网帖翻译

（接上）

Deregulation has also allowed the UK to become a global centre for financial fraud. A 2016 report estimated that financial fraud costs the UK £193bn per year — more than the entire budget of the National Health Service. Margaret Hodge, the former head of the UK’s Public Accounts Committee, named Britain as “the country of choice for every kleptocrat, crook and despot in the world”. In one high profile case that demonstrated this role London now serves, the city was at the centre of a massive Russian money-laundering scheme where Russian insiders laundered as much as $80 billion in dirty money, passing it through fictitious companies registered in London.


放松管制也使英国成为全球金融欺诈中心。2016 年的一份报告估计，金融欺诈每年给英国造成 1930 亿英镑的损失——超过英国国民健康服务体系的全部预算。英国公共账目委员会前主席玛格丽特·霍奇称英国是“世界上所有贪腐统治者、骗子和独裁者的首选国家”。一起备受瞩目的案件表明了伦敦现在扮演的这一角色，该市是俄罗斯大规模洗钱计划的中心，俄罗斯内部人士通过在伦敦注册的虚构公司洗钱，洗钱金额高达 800 亿美元。

The City of London — the deregulated, semi-independent financial district of London — is also at the centre of the world’s “shadow banking” economy, which is now estimated to account for half the world’s assets. Britain has created, since the 1950s, a deeply complex financial ecosystem which makes use of deregulated offshore British jurisdictions like the Cayman Islands and Jersey, allowing the world’s super rich to hide their wealth and business activities from tax and regulation.


伦敦金融城是伦敦不受监管的半独立金融区，也是世界“影子银行”经济的中心，据估计，目前影子银行经济占世界资产的一半。自 1950 年代以来，英国创造了一个极其复杂的金融生态系统，利用开曼群岛和泽西岛等不受监管的英国离岸司法管辖区，让世界超级富豪能够隐藏他们的财富和商业活动，逃避税收和监管。

Deregulation by the British government of the “Eurodollar market” of offshore trading — done consciously at a time of British colonial decline to try and maintain British financial power — allowed the City of London to become “the main nerve centre of the darker global offshore system that hides and guards the world’s stolen wealth.” The City of London thus benefits from depriving the world of hundreds of billions in lost taxation and facilitating fraud and deceit on a massive scale.

英国政府放松对离岸交易“欧洲美元市场”的管制——这是在英国殖民衰落时期有意识地采取的措施，目的是试图维护英国的金融实力——这使伦敦金融城成为“隐藏和守护世界被盗财富的黑暗全球离岸体系的主要神经中枢” 。因此，伦敦金融城从剥夺世界数千亿美元的税收损失和大规模欺诈和欺骗中获益。

An overlooked way in which financialisation drags down the rest of the economy is in how the rentier state treats the national currency. The attempt to make Britain a hub for inflows of foreign money has made successive governments want a “strong” or overvalued pound sterling relative to other currencies.

金融化拖累经济其他部分的一个被忽视的方面是食利国家如何对待本国货币。为了使英国成为外国资金流入的枢纽，历届政府都希望英镑相对于其他货币“坚挺”或被高估。

The effect of this overvalued pound contributed substantially to the decline of British manufacturing — exporters suffer from an overvalued currency, as their products become less affordable to other countries. From 1950 to 1970, Britain’s share of the world’s manufacturing fell from 25% to 10%. While this has often been presented as an inevitable feature of modernisation, in the same period Germany grew its share from 7% to 20%. The key difference is that in Germany, monetary policies have consciously been set to favour the growth of industry, whereas Britain has treated industrial interests as subordinate to finance and banking.

英镑高估的影响在很大程度上导致了英国制造业的衰落——出口商遭受货币高估的困扰，因为他们的产品在其他国家变得难以负担。从 1950 年到 1970 年，英国在全球制造业中的份额从 25% 下降到 10%。虽然这通常被认为是现代化的必然特征，但在同一时期，德国的份额从 7% 增长到 20%。关键的区别在于，德国的货币政策有意识地倾向于支持工业增长，而英国则将工业利益视为从属于金融和银行业。

In leaning on finance to replace the economic growth once provided by industrial output and innovation, Britain followed the course of other once great empires. Previous capitalist hegemons like Genoa and the Netherlands also encouraged financial speculation and tried to build their economies on usury as they went into decline.


英国依靠金融来取代曾经由工业产出和创新带来的经济增长，这追随了其他曾经伟大的帝国的脚步。热那亚和荷兰等前资本主义霸权国家在衰落时也鼓励金融投机，并试图依靠高利贷来建立经济。

For Britain, this has allowed the country to maintain a level of economic might that its citizens were accustomed to, but this is a precarious state of affairs. The economist Philip Pilkington explains how this affair with international finance works:

对于英国来说，这使得该国能够维持其公民习惯的经济实力水平，但这是一种不稳定的状态。经济学家菲利普·皮尔金顿解释了这一国际金融事件是如何运作的：

Britain is allowed to run large trade deficits because its trade partners are keen to hold British-domiciled financial assets. This in turn allows Britons to live beyond their means. Foreigners send Britain goods they would otherwise be unable to afford, Britain sends sterling in return and instead of dumping sterling onto foreign exchange markets — thereby driving down its value and rendering the goods less affordable for Britons — the foreigners buy British financial assets. Britain is a potentially rather low-income country living the life of a high-income country, and the whole show is kept on the road by the financiers in the City. A clever arrangement — but clearly an unstable one.

英国之所以能够出现巨额贸易逆差，是因为其贸易伙伴热衷于持有英国境内的金融资产。这反过来又使英国人入不敷出。外国人向英国提供他们原本买不起的商品，英国则向其提供英镑，而外国人并没有将英镑抛售到外汇市场——这会压低英镑价值，使英国人买不起这些商品——而是购买英国的金融资产。英国是一个潜在的低收入国家，却过着高收入国家的生活，而整个局面都由金融城的金融家们掌控着。这是一个聪明的安排——但显然是不稳定的。

There is already reason to think this precarious relationship is in jeopardy. The rich are fleeing the UK in droves — 9,500 millionaires are set to leave the UK in 2024. The UK is only behind China worldwide for millionaire emigration, but outpaces it per capita by a factor of 14.

已经有理由认为，这种不稳定的关系正处于危险之中。富人正成群结队地逃离英国——预计到 2024 年，将有 9,500 名百万富翁离开英国。英国的百万富翁移民数量仅次于中国，但人均移民数量却是中国的 14 倍。

At the same time, many heavy hitters within the British economy are being sold to American capital. Blackrock has just finalised a deal to acquire the UK-based data provider Preqin for $3.2 billion. To economists like Pilkington, this is another phase in Britain’s long decline and retreat from the world stage, the final consolidation of a post-war settlement which made the UK a subordinate partner to the United States:

与此同时，英国经济中的许多重量级机构正在被出售给美国资本。贝莱德刚刚敲定以 32 亿美元收购英国数据提供商Preqin的交易。对于皮尔金顿这样的经济学家来说，这是英国长期衰落和退出世界舞台的另一个阶段，也是战后协议的最终巩固，该协议使英国成为美国的从属伙伴：

In the Eighties and Nineties, Britain managed to carve out a place in the world by becoming a major financial centre. But it has long been well-known that the City of London is just an outpost of Wall Street. Since the 2008 financial crisis, the City has waned in importance with more and more British companies being listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Now the financialised British economy is being actively weaponised against the country to asset-strip its companies and place them under American ownership.

20 世纪 80 年代和 90 年代，英国成功成为世界主要金融中心，在世界占据一席之地。但众所周知，伦敦金融城只是华尔街的前哨。自 2008 年金融危机以来，随着越来越多的英国公司在纽约证券交易所上市，伦敦金融城的重要性已逐渐减弱。现在，金融化的英国经济正被积极用作对付该国的武器，以剥离其公司的资产并将其置于美国手中。

Left Behind
A 2022 piece in the Financial Times painted a bleak picture of the economic reality for most Brits that is masked by popular measures of economic health like GDP. Although Britain has many wealthy people, the average person is not very well off compared to other developed countries. In fact, the lowest-earning bracket of households in Britain were 20% worse off than their counterparts in Slovenia. The British middle class is also rapidly declining in its living standard relative to the rest of Europe:

留下来
《金融时报》 2022 年的一篇文章描绘了大多数英国人经济状况的惨淡图景，而这一图景被 GDP 等流行的经济健康状况指标所掩盖。尽管英国有很多富人，但与其他发达国家相比，普通人的生活水平并不高。事实上，英国收入最低的家庭比斯洛文尼亚的家庭收入低 20%。与欧洲其他国家相比，英国中产阶级的生活水平也在迅速下降：
原创翻译：龙腾网 https://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处

In 2007, the average UK household was 8 per cent worse off than its peers in north-western Europe, but the deficit has since ballooned to a record 20 per cent. On present trends, the average Slovenian household will be better off than its British counterpart by 2024, and the average Polish family will move ahead before the end of the decade.

2007 年，英国家庭的平均收入比西北欧国家低 8%，但此后这一差距已飙升至创纪录的 20%。按照目前的趋势，到 2024 年，斯洛文尼亚家庭的平均收入将超过英国家庭，而波兰家庭的平均收入将在 2030 年前超过英国家庭。

Britain is, in the authors words, a poor country with some very rich people. Another way to put it might be that Britain is poor country with one very rich region. Data presented by the same author shows that removing London would take 14% off average British living standards, enough to leave the remainder of Britain poorer than every state in the US.

用作者的话来说，英国是一个贫穷的国家，但有一些非常富有的人。另一种说法可能是，英国是一个贫穷的国家，但有一个非常富裕的地区。同一位作者提供的数据显示，如果去掉伦敦，英国人的平均生活水平将下降 14%，足以让英国其他地区比美国每个州都穷。

This reflects how much Britain’s general decline has been masked by the growth of finance capitalism. The British economy has been stagnant since the 2008 financial crisis. In the period since, real wages have declined by 3%. For comparison, real wages in Germany grew by almost 9% in the same period. This has been coupled with a cost of living crisis and persistently high inflation since 2021, as well as a rising cost in rents. More than a third of people in Britain spend over half their income on rent, 80% spent over a third. Here too, the shift to a rentier economy has been devastating.

这反映出英国的普遍衰退在多大程度上被金融资本主义的增长所掩盖。自 2008 年金融危机以来，英国经济一直处于停滞状态。自那以来，实际工资下降了 3%。相比之下，德国的实际工资在同一时期增长了近 9%。与此同时，自 2021 年以来，生活成本危机和持续的高通胀以及租金成本的上涨也随之而来。超过三分之一的英国人将收入的一半以上花在房租上，80% 的人将收入的三分之一以上花在房租上。从这里看，向食利经济的转变也是毁灭性的。

In the general election that won her power in 1979, one of Margaret Thatcher’s more popular promises was the “right to buy”, promising over 5 million tenants of social housing the right to buy their home from the local authorities at much reduced rates. The average discount obtained by those availing of the scheme was 44%, an amazing bargain considering how much the value of many of these houses would inflate since — in southern England in 1981 the average valuation of a Right to Buy property was just under £20,000. Most sales were financed by lending.


在 1979 年赢得大选的大选中，撒切尔夫人最受瞩目的承诺之一就是“购买权”，承诺 500 多万社会住房租户有权以大幅降低的价格从地方当局购买住房。该计划的受益者获得的平均折扣为 44%，考虑到许多此类房屋的价值会大幅膨胀，这惊人的便宜——1981 年在英格兰南部，购买权房产的平均估值略低于 20,000 英镑。大多数销售都是通过贷款融资的。

This policy embodied Thatcher’s ethos as much as any, flogging off public resources at a discount, funded by private credit, and instilling in the millions of new homeowners a spirit of risk-taking individualism and independence from the welfare state.

这项政策充分体现了撒切尔夫人的精神：以折扣价出售公共资源，由私人信贷提供资金，并向数百万新房主灌输一种敢于冒险的个人主义和独立于福利国家的精神。

In the following decade, rents rose substantially on those who did not avail of the Right to Buy. In effect, poorer renters subsidised through higher rents the ability of their wealthier neighbours to become homeowners. Since Right to Buy, the number of social housing available has plummeted, as has building of these houses. 40% of ex-council flats sold through statutory Right to Buy are now private rental properties. So, while lower-middle class Britons got to experience affordable home ownership in the 1980s, millions of younger people now exist in precarity around housing, forced into overly expensive privately rented accommodation with no hope of affording a home.

在接下来的十年里，没有享受购买权的人的租金大幅上涨。实际上，较贫穷的租房者通过提高租金补贴了较富裕的邻居成为房主的能力。自购买权颁布以来，可用的社会住房数量急剧下降，这些房屋的建设也急剧下降。通过法定购买权出售的 40% 的前政府公寓现在是私人出租物业。因此，虽然中下阶层的英国人在 1980 年代体验到了负担得起的房屋所有权，但数百万年轻人现在却生活在住房方面岌岌可危的境地，被迫住在过于昂贵的私人出租房屋中，没有希望买得起房子。
原创翻译：龙腾网 https://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处

The scheme also took away power from local authorities, who can now do little about local housing problems other than turn to the London government. This was one of the largest privatisation schemes ever undertaken, a major step in the transition to a rentier economy, and a classic example of politicians cashing in on short term gain at the expense of long-term concerns. Much like the cash giveaway taken from North Sea oil, Thatcher’s government took from future generations for short term abundance.

该计划还剥夺了地方当局的权力，现在地方当局除了求助于伦敦政府外，几乎无力解决当地住房问题。这是有史以来实施的最大私有化计划之一，是向食利经济转型的重要一步，也是政客以牺牲长期利益为代价谋取短期利益的典型例子。就像从北海石油中获取的现金一样，撒切尔政府从子孙后代手中夺取了短期的富足。

Of course, no housing crisis can be explained just by looking at supply, and housing is one of the sectors of the economy most clearly affected by decades of mass-immigration.

当然，仅从供应角度无法解释任何住房危机，而且住房是受数十年来大规模移民影响最明显的经济部门之一。