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今天的《頂尖主廚大對決》將教導大家如何搶銀行。顯然一般大眾需要一些指導,因為一般銀行搶劫平均只能搶到7500美元,完全是不懂如何做假帳的業餘者水準。
當然,內行人全是大銀行的經營者。上次他們一出手,我們就損失了超過11兆美元。11兆看起來像這樣,相當於幾個0?也讓我們損失超過1000萬個工作機會。
因此我們的當務之急是自我教育,以瞭解為何金融危機會一再出現,且變本加厲,以及未來如何防範。答案就是,我們必須制止大規模管理舞弊行為。管理舞弊是指當管理者-通常是總裁-管理一個貌似合法的機構時,將它當成詐騙的武器。這是金融界的大規模毀滅性武器。
在金融界,他們亦採取某種策略,因為金融界的首選武器是會計。會計管理舞弊的發生有個「秘方」,我們在相當特殊的情況下發現這個「秘方」,我稍後再談。這個「秘方」的成分是,第一:瘋狂地膨脹。第二:製造或購買風險貸款,但這種貸款的利率或收益相當高。第三:大肆運用財務槓桿,這意味著與資產不成比例的龐大債務。第四:提供微不足道的準備金,因應必然會出現的爛帳損失。如果遵循這四個簡單步驟-任何銀行都能做到-保證會發生以下三種情況。第一:銀行的帳面利潤將史無前例地高;不僅是高,而是史無前例地高。第二:鑒於目前的高層管理者薪資結構,總裁會瞬間暴富。第三:長此以往,銀行將遭受巨額損失,除非獲得援助,否則就會倒閉。這就是我們發現這份「秘方」的關鍵,因為我們對整個流程進行剖析。1984年儲貸危機期間,我們研究每一個破產案例,尋找其中的共同點。我們發現這個「秘方」是每一個舞弊案例的共同點。換句話說,稽查員能找到這些東西,因為這是致命「秘方」,不僅會摧毀銀行,也會摧毀經濟,這也正是可阻止這類危機的方法。僅在住房領域,這類危機就讓我們損失了11兆美元和1000萬個工作機會。這也是至今最容易全面防範的金融危機,只要我們能運用這個「秘方」,從大規模管理舞弊中吸取教訓。因此我們討論一下這類危機,以及導致這類危機的兩種大規模借貸舞弊手段:估價舞弊和騙子貸款。研究這兩個部分,我們將發現,對於這些舞弊行為,我們在相當早期即可獲得警訊。藉由這些警訊,我們可輕易獲得優勢。因為早在儲貸危機時期,我們就瞭解如何因應及避免這些危機。第三:這些警訊相當明確,清楚顯示大規模會計管理舞弊正在發生。
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以下為系統擷取之英文原文
So today's top chef class is in how to rob a bank, and it's clear that the general public needs guidance, because the average bank robbery nets only 7,500 dollars. Rank amateurs who know nothing about how to cook the books.
The folks who know, of course, run our largest banks, and in the last go-around, they cost us over 11 trillion dollars. That's what 11 trillion looks like. That's how many zeros? And cost us over 10 million jobs as well.
So our task is to educate ourselves so that we can understand why we have these recurrent, intensifying financial crises, and how we can prevent them in the future. And the answer to that is that we have to stop epidemics of control fraud. Control fraud is what happens when the people who control, typically a CEO, a seemingly legitimate entity, use it as a weapon to defraud. And these are the weapons of mass destruction in the financial world.
They also follow in finance a particular strategy, because the weapon of choice in finance is accounting, and there is a recipe for accounting control fraud, and how it occurs. And we discovered this recipe in quite an odd way that I'll come back to in a moment. First ingredient in the recipe: grow like crazy; second, by making or buying really crappy loans, but loans that are made at a very high interest rate or yield; three, while employing extreme leverage -- that just means a lot of debt -- compared to your equity; and four, while providing only trivial loss reserves against the inevitable losses. If you follow those four simple steps, and any bank can follow them, then you are mathematically guaranteed to have three things occur. The first thing is you will report record bank profits -- not just high, record. Two, the CEO will immediately be made incredibly wealthy by modern executive compensation. And three, farther down the road, the bank will suffer catastrophic losses and will fail unless it is bailed out. And that's a hint as to how we discovered this recipe, because we discovered it through an autopsy process. During the savings and loan debacle in 1984, we looked at every single failure, and we looked for common characteristics, and we discovered this recipe was common to each of these frauds. In other words, a coroner could find these things because this is a fatal recipe that will destroy the banks as well as the economy. And it also turns out to be precisely what could have stopped this crisis, the one that cost us 11 trillion dollars just in the household sector, that cost us 10 million jobs, was the easiest financial crisis by far to have avoided completely if we had simply learned the lessons of epidemics of control fraud, particularly using this recipe. So let's go to this crisis, and the two huge epidemics of loan origination fraud that drove the crisis -- appraisal fraud and liar's loans -- and what we're going to see in looking at both of these is we got warnings that were incredibly early about these frauds. We got warnings that we could have taken advantage of easily, because back in the savings and loan debacle, we had figured out how to respond and prevent these crises. And three, the warnings were unambiguous. They were obvious that what was going on was an epidemic of accounting control fraud building up.
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我們先來看估價舞弊。簡單來說,那就是誇大做為貸款擔保的房屋價值。2000年,順帶一提,也就是安隆破產一年多前,正直的估價師共同擬定一份正式請願書,要求聯邦政府及相關業者採取措施,制止這種大規模估價舞弊行為。這些估價師解釋這類舞弊如何發生:銀行要求估價師誇大估價,如果估價師拒絕配合,銀行就會把這些正直的估價師列入黑名單,拒絕雇用他們。好,我們在儲貸危機期間已見過這種情形,我們知道這種舞弊行為只可能來自借方,正直的借方絕不會替估價灌水,因為這是防止損失的上策。因此這項警訊早在2000年就已出現,這是我們曾經見過且相當明確的警訊。這是銀行主導的大規模會計管理舞弊行為。
何謂騙子貸款?好,事實上這項警訊出現的更早。儲貸危機基本上發生於1980年代早期至1993年。在打擊那波會計管理舞弊浪潮中,我們於1990年發現第二波舞弊浪潮興起。如同美國所有精心策畫的金融舞弊行為,其發源地是加州橘郡,我們正好是該地區的監管機構。我們的稽查人員說,他們甚至不曾查核借款人收入情況就發放貸款。這太離譜了,必然會導致巨大損失,只有金融機構直接參與這些會計管理舞弊行為才說得通。我們說,是的,你們說的沒錯。我們於1990、1991年將這些騙子貸款逐出金融業。但我們只能處理管轄範圍內的行業,也就是儲貸業務。因此其中規模最大、最惡質的舞弊者-長灘儲貸銀行-主動放棄聯邦儲貸執照、放棄聯邦存款保險,變身為一家抵押銀行,只為了逃避我們的監管,且更名為Ameriquest,成為早期最聲名狼藉的騙子貸款舞弊案例。此外,他們還刻意針對弱勢族群進行掠奪性貸款。
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Let's take appraisal fraud first. This is simply where you inflate the value of the home that is being pledged as security for the loan. In 2000, the year 2000, that is over a year before Enron fails, by the way, the honest appraisers got together a formal petition begging the federal government to act, and the industry to act, to stop this epidemic of appraisal fraud. And the appraisers explained how it was occurring, that banks were demanding that appraisers inflate the appraisal, and that if the appraisers refused to do so, they, the banks, would blacklist honest appraisers and refuse to use them. Now, we've seen this before in the savings and loan debacle, and we know that this kind of fraud can only originate from the lenders, and that no honest lender would ever inflate the appraisal, because it's the great protection against loss. So this was an incredibly early warning, 2000. It was something we'd seen before, and it was completely unambiguous. This was an epidemic of accounting control fraud led by the banks.
What about liar's loans? Well, that warning actually comes earlier. The savings and loan debacle is basically the early 1980s through 1993, and in the midst of fighting that wave of accounting control fraud, in 1990, we found that a second front of fraud was being started. And like all good financial frauds in America, it began in Orange County, California. And we happened to be the regional regulators for it. And our examiners said, they are making loans without even checking what the borrower's income is. This is insane, it has to lead to massive losses, and it only makes sense for entities engaged in these accounting control frauds. And we said, yeah, you're absolutely right, and we drove those liar's loans out of the industry in 1990 and 1991, but we could only deal with the industry we had jurisdiction over, which was savings and loans, and so the biggest and the baddest of the frauds, Long Beach Savings, voluntarily gave up its federal savings and loan charter, gave up federal deposit insurance, converted to become a mortgage bank for the sole purpose of escaping our jurisdiction, and changed its name to Ameriquest, and became the most notorious of the liar's loans frauds early on, and to add to that, they deliberately predated upon minorities.
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因此我們知道這類危機再次發生。我們之前見過,也阻止過。我們相當早期即接獲警訊,訊息相當明確。正直的借方絕不會這麼辦理貸款。因此我們看一下行業本身、監管機構及檢調人員的反應,針對這些可預防危機發生的早期警訊。
先從金融業本身開始。2003至2006年,金融行業的騙子貸款增加率超過500%,意味著這類貸款過度膨脹、形成泡沫化,造成經濟危機。截至2006年,半數所謂的「次貸」同時也是騙子貸款,兩者並非獨立運作,而是彼此交織,形成你所能想像最致命的組合。到了2006年,當年成立的所有貸款、當年所有的房貸,40%是騙子貸款,高達40%。儘管金融業本身的反舞弊專家曾經警告,這些貸款簡直是引狼入室,舞弊發生率仍高達90%,90%。金融業的反應是:首先開始稱呼這些貸款為騙子貸款,相當一目了然。其次,大幅增加這種貸款。沒有任何政府監管機構曾要求或鼓勵任何借方辦理騙子貸款,或要求任何人購買騙子貸款,當然也包括房利美和房地美。這是借方的問題,因為其中存在舞弊「秘方」。
估價舞弊是什麼情形?同樣相當氾濫。2007年有份針對估價師的調查,90%估價師表示,他們曾受到借方施壓,要求他們對估價灌水。換句話說,兩種形式的舞弊已成為業界通病和常態,這就是泡沫化的原因。
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So we knew again about this crisis. We'd seen it before. We'd stopped it before. We had incredibly early warnings of it, and it was absolutely unambiguous that no honest lender would make loans in this fashion. So let's take a look at the reaction of the industry and the regulators and the prosecutors to these clear early warnings that could have prevented the crisis.
Start with the industry. The industry responded between 2003 and 2006 by increasing liar's loans by over 500 percent. These were the loans that hyperinflated the bubble and produced the economic crisis. By 2006, half of all the loans called subprime were also liar's loans. They're not mutually exclusive, it's just that together, they're the most toxic combination you can possibly imagine. By 2006, 40 percent of all the loans made that year, all the home loans made that year, were liar's loans, 40 percent. And this is despite a warning from the industry's own antifraud experts that said that these loans were an open invitation to fraudsters, and that they had a fraud incidence of 90 percent, nine zero. In response to that, the industry first started calling these loans liar's loans, which lacks a certain subtlety, and second, massively increased them, and no government regulator ever required or encouraged any lender to make a liar's loan or anyone to purchase a liar's loan, and that explicitly includes Fannie and Freddie. This came from the lenders because of the fraud recipe.
What happened to appraisal fraud? It expanded remarkably as well. By 2007, when a survey of appraisers was done, 90 percent of appraisers reported that they had been subject to coercion from the lenders trying to get them to inflate an appraisal. In other words, both forms of fraud became absolutely endemic and normal, and this is what drove the bubble.
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政府部門的情況如何?好,至於政府,如我說過的,當我們監管儲貸業務時,我們只能處理與業務相關的行業。如果借方放棄聯邦存款保險,我們將束手無策。至於國會,你們或許認為難以置信,但他們在1994年確實做了點聰明事,通過《住宅所有權及產權保護法》,賦予美聯儲-僅賦予美聯儲-明確的法定權力,禁止任何借方的騙子貸款業務,無論他們是否擁有聯邦存款保險。因此曾擔任美聯儲主席的班.柏南克和亞倫.葛林斯班做了什麼,當他們獲得這些大規模騙子貸款將轉售給次級市場的警訊時?請記住,沒人能驅逐這些舞弊。騙子貸款一旦出現,只能藉由更多舞弊行為轉售給次級市場,例如編造聲明和保證條款,然後這些人再推出不動產抵押貸款證券和衍生產品,它們背後的擔保者也是這些騙子貸款。因此舞弊行為將貫穿整個系統,使泡沫急劇膨脹,造成災難。記得嗎?我們經歷過這些事,我們曾遭受巨大損失,我們也見過監管機構阻止這類危機的發生。葛林斯班和柏南克拒絕使用法律賦予的權力阻止騙子貸款,主要是意識形態作祟。他們只知竭力反對任何形式的監管。但問題也在於國際間的寬鬆政策競爭,美國和英國之間的「墊底競爭」,確切來說是倫敦。倫敦在這場「墊底競爭」中勝出,但這意味著西方世界的監管措施徹底退化,在這場比較「誰的監管最鬆」的愚蠢競爭中。
因此這是監管機構的反應。檢調機構的反應如何?在這場危機之後,在11兆美元的損失之後,在1000萬個工作機會的損失之後,在這場損失和舞弊規模勝於儲貸危機70倍的危機之後?好,在儲貸危機中,我們的機構-負責監管儲貸業務的OTS(儲蓄管理局)提出3萬多起刑事訴訟,使1千多人面臨重罪審判。這僅是重大案件部分,這尚未反映問題的嚴重性。因為我們與聯邦調查局合作列出一份全國範圍內前100名最惡質的舞弊計畫清單,其中包括約300間儲貸機構及大約600名高級官員。他們幾乎全被起訴,定罪率高達90%,這是針對白領精英犯罪有史以來最大的勝利,全是因為我們對管理舞弊及會計管理舞弊機制的瞭解。
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What happened in the governmental sector? Well, the government, as I told you, when we were the savings and loan regulators, we could only deal with our industry, and if people gave up their federal deposit insurance, we couldn't do anything to them. Congress, it may strike you as impossible, but actually did something intelligent in 1994, and passed the Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act that gave the Fed, and only the Federal Reserve, the explicit, statutory authority to ban liar's loans by every lender, whether or not they had federal deposit insurance. So what did Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan, as chairs of the Fed, do when they got these warnings that these were massively fraudulent loans and that they were being sold to the secondary market? Remember, there's no fraud exorcist. Once it starts out a fraudulent loan, it can only be sold to the secondary market through more frauds, lying about the reps and warrantees, and then those people are going to produce mortgage-backed securities and exotic derivatives which are also going to be supposedly backed by those fraudulent loans. So the fraud is going to progress through the entire system, hyperinflate the bubble, produce a disaster. And remember, we had experience with this. We had seen significant losses, and we had experience of competent regulators in stopping it. Greenspan and Bernanke refused to use the authority under the statute to stop liar's loans. And this was a matter first of dogma. They're just horrifically opposed to anything regulatory. But it is also the international competition in laxity, the race to the bottom between the United States and the United Kingdom, the city of London, in particular, and the city of London won that race to the bottom, but it meant that all regulation in the West was completely degraded in this stupid competition to be who could have the weakest regulation.
So that was the regulatory response. What about the response of the prosecutors after the crisis, after 11 trillion dollars in losses, after 10 million jobs lost, a crisis in which the losses and the frauds were more than 70 times larger than the savings and loan debacle? Well, in the savings and loan debacle, our agency that regulated savings and loans, OTS, made over 30,000 criminal referrals, produced over 1,000 felony convictions just in cases designated as major, and that understates the degree of prioritization, because we worked with the FBI to create the list of the top 100 fraud schemes, the absolute worst of the worst, nationwide. Roughly 300 savings and loans involved, roughly 600 senior officials. Virtually all of them were prosecuted. We had a 90 percent conviction rate. It's the greatest success against elite white collar criminals ever, and it was because of this understanding of control fraud and the accounting control fraud mechanism.
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再回頭談談當前的危機。同一個機構,儲蓄管理局,本應監管全國眾多大規模騙子貸款的製造者,直到今天-彷彿就這麼不了了之-直到一年前,提出的刑事訴訟仍掛零。應負責監管全國各大銀行的金融管理局提出的刑事訴訟同樣掛零,美聯儲提出的刑事訴訟似乎也掛零。聯邦存款保險公司狡猾地拒絕回答這個問題。沒有任何來自監管機構的指引,聯邦調查局沒有調查複雜舞弊案件的專業知識,原因不在於他們得從新研擬如何提出這些訴訟,他們只是忘了這些訴訟的存在。因此沒有任何人被起訴,當然也沒有任何人被定罪,對造成這場危機的華爾街等級頂尖銀行舞弊高手來說。
在監管機構不願提供專業協助的情況下,聯邦調查局於2007年與抵押貸款銀行家協會建立所謂的合作關係。抵押貸款銀行家協會正是這些罪魁禍首的同業公會。抵押貸款銀行家協會著手行動,他們擁有欺騙聯邦調查局的膽量和能力,它為抵押貸款舞弊行為下了似是而非的定義,知道它是怎麼說的嗎?它的成員都是受害者,絕非加害者。聯邦調查局不疑有他、照單全收,因此在非裔司法部長和非裔總統領導下的聯邦調查局採納茶黨對這場危機的說辭,這是史上首宗高層管理者無人被定罪的金融危機事件,問題出在那些聰明絕頂的小角色身上,他們有能力欺騙那些對金融複雜性一無所知的可憐銀行業者;這是你能想像最荒謬的說法。因此他們起訴了小角色,銀行家流氓們安然無恙。因此當猛獅四處肆虐時,聯邦調查局只追逐小老鼠。
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Flash forward to the current crisis. The same agency, Office of Thrift Supervision, which was supposed to regulate many of the largest makers of liar's loans in the country, has made, even today -- it no longer exists, but as of a year ago, it had made zero criminal referrals. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which is supposed to regulate the largest national banks, has made zero criminal referrals. The Fed appears to have made zero criminal referrals. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is smart enough to refuse to answer the question. Without any guidance from the regulators, there's no expertise in the FBI to investigate complex frauds. It isn't simply that they've had to reinvent the wheel of how to do these prosecutions; they've forgotten that the wheel exists, and therefore, we have zero prosecutions, and of course, zero convictions, of any of the elite bank frauds, the Wall Street types, that drove this crisis.
With no expertise coming from the regulators, the FBI formed what it calls a partnership with the Mortgage Bankers Association in 2007. The Mortgage Bankers Association is the trade association of the perps. And the Mortgage Bankers Association set out, it had the audacity and the success to con the FBI. It had created a supposed definition of mortgage fraud, in which, guess what, its members are always the victim and never the perpetrators. And the FBI has bought this hook, line, sinker, rod, reel and the boat they rode out in. And so the FBI, under the leadership of an attorney general who is African-American and a president of the United States who is African-American, have adopted the Tea Party definition of the crisis, in which it is the first virgin crisis in history, conceived without sin in the executive ranks. And it's those oh-so-clever hairdressers who were able to defraud the poor, pitiful banks, who lack any financial sophistication. It is the silliest story you can conceive of, and so they go and they prosecute the hairdressers, and they leave the banksters alone entirely. And so, while lions are roaming the campsite, the FBI is chasing mice.
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我們該怎麼做?面對這一切,我們能做什麼?我們需要改革不當的激勵機制,它們導致造成這類危機的大規模會計管理舞弊一再發生。因此首先我們必須排除具有系統危險性的金融機構,這些所謂「尾大不掉」的金融機構。在未來五年當中,我們必須縮小它們的規模,使它們不再具有系統風險性。現在它們彷彿定時炸彈,一旦其中一家破產,將引發全球危機;並非存在這個可能性,而是時間問題。其次我們必須做的是,徹底改革目前的高層管理人員薪酬制度,這正是他們用來收買估價師的手段。記得嗎?他們藉由薪酬制度向估價師施壓,試圖在市場上造成「劣幣驅逐良幣」的格雷欣效應。他們取得大幅勝利,這就是舞弊如此猖獗的原因。第三,我們必須處理所謂的「3D」問題:deregulation(放寬管制)、desupervision(放寬監督)、de facto decriminalization(事實上的合法化)。因為我們可從這三點進行改革。如果這麼做,我們可大幅減少危機發生的頻率和危害程度。這不僅對我們的經濟至關緊要,你可看出這類危機對經濟不平等及民主制度的影響。它造成美國式裙帶資本主義,其中最大的金融機構是兩黨的主要金主,這就是為何這場比儲貸危機嚴重70倍的危機發生後,我提到的三大層面依然沒有任何實質改革,除了取締騙子貸款。這是好事,但這只是舞弊軍火庫中其中一種武器,他們可使用的武器種類相當多。
這就是我們需要學習銀行家法寶的原因:搶銀行的最佳「秘方」。這樣我們才能制止這種做法,因為我們的立法者仰賴政治獻金,不會主動採取相關措施。
十分感謝。
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What do we need to do? What can we do in all of this? We need to change the perverse incentive structures that produce these recurrent epidemics of accounting control fraud that are driving our crises. So we have to first get rid of the systemically dangerous institutions. These are the so-called too-big-to-fail institutions. We need to shrink them to the point, within the next five years, that they no longer pose a systemic risk. Right now, they are ticking time bombs that will cause a global crisis as soon as the next one fails -- not if, when. Second thing we need to do is completely reform modern executive and professional compensation, which is what they use to suborn the appraisers. Remember, they were pressuring the appraisers through the compensation system, trying to produce what we call a Gresham's dynamic, in which bad ethics drives good ethics out of the marketplace. And they largely succeeded, which is how the fraud became endemic. And the third thing that we need to do is deal with what we call the three D's: deregulation, desupervision, and the de facto decriminalization. Because we can make all three of these changes, and if we do so, we can dramatically reduce how often we have a crisis and how severe those crises are. That is not simply critical to our economy. You can see what these crises do to inequality and what they do to our democracy. They have produced crony capitalism, American-style, in which the largest financial institutions are the leading financial donors of both parties, and that's the reason why even after this crisis, 70 times larger than the savings and loan crisis, we have no meaningful reforms in any of the three areas that I've talked about, other than banning liar's loans, which is good, but that's just one form of ammunition for this fraud weapon. There are many forms of ammunition they can use.
That's why we need to learn what the bankers have learned: the recipe for the best way to rob a bank, so that we can stop that recipe, because our legislators, who are dependent on political contributions, will not do it on their own.
Thank you very much.