When Alex Turnbull was a teenager growing up in the small town of Hemmingway, North Carolina, he only knew one thing — hogs.
After all, Turnbull’s great grandfather, grandfather and his father before him had been hog farmers.
而且,当他即将毕业时,毫无疑问,他将有一天到哪里去,离他的高中只有几英里,那里有种猪。
Yet if Turnbull was disappointed with his lot in life, it didn’t show.
当他的高中朋友们计划去查尔斯顿或其他大城市时,特恩布尔不仅接受了他的生活,还接受了他的生活。
直到最后几十年左右,养猪都是一种高度手动的动手农业活动,主要由特恩布尔(Turnbull)家族等小农经营。
但是随着工业化和工厂化农业以及对猪肉的无限满足,一些工业化农业的大人物从小农那里购买了数百万英亩的养猪场,并使它们与农户签约,这在很大程度上对大公司有利。从本质上讲,农民不过是契约公司的奴隶。
特恩布尔注意到,他周围的一小块土地开始抬起一些猪肉和猪肉产品中一些大人物的旗帜,并决心走另一条路。
在阅读了有关西班牙伊比利亚地区特有的一种猪之后,他听说他们的肉如何因其质量和口味而享誉全球。
特恩布尔(Turnbull)相信自己可以在自己的小农场上做些类似的事情,因此实际上打赌该农场饲养特殊饲养的高级猪,并给予苹果和橡子特殊的饮食,它们可以渗透并调味肉类,并收取费用该产品的溢价。
Turnbull’s father was initially hesitant, believing that the safest route for the farm was to go the way of the big corporations and cave to their demands, but Turnbull junior was insistent, because by his calculation, taking a risk was perhaps the safer bet at the end of the day.
它得到了回报。
邻近的农场被大型猪肉生产商所接受,Turnbull农场生产高质量的小批量猪肉产品,为此他们可能要支付巨额溢价。
Today, Turnbull Farm’s pork products can be found in gourmet supermarkets from Charleston to Chicago and are prized for their quality, flavor and ethical farming methods.
因为有时冒最大的风险才能发现安全。
And as the world confronts the seemingly relentless economic onslaught wrought by the coronavirus pandemic, investors have been left frantically searching for “safe haven” assets, only to find that there may be no such thing.
With geopolitical tensions between the world’s two largest economies rising, the investing world has entered into its most complex and difficult phase in over a decade.
大流行带来了无数的商业限制,并给企业和家庭带来了巨大的经济不确定性。
在此背景下,过去二十年来,大多数富裕国家的长期实际利率已长期下降。
尽管此后中央银行曾多次尝试加息,但这些尝试都没有停止,因为市场威胁在中央银行出现强硬迹象的第一时间就出现下跌。
The coronavirus pandemic has simply put a two decades’ long trend in real interest rates, into sharp focus, as consumers faced with rising uncertainty reduce consumption and increase savings which helps to further depress rates.
尽管历史上一直存在大量的安全资产,例如高评级的政府债券或房地产支持的证券,但2008年的金融危机使这些保护区不堪重负。
2009年的欧洲债务危机使德国债券(世界上评级最高的一些主权债券)陷入负利率,而导致2008年金融危机的美国住房危机使抵押贷款支持的证券市场大幅缩水。
葡萄牙,意大利,希腊和西班牙的片面主权债务崩溃(形成不幸的缩写PIGS)破坏了欧洲主权债券的声誉。
长期以来人们一直认为,以土地为抵押的美国资产永远不会急剧下降,这一点在2008年被证明是错误的。
With sovereign debt from rich countries and asset-backed securities having lost their “safe haven” status, investors have been left feckless at a time when “safe haven” assets are more in demand than at any time in the past.
And that shortage of “safe haven” assets has seen a rush into gold — which although down somewhat from its record high, remains above multi-year averages — as well as cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.
Because there is a limit to how low interest rates can go (a form of zero lower bound or negative interest rate) to clear this excess demand for “safe haven” assets, low rates can create a persistent stagnation in the global economy and dramatically hamstring the efficacy of monetary policy, at a time when policymakers are increasingly running out of tools to boost the economy.
华盛顿和北京之间日益紧张的关系有可能扩散到一场货币战争中,这将导致两种法定货币都陷入低谷,并参与支持比特币和黄金的叙事。
更加不确定的是,谁将在11月的美国总统大选中获胜,对权力是否会平稳过渡(如果有的话)的担忧较少。
To be sure, America’s democratic institutions have come under serious pressure by almost four years of the Trump administration, and a failure for a smooth democratic handover, should Biden win the White House, may be the last straw on the camel’s back for American democracy.
政治不确定性可能对美元的价值(对美国国债的信念)产生巨大影响。
如果人们对美元及其民主机构的全球信念遭到破坏,它可能会在黄金和比特币投资者的剧本中发挥作用。
But investors betting on Bitcoin for safety should also note the new entrants into the digital asset markets, for whom “safety” is an unintentional byproduct, as opposed to an articulated goal.
在新兴的数字资产类别中,包括高盛(Goldman Sachs)和摩根大通(JPMorgan Chase)在内的投资银行业中的一些大人物已经把自己的脚趾浸入水中,但是池畔却拥挤不堪。
包括渣打银行和瑞银集团在内的欧洲银行也正在密切监视这一领域,而私人银行已经在此领域大跌。
指定的驾驶员的寿命似乎过高。 (照片由Jacob Bentzinger在Unsplash上拍摄)
但是历史证明,当投资银行介入时,它们几乎总是会加剧投机和波动。
As investment bankers feed off fee income and juice bets with leverage, especially given the highly unregulated state of the digital asset industry, can Bitcoin really serve the role that it’s being touted to serve in portfolios?
If and when the coronavirus pandemic comes to pass, the demand for a mix of “safe” and “risky” assets needs to be balanced — the options can’t simply be “risky” and “more risky.”
And existing investment paradigms will need to be shifted to redefine portfolio risk as well as what qualifies as a “safe” asset class.
Against this backdrop, the many snake oil salesmen (and women) touting Bitcoin as a cure-all for the pandemic’s economic ails, must be received with more than a pinch of salt.
And while there are plenty of macro factors which threaten our existing assumptions about fiat currency, not least among which has been the relentless money-printing, that doesn’t make it obvious that gold and Bitcoin are the necessary successors to the fiat currency system.
It may be that the global financial system will need to go through a painful period of re-discovery — to reassess what value and risk actually mean to the individual investor and more importantly, whether there’s such a thing as a “safe asset” to even begin with.
For now, the sooner investors learn to embrace that all assets are risky, the easier it will become to make sense of our present age — and that acceptance of risk, may end up becoming the safest asset of all.
We can’t all be hog farmers.