中财网蜂巢床垫 电话:2011.12.17.G3 伦敦金融城——言语与承诺，渐行渐远 By 苏鑫
来源：百度文库 编辑：中财网 时间：2024/04/26 23:14:40
THE bankers and traders in the City of London are proof of Hegel’s contention that the only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. Bankers do have a history, but most are wilfully ignorant of it. In the 1990s a talented young historian named David Kynaston set out to tell their story, and made his reputation with a history of the City of London from 1815 to 2000. The intention was to write it in a single volume, but it spread over four, adding up to more than 1m words.
伦敦金融城的银行家和交易商们验证了黑格尔（Hegel）的那句：我们唯一能从历史中学到的就是我们对历史的一无所知。银行家们也算有一段历史了，但是他们大多数却肆意无视历史。20世纪90年代，才华横溢的青年历史学家大卫·凯纳斯顿(David Kynaston)打算对银行家们的这段历史盘整一番，而且在1815年到2000年完成了其著作《伦敦金融城》并以此一鸣惊人。他本来只打算写成单卷版，但后来的发行却超过了四卷，加起来字数可达一百多万字。
Mr Kynaston delights in vivid personalities, such as Nathan Rothschild, who single-handedly rescued the Bank of England when it was about to run out of gold in 1825, Sir Montagu Norman, who stubbornly defended the gold standard against the bitter criticism of John Maynard Keynes, and Siegmund Warburg, who overcame anti-Semitism and entrenched custom to become a pre-eminent merchant banker in the Eurodollar market which triggered the explosive growth of the 1960s. Mr Kynaston lingers over the City’s fabric: staircases of Honduran mahogany, panelling of the best English oak and windowsills of Portland stone in the merchant banks. He is intrigued too by bankers’ habits of working at partners’ desks in a single room, an early example of the open-plan office.
凯纳斯顿乐以描绘各个鲜活的人物形象，比如说在1825年英格兰银行黄金将尽之际一手将其拯救的内森·罗斯柴尔德（Nathan Rothschild）；在凯恩斯严厉批评的情况下仍然坚持保卫金本位制的蒙塔古˙诺曼爵士(Sir Montagu Norman)；以及克服反犹太主义，打破桎梏成为欧洲美元市场杰出商业银行家并使其在20世纪60年代得以蓬勃发展的西格蒙德·华宝(Siegmund Warburg)。凯纳斯顿对这一金融城的构造做了细致入微的描绘：从各商业银行中宏都拉斯桃木做的楼梯到用英国最好的橡木做的镶板以及波特兰的石灰石建成的窗沿。他也同样提到了过去的银行家们在一间房间里与同事们合用办公桌的习惯，而这正是早期开放式大办公室的例子。
The book’s fans have grown even if reading all its 2,641 pages is a formidable undertaking. Edited down to one volume, it should gain a wider audience. This is commendable, especially if it encourages bankers and traders to become less inclined to repeat the errors of the past, learn how to recognise a bubble and remember that what tends to follow a boom is a bust.
全书共有2,641页，要想读完这本书可是一项极为艰巨的事情，但是该书的读者群却在逐渐扩大。如果能将其编辑缩减至一卷，那么这本书的读者就会更多了。这是值得推荐的，尤其是它能使银行家和交易商们避免重蹈过去的覆辙，学会识别泡沫经济并记住繁荣过后必定萧条的市场趋势。
David Milner, the editor, has necessarily denuded the text of some of the more delightful ornaments unearthed by Mr Kynaston in hitherto obscure letters and diaries; he has also been required to cull anecdotes. But the familiar structure still supports a compelling story. Some sections survive virtually intact, such as one about the influence of Walter Bagehot, the most distinguished of all the editors of this newspaper, whose “Lombard Street” established the concept of the lender of last resort. Some disappear entirely, such as the one on the tribunal that investigated sensational allegations that a director of the Bank of England leaked a change in bank rate in 1957. The only thing that is now hopelessly out of date is the list of the City’s acceptable drinking holes.
这本书的编辑戴维·米尔纳（David Milner）对书中的部分非主干且较为晦涩难懂的内容作了必要的删减；他也曾被要求将整本书中记载的轶事提炼出来。然而这种熟悉的结构仍然能展现如此引人注目的故事情节。在删减过程中，书中也有些部分是没有任何改动的，比方说书中关于杰出编辑沃尔特·白芝浩（Walter Bagehot）的影响的部分：白芝浩在《朗伯德街》一书中，确立了最后贷款人这一概念。书中也有些部分被完全地剔除掉了，比如说1957年法院对一位英格兰银行主管因泄露银行利率变动而轰动一时案件的裁决。全书中，唯一完全过时的可能就只是金融城里差强人意的酒吧名单了。
In a short preface Mr Kynaston says that his intention was to demythologise the City which had thought of itself as a village in which a man’s word was his bond and discipline was administered by a nod and a wink from the governor of the Bank of England. “Before the 1980s the City had been viewed as stuffy, boring and unimaginative but essentially honest and competent,” he writes. By the final chapters of the fourth volume the author’s disenchantment was growing. By the mid-1990s, after the bankrupt Barings bank deserted its bondholders, he declared that the City could no longer claim the moral high ground. Since 2000, Mr Kynaston believes that it is greedier than ever, and that it has become a beast that ought to be tamed.
在书中简短的引言当中，凯纳斯顿指出他的目的在于揭开这座金融城的神秘面纱。而过去在这座金融城里，每个人的一句话就是一个承诺，城里的规则是由英格兰银行主管人员定下的。在书中凯纳斯顿写道：“在20世纪80年代以前，人们眼中的金融城古板、乏味无趣的，但是从本质上来讲它仍然是诚实有能力的。”到书中第四卷的最后一张，作者的幻想逐渐破灭。到了20世纪90年代中期，在巴林银行破产并抛弃其债券持有者后，他宣称，金融城已不再占据道德高地。自2000年以来，凯纳斯顿就一直认为金融城已变得无比地贪婪，而且已经发展成为一头猛兽，亟待驯服。