Man and machine

　　投資人與經濟機器

　　The economic ideas of the world s most successfulhedge-fund boss;

　　世界最成功的對沖基金經理的經濟思想;

　　The most beautiful deleveraging yet seen is howRay Dalio describes what is now going on inAmerica s economy. As America has gone throughthe necessary process of reducing itsdebt-to-income ratio since the financial crash of2008, he reckons its policymakers have done well inmixing painful stuff like debt restructuring with injections of cash to keep demand growing.Europe s deleveraging, by contrast, is ugly.

　　這是我所見過的最美麗的去杠桿化Ray Daio如此描述美國的經濟現狀。2008年經濟危機以來，美國經歷了為降低負債收入比而必須的的過程，他認為美國的政策制定者們在均衡棘手事務如債務重調和資金注入從而保持需求的持續上升方面做得可圈可點。相比之下，歐洲的去杠桿化顯得丑陋不堪。

　　Mr Dalio s views are taken seriously. He made a fortune betting before the crash that theworld had taken on too much debt and would need to slash it. Last year alone, hisBridgewater Pure Alpha fund earned its investors 13.8 billion Dollor, taking its total gainssince it opened in 1975 to 35.8 billion Dollor, more than any other hedge fund ever, includingthe previous record-holder, George Soros s Quantum Endowment Fund.

　　Dalio的觀點備受界內關注。在經濟危機產生之前，他曾對經濟局勢做了一個斷言，即世界經濟需要大幅度地削減過重的負債。只去年一年，他的 Bridgewater Pure Alpha基金就給投資者帶來了138億美元的回報，這也使得該基金達到自開創以來的358億美元，并超過了包括以前的紀錄保持者George Soros的Quantum Endownment基金在內的任何一項對沖基金。

　　Mr Dalio, an intense 62-year-old, is following in the footsteps of Mr Soros in other ways, too.Mr Soros has published several books on his theories, and is funding an institute to getmainstream economists to take alternative ideas seriously. Mr Dalio, too, is now trying toimprove the public understanding of how the economy works. His economic model is notvery orthodox but gives him a pretty good sense of where the economy is, says PaulVolcker, a former chairman of America s Federal Reserve and one of Mr Dalio s growingnumber of influential fans.

　　在其他方面，現如今富有激情的已62歲的Dalio也在緊跟Soros的步伐。Soros至今已經出版了多本有關其理論的書籍，并正在資助一個機構，以便促使主流經濟學家對另類思想加以重視。Dalio也在努力促進公眾對經濟運作過程的理解。美聯儲前主席Paul Volcker，作為Dalio日益增多且頗具影響力的粉絲之一，稱其經濟模式并非絕對正統，但帶給了他相當敏感的經濟趨勢把握能力。

　　Whereas Mr Soros credits the influence of Karl Popper, a philosopher who taught him as astudent, Mr Dalio says his ideas are entirely the product of his own reflections on his life as atrader and his study of economic history. He has read little academic economics but has conducted in-depth analysisof past periods of economic upheaval, such as the Depression in America, post-war Britainand the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic. He has even simulated being an investor inmarkets in those periods by reading daily papers from these eras, receiving data andtrading as if in real time.

　　不同的是，Soros把他的成功歸于其學生時代的哲學家老師 Karl Popper的影響。Dalio則說他的思想完全是自己作為一個交易商的生活感悟和對經濟學歷史研究的產物。他幾乎沒有讀過正統的學術經濟學，但是他對過去的經濟劇變時期的情況作了深入分析，其中包括美國的經濟大蕭條，戰后的英國和魏瑪共和國的惡性通貨膨脹。他甚至曾假裝自己是當時的投資者，通過閱讀當時的日報來獲得數據信息，并進行現實般的交易。

　　In the early 1980s Mr Dalio started writing down rules that would guide his investing. Hewould later amend these rules depending on how well they predicted what actuallyhappened. The process is now computerised, so that combinations of scores of decision-rulesare applied to the 100 or so liquid-asset classes in which Bridgewater invests. These rules ledhim to hold both government bonds and gold last year, for example, because thedeleveraging process was at a point where, unusually, those two assets would rise at thesame time. He was right.

　　在20世紀80年代早期，Dalio就開始積累決策規律以備引導他日后的投資。以后的日子里，他會根據這些規律預測事實的準確度來修改它們。現在這項工作已由計算機來處理，從而得出大量決策規律的組合并將其應用于Bridgewater投資的約100項流動資產中。比如在去年，因為不同尋常的是，在去杠桿化進程中政府債券和黃金會同時漲價，這些決策規律指導他同時握有二者。果不其然，他是正確的。

　　What Mr Dalio calls the timeless and universal core of his economic ideas is set out in a20-page Template for Understanding that he wrote shortly after the collapse of LehmanBrothers in 2008 and recently updated. The document begins: The economy is like amachine. This machine may look complex but is, he insists, relatively simple even if it isnot well understood. Mr Dalio models the macroeconomy from the bottom up, by focusingon the individual transactions that are the machine s moving parts. Conventional economicsdoes not pay enough attention to the individual components of supply and, above all,demand, he says. To understand demand properly, you must know whether it is funded bythe buyers own money or by credit from others.

　　Dalio所謂的不受時間限制，放之四海而皆準的經濟思想核心陳述于20頁的《用于理解的模板》中。他寫于2008年雷曼兄弟破產后不久并于近日更新。該文件以經濟就像一臺機器開始，他堅信，這臺機器可能看起來復雜，但實際上它是相對簡單的，即使是在它不被很好地理解的情況下。Dalio通過對經濟機器的移動組成部分個體交易，來自下而上地模擬宏觀經濟。他說，傳統經濟學對個體組成的供應尤其是他們的需求關注不夠。要恰當地了解需求，你就必須知道為它提供資金的錢是來自購買者自己還是從他人的借貸。

　　A huge amount of Bridgewater s efforts goes into gathering data on credit and equity, andunderstanding how that affects demand from individual market participants, such as a bank,or from a group of participants . Bridgewaterpredicted the euro-zone debt crisis by totting up how much debt would need to berefinanced and when; and by examining all the potential buyers of that debt and their abilityto buy it. Mr Volcker describes the degree of detail in Mr Dalio s work as mind-blowing andadmits to feeling sometimes that he has a bigger staff, and produces more relevantstatistics and analyses, than the Federal Reserve.

　　Bridgewater公司花了大力氣來收集有關信貸和普通股的數據，并分析其是如何影響單個市場參與者比如一家銀行和一群參與者的需求的。該公司通過對需要再貸款的債務總值的合計，以及對歐元區債務潛在購買者的數量和他們的購買能力的研究，成功預測了歐元區的債務危機和其發生的時間。Volcker如此描述Dalio工作的細節詳細程度嘆為觀止，他也承認，在有些時候他有更強大的團隊，并能給出比美聯儲更中肯的統計數據和分析。

　　Two sorts of credit cycle are at the heart of Mr Dalio s economic model: the business cycle,which typically lasts five to eight years, and a long-term debt cycle, which canlast 50-70 years. A business cycle usually ends in a recession, because the central bank raisesthe interest rate, reducing borrowing and demand. The debt cycle ends in deleveragingbecause there is a shortage of capable providers of capital and/or a shortage of capablerecipients of capital that cannot be rectified by the centralbank changing the cost of money. Business cycles happen often, they are well understoodand policymakers are fairly adept at managing them. A debt cycle tends to come along in acountry once in a lifetime, tends to be poorly understood and is often mishandled bypolicymakers.

　　Dalio的經濟模式中有兩種核心的信貸周期：通常持續5-8年的商業周期和長期的債務周期，后者長達50-70年。一次商業周期一般在經濟衰退中結束，因為在經濟衰退期，中央銀行會提高利率，以降低貸款和需求。債務周期結束于去杠桿化過程中，此時缺乏有能力的資金提供者或資金接收者，而中央銀行卻無法通過改變資金成本來加以調節。。商業周期時常產生，它們易于理解，也是政策制定者們善于控制的;然而，對某個國家而言，債務周期往往在人一生中只發生一次，所以他們對此不甚了解且往往處理不當。

　　An ordinary recession can be ended by the central bank lowering the interest rate again. Adeleveraging is much harder to end. According to Mr Dalio, it usually requires somecombination of debt restructurings and write-offs, austerity, wealth transfers from rich topoor and money-printing. A beautiful deleveraging is one in which all these elementscombine to keep the economy growing at a nominal rate that is higher than the nominalinterest rate.

　　中央銀行通過降低利率來解決一般情況下的經濟衰退。而去杠桿化遠非如此簡單，據Dalio稱，它通常需要均衡債務重調與銷賬、財政緊縮、財富由富有階層到貧困階層的轉移以及鈔票印刷之間的關系。所謂美麗的去杠桿化是指能綜合所有提及的因素從而保持經濟的名義增長率高于名義利率。

　　Print too little money and the result is an ugly, deflationary deleveraging ; printtoo much and the deleveraging may become inflationary, as in Weimar Germany. AlthoughMr Dalio says he fears being misunderstood as saying print a lot of money and everythingwill be OK, which I don t believe, all deleveragings have ended with the printing of significantamounts of money. But it has to be in balance with other policies.

　　印制過少貨幣的結果是丑陋的、通貨緊縮的去杠桿化;印制過多則會導致類似德國魏瑪的通貨膨脹的去杠桿化。Dalio說我并不同意所有去杠桿化都要大量地印制貨幣，那么只要印制鈔票就會萬事大吉的觀點。但是這確實需要和其他政策均衡作用。即使他說自己擔心被人誤解。

　　Mr Dalio admits to being wrong roughly a third of the time; indeed, he attributes a big part ofhis success to managing the risk of bad calls. And the years ahead are likely to provide aserious test of whether the economic machine is as simple as he says. For now, he is in amore optimistic mood thanks to the European Central Bank s recent moves, in effect, toprint money. Although he still expects debt restructuring in Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland,on top of that in Greece, he says that the risk of chaos has been reduced and we are nowcalming ourselves down.Here s hoping he is right again.

　　Dalio承認他可能在犯第三次錯誤，而事實上，他把自己成功的大部分歸功于對錯誤預測的風險的把握上。而且，過去的幾年似乎是對他嚴峻的考驗驗證經濟機器是否同他說的一樣簡單。就現在來說，因為今日歐洲中央銀行正實行的貨幣印刷舉措，他處于較樂觀的心態。即使他仍希望西班牙、葡萄牙、意大利和愛爾蘭尤其是希臘的債務重組。他說混亂的風險已被降低，我們正在逐步安定下來。這一次，我們希望它仍然是對的。

　　Man and machine

　　投資人與經濟機器

　　The economic ideas of the world s most successfulhedge-fund boss;

　　世界最成功的對沖基金經理的經濟思想;

　　The most beautiful deleveraging yet seen is howRay Dalio describes what is now going on inAmerica s economy. As America has gone throughthe necessary process of reducing itsdebt-to-income ratio since the financial crash of2008, he reckons its policymakers have done well inmixing painful stuff like debt restructuring with injections of cash to keep demand growing.Europe s deleveraging, by contrast, is ugly.

　　這是我所見過的最美麗的去杠桿化Ray Daio如此描述美國的經濟現狀。2008年經濟危機以來，美國經歷了為降低負債收入比而必須的的過程，他認為美國的政策制定者們在均衡棘手事務如債務重調和資金注入從而保持需求的持續上升方面做得可圈可點。相比之下，歐洲的去杠桿化顯得丑陋不堪。

　　Mr Dalio s views are taken seriously. He made a fortune betting before the crash that theworld had taken on too much debt and would need to slash it. Last year alone, hisBridgewater Pure Alpha fund earned its investors 13.8 billion Dollor, taking its total gainssince it opened in 1975 to 35.8 billion Dollor, more than any other hedge fund ever, includingthe previous record-holder, George Soros s Quantum Endowment Fund.

　　Dalio的觀點備受界內關注。在經濟危機產生之前，他曾對經濟局勢做了一個斷言，即世界經濟需要大幅度地削減過重的負債。只去年一年，他的 Bridgewater Pure Alpha基金就給投資者帶來了138億美元的回報，這也使得該基金達到自開創以來的358億美元，并超過了包括以前的紀錄保持者George Soros的Quantum Endownment基金在內的任何一項對沖基金。

　　Mr Dalio, an intense 62-year-old, is following in the footsteps of Mr Soros in other ways, too.Mr Soros has published several books on his theories, and is funding an institute to getmainstream economists to take alternative ideas seriously. Mr Dalio, too, is now trying toimprove the public understanding of how the economy works. His economic model is notvery orthodox but gives him a pretty good sense of where the economy is, says PaulVolcker, a former chairman of America s Federal Reserve and one of Mr Dalio s growingnumber of influential fans.

　　在其他方面，現如今富有激情的已62歲的Dalio也在緊跟Soros的步伐。Soros至今已經出版了多本有關其理論的書籍，并正在資助一個機構，以便促使主流經濟學家對另類思想加以重視。Dalio也在努力促進公眾對經濟運作過程的理解。美聯儲前主席Paul Volcker，作為Dalio日益增多且頗具影響力的粉絲之一，稱其經濟模式并非絕對正統，但帶給了他相當敏感的經濟趨勢把握能力。

　　Whereas Mr Soros credits the influence of Karl Popper, a philosopher who taught him as astudent, Mr Dalio says his ideas are entirely the product of his own reflections on his life as atrader and his study of economic history. He has read little academic economics but has conducted in-depth analysisof past periods of economic upheaval, such as the Depression in America, post-war Britainand the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic. He has even simulated being an investor inmarkets in those periods by reading daily papers from these eras, receiving data andtrading as if in real time.

　　不同的是，Soros把他的成功歸于其學生時代的哲學家老師 Karl Popper的影響。Dalio則說他的思想完全是自己作為一個交易商的生活感悟和對經濟學歷史研究的產物。他幾乎沒有讀過正統的學術經濟學，但是他對過去的經濟劇變時期的情況作了深入分析，其中包括美國的經濟大蕭條，戰后的英國和魏瑪共和國的惡性通貨膨脹。他甚至曾假裝自己是當時的投資者，通過閱讀當時的日報來獲得數據信息，并進行現實般的交易。

　　In the early 1980s Mr Dalio started writing down rules that would guide his investing. Hewould later amend these rules depending on how well they predicted what actuallyhappened. The process is now computerised, so that combinations of scores of decision-rulesare applied to the 100 or so liquid-asset classes in which Bridgewater invests. These rules ledhim to hold both government bonds and gold last year, for example, because thedeleveraging process was at a point where, unusually, those two assets would rise at thesame time. He was right.

　　在20世紀80年代早期，Dalio就開始積累決策規律以備引導他日后的投資。以后的日子里，他會根據這些規律預測事實的準確度來修改它們。現在這項工作已由計算機來處理，從而得出大量決策規律的組合并將其應用于Bridgewater投資的約100項流動資產中。比如在去年，因為不同尋常的是，在去杠桿化進程中政府債券和黃金會同時漲價，這些決策規律指導他同時握有二者。果不其然，他是正確的。

　　What Mr Dalio calls the timeless and universal core of his economic ideas is set out in a20-page Template for Understanding that he wrote shortly after the collapse of LehmanBrothers in 2008 and recently updated. The document begins: The economy is like amachine. This machine may look complex but is, he insists, relatively simple even if it isnot well understood. Mr Dalio models the macroeconomy from the bottom up, by focusingon the individual transactions that are the machine s moving parts. Conventional economicsdoes not pay enough attention to the individual components of supply and, above all,demand, he says. To understand demand properly, you must know whether it is funded bythe buyers own money or by credit from others.

　　Dalio所謂的不受時間限制，放之四海而皆準的經濟思想核心陳述于20頁的《用于理解的模板》中。他寫于2008年雷曼兄弟破產后不久并于近日更新。該文件以經濟就像一臺機器開始，他堅信，這臺機器可能看起來復雜，但實際上它是相對簡單的，即使是在它不被很好地理解的情況下。Dalio通過對經濟機器的移動組成部分個體交易，來自下而上地模擬宏觀經濟。他說，傳統經濟學對個體組成的供應尤其是他們的需求關注不夠。要恰當地了解需求，你就必須知道為它提供資金的錢是來自購買者自己還是從他人的借貸。

　　A huge amount of Bridgewater s efforts goes into gathering data on credit and equity, andunderstanding how that affects demand from individual market participants, such as a bank,or from a group of participants . Bridgewaterpredicted the euro-zone debt crisis by totting up how much debt would need to berefinanced and when; and by examining all the potential buyers of that debt and their abilityto buy it. Mr Volcker describes the degree of detail in Mr Dalio s work as mind-blowing andadmits to feeling sometimes that he has a bigger staff, and produces more relevantstatistics and analyses, than the Federal Reserve.

　　Bridgewater公司花了大力氣來收集有關信貸和普通股的數據，并分析其是如何影響單個市場參與者比如一家銀行和一群參與者的需求的。該公司通過對需要再貸款的債務總值的合計，以及對歐元區債務潛在購買者的數量和他們的購買能力的研究，成功預測了歐元區的債務危機和其發生的時間。Volcker如此描述Dalio工作的細節詳細程度嘆為觀止，他也承認，在有些時候他有更強大的團隊，并能給出比美聯儲更中肯的統計數據和分析。

　　Two sorts of credit cycle are at the heart of Mr Dalio s economic model: the business cycle,which typically lasts five to eight years, and a long-term debt cycle, which canlast 50-70 years. A business cycle usually ends in a recession, because the central bank raisesthe interest rate, reducing borrowing and demand. The debt cycle ends in deleveragingbecause there is a shortage of capable providers of capital and/or a shortage of capablerecipients of capital that cannot be rectified by the centralbank changing the cost of money. Business cycles happen often, they are well understoodand policymakers are fairly adept at managing them. A debt cycle tends to come along in acountry once in a lifetime, tends to be poorly understood and is often mishandled bypolicymakers.

　　Dalio的經濟模式中有兩種核心的信貸周期：通常持續5-8年的商業周期和長期的債務周期，后者長達50-70年。一次商業周期一般在經濟衰退中結束，因為在經濟衰退期，中央銀行會提高利率，以降低貸款和需求。債務周期結束于去杠桿化過程中，此時缺乏有能力的資金提供者或資金接收者，而中央銀行卻無法通過改變資金成本來加以調節。。商業周期時常產生，它們易于理解，也是政策制定者們善于控制的;然而，對某個國家而言，債務周期往往在人一生中只發生一次，所以他們對此不甚了解且往往處理不當。

　　An ordinary recession can be ended by the central bank lowering the interest rate again. Adeleveraging is much harder to end. According to Mr Dalio, it usually requires somecombination of debt restructurings and write-offs, austerity, wealth transfers from rich topoor and money-printing. A beautiful deleveraging is one in which all these elementscombine to keep the economy growing at a nominal rate that is higher than the nominalinterest rate.

　　中央銀行通過降低利率來解決一般情況下的經濟衰退。而去杠桿化遠非如此簡單，據Dalio稱，它通常需要均衡債務重調與銷賬、財政緊縮、財富由富有階層到貧困階層的轉移以及鈔票印刷之間的關系。所謂美麗的去杠桿化是指能綜合所有提及的因素從而保持經濟的名義增長率高于名義利率。

　　Print too little money and the result is an ugly, deflationary deleveraging ; printtoo much and the deleveraging may become inflationary, as in Weimar Germany. AlthoughMr Dalio says he fears being misunderstood as saying print a lot of money and everythingwill be OK, which I don t believe, all deleveragings have ended with the printing of significantamounts of money. But it has to be in balance with other policies.

　　印制過少貨幣的結果是丑陋的、通貨緊縮的去杠桿化;印制過多則會導致類似德國魏瑪的通貨膨脹的去杠桿化。Dalio說我并不同意所有去杠桿化都要大量地印制貨幣，那么只要印制鈔票就會萬事大吉的觀點。但是這確實需要和其他政策均衡作用。即使他說自己擔心被人誤解。

　　Mr Dalio admits to being wrong roughly a third of the time; indeed, he attributes a big part ofhis success to managing the risk of bad calls. And the years ahead are likely to provide aserious test of whether the economic machine is as simple as he says. For now, he is in amore optimistic mood thanks to the European Central Bank s recent moves, in effect, toprint money. Although he still expects debt restructuring in Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland,on top of that in Greece, he says that the risk of chaos has been reduced and we are nowcalming ourselves down.Here s hoping he is right again.

　　Dalio承認他可能在犯第三次錯誤，而事實上，他把自己成功的大部分歸功于對錯誤預測的風險的把握上。而且，過去的幾年似乎是對他嚴峻的考驗驗證經濟機器是否同他說的一樣簡單。就現在來說，因為今日歐洲中央銀行正實行的貨幣印刷舉措，他處于較樂觀的心態。即使他仍希望西班牙、葡萄牙、意大利和愛爾蘭尤其是希臘的債務重組。他說混亂的風險已被降低，我們正在逐步安定下來。這一次，我們希望它仍然是對的。