元康律师事务所:建行所得远大于失

建行所得远大于失

 如今人们在经济评估中往往只重视金额大小得失，恰恰最忽略的就是相关政治影响的深远性。比如，对于中国建行那5%股份被美国银行套现得利恨的咬牙切齿，嚷嚷如何上当受骗，却丝毫没有想到建行及其股东所持那另外94%股份增值是这笔钱的数十倍。如果没有美国银行的持股，当初中国银行要进入国际投资银行的金融圈很难，国际政治压力也更难减缓，这些并非仅仅金钱所能界定的。这类国人评论不外乎是中国人传统小农意识作怪的典型事例。从建行的事件中，我们应当学会从整体政治和经济战略格局考虑问题，减少中国式的患得患失心态，这何尝不是我们逐步走向国民心理现代化的过程。

 对于整体评估国家经济效益和政治影响力，可以参考美国人的角度和方式，尤其注意他们如何从具体事件推演的方法。这方面例子不少，最典型的例子就是9.11事件，这个事件的制造者以最低成本造成了深远的世界性灾难，其中受损最大的就是美国。当然，这导致了一系列的连锁反应，其中最典型的便是中东动乱和西方经济泡沫的形成和崩溃。单单从金钱角度评估9.11的危害性，在人类历史上恐怕除了二战之外没有其它可及了。二战是当年西方彻底摆脱大萧条的机遇，而9.11却是进入大萧条的契机，人们根本无法清楚地用金钱衡量这种历史性的损害。

 以下一文转载来自雅虎美国，从中了解美国人是如何评估9.11对于经济影响的，多少可以学习打开眼界看问题，从而避免狭隘的小农金钱观：

Sept. 11, 2001, was a one-of-a-kind moment for the nation's psyche. The terrorist attacks killed nearly 3,000 people, rained down fear and grief on countless others and launched the nation into two wars.

But was that day similarly devastating for the financial world?

At first glance, it seems the answer is yes. On Sept. 17, 2001 -- the emotional date that the New York Stock Exchange reopened amid soldiers, police and Wall Streeters wearing air masks on the smoky streets of lower Manhattan -- the Dow Jones Industrial Averagelost 684 points, at the time the largest single-day point loss on record.

Yet with a decade of hindsight, 9/11 can be seen as but one of a half-dozen financial dominoes that have fallen for the U.S. economy during a long boom-and-bust cycle -- from the 1998 collapse of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, to the demise of Lehman Brothers amid the 2008 financial crisis, to more recent events, including the ongoing European sovereign-debt crisis and the downgrade of the United States' AAA credit rating.

"Nine-eleven was a shock, that we were in a new world where America was no longer as safe as it was," said William Silber, a professor and historian at New York University's Stern School of Business.

For a short time, the attacks and the fear and uncertainty they spawned were a classic case of perception versus reality -- the situation looked worse than it was.

Events like 9/11 create "sudden substantial revisions in expectations about future economic and financial variables," Christopher J. Neely concluded in his 2004 study "

And while 9/11, like other financial episodes of recent years, is symptomatic of the age of leverage on Wall Street, it differs in one key way: It is a classic example of an external shock, like Pearl Harbor or the 1973-74 oil embargo. It was not a self-inflicted wound, such as the subprime crisis, or a cyclical downturn, such as the 2001 and 2008 recessions.

"The difference is whether the shock has a temporary liquidity impact versus an underlying credit impact. Nine-eleven didn't necessarily go to the underlying creditworthiness of the institutions," said Silber, who chronicled the monetary crisis surrounding World War I.

Adds Silber, "It goes to (show) how easily the central bank can counteract (a crisis) and can stabilize the system."

Thanks largely to leverage, the last dozen years have been a timeline of boom and bust, of a financial-services-dominated economy out of control and a central bank compounding the problem with cheap money and other instruments of interventionist monetary policy.

"It sounds a whole lot like the economy during and after the Civil War -- one step forward and two steps back," says Charles Geisst, a professor of finance at Manhattan College.

Silber compares the modern period to the stock market crashes of 1929 and the 1930s. "There was not just one event but a series of events," he said.