苗疆的蛊术:你买的是黄金吗？

Last month, I happened to visit New York’s Tutankhamun exhibition, to chair a dinner conference on gold exchange-traded funds (ETFs). It felt like attending a church revival meeting. As I faced a crowd of well-dressed financial advisers from premier Wall Street banks, there were cheers and rapt applause. There were even a few angry, wine-fuelled heckles when I dared to ask if gold was in a bubble. This was not your normal investment event. Not once did anyone mention the Capital Asset Allocation Model, or any other technical areas of investment expertise.

上月，我在纽约参观图坦卡蒙(Tutankhamun)展时，主持了一次以“黄金交易所交易基金”（黄金EFT）为主题的晚餐会。我感觉像是参加了一次教堂的培灵会。当我面对来自华尔街顶尖银行的衣履光鲜的理财顾问们时，人群中爆发出了欢呼声和热烈的掌声。当我斗胆问出黄金是否处于泡沫之中时，还有些人借着酒意发出愤怒的起哄声。这不是你平常参加的那种投资会议。人们绝口不提资本资产配置模型(CAAM)，也不提及其它任何一个投资专业技术领域。

Over the past year, the US political scene has been shaken by the arrival of the so-called Tea Party, the populist, angry, anti-government movement. Meanwhile, however, in the financial sphere, another populist, individualist, anti-big-government movement of sorts is also now gathering pace: call it, if you like, the Gold Bug Band.

过去一年来，“茶叶党”（奉行民粹主义的、愤怒的反政府运动团体）的兴起撼动了美国政局。而在金融领域，另一种奉行民粹主义和个人主义、带有几分“反大政府”色彩的团体也在逐渐壮大声势——我们不妨称之为“黄金虫帮”。

To be sure, gold devotees have always existed in America, just as a version of the Tea Party has always been around (that is, fiscally conservative, anti-government right-wingers). Indeed, before the 1960s, when the American dollar was employing the gold standard, it was widely assumed that gold was the best store of value available to mankind. Even after America left the gold standard in 1971, some investors continued to revere the yellow stuff. Alan Greenspan, the former Fed chairman, for example, wrote an essay in his youth, entitled “Gold and Economic Freedom”, which declared that “in the absence of a gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value.”

诚然，黄金信徒在美国始终都是存在的，正如“茶叶党”也始终未曾消失一样（奉行财政保守主义、反政府的右翼分子不就是茶叶党？）。事实上，在上世纪60年代以前美元仍采用金本位制的时候，人们普遍认为，黄金是人世间最好的保值工具。即使是在1971年美国放弃金本位制以后，仍然有一些投资者崇奉黄金。例如，美联储前主席艾伦•格林斯潘(Alan Greenspan)年轻时就曾写过一篇论文，题目是《黄金与经济自由》(Gold and Economic Freedom)。文中声称，“废除金本位制后，人们没有办法防止储蓄经由通胀被充公，没有可靠的保值方式。”

But from the 1970s onwards those gold devotees sat on the fringe (and Greenspan himself went on to stoke up credit bubbles, having apparently forgotten his earlier creed). Gold came to seem old-fashioned in the investing world; it had little place in the new era of innovation and cyber-finance.

但黄金信徒从上世纪70年代起就流于边缘（格林斯潘本人忙着为信贷泡沫推波助澜，明显已经忘了他早年的信条）。在投资界，黄金似乎已经过气，它在创新和网络金融的新时代几乎毫无立足之地。

But now a new “back-to-basics” mood is afoot – and those Gold Bugs have jumped into the mainstream, as interest in gold has soared. Every time the FT runs a story on gold (even a negative one), we get a tidal wave of reader online “hits”. Daytime TV in America is running ads for gold investments. The mighty JPMorgan Chase has just reopened an ancient gold storage vault. Highly respected hedge fund managers, such as John Paulson (the man who made zillions betting against subprime mortgages) are purchasing the stuff. And staid financial advisers are now attending gold conferences – whooping with joy, as I discovered.

但如今一种新的“返本归元”心态正在躁动，黄金信徒一跃成为主流，人们对黄金兴趣激增。英国《金融时报》每刊登一篇关于黄金的文章（即使是不看好黄金的文章），都会有大批网友点击。美国的日间电视节目不断播放黄金投资广告。实力雄厚的摩根大通(JPMorgan Chase)近期重新启用了一个古老的黄金储存库。极受敬重的对冲基金经理们，如约翰•保尔森（John Paulson，此人曾靠做空次级抵押贷款赚了数不清的钱），正纷纷买进黄金。稳重的理财顾问们如今出现在各种黄金会议上——我发现，他们呼喊是出于喜悦。

Why? The mania is partly explained by some serious macroeconomic factors. Many investors think gold is a good hedge against future inflation, or a falling dollar. Jewellery demand in places such as India and China is rising, as those countries’ wealth grows. And since supply is short, lots of investors are simply buying into the trend.

这一切究竟是为什么呢？黄金热的兴起，部分可用一些严肃的宏观经济因素来解释。许多投资者认为，黄金是防范未来通胀、应对美元贬值的良好对冲工具。印度和中国等国随着财富逐渐增长，对首饰的需求日趋旺盛。既然供应紧张，很多投资者干脆跟风买入。

But it seems there is another factor at work: faith. One of the first things that you learn in any economic anthropology course is that value is always relative and culturally anchored – whether the goods being exchanged are cowrie shells (used as a status symbol in the Trobriand Islands) or dollar bills (whose worth depends on trust in a central bank). Back in the credit boom, most bankers and macroeconomists forgot that basic point but the credit crunch has rammed it home. After all, when faith in banks – and most other forms of modern financial institution – crumbled, the system almost broke down. And now, as western national debt levels spiral, faith in government is also wobbling – or, more accurately, faith in the ability of the state to honour its debts and maintain the value of money.

但此中似乎还有另一个因素在起作用，那就是信心。你在经济人类学课堂上最早学到的要点之一，就是价值永远是相对的，并与文化脱不开干系——不管交换的物品是贝壳货币（在Trobriand群岛被用作社会地位的象征），还是钞票（其价值取决于人们对央行的信心）。在信贷繁荣时期，多数银行家和宏观经济学家都遗忘了这一基本要点，但信贷危机让他们重新认识到这一点。毕竟，当人们对银行——以及大多数其它形式的现代金融机构——的信心崩溃时，整个金融体系几乎垮掉。眼下，随着西方国家债务水平不断攀升，人们对政府——更确切地说，是对政府偿债及维持本币价值的能力——的信心也在动摇。

That plays into the Gold Bugs’ hands. After all, the value of gold does not depend on Big Government. It seems tangible; it is readily understood; it appears to have permanent, immutable value. That is attractive, particularly in a world where investors are reeling from the vagaries of excessively complex, disembodied cyber-finance.

这种形势对黄金信徒有利。毕竟，黄金的价值并不依赖于“大政府”。黄金看得见摸得着、容易理解，似乎具有永恒不变的价值。这很有吸引力，尤其是在投资者被各种过于复杂、虚无飘渺、怪异的网络金融产品搞得头晕眼花的时候。

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Of course, a cynic might argue that this reverence for gold is also a social construct. After all, the yellow metal cannot be eaten, burnt or used to power a car. And most modern gold devotees are not actually buying gold bars to bury in the garden, but instead acquiring ETFs (a financial innovation which entails buying a stake in a collectively held pool of gold, comparable to an equity mutual fund). They are doing this since ETFs are infinitely more convenient than gold bars. But who knows if the bankers running the ETF are honest? How do you know they actually hold that gold?

当然，愤世嫉俗的人可能会说，对黄金的崇拜也是一种社会建构(social construct)。毕竟，这种黄色金属不能吃、不能烧，也不能用来发动汽车。大多数现代黄金信徒实际上并非购买金条然后埋在花园里，而是购买ETF（一种金融创新产品，投资者购买的是由集体拥有的一批黄金中的一份，类似于股票共同基金）。之所以这么做，是因为ETF比起金条来方便了无数倍。但谁知道掌管ETF的银行家是否诚实呢？你怎么知道他们真的是在持有相应的黄金呢？

As it happens, I was told at the conference in the Tutankhamun museum that some Swiss ETFs are now trying to allay any such concerns by installing webcams to monitor those bars. But apparently very few investors bother to check. Trust in gold is sky-high – precisely because faith in central banks is now so low. Maybe it is time for Greenspan to revise his long-forgotten essay and turn it into a book; I guarantee it would be a best seller.

碰巧，我在图坦卡蒙博物馆举行的会议上获悉，瑞士一些ETF正打算安装网络摄像头监控金条，以缓解上述担忧。但显然没有几个投资者会费心去核查一下。眼下人们对黄金信心十足，而这恰恰是因为他们对央行极其缺乏信心。也许格林斯潘应该趁机翻出他那篇遗忘已久的论文，把它改写成书。肯定畅销。

译者/杨远