【阅读】2019/11/25起月度整理（12.02更新，38篇原始，37篇考古）

挽回你的心

十三、金融市场
参考阅读
前面还有一段说一座桥因为摇晃，就close了，应该不太重要…我就删了….Some commentators suspected the bridge’s foundations, others an unusual air pattern. The real problem was that the designers of the bridge had not taken into account how the footway would react to all the pedestrians walking on it（Q1）. When a person walks, lifting and dropping each foot in turn, he or she produces a slight sideways force. If hundreds of people are walking in a confined space, and some happen to walk in step, they can generate enough lateral momentum to move a footbridge（人行桥）—just a little. Once the footway starts swaying, however subtly, more and more pedestrians adjust their gait to get comfortable, stepping to and fro in synch（来回同步）. As a positive-feedback loop（循环） develops between the bridge’s swing and the pedestrians’ stride, the sideways forces can increase dramatically and the bridge can lurch(倾斜) violently. The investigating engineers termed this process “synchronous lateral excitation”.

Most of the time, financial markets are pretty calm, trading is orderly, and andparticipants can buy and sell in large quantities. Whenever a crisis hits, however, the biggest players—banks, investment banks, hedge funds(对冲基金)—rush to reduce their exposure, buyers disappear, and liquidity dries up. Where previously there were diverse views, now there is unanimity: everybody’s moving in lockstep（步伐一致）（Q3）. “The pedestrians on the bridge are like banks adjusting their stance and the movements of the bridge itself are like price changes,” Shin wrote. And the process is self-reinforcing: once liquidity falls below a certain threshold（一旦流动性低于某个阈值）, “all the elements that formed a virtuous circle（良性循环） to promote stability now will conspire to undermine it.” The financial markets can become highly unstable.

This is essentially what happened in the lead-up to the Great Crunch（巨大的危机）. The trigger was, of course, the market for subprime-mortgage bonds—bonds backed by the monthly payments from pools of loans that had been made to poor and middle-income home buyers. In August, 2007, with house prices falling and mortgage delinquencies rising, the market for subprime securities（次级房贷） froze. By itself, this shouldn’t have caused too many problems: the entire stock of outstanding subprime mortgages was about a trillion dollars, a figure dwarfed by nearly twelve trillion dollars in total outstanding mortgages, not to mention the eighteen-trillion-dollar value of the stock market. But then banks, which couldn’t estimate how much exposure other firms had to losses, started to pull back credit lines（紧缩信贷额度） and hoard their capital—and they did so en masse（全体的）, confirming Shin’s point about the market imposing uniformity. An immediate collapse was averted（避免） when the European Central Bank and the Fed announced that they would pump more money into the financial system（寂静里的Q2：类似的，政府可以做什么）. Still, the global economic crisis didn’t ease up until early this year, and by then governments had committed an estimated nine trillion dollars to propping up（支撑） the system.

A number of explanations have been proposed for the great boom and bust（萧条与繁荣）, most of which focus on greed, overconfidence, and downright stupidity on the part of mortgage lenders, investment bankers, and Wall Street C.E.O.s. If this were all there was to it, we could rest more comfortably: greed can be controlled, with some difficulty, admittedly; overconfidence gets punctured; even stupid people can be educated. Unfortunately, the real causes of the crisis are much scarier（更加可怕） and less amenable to reform（更少服从改良?）: they have to do with the inner logic of an economy like ours. The root problem is what might be termed “rational irrationality”—behavior that, on the individual level, is perfectly reasonable but that, when aggregated in the marketplace, produces calamity.

DoorbellDong

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