纽约时报：阻止金融危机的瑞典道路
Stopping a Financial Crisis, the Swedish Way
By CARTER DOUGHERTY
Published: September 22, 2008 New York Times
卡特·杜尔迪
本译文为宇琦译，人文与社会编辑小组校订(http://humanities.cn)，转载请注明。
纽约时报，2008-9-22
一个正处于房地产泡沫崩溃后的危机的金融系统。一个正在大量流失就业机会的经济体。一个以市场为导向、并正在奋力阻遏（市场？）恐慌的政府。
听起来很熟悉吧？
对瑞典来说的确如此。1992年的瑞典陷入经济困难——数年来不谨慎的管制、短视的经济政策终于使这个国家走到资产繁荣（膨胀）的终点——它的整个银行系统实际上已经破产。
但是当时瑞典选择的解决之道，和如今美国财政部的提议完全不同。而且瑞典官员认为，华盛顿可能漏掉了本可以从他们的往日噩梦中学到的教训。
政府不单单是接管了不良债务，来帮助金融机构摆脱困境。在开出支票前，政府先让银行股东大出血－－这些银行必须在帐面上减计损失额，并向政府发行认股权证。
这种策略使银行负担了相应的责任并把政府变成所有者。不良资产被出售时，利润得以流向纳税人，政府也可以在日后通过出售公司股份而得到补偿。
“如果我接管一家银行”，彼时的瑞典财政部长布·隆德格林（Bo Lundgren）说，“我更倾向于获得股权，这会给纳税人带来潜在的上升空间。”
瑞典花费了它GDP的4%，即650亿克朗，相当于当时的117亿美元或现今的183亿美元，来援救那些境况不佳的银行。这个比例略小于布什政府预计投入的7000亿美元，约占美国GDP的5%。
但是瑞典最终的投入不到GDP的2%。一些官员认为实际上接近于0，这取决于如何计算回报率。
之前数周的争议事件在斯德哥尔摩让很多人缄默地点头表示同意。Lundgren先生甚至在9月初造访纽约，解释他们国家在20世纪90年代初的做法。
少数美国评论家提议美国政府从银行获取股权作为救援的代价。但是迄今为止，该建议似乎未被布什政府或国会认真考虑。
原因尚不明朗。政府已经动用了主权担保，针对房利美（Fannie Mae）和房地美（Freddie Mac）这两家住房抵押贷款机构，以及全球保险业巨头美国国际集团（AIG）。
没有任何回报地将纳税人置于泥潭中，很可能是错误的，当时瑞典财政部的一个高级官员Urban Backstrom说。“如果一个计划不为原来的执股者留下些什么，就不会得到公众的支持。”
瑞典危机的起源，同美国的情况惊人地相似，它的邻国挪威和芬兰也都是一直蹒跚地走到需要政府救援才能摆脱困境的地步。
1980年代，金融管制的放松导致了瑞典银行对不动产放贷的狂热，至于那些抵押品会不会在经济不景气时价值缩水（价值蒸发），则未被予以足够的关注。
资产价格暴跌，泡沫在1991和1992年间迅速破灭。捍卫瑞典货币克朗的努力是徒劳的，隔夜利率从5%猛增到500%。瑞典经济在经历了长期扩张后连续2年紧缩，失业率则在3年间从1990年的3%增加了4倍。
一连串的银行倒闭和临时解决方案之后，关键时刻终于在1992年2月到来：前首相Carl Bildt领导的政府决定，是要理牌的时候了。
Bildt的保守党政府与中左派在野党达成共识，并宣布，（瑞典）国家将为全国114家银行所有的银行存款和债权人提供担保。瑞典还组建了两个新的机构，一个负责监管需要资产重组的机构，另一个负责出售作为银行抵押的资产，主要是不动产。
瑞典要求这些银行在接受国家的资产重组前，即时在其帐面上减计损失额。日本在1990年代后期也遭遇了自己的问题时，却延误了这个程序，以至于解决方案数年间都迟迟未出。
接下来首先是必须让股东出血。Lundgren与当时瑞典最大银行SEB的主席、全国最有名望家族的后裔、也是经济体大头的守护人Peter Wallenberg进行了对话。Wallenberg从中得到的信息是：没有什么是神圣不可触碰的。
Wallenberg家族回身着手安排其自身资产的重组，避免了国家对之救市的需要。SEB次年即1993年就扭亏为盈。
“我们注入银行的每一克郎，都希望能收到同样的效果。”Lundgren说。“这就确定了有些银行我们不需要进入。”
危机终结时，瑞典政府已经控制了银行业相当大的一部分，而救援机构也基本实现了那个精明的命令，即在注资前清空股权资本。当市场稳定下来后，国家得以通过银行重新上市而获益。
越来越多的钱仍然在流入官方保险箱，政府至今还持有Nordea银行19.9%的股份。这家曾经是完全国有的斯德哥尔摩银行，如今是在斯堪的纳维亚和波罗地海地区都备受关注的巨头。
瑞典的危机管理在政治方面同样手段强硬，虽然相比之下要平稳得多。
（危机处理）计划宣布不久，瑞典政府就发现，国际信心的恢复比预计的快很多，减轻了对其通货的压力，并带来了资金回流。中左派的在野党，尽管很担心政府会让银行脱出责任，私下还是提出要惩罚执股者的理由。
“唯一阻止能雪崩的，就是对于系统能够维持下去的希望”，彼时的在野党资深成员Leif Pagrotzky说，“在公众面前，我们要百分之百地团结一致、相互支持，但是在幕后我们仍然有分歧。”
本译文为宇琦译，人文与社会编辑小组校订(http://humanities.cn)，转载请注明。
《纽约时报》更正：2008－9－27
Bo Lundgren在1992年经济危机时的职务应该是财政部副部长，Anne Wibble才是当时的财政部部长。
＝＝
英文：
Stopping a Financial Crisis, the Swedish Way
By CARTER DOUGHERTY
Published: September 22, 2008
Correction Appended
A banking system in crisis after the collapse of a housing bubble. An economy hemorrhaging jobs. A market-oriented government struggling to stem the panic. Sound familiar?
It does to Sweden. The country was so far in the hole in 1992 — after years of imprudent regulation, short-sighted economic policy and the end of its property boom — that its banking system was, for all practical purposes, insolvent.
But Sweden took a different course than the one now being proposed by the United States Treasury. And Swedish officials say there are lessons from their own nightmare that Washington may be missing.
Sweden did not just bail out its financial institutions by having the government take over the bad debts. It extracted pounds of flesh from bank shareholders before writing checks. Banks had to write down losses and issue warrants to the government.
That strategy held banks responsible and turned the government into an owner. When distressed assets were sold, the profits flowed to taxpayers, and the government was able to recoup more money later by selling its shares in the companies as well.
“If I go into a bank,” said Bo Lundgren, who was Sweden’s deputy minister of finance at the time, “I’d rather get equity so that there is some upside for the taxpayer.”
Sweden spent 4 percent of its gross domestic product, or 65 billion kronor, the equivalent of $11.7 billion at the time, or $18.3 billion in today’s dollars, to rescue ailing banks. That is slightly less, proportionate to the national economy, than the $700 billion, or roughly 5 percent of gross domestic product, that the Bush administration estimates its own move will cost in the United States.
But the final cost to Sweden ended up being less than 2 percent of its G.D.P. Some officials say they believe it was closer to zero, depending on how certain rates of return are calculated.
The tumultuous events of the last few weeks have produced a lot of tight-lipped nods in Stockholm. Mr. Lundgren even made the rounds in New York in early September, explaining what the country did in the early 1990s.
A few American commentators have proposed that the United States government extract equity from banks as a price for their rescue. But it does not seem to be under serious consideration yet in the Bush administration or Congress.
The reason is not quite clear. The government has already swapped its sovereign guarantee for equity in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage finance institutions, and the American International Group, the global insurance giant.
Putting taxpayers on the hook without anything in return could be a mistake, said Urban Backstrom, a senior Swedish finance ministry official at the time. “The public will not support a plan if you leave the former shareholders with anything,” he said.
The Swedish crisis had strikingly similar origins to the American one, and its neighbors, Norway and Finland, were hobbled to the point of needing a government bailout to escape the morass as well.
Financial deregulation in the 1980s fed a frenzy of real estate lending by Sweden’s banks, which did not worry enough about whether the value of their collateral might evaporate in tougher times.
Property prices imploded. The bubble deflated fast in 1991 and 1992. A vain effort to defend Sweden’s currency, the krona, caused overnight interest rates to spike at one point to 500 percent. The Swedish economy contracted for two consecutive years after a long expansion, and unemployment, at 3 percent in 1990, quadrupled in three years.
After a series of bank failures and ad hoc solutions, the moment of truth arrived in September 1992, when the government of Prime Minister Carl Bildt decided it was time to clear the decks.
Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the opposition center-left, Mr. Bildt’s conservative government announced that the Swedish state would guarantee all bank deposits and creditors of the nation’s 114 banks. Sweden formed a new agency to supervise institutions that needed recapitalization, and another that sold off the assets, mainly real estate, that the banks held as collateral.
Sweden told its banks to write down their losses promptly before coming to the state for recapitalization. Facing its own problem later in the decade, Japan made the mistake of dragging this process out, delaying a solution for years.
Then came the imperative to bleed shareholders first. Mr. Lundgren recalls a conversation with Peter Wallenberg, at the time chairman of SEB, Sweden’s largest bank. Mr. Wallenberg, the scion of the country’s most famous family and steward of large chunks of its economy, heard that there would be no sacred cows.
The Wallenbergs turned around and arranged a recapitalization on their own, obviating the need for a bailout. SEB turned a profit the following year, 1993.
“For every krona we put into the bank, we wanted the same influence,” Mr. Lundgren said. “That ensured that we did not have to go into certain banks at all.”
By the end of the crisis, the Swedish government had seized a vast portion of the banking sector, and the agency had mostly fulfilled its hard-nosed mandate to drain share capital before injecting cash. When markets stabilized, the Swedish state then reaped the benefits by taking the banks public again.
More money may yet come into official coffers. The government still owns 19.9 percent of Nordea, a Stockholm bank that was fully nationalized and is now a highly regarded giant in Scandinavia and the Baltic Sea region.
The politics of Sweden’s crisis management were similarly tough-minded, though much quieter.
Soon after the plan was announced, the Swedish government found that international confidence returned more quickly than expected, easing pressure on its currency and bringing money back into the country. The center-left opposition, while wary that the government might yet let the banks off the hook, made its points about penalizing shareholders privately.
“The only thing that held back an avalanche was the hope that the system was holding,” said Leif Pagrotzky, a senior member of the opposition at the time. “In public we stuck together 100 percent, but we fought behind the scenes.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 27, 2008
An article and a picture caption on Tuesday about Sweden’s response to its 1992 financial crisis misstated the position at the time of Bo Lundgren, who described Sweden’s strategy and commented on the United States’ proposals for resolving its own crisis. He was the deputy minister of finance — not the finance minister, a post held by Anne Wibble.
Stopping a Financial Crisis, the Swedish Way
By CARTER DOUGHERTY
Published: September 22, 2008 New York Times
卡特·杜尔迪
本译文为宇琦译，人文与社会编辑小组校订(http://humanities.cn)，转载请注明。
纽约时报，2008-9-22
一个正处于房地产泡沫崩溃后的危机的金融系统。一个正在大量流失就业机会的经济体。一个以市场为导向、并正在奋力阻遏（市场？）恐慌的政府。
听起来很熟悉吧？
对瑞典来说的确如此。1992年的瑞典陷入经济困难——数年来不谨慎的管制、短视的经济政策终于使这个国家走到资产繁荣（膨胀）的终点——它的整个银行系统实际上已经破产。
但是当时瑞典选择的解决之道，和如今美国财政部的提议完全不同。而且瑞典官员认为，华盛顿可能漏掉了本可以从他们的往日噩梦中学到的教训。
政府不单单是接管了不良债务，来帮助金融机构摆脱困境。在开出支票前，政府先让银行股东大出血－－这些银行必须在帐面上减计损失额，并向政府发行认股权证。
这种策略使银行负担了相应的责任并把政府变成所有者。不良资产被出售时，利润得以流向纳税人，政府也可以在日后通过出售公司股份而得到补偿。
“如果我接管一家银行”，彼时的瑞典财政部长布·隆德格林（Bo Lundgren）说，“我更倾向于获得股权，这会给纳税人带来潜在的上升空间。”
瑞典花费了它GDP的4%，即650亿克朗，相当于当时的117亿美元或现今的183亿美元，来援救那些境况不佳的银行。这个比例略小于布什政府预计投入的7000亿美元，约占美国GDP的5%。
但是瑞典最终的投入不到GDP的2%。一些官员认为实际上接近于0，这取决于如何计算回报率。
之前数周的争议事件在斯德哥尔摩让很多人缄默地点头表示同意。Lundgren先生甚至在9月初造访纽约，解释他们国家在20世纪90年代初的做法。
少数美国评论家提议美国政府从银行获取股权作为救援的代价。但是迄今为止，该建议似乎未被布什政府或国会认真考虑。
原因尚不明朗。政府已经动用了主权担保，针对房利美（Fannie Mae）和房地美（Freddie Mac）这两家住房抵押贷款机构，以及全球保险业巨头美国国际集团（AIG）。
没有任何回报地将纳税人置于泥潭中，很可能是错误的，当时瑞典财政部的一个高级官员Urban Backstrom说。“如果一个计划不为原来的执股者留下些什么，就不会得到公众的支持。”
瑞典危机的起源，同美国的情况惊人地相似，它的邻国挪威和芬兰也都是一直蹒跚地走到需要政府救援才能摆脱困境的地步。
1980年代，金融管制的放松导致了瑞典银行对不动产放贷的狂热，至于那些抵押品会不会在经济不景气时价值缩水（价值蒸发），则未被予以足够的关注。
资产价格暴跌，泡沫在1991和1992年间迅速破灭。捍卫瑞典货币克朗的努力是徒劳的，隔夜利率从5%猛增到500%。瑞典经济在经历了长期扩张后连续2年紧缩，失业率则在3年间从1990年的3%增加了4倍。
一连串的银行倒闭和临时解决方案之后，关键时刻终于在1992年2月到来：前首相Carl Bildt领导的政府决定，是要理牌的时候了。
Bildt的保守党政府与中左派在野党达成共识，并宣布，（瑞典）国家将为全国114家银行所有的银行存款和债权人提供担保。瑞典还组建了两个新的机构，一个负责监管需要资产重组的机构，另一个负责出售作为银行抵押的资产，主要是不动产。
瑞典要求这些银行在接受国家的资产重组前，即时在其帐面上减计损失额。日本在1990年代后期也遭遇了自己的问题时，却延误了这个程序，以至于解决方案数年间都迟迟未出。
接下来首先是必须让股东出血。Lundgren与当时瑞典最大银行SEB的主席、全国最有名望家族的后裔、也是经济体大头的守护人Peter Wallenberg进行了对话。Wallenberg从中得到的信息是：没有什么是神圣不可触碰的。
Wallenberg家族回身着手安排其自身资产的重组，避免了国家对之救市的需要。SEB次年即1993年就扭亏为盈。
“我们注入银行的每一克郎，都希望能收到同样的效果。”Lundgren说。“这就确定了有些银行我们不需要进入。”
危机终结时，瑞典政府已经控制了银行业相当大的一部分，而救援机构也基本实现了那个精明的命令，即在注资前清空股权资本。当市场稳定下来后，国家得以通过银行重新上市而获益。
越来越多的钱仍然在流入官方保险箱，政府至今还持有Nordea银行19.9%的股份。这家曾经是完全国有的斯德哥尔摩银行，如今是在斯堪的纳维亚和波罗地海地区都备受关注的巨头。
瑞典的危机管理在政治方面同样手段强硬，虽然相比之下要平稳得多。
（危机处理）计划宣布不久，瑞典政府就发现，国际信心的恢复比预计的快很多，减轻了对其通货的压力，并带来了资金回流。中左派的在野党，尽管很担心政府会让银行脱出责任，私下还是提出要惩罚执股者的理由。
“唯一阻止能雪崩的，就是对于系统能够维持下去的希望”，彼时的在野党资深成员Leif Pagrotzky说，“在公众面前，我们要百分之百地团结一致、相互支持，但是在幕后我们仍然有分歧。”
本译文为宇琦译，人文与社会编辑小组校订(http://humanities.cn)，转载请注明。
《纽约时报》更正：2008－9－27
Bo Lundgren在1992年经济危机时的职务应该是财政部副部长，Anne Wibble才是当时的财政部部长。
＝＝
英文：
Stopping a Financial Crisis, the Swedish Way
By CARTER DOUGHERTY
Published: September 22, 2008
Correction Appended
A banking system in crisis after the collapse of a housing bubble. An economy hemorrhaging jobs. A market-oriented government struggling to stem the panic. Sound familiar?
It does to Sweden. The country was so far in the hole in 1992 — after years of imprudent regulation, short-sighted economic policy and the end of its property boom — that its banking system was, for all practical purposes, insolvent.
But Sweden took a different course than the one now being proposed by the United States Treasury. And Swedish officials say there are lessons from their own nightmare that Washington may be missing.
Sweden did not just bail out its financial institutions by having the government take over the bad debts. It extracted pounds of flesh from bank shareholders before writing checks. Banks had to write down losses and issue warrants to the government.
That strategy held banks responsible and turned the government into an owner. When distressed assets were sold, the profits flowed to taxpayers, and the government was able to recoup more money later by selling its shares in the companies as well.
“If I go into a bank,” said Bo Lundgren, who was Sweden’s deputy minister of finance at the time, “I’d rather get equity so that there is some upside for the taxpayer.”
Sweden spent 4 percent of its gross domestic product, or 65 billion kronor, the equivalent of $11.7 billion at the time, or $18.3 billion in today’s dollars, to rescue ailing banks. That is slightly less, proportionate to the national economy, than the $700 billion, or roughly 5 percent of gross domestic product, that the Bush administration estimates its own move will cost in the United States.
But the final cost to Sweden ended up being less than 2 percent of its G.D.P. Some officials say they believe it was closer to zero, depending on how certain rates of return are calculated.
The tumultuous events of the last few weeks have produced a lot of tight-lipped nods in Stockholm. Mr. Lundgren even made the rounds in New York in early September, explaining what the country did in the early 1990s.
A few American commentators have proposed that the United States government extract equity from banks as a price for their rescue. But it does not seem to be under serious consideration yet in the Bush administration or Congress.
The reason is not quite clear. The government has already swapped its sovereign guarantee for equity in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage finance institutions, and the American International Group, the global insurance giant.
Putting taxpayers on the hook without anything in return could be a mistake, said Urban Backstrom, a senior Swedish finance ministry official at the time. “The public will not support a plan if you leave the former shareholders with anything,” he said.
The Swedish crisis had strikingly similar origins to the American one, and its neighbors, Norway and Finland, were hobbled to the point of needing a government bailout to escape the morass as well.
Financial deregulation in the 1980s fed a frenzy of real estate lending by Sweden’s banks, which did not worry enough about whether the value of their collateral might evaporate in tougher times.
Property prices imploded. The bubble deflated fast in 1991 and 1992. A vain effort to defend Sweden’s currency, the krona, caused overnight interest rates to spike at one point to 500 percent. The Swedish economy contracted for two consecutive years after a long expansion, and unemployment, at 3 percent in 1990, quadrupled in three years.
After a series of bank failures and ad hoc solutions, the moment of truth arrived in September 1992, when the government of Prime Minister Carl Bildt decided it was time to clear the decks.
Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the opposition center-left, Mr. Bildt’s conservative government announced that the Swedish state would guarantee all bank deposits and creditors of the nation’s 114 banks. Sweden formed a new agency to supervise institutions that needed recapitalization, and another that sold off the assets, mainly real estate, that the banks held as collateral.
Sweden told its banks to write down their losses promptly before coming to the state for recapitalization. Facing its own problem later in the decade, Japan made the mistake of dragging this process out, delaying a solution for years.
Then came the imperative to bleed shareholders first. Mr. Lundgren recalls a conversation with Peter Wallenberg, at the time chairman of SEB, Sweden’s largest bank. Mr. Wallenberg, the scion of the country’s most famous family and steward of large chunks of its economy, heard that there would be no sacred cows.
The Wallenbergs turned around and arranged a recapitalization on their own, obviating the need for a bailout. SEB turned a profit the following year, 1993.
“For every krona we put into the bank, we wanted the same influence,” Mr. Lundgren said. “That ensured that we did not have to go into certain banks at all.”
By the end of the crisis, the Swedish government had seized a vast portion of the banking sector, and the agency had mostly fulfilled its hard-nosed mandate to drain share capital before injecting cash. When markets stabilized, the Swedish state then reaped the benefits by taking the banks public again.
More money may yet come into official coffers. The government still owns 19.9 percent of Nordea, a Stockholm bank that was fully nationalized and is now a highly regarded giant in Scandinavia and the Baltic Sea region.
The politics of Sweden’s crisis management were similarly tough-minded, though much quieter.
Soon after the plan was announced, the Swedish government found that international confidence returned more quickly than expected, easing pressure on its currency and bringing money back into the country. The center-left opposition, while wary that the government might yet let the banks off the hook, made its points about penalizing shareholders privately.
“The only thing that held back an avalanche was the hope that the system was holding,” said Leif Pagrotzky, a senior member of the opposition at the time. “In public we stuck together 100 percent, but we fought behind the scenes.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 27, 2008
An article and a picture caption on Tuesday about Sweden’s response to its 1992 financial crisis misstated the position at the time of Bo Lundgren, who described Sweden’s strategy and commented on the United States’ proposals for resolving its own crisis. He was the deputy minister of finance — not the finance minister, a post held by Anne Wibble.
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