Frothy U.S. Stock Market Just Isn’t Crazy Enough to Be a Bubble


人工智能等领域确实出现了一些泡沫，但整个市场尚未出现投机狂潮。



当所有人都在谈论股市泡沫时，我们是该紧张还是该淡定？以过往的泡沫为鉴，似乎应该两者兼而有之，就当下市场而言，还得有所警惕。 6park.com
When everybody’s talking about a bubble in the stock market, should we worry or relax? The answer from past bubbles seems to be a bit of both—with one big caveat about today’s market. 6park.com
    
先考虑需要警惕的情况。虽然可能感觉市场上人人都在谈论是否存在泡沫，但媒体上的提及率和谷歌(Google)上的搜索量并没有特别高。 6park.com
The caveat comes first. While it might feel like everyone in the markets is talking about whether there is a bubble, mentions in the media and searches on Google aren’t especially elevated. 6park.com
   
不幸的是，这种情况也曾出现在2000年互联网泡沫破灭之前，以及2007年信贷泡沫破灭之前，此外，还曾出现在2015年中国泡沫破灭之前（尽管相关数据仅基于英语信息）。在这三个例子中，投资者都关注到泡沫，但相关文章相对而言非常少，直到破灭破裂后，随着投资者的投资组合崩溃，相关文章数量和搜索量才出现爆炸式增长。 6park.com
Unfortunately, this was also true before the great dot-com bubble that burst in 2000, the credit bubble that burst in 2007 and—although the data is only for the English language—the China bubble of 2015. In all three cases investors were focused on the bubble, but relatively little was written about them until afterward, when the number of articles and searches exploded as investor portfolios imploded. 6park.com
   
这就削弱了保持淡定的理由，这个理由是从人性的角度考量： 如果人人都在谈论泡沫，投资者应该会对买入持谨慎态度，这样一来泡沫就很难膨胀。 6park.com
This undermines the argument for relaxing, which comes from human nature: If everyone is talking about a bubble, investors ought to be cautious about buying, making it hard for a bubble to inflate.



若尝试预测泡沫，会有两方面的麻烦。首先，在泡沫破灭之前，那些予以密切关注的人往往明显感知到了泡沫的存在，但他们无法把这一讯息足够广泛地传播出去，以便让泡沫收缩。报纸要是不断地就泡沫发出警告，恐怕会让读者感到厌烦；当看到过去类似警告发出后股价反而走高，读者也很难不去买股。正如一个老笑话所说，泡沫就发生在其他投资者都在发财、你却没发财之时。这种情况如果经常发生，多数投资者要么不再听信警告，要么不顾自己的疑虑投身其中。 6park.com
The trouble with trying to foresee bubbles is twofold. First, before a bubble bursts it is often obvious to those paying close attention, but they can’t get the message out widely enough to take the air out of it. It’s hard for a newspaper to keep warning of a bubble without boring its readers; it’s hard for readers to avoid buying stocks when past warnings have been followed by yet-higher prices. As the old joke has it, a bubble is when other investors are getting rich and you aren’t. When that happens often enough, most investors either stop listening to the warnings or join in despite their misgivings. 6park.com
    
其次，当价格不断走高时，自然会改变人们的看法。泡沫膨胀的同时，价格在真真切切地上涨，投资者（和记者）会被裹挟，因为这是真实发生的，而且价格大涨似乎证明看空者错了。随着泡沫膨胀，泡沫预言者要么被忽视，要么丢掉饭碗，2000年3月，在瑞银(UBS)旗下一个部门担任首席投资官、有末日博士(Dr Doom)之称的知名科技板块唱空者Tony Dye就遭遇了这种情况。同月，互联网泡沫破灭，这个原本表现不佳的部门则成了当年全球表现最好的基金管理机构之一，正是得益于承袭自Dye的仓位配置。 6park.com
Second, when prices keep going up it’s natural to change one’s views. Investors (and journalists) get drawn into the grain of truth from which the bubble inflated, both because it is true and because the huge rise in prices appears to prove the bears wrong. Cassandras are ignored as bubbles inflate, or lose their jobs, as high-profile tech bear Tony “Dr Doom” Dye, chief investment officer of a division of UBS, did in March 2000. The dot-com bubble burst the same month, and the underperforming division became one of the best-performing fund managers in the world that year thanks to the positions it inherited from Dye. 6park.com
    
1929年，《华尔街日报》(The Wall Street Journal)的姊妹刊物《巴伦周刊》(Barron's)就是这种情况的一个典型例子。《巴伦周刊》写道：“ 尽管不可否认存在大量投机行为，但同样不可否认的是，尽管多年来惊吓纷扰不断，价格仍涨到了现在这样的水平。这种持久的强劲表现看起来更像是健康状态而非发烧。” 6park.com
In 1929, Barron’s, our sister publication, was a perfect example of what happens, when it opined: “Although considerable speculation cannot be denied, neither can it be denied that existing prices have developed in spite of years of back-seat fright. Such lasting strength looks more like health than fever.” 6park.com
    
一个月后，股价暴跌，事实证明市场已病入膏肓。 6park.com
When share prices crashed a month later, it turned out the market was very, very sick. 6park.com
    
互联网泡沫时期也发生过类似的事。其中一个例子是，2000年3月《华尔街日报》在头版刊登了一篇文章，称赞“新经济”科技股在迅速扩张的同时，还能抵御利率或油价的上涨。 6park.com
Something similar happened in the dot-com bubble. One example: A front-page piece in The Wall Street Journal in March 2000 hailed the “New Economy” technology stocks as secure against higher interest rates or oil prices while rapidly expanding. 6park.com
    
文章称，尽管有关高科技泡沫的言论甚嚣尘上，但市场价值分化的背后有一个基本逻辑，即高科技是增长所在。 6park.com
“For all the talk of a high-tech bubble, there is a basic logic driving the divergence of market values: High-tech is where the growth is,” it said. 6park.com
    
现在我们知道，在这篇文章发表的两周前，互联网泡沫已经开始破灭。两年后，纳斯达克指数下跌近80%，跌至历史最低水平。 6park.com
We now know that the dot-com bubble had started to deflate two weeks before the piece was even published. The Nasdaq dropped almost 80% to its low two years later. 6park.com
    
这些情况会令今天的市场专家感觉不适。1929年的“新时代”是真实存在的。大规模生产和汽车使经济发生了转型，生产力飞速提升。同样，1999年的互联网“新经济”也是如此。 6park.com
This is uncomfortable reading for today’s market pundits. The “New Era” of 1929 was real. Mass production and motoring had transformed the economy, and productivity had soared. Likewise the “New Economy” of the internet in 1999. 6park.com
    
还有规模小一些的例子，2020-2021年大麻合法化、商业太空飞行和政府对清洁能源的支持也是看得见摸得着的（模因股则不好说）。出现泡沫时，问题通常不是泡沫之说实属子虚乌有，而是价格不合理，因为投资者对变革的速度或由此带来的利润过于乐观。在泡沫膨胀到极点之前，投资者根本不再关心事实，而只关心下一个买家是谁（模因股则直接跳到了最后一个阶段）。 6park.com
On a smaller scale, legal cannabis, commercial space flights and government support for clean energy were real in 2020-2021 (meme stocks not so much). The problem in a bubble isn’t usually that the story is wrong, but that the price is wrong, because investors are wildly overoptimistic about how fast or how profitable the changes will be. By the time the bubble is fully inflated, investors no longer care about facts at all, merely who the next buyer will be (meme stocks jumped straight to the final stage). 6park.com
    
对投资者来说，现在的问题仍是价格。我没看到像1929年、1999年、中国的2015年或2020-2021年的美国部分地区那么大的投机规模。人工智能(AI)也确实能推动生产力，尽管鉴于当前系统的明显缺陷，AI能在多大规模上提高效率仍不确定。 6park.com
For investors, price is still the question today. I don’t see the scale of speculation that was so obvious in 1929, 1999, China in 2015 or parts of the U.S. in 2020-21. There is also a genuine productivity story to tell about artificial intelligence, even though the scale of efficiency improvements from AI remains a matter of guesswork, given the obvious drawbacks of current systems. 6park.com
    
这种似曾相识的感觉让我担心自己在重蹈覆辙，认为股市现在还不是大泡沫，而只是小泡沫。正如波士顿GMO的资深泡沫观察员Jeremy Grantham所指出的那样，投资者当然希望好时光能够继续，这表现在高估值（尽管还没有达到2000年的规模）和高利润上。我认为，高估值和高利润必须至少占一条，如果估值和利润双双下滑，就该有麻烦了。我的职业在鉴别泡沫方面的总体记录很糟糕，但至少这次我没看到整个市场出现投机狂潮。 6park.com
The parallels to the past make me worry that I’m repeating the errors of the past in thinking this isn’t yet a stock bubble, but merely a bit of froth. Certainly investors expect the good times to continue, shown by high valuations—albeit not on the scale of 2000—on top of high profits, as veteran bubble watcher Jeremy Grantham of Boston’s GMO points out. I suspect one or the other will have to give, and if both drop it will hurt. My profession has a terrible record overall in spotting bubbles, but at least this time I can’t see a speculative mania in the overall market.