瑞银对自身风险缺乏监控

“If you see a Swiss banker jumping out of a window, follow him. There is sure to be a profit in it, Voltaire is once said to have remarked. These days, no action by a Swiss banker should be taken on trust.

伏尔泰(Voltaire)据说曾说过这么一句话：“如果你见到一个瑞士银行家从窗口跳出去，跟着他跳，肯定能赚钱。如今，瑞士银行家的行为却再也不值得信任了。

The Sfr1.4bn penalty levied on UBS for its organised rigging of official Libor interest rates would come as a shock at many banks. But UBS has brought a special quality of poor management – and worse – to investment banking for the past two decades. This is just another episode in a saga of ambition, incompetence and malfeasance.

瑞银(UBS)因有组织地操纵官方的伦敦银行间同业拆借利率(Libor)而被处以14亿瑞士法郎的罚款，这对许多银行都会是一次巨大的冲击。不过，过去20年瑞银一直在对投资银行部门实行罕见的糟糕管理——有时候还会更糟。这次不过是上演了关于野心、无能和渎职的又一幕大戏。

The fact that UBS stands for nothing – it was reduced to a set of initials in the 1998 merger of Swiss Bank Corporation and Union Bank of Switzerland – strikes me as symbolic. Its investment bank, which caused most of its troubles, was built from a patchwork of banks – SG Warburg, Paine Webber, Dillon Read – and has always lacked a heart.

令我震惊的一个有象征意义的事实是，瑞银的名称“UBS什么都不代表。1998年瑞士银行公司(Swiss Bank Corporation)和瑞士联合银行(Union Bank of Switzerland)合并后，该集团的名称就仅仅是一串首字母。而为瑞银带来最大麻烦的投行部门，则是由华宝(SG Warburg)、普惠(Paine Webber)、迪伦里德(Dillon Read)几家银行拼凑而成的，始终缺乏一个统一的核心。

Again and again – in the 2008 financial crisis in which it lost $38bn on credit derivatives; in the scandal over tax evasion by private bank clients that led to a $780m fine; in its failure to stop Kweku Adoboli, the rogue trader who lost $2.3bn – the bank’s executives have been exposed as knowing little about what was going on below.

一次又一次的事件暴露出，瑞银高管们对下面发生了什么几乎一无所知：2008年金融危机中，瑞银在信用衍生品上亏损了380亿美元；私人银行客户逃税的丑闻令瑞银不得不支付7.80亿美元罚金；流氓交易员奎库·阿多博利(Kweku Adoboli)令瑞银亏损23亿美元，瑞银却无力阻止。

There is a broader lesson – that investment banking is a volatile business that demands strict management to prevent the kind of misbehaviour seen in the Libor affair. Instead, UBS led a group of banks that threw capital at it from the 1990s onwards without the expertise to control it.

另一个意义更广泛的教训是，在投行这样瞬息万变的业务中，只有进行严格管理才能阻止Libor丑闻这类事件中的不当行为。然而，上世纪90年代起，瑞银领导的多家银行把资金交付到它手里，它却缺乏管控这些资金的专业技能。

To its credit, UBS reflected long and hard about the 2008 crisis, in which it had to be bailed out by the Swiss National Bank after its board failed to grasp that it had been loaded with subprime debt. It commissioned Tobias Straumann, a lecturer at the University of Zurich, to analyse why it had ignored the lurking financial disaster.

值得称道的是，瑞银对2008年危机进行了长期而艰难的反思，在那次危机中，瑞银的董事会未能深刻认识到瑞银已持有过多的次级债务，结果不得不由瑞士央行(Swiss National Bank)出面纾困。为此瑞银委托苏黎世大学(University of Zurich)教师托比亚斯·施特劳曼(Tobias Straumann)分析为何瑞银忽略了潜伏的金融灾难。

“Top management was too complacent, wrongly believing that everything was under control, given that numerous risk reports, internal audits and external reviews always ended in a positive conclusion, Prof Straumann concluded. “The bank did not lack risk consciousness; it lacked healthy mistrust, independent judgment and strength of leadership.

施特劳曼的结论是：“由于无数的风险报告、内部审计以及外部审查总是得出正面结论，导致最高管理层太过自满，错误地相信一切都处于控制当中。瑞银并不缺少风险意识；它缺乏健康的怀疑精神、独立的判断能力以及强大的领导力。

As his report was published in October 2010, UBS’s then-chairman, Kaspar Villiger, pledged that things had changed. Inside the investment bank, Mr Villiger told shareholders, business units were being “closely monitored and it had turned away from trading to advisory and client services. “The level of proprietary trading has, accordingly, been drastically reduced.

在他的报告于2010年10月发表时，瑞银当时的董事长卡斯帕·维利热(Kaspar Villiger)发誓情况已经改变。维利热告诉股东，投行部门内部的业务部门正被“严密监控，并且已从交易转向了咨询及客户服务。“因此自营交易已经大幅减少。

Only a month later, Carsten Kengeter, the newly appointed chief executive of its investment bank, said that it needed to “reinstall the turbocharger in equities, and the exchange traded funds desk where Adoboli worked was pushed to take more trading risk. Meanwhile, its traders kept on manipulating Libor until the year-end.

仅仅一个月之后，瑞银投行部门新任首席执行官卡斯滕·肯格特(Carsten Kengeter)表示，该部门需要为股票部门“重新装上涡轮增压系统，而阿多博利所在的交易所交易基金(ETF)部门被鼓励承担更多交易风险。正是同一时间，投行部门的交易员们一直在操纵Libor直到年底。

In other words, the leadership of a bank that had almost collapsed because its predecessors were out of touch held a thorough investigation, changed management, imposed new controls – and fell into exactly the same trap again. What it said, and perhaps believed, was happening within its investment bank bore little resemblance to reality.

换句话说，在这家银行因其前任领导层的认识脱节而差点崩溃后，该行新领导层进行了一次彻底调查，改变了管理方式，实行了新的控制措施，却又一次落入了完全相同的陷阱。对于投行部门所发生的事，该行领导层描述的情况（也许他们的确是这么认为的）和真实情况牛头不对马嘴。

That was not a new phenomenon. SBC took over UBS in 1998 after the latter was caught out in the Asian financial crisis and over-invested in the ill-fated hedge fund Long Term Capital Management. Its global ambitions have been a source of instability ever since.

这种现象并不是头一次发生。1998年，由于卷入亚洲金融危机，并且过度投资于注定失败的对冲基金——长期资本管理公司(Long Term Capital Management)，瑞士联合银行被瑞士银行公司收购。从那之后，瑞银的全球野心就成为一大不稳定因素。

The underlying problem was, as Prof Straumann wrote, UBS did not want to accept the reality of its ambitions. It “was neither the sole, nor the first, bank to believe that it was possible to achieve exceptional balance sheet growth without having to undertake massive increases in risk exposure.

这其中的问题在于，正如施特劳曼指出的，瑞银不愿意承认它的野心。该行“不是唯一一家，也不是第一家，相信自己能极大扩张资产负债表、而不必承担巨额风险增长的银行。

It was hard enough for a well-established investment bank such as Goldman Sachs, with a long history of trading and a cohesive culture, to monitor and control its employees. UBS, which was trying to catch up with Wall Street as fast as it could by hiring outsiders and buying other banks, was out of its depth.

即便是对高盛(Goldman Sachs)这样拥有悠久交易历史和富有凝聚力的文化的老牌投行，监控其员工行为仍然困难重重。而瑞银试图通过雇佣外来人员以及收购其他银行，来尽可能赶上华尔街的步伐，监控员工的难度超出了其能力范围。

Given its repeated failure to abide by its own promises, the sensible response was to scale back. Under pressure from regulators and higher capital standards, it did that in October, announcing that it would slash its fixed-income division, the scene of many losses.

鉴于瑞银屡次未能遵守自己作出的承诺，合理的解决办法是缩减业务。瑞银10月份正是这么做的，当时在监管机构以及更高资本标准的压力下，瑞银宣布将大幅裁减其固定收益部门，正是这一部门导致了许多亏损。

However, investment banking is expensive to enter, expensive to manage (since the employees siphon off much of the revenues) and expensive to quit. Over the next three years UBS wants to cut 10,000 jobs and to wind down billions of dollars in derivatives and bonds, a challenge which Jeremy Sigee, an analyst at Barclays, compares with “dismantling a nuclear power station while it is still in operation.

然而，投资银行的进入、管理（大量收入都被员工抽走）和退出成本都很高。今后三年瑞银打算裁减1万个工作岗位，并且将衍生品和债券方面的投资逐步减少数十亿美元。巴克莱(Barclays)分析师杰里米·西吉(Jeremy Sigee)将瑞银面临的这一挑战比作“拆除一个正在运转的核电站。

Even if it does, UBS still needs to pull off something that has always defeated it – get a grip on the rest of the business. Axel Weber, its new chairman, the former president of the Bundesbank, says he wants to instil a similar public service ethos at UBS: “We need more company focus and team spirit.

即便瑞银能做到，它仍然需要摆脱某些一直为它带来失败的因素——它需要对其余业务加强控制。瑞银新董事长、前德国央行(Bundesbank)行长埃克塞尔·韦伯(Axel Weber)表示，他希望在瑞银逐步培养起与德国央行类似的公众服务精神：“我们需要对企业更加关注，我们需要更多团队精神。

To judge by the Libor inquiry, there has been little of that in some parts of UBS. Instead, the bank permitted rampant individualism, with traders cajoling and bribing each other, and brokers from outside UBS, to fix the prices of official contracts according to what made them the most money.

通过Libor丑闻的调查来判断，在瑞银某些部门几乎毫无以上精神。相反，瑞银纵容个人主义疯狂滋长，交易员通过哄骗和贿赂其他内部交易员及外部经纪人，操纵官方合同价格以赚取最大收益。

Looking back, UBS does not strike me as a corrupt or fraudulent bank so much as a naive and careless one. It cut too many corners to compete in an industry in which extreme caution was required. Now, at last, it has to change its ways.

回顾过去，瑞银令我震惊之处在于，与其说它是一家腐败或欺诈性的银行，不如说是一家无知而疏忽大意的银行。为在行业中竞争，瑞银走了太多捷径，而这个行业却偏偏需要极端小心。如今，瑞银终于不得不改变其旧有方式。