the investment needed on the necessary scale would have meant that the investing Rich World nations would not have grown so rapidly and their citizens would have had to accept a little less in the way of ever rising material standards of living, but that would have been a small price to pay for giving Western capitalism a sustainable future and all of our children wherever they live the prospect of a future worth having. (Whereas today they do not have a future worth having).

 Instead of starting down the road to making capitalism work for the benefit of all in global terms, the system’s Western managers opted to keep things going by flooding the Rich World with credit cards to enable its citizens to live beyond their means and get deeper and deeper into debt. “I need” was replaced with “I want”. (My working class father used to say to me, “Boy, if we can’t afford it, we don’t look in the shop window.”)

 There was bound to come a time when Rich World citizens simply could not afford to go on buying on the scale needed to keep Western consumer capitalism going.

 Then, partly to fuel debt-driven consumer and government spending, the greed-driven, totally irresponsible bankers drove the final nail into Western capitalism’s coffin by playing their leveraging games, producing debt instruments with a face value of hundreds of trillions of U.S. dollars but which were not backed and supported by real assets. (A good friend of mine was the senior risk manager for one of the world’s biggest banks headquartered in London. She told me that for five years she and her team tried to warn top management that leveraging with Mickey Mouse instruments was creating a catastrophe, but top management didn’t want to listen. It was focused only on bonuses).

 If Jeremy Clarkson had said that banking chiefs should have been taken out and shot in front of their families, I would have smiled and said to myself, “If only.”

 And I would not have bailed out the banks with taxpayers’ money. I would have let them go bust. (The first rule of capitalism is supposed to be that if you get it wrong you go bust). But before making that decision public I (as prime minister) would have said to my people something like the following. “Don’t panic. The money we would have to put into bailing out reckless and irresponsible banks will instead be used to create a new national bank which, rather like the High Street banks of the old days, will exist only to serve the needs of their customers.”

 There’s no question that banking chiefs were short-sighted, greedy and stupid, but… They were not the architects of what future historians will call the crash of Western capitalism. They, the architects, were the politicians who deregulated the banks and financial markets. The leading architect was Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. On 27 October 1986, she initiated the “Big Bang” in the City of London, the sudden deregulation of the banks and financial markets. In the name of “financial liberalism” she truly believed that markets would work better, more efficiently, if they were free of rules and restrictions. In her view millions of decisions made every day by traders in a free market would be better for all of us than decisions that had to be made with reference to rules and regulations drawn up by committees of the great and the good.

 Though I might be exaggerating to make a point and may be misrepresenting her to some extent, she seemed to be saying, “We need not bother too much with our old industries and ways of creating wealth, the banks and the markets will do it for us.”

 Events were to prove that she could not have been more naive and more wrong, but before they did American presidents starting with Ronald Reagan had followed her lead.

 My understanding of the situation today can be summarized as follows. The debts of Western governments are so big that no Western country will be able to generate the growth and so the money needed to repay them. On that basis I can see only two scenarios for the future.

 One is that in order to repay the debts, governments slash expenditure across the board, cutting, cutting and cutting back massively on budgets for everything including state pensions and social welfare benefits and services. Unemployment rises to unthinkable levels and living standards plunge to unacceptable levels. Eventually the citizens revolt and violence escalates. What passes for democracy is shut down and martial law is established. Orwell’s 1984 finally arrives. (Soon after Edward Heath ceased to be prime minister, my wife and I had lunch with him. I asked him what his biggest fear for the future was. I expected it to be related to global poverty because he had been a member of the Brandt Commission which studied it. His reply, calm in delivery and matter of fact in tone, was, “That Britain will become the first police state in the democratic world.”)

 In the other scenario all debts, including mortgages on homes, are written off and we all start again.

 By definition a re-start would have to be based on a rock-solid commitment to fairness with a real intention to make capitalism work for the benefit of all.

 This idiot is in quite good company. American Martin Weiss is the founder of the Weiss Rating Agency (WRA). In his latest presentation he makes the following claims about his agency’s astonishing success in predicting economic disasters of the past 40 years, a claim which is confirmed by all the major American newspapers and economic journals.

 Months in advance WRA warned about the S&L crisis of the 1980’s; the great insurance company failures of the 1990’s; plus the great “Tech Wreck” of the early 2000’s.

 WRA was the only firm in the world to warn of the financial crisis of 2008 more than a year in advance, specifically naming nearly every major company that later collapsed.

 Today Martin Weiss says this:

 Barring a miracle, an historic, world-changing event is about to end the American way of life as we know it. This monumental event will plunge vast numbers of families into the nightmare of poverty, homeless and hunger. In a worst case scenario you will see soaring crime, the confiscation of property, the suspension of civil rights, and even the enforcement of martial law by the U.S. military.

 The world-changing event he is anticipating is a decision by China to stop buying U.S. debt, which will mean, he says, that America will no longer be able to borrow money; and that, he adds, will see the beginning of “America’s Financial Doomsday”.

 My own biggest fear which I have been expressing to friends in private for a number of years is that the unfolding economic crisis may take us all the way to World War 111. It could happen for two related reasons. One is the need of governments to deflect the attention of their own people away from the mess within. The other is the need to have an outside party to blame. There’s a case for saying that some American politicians are already setting up China for blame.

 We shall see…

 Footnote

 European plans to bring in tough budget controls are irrelevant, even a farce. They are designed to stop the present unfolding catastrophe from happening again, but they won’t do anything to solve the present debt crisis. European leaders are shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.

 Alan Hart has been engaged with events in the Middle East and globally as a researcher, author, and a correspondent for ITN and the BBC. Read other articles by Alan, or visit Alan's website.

 This article was posted on Wednesday, December 7th, 2011 at 8:00am and is filed under Capitalism, Economy/Economics, Poverty.