“你美国去工业化关我中国什么事儿” 前CEO退休老头华斌继续数落美国之“杰克·韦尔奇、金融化以及美国去工业化的真正力量”
正文翻译
When I studied business in the mid-90s, there was no company more revered than General Electric and no CEO more respected than Jack Welch.
For years, GE was honored as the most admired company in the world and was the most valuable by market cap.
Jack Welch was the idol corporate chieftain case-studied in every business school and emulated by aspiring “corporate leaders”. He pioneered “the GE Way”.
GE had an array of world leading businesses from aircraft engines, turbines, health care, NBC, Universal Studios, to refrigerators and light bulbs. GE Finance led in aircraft leasing and financing of capital goods produced by GE’s industrial units.
在我90年代中期学习商科时，没有哪家公司比通用电气更受推崇，也没有哪位CEO比杰克·韦尔奇更受尊敬。
多年来，通用电气被誉为世界上最受尊敬的公司，同时也是市值最高的企业。
杰克·韦尔奇是各大商学院研究的偶像级企业领袖典范，也是众多胸怀大志的“企业领导者”竞相效仿的对象。他开创了“通用电气之道”。
通用电气拥有一系列世界领先的业务，从飞机发动机、涡轮机、医疗保健、NBC电视台、环球影业，到冰箱和灯泡。通用电气金融部门则在飞机租赁和由其工业部门生产的资本货物的融资领域占据领导地位。
GE executives were widely courted as corporate superstars.
When Welch retired in 2001 and Jeff Immelt took over as CEO, several frontrunners to succeed Welch immediately were headhunted to run other major corporations – Robert Nardelli at Home Depot, Jim McNerney at 3M and then Boeing, David Cote at TRW and then Honeywell.
Welch, a.k.a. Neutron Jack, was a ruthless cost cutter and famously claimed for any business GE was in, it should be either No. 1 or No. 2 or get out.
He was the original Wall Street darling, laser-focused on quarterly earnings and stock price. Welch aggressively offshored and outsourced manufacturing overseas to reduce labor costs and taxes.
通用电气的高管们被广泛追捧为企业界的超级明星。
当韦尔奇于2001年退休，杰夫·伊梅尔特接任CEO时，几位曾被视为韦尔奇接班热门人选的高管立即被猎头挖走，去执掌其他大型企业——罗伯特·纳德里去了家得宝，詹姆斯·麦克纳尼去了3M随后又执掌波音，戴维·科特去了TRW之后又领导霍尼韦尔。
韦尔奇，人称"中子杰克"，是一位无情的成本削减者，他有一句名言：通用电气涉足的任何业务，都必须做到行业第一或第二，否则就退出。
他是华尔街最初的宠儿，极度专注于季度盈利和股价。韦尔奇积极地将制造业务离岸外包到海外，以降低劳动力成本和税负。
Most importantly, Welch prioritized GE Finance over the legacy industrial and consumer BUs and turned GE essentially into a financial company by the time of his retirement.
In its height, Welch and GE were lionized with books such as his own memoir Straight from the Gut and Robert Slater’s Jack Welch and the GE Way.
Fast forward to today, GE has become a footnote in American business and its stock price is lower than 2001 when Welch retired.
The company was broken apart into three separate businesses.
Few b-school students know anything about the company and if any case studies were done on the company, it is to show how the mighty have fallen.
最重要的是，韦尔奇将通用电气金融置于传统的工业和消费业务部门之上，到他退休时，已实质上将通用电气转变为一家金融公司。
在其鼎盛时期，韦尔奇和通用电气备受推崇，相关著作层出不穷，例如他自己的回忆录《杰克·韦尔奇自传》以及罗伯特·斯莱特所著的《杰克·韦尔奇与通用电气之路》。
快进到今天，通用电气已沦为美国商业史上的一个注脚，其股价甚至低于韦尔奇2001年退休时的水平。
这家公司已被拆分为三家独立的业务实体。
如今，很少有商学院的学生对这家公司有所了解；即使有相关的案例分析，也多半是为了展示昔日巨擘如何衰落。
In 2018, as the ultimate coup de grace, GE was ousted from the Dow Jones Index and replaced by Walgreen.
GE’s fall symbolizes the fall of industrial America and the rise of financial capitalism.
Welch famously quipped “GE is not in the business of making engines or light bulbs, it is in the business of making money”.
This has become the ethos of Wall Street and high street.
Money making alone has become the yardstick to measure success, permeating into popular culture through movies like Oliver Stone’s Wall Street and Norman Jewison’s Other People’s Money.
Also books like Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of Vanity and Michael Lewis’ true account Liar’s Poker.
2018年，作为最终的致命一击，通用电气被逐出道琼斯指数，由沃尔格林取而代之。
通用电气的衰落象征着美国工业的没落和金融资本主义的崛起。
韦尔奇有句名言："通用电气的业务不是制造发动机或灯泡，而是赚钱。"
这已成为华尔街和主流商界的核心理念。
唯利是图已成为衡量成功的标尺，并通过奥利弗·斯通的电影《华尔街》、诺曼·杰威森的《金钱太保》等作品渗透进大众文化。
同样传递这一理念的还有汤姆·沃尔夫的小说《虚荣的篝火》以及迈克尔·刘易斯基于真实事件撰写的《说谎者的扑克牌》。
While these movies and books were critical of the money culture of the go-go 1980s, many people took them up as inspirations to make a killing by learning from the characters played by Michael Douglas and Danny de Vitto.
Lewis, the greatest financial chronicler and satirist of our time (he was also the author of The Big Short), said in an interview that he received thousands of letters when The Liar’s Poker was published in 1989.
While the book was a sharp and hilarious critique of his former employer and Wall Street bond king Soloman Brothers, most of the letters asked Lewis how to get in Soloman Brothers, taking the book as a how-to guide.
A side note, I loved the book when I first read it in the 90s and still consider it the best memoir about Wall Street ever. Not even Jordan Belfort’s The Wolf of Wall Street is close. Still worth reading today.
The story of GE and the rise of Wall Street symbolizes the financialization of the US economy.
尽管这些电影和书籍旨在批判80年代狂热的金钱文化，许多人却从中获得"灵感"，试图效仿迈克尔·道格拉斯和丹尼·德维托饰演的角色在金融市场上大赚一笔。
我们这个时代最伟大的金融记录者兼讽刺作家刘易斯（他也是《大空头》的作者）曾在采访中提到，1989年《说谎者的扑克牌》出版时，他收到了数千封读者来信。
尽管这本书是对他前雇主所罗门兄弟公司——这位华尔街债券之王——犀利而诙谐的批判，但绝大多数来信都是询问刘易斯如何能进入所罗门兄弟公司工作，把这本书当作了求职指南。
顺便提一句，我在90年代初次读到这本书时就非常喜欢，至今仍认为它是有史以来关于华尔街的最佳回忆录。即便是乔丹·贝尔福特的《华尔街之狼》也难以与之比肩。时至今日，这本书依然值得一读。
通用电气的故事与华尔街的崛起，共同象征着美国经济的金融化进程。
Financialization is the increasing dominance of financial markets, incentives, and institutions over the “real” economy of production and services.
Financialization orients economic activity toward generating profits through financial channels, such as trading and speculation, rather than through traditional manufacturing and production – activities that used to be called “an honest day’s work”.
The rise of modern financialization started in the 1970s, following the end of the Bretton Woods monetary system under Richard Nixon, the single most important event in US economic history after WW2.
金融化是指金融市场、金融激励和金融机构对生产与服务等"实体"经济的主导地位日益增强。
金融化使经济活动转向通过金融渠道——如交易与投机——来创造利润，而非通过传统的制造与生产。那些传统的生产活动，过去常被称为"诚实的劳动"。
现代金融化的兴起始于1970年代，紧随理查德·尼克松终结布雷顿森林货币体系之后。这一事件是二战后美国经济史上最重要的事件。
Subsequent governments, especially under President Reagon, opened the financial deregulation floodgate with predictable results –
Growing financial sector: the size and influence of the financial sector have increased relative to the total economy. Financial assets have grown to vastly outstrip the output of the real economy.
Shift in corporate behavior: Even non-financial companies now earn a larger share of their profits from financial activities rather than from their core business. GM regularly makes more money from its financing arm than from selling cars.
Shareholder value doctrine: The focus on maximizing shareholder value has led to practices like stock buybacks, often at the expense of long-term investments in production or R&D.
随后的政府，特别是在里根总统任内，开启了金融放松管制的闸门，其结果可想而知：
金融业规模膨胀：金融业的规模和影响力相对于整体经济显著增加。金融资产的增长速度已大幅超越实体经济的产出。
企业行为转变：如今，即便是非金融公司，其利润中也有更大比例来自于金融活动，而非核心业务。通用汽车从金融部门获得的利润，常常超过其销售汽车所得。
股东价值至上：对股东价值最大化的追求，导致了股票回购等盛行行为，而这些行为往往以牺牲生产或研发方面的长期投资为代价。
Financialization of daily life: Households have become more intertwined with financial markets through home mortgages, consumer debt, student loans, payday loans, and defined-contribution retirement plans like 401(k)s. This transfers financial risks from corporations and the state to individuals.
Deregulation and “innovation”: Beginning in the 1980s, financial deregulation and the rise of technology enabled new financial products and markets, including complex derivatives, securitized assets, and high frequency trading. These “innovations” facilitate greater speculation and systemic risk.
日常生活金融化：家庭通过住房抵押贷款、消费债务、学生贷款、发薪日贷款以及像401(k)这样的固定缴费型退休计划，与金融市场的联系日益紧密。这实际上将金融风险从企业和国家转移到了个人身上。
放松管制与"创新"：自1980年代起，金融放松管制和技术的兴起催生了新的金融产品和市场，包括复杂的衍生品、证券化资产和高频交易。这些"创新"为更大规模的投机和系统性风险提供了条件。
I don’t know about you, but I still can barely understand the CDOs (collateralized debt obligations), CDSs (credit default swaps), or synthetic CDOs after reading The Big Short book twice and watching the movie three times.
Even Margot Robbie failed to make it clear. And I thought I had a decent education in finance.
Financialization has been lixed to a rise in income and wealth inequality.
Executive compensation, often tied to stock performance, has grown dramatically, while financial speculation has disproportionately benefited high-income earners who own financial assets.
US CEOs regularly make 300 to 400 times the total comp of average employees today, compared with 20 – 30 times in the 1960s.
不知道你们怎么看，反正我在读了两遍《大空头》原著，看了三遍电影之后，依然几乎搞不懂什么是CDO（担保债务凭证）、CDS（信用违约互换）或者合成CDO。
连玛格特·罗比都没能把它讲明白。而我本以为自己受过还算不错的金融教育。
金融化与收入和财富不平等的加剧密切相关。
与股票表现挂钩的高管薪酬大幅增长，而金融投机则不成比例地惠及了持有金融资产的高收入人群。
如今，美国CEO的总薪酬通常是普通员工的300到400倍，而在1960年代，这个比例仅是20到30倍。
The University of Chicago neoliberal economics thinkers, led by the eminent Jewish economic philosopher Milton Friedman, have provided the intellectual support and rationale for such corporate greed by telling the world the financial market is the most efficient in “allocating capital”. (Watch the other people’s money video clip at the end on Friedman’s pontifications on economics).
Such endorsement is supposed to reassure the population “in Wall Street we trust”.
Haven’t they monopolized Nobel economics prizes since 1976? How could anything go wrong in the steady hands of policy makers schooled in such economic wisdom?
Politicians in the West like to accuse China and other developing countries to steal jobs and cause deindustrialization.
No one seems to ask: has anyone put a gun on the heads of these multinational companies to offshore and outsource? Doesn’t the market know the best?
由杰出的犹太裔经济哲学家米尔顿·弗里德曼领衔的芝加哥大学新自由主义经济学思想家们，通过向世界宣称金融市场在"配置资本"方面最有效率，为这种企业贪婪提供了智识支持和理论依据。（可观看文末关于弗里德曼经济论述的《金钱太保》视频片段）。
这种背书本应让民众确信"我们信任华尔街"。
自1976年以来，他们不是几乎垄断了诺贝尔经济学奖吗？在受过如此经济智慧熏陶的政策制定者稳健掌控下，怎会出错呢？
西方政客喜欢指责中国和其他发展中国家窃取工作岗位、导致去工业化。
但似乎没人追问：可曾有人用枪顶着这些跨国公司的脑袋逼他们进行离岸外包？市场难道不是最清楚该怎么做吗？
Greed alone drives the behavior of these businesses in the capitalist system. After all, making money is the lone purpose of a business, as Welch proclaimed.
When Gordon Gekko pronounced “Greed is Good”, he illuminated for us: “greed, for lack of a better word, is fundamentally good, right, and essential for progress, clarifying, and capturing the evolutionary spirit, driving mankind’s upward surge for life, money, love, and knowledge, and ultimately saving failing entities like Teldar Paper… and the USA”.
Greed is to be celebrated, not denounced. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Ellison are crowned as the Colossus and Oracle (no wonder they picked these grandiose names for their businesses).
General Electric’s 1953 annual report boasted that the firm’s “biggest payday ever” was the record sum it had paid for labor, because prosperity shared with workers was judged a source of national strength.
在资本主义体系中，贪婪是驱动这些企业行为的唯一动力。毕竟，正如韦尔奇所宣称的，赚钱是企业的唯一目的。
当戈登·盖柯宣告"贪婪是好的"时，他为我们阐明了："贪婪，恕我直言，本质上是好的、正确的，并且是进步、澄明和把握进化精神所必需的，它驱动着人类在生活、金钱、爱和知识方面的向上攀升，并最终拯救了像泰达纸业……和美国这样濒临失败的实体。"
贪婪值得颂扬，而非谴责。埃隆·马斯克、杰夫·贝佐斯和拉里·埃里森被奉为巨擘与先知（难怪他们为自己的企业选择了这些宏伟的名称）。
通用电气在1953年的年度报告中自豪地宣称，公司"有史以来最大的发薪日"是支付给劳动力的创纪录薪酬，因为与工人共享繁荣被视为国家力量的源泉。
That made GE one of the most progressive and responsible corporate employers.
However, in the twenty years Jack Welch was the CEO, he eliminated more than 100,000 GE jobs, shuttered dozens of US factories, moved production abroad, and transformed the company from an industrial titan into a quasi-bank whose largest profit engine was the unregulated lending arm GE Capital.
For his trouble, Jack Welch received a severance pay of $417 million when he retired in 2001, reportedly the largest such payment in business history at the time.
Welsh supplied a playbook that hundreds of other corporations copied, helping to hollow out America’s industrial base and shift the economy’s center of gravity from the factory floor to the trading floor.
这使得通用电气成为最具进步性和责任感的雇主之一。
然而，在杰克·韦尔奇担任CEO的二十年里，他裁减了超过10万个通用电气的工作岗位，关闭了数十家美国工厂，将生产转移到海外，并将公司从一个工业巨头转变为准银行机构——其最大的利润引擎是未受监管的贷款部门"通用电气金融"。
作为其"辛劳"的回报，杰克·韦尔奇在2001年退休时获得了4.17亿美元的离职金，据报道这是当时商业史上金额最高的此类支付。
韦尔奇提供了一套被数百家公司效仿的行动剧本，这加速掏空了美国的工业基础，并将经济的重心从生产车间转移到了交易大厅。
Welch turned GE into both the emblem and the engine of America’s transition from a society that built things to one that trades paper claims on the value others create.
The Welch era marked a hinge moment in US economic history: the moment when deindustrialization and financialization became conscious corporate strategy rather than unavoidable fate.
The ruins of that model—industrial ghost towns, a shrinking middle class, and an economy prone to financial crisis—are the enduring legacy of the man once hailed as “Manager of the Century.”
Another gift from Jack Welch to corporate America is short-termism, a.k.a. quarterly capitalism.
韦尔奇将通用电气塑造成了一个标志与引擎，标志着美国从一个制造实物的社会，转变为一个交易他人创造价值的纸质凭证的社会。
韦尔奇时代是美国经济史上的一个转折点：去工业化和金融化从一种无法避免的命运，变成了企业有意识的战略。
这一模式留下的废墟——工业鬼城、萎缩的中产阶级以及易受金融危机冲击的经济——正是这位曾被尊为"世纪经理人"所留下的持久遗产。
杰克·韦尔奇送给美国企业界的另一份"礼物"是短期主义，即季度资本主义。
Since R&D and CAPEX take a long time to yield results, they are abandoned in favor of projects that generate returns in the next quarter.
If financial engineering boosts the P&L immediately, why bother with real engineering?
The philosophy is adopted in the political world as well. Why would any politician build a highspeed rail network if such an undertaking will take 2 decades? The cost will be upfront and the benefits only come much later.
Will any rational term-based politician make such long-term planning today? The US inter-state highway system was built between 1956 and 1992, nearly 4 decades. Would such long-term whole-of-nation endeavor be possible today?
King Louis xiV said out aloud his governing creed: “Après moi, le déluge”. It is practiced by the capitalists – the corporate aristocracy – now.
Check out the below Capitalist Manifestos:
既然研发和资本支出需要很长时间才能产生成果，它们便被舍弃，转而青睐能在下个季度就产生回报的项目。
如果金融工程能立即提振利润表，谁还费心去做真正的工程呢？
这种哲学在政治领域同样被采纳。如果建设高速铁路网络需要20年，哪位政治家会愿意推动呢？成本需当下承担，而收益则要等到很久以后。
如今，任何理性的任期制政治家还会做这样的长远规划吗？美国的州际公路系统建于1956年至1992年间，历时近40年。在今天，这样的长期全国性工程还可能实现吗？
法国国王路易十四曾高调宣扬他的治国信条："我死后，哪管洪水滔天"。如今，资本家——即企业贵族阶层——正在践行这一点。
（完）
When I studied business in the mid-90s, there was no company more revered than General Electric and no CEO more respected than Jack Welch.
For years, GE was honored as the most admired company in the world and was the most valuable by market cap.
Jack Welch was the idol corporate chieftain case-studied in every business school and emulated by aspiring “corporate leaders”. He pioneered “the GE Way”.
GE had an array of world leading businesses from aircraft engines, turbines, health care, NBC, Universal Studios, to refrigerators and light bulbs. GE Finance led in aircraft leasing and financing of capital goods produced by GE’s industrial units.
在我90年代中期学习商科时，没有哪家公司比通用电气更受推崇，也没有哪位CEO比杰克·韦尔奇更受尊敬。
多年来，通用电气被誉为世界上最受尊敬的公司，同时也是市值最高的企业。
杰克·韦尔奇是各大商学院研究的偶像级企业领袖典范，也是众多胸怀大志的“企业领导者”竞相效仿的对象。他开创了“通用电气之道”。
通用电气拥有一系列世界领先的业务，从飞机发动机、涡轮机、医疗保健、NBC电视台、环球影业，到冰箱和灯泡。通用电气金融部门则在飞机租赁和由其工业部门生产的资本货物的融资领域占据领导地位。
GE executives were widely courted as corporate superstars.
When Welch retired in 2001 and Jeff Immelt took over as CEO, several frontrunners to succeed Welch immediately were headhunted to run other major corporations – Robert Nardelli at Home Depot, Jim McNerney at 3M and then Boeing, David Cote at TRW and then Honeywell.
Welch, a.k.a. Neutron Jack, was a ruthless cost cutter and famously claimed for any business GE was in, it should be either No. 1 or No. 2 or get out.
He was the original Wall Street darling, laser-focused on quarterly earnings and stock price. Welch aggressively offshored and outsourced manufacturing overseas to reduce labor costs and taxes.
通用电气的高管们被广泛追捧为企业界的超级明星。
当韦尔奇于2001年退休，杰夫·伊梅尔特接任CEO时，几位曾被视为韦尔奇接班热门人选的高管立即被猎头挖走，去执掌其他大型企业——罗伯特·纳德里去了家得宝，詹姆斯·麦克纳尼去了3M随后又执掌波音，戴维·科特去了TRW之后又领导霍尼韦尔。
韦尔奇，人称"中子杰克"，是一位无情的成本削减者，他有一句名言：通用电气涉足的任何业务，都必须做到行业第一或第二，否则就退出。
他是华尔街最初的宠儿，极度专注于季度盈利和股价。韦尔奇积极地将制造业务离岸外包到海外，以降低劳动力成本和税负。
Most importantly, Welch prioritized GE Finance over the legacy industrial and consumer BUs and turned GE essentially into a financial company by the time of his retirement.
In its height, Welch and GE were lionized with books such as his own memoir Straight from the Gut and Robert Slater’s Jack Welch and the GE Way.
Fast forward to today, GE has become a footnote in American business and its stock price is lower than 2001 when Welch retired.
The company was broken apart into three separate businesses.
Few b-school students know anything about the company and if any case studies were done on the company, it is to show how the mighty have fallen.
最重要的是，韦尔奇将通用电气金融置于传统的工业和消费业务部门之上，到他退休时，已实质上将通用电气转变为一家金融公司。
在其鼎盛时期，韦尔奇和通用电气备受推崇，相关著作层出不穷，例如他自己的回忆录《杰克·韦尔奇自传》以及罗伯特·斯莱特所著的《杰克·韦尔奇与通用电气之路》。
快进到今天，通用电气已沦为美国商业史上的一个注脚，其股价甚至低于韦尔奇2001年退休时的水平。
这家公司已被拆分为三家独立的业务实体。
如今，很少有商学院的学生对这家公司有所了解；即使有相关的案例分析，也多半是为了展示昔日巨擘如何衰落。
In 2018, as the ultimate coup de grace, GE was ousted from the Dow Jones Index and replaced by Walgreen.
GE’s fall symbolizes the fall of industrial America and the rise of financial capitalism.
Welch famously quipped “GE is not in the business of making engines or light bulbs, it is in the business of making money”.
This has become the ethos of Wall Street and high street.
Money making alone has become the yardstick to measure success, permeating into popular culture through movies like Oliver Stone’s Wall Street and Norman Jewison’s Other People’s Money.
Also books like Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of Vanity and Michael Lewis’ true account Liar’s Poker.
2018年，作为最终的致命一击，通用电气被逐出道琼斯指数，由沃尔格林取而代之。
通用电气的衰落象征着美国工业的没落和金融资本主义的崛起。
韦尔奇有句名言："通用电气的业务不是制造发动机或灯泡，而是赚钱。"
这已成为华尔街和主流商界的核心理念。
唯利是图已成为衡量成功的标尺，并通过奥利弗·斯通的电影《华尔街》、诺曼·杰威森的《金钱太保》等作品渗透进大众文化。
同样传递这一理念的还有汤姆·沃尔夫的小说《虚荣的篝火》以及迈克尔·刘易斯基于真实事件撰写的《说谎者的扑克牌》。
While these movies and books were critical of the money culture of the go-go 1980s, many people took them up as inspirations to make a killing by learning from the characters played by Michael Douglas and Danny de Vitto.
Lewis, the greatest financial chronicler and satirist of our time (he was also the author of The Big Short), said in an interview that he received thousands of letters when The Liar’s Poker was published in 1989.
While the book was a sharp and hilarious critique of his former employer and Wall Street bond king Soloman Brothers, most of the letters asked Lewis how to get in Soloman Brothers, taking the book as a how-to guide.
A side note, I loved the book when I first read it in the 90s and still consider it the best memoir about Wall Street ever. Not even Jordan Belfort’s The Wolf of Wall Street is close. Still worth reading today.
The story of GE and the rise of Wall Street symbolizes the financialization of the US economy.
尽管这些电影和书籍旨在批判80年代狂热的金钱文化，许多人却从中获得"灵感"，试图效仿迈克尔·道格拉斯和丹尼·德维托饰演的角色在金融市场上大赚一笔。
我们这个时代最伟大的金融记录者兼讽刺作家刘易斯（他也是《大空头》的作者）曾在采访中提到，1989年《说谎者的扑克牌》出版时，他收到了数千封读者来信。
尽管这本书是对他前雇主所罗门兄弟公司——这位华尔街债券之王——犀利而诙谐的批判，但绝大多数来信都是询问刘易斯如何能进入所罗门兄弟公司工作，把这本书当作了求职指南。
顺便提一句，我在90年代初次读到这本书时就非常喜欢，至今仍认为它是有史以来关于华尔街的最佳回忆录。即便是乔丹·贝尔福特的《华尔街之狼》也难以与之比肩。时至今日，这本书依然值得一读。
通用电气的故事与华尔街的崛起，共同象征着美国经济的金融化进程。
Financialization is the increasing dominance of financial markets, incentives, and institutions over the “real” economy of production and services.
Financialization orients economic activity toward generating profits through financial channels, such as trading and speculation, rather than through traditional manufacturing and production – activities that used to be called “an honest day’s work”.
The rise of modern financialization started in the 1970s, following the end of the Bretton Woods monetary system under Richard Nixon, the single most important event in US economic history after WW2.
金融化是指金融市场、金融激励和金融机构对生产与服务等"实体"经济的主导地位日益增强。
金融化使经济活动转向通过金融渠道——如交易与投机——来创造利润，而非通过传统的制造与生产。那些传统的生产活动，过去常被称为"诚实的劳动"。
现代金融化的兴起始于1970年代，紧随理查德·尼克松终结布雷顿森林货币体系之后。这一事件是二战后美国经济史上最重要的事件。
Subsequent governments, especially under President Reagon, opened the financial deregulation floodgate with predictable results –
Growing financial sector: the size and influence of the financial sector have increased relative to the total economy. Financial assets have grown to vastly outstrip the output of the real economy.
Shift in corporate behavior: Even non-financial companies now earn a larger share of their profits from financial activities rather than from their core business. GM regularly makes more money from its financing arm than from selling cars.
Shareholder value doctrine: The focus on maximizing shareholder value has led to practices like stock buybacks, often at the expense of long-term investments in production or R&D.
随后的政府，特别是在里根总统任内，开启了金融放松管制的闸门，其结果可想而知：
金融业规模膨胀：金融业的规模和影响力相对于整体经济显著增加。金融资产的增长速度已大幅超越实体经济的产出。
企业行为转变：如今，即便是非金融公司，其利润中也有更大比例来自于金融活动，而非核心业务。通用汽车从金融部门获得的利润，常常超过其销售汽车所得。
股东价值至上：对股东价值最大化的追求，导致了股票回购等盛行行为，而这些行为往往以牺牲生产或研发方面的长期投资为代价。
Financialization of daily life: Households have become more intertwined with financial markets through home mortgages, consumer debt, student loans, payday loans, and defined-contribution retirement plans like 401(k)s. This transfers financial risks from corporations and the state to individuals.
Deregulation and “innovation”: Beginning in the 1980s, financial deregulation and the rise of technology enabled new financial products and markets, including complex derivatives, securitized assets, and high frequency trading. These “innovations” facilitate greater speculation and systemic risk.
日常生活金融化：家庭通过住房抵押贷款、消费债务、学生贷款、发薪日贷款以及像401(k)这样的固定缴费型退休计划，与金融市场的联系日益紧密。这实际上将金融风险从企业和国家转移到了个人身上。
放松管制与"创新"：自1980年代起，金融放松管制和技术的兴起催生了新的金融产品和市场，包括复杂的衍生品、证券化资产和高频交易。这些"创新"为更大规模的投机和系统性风险提供了条件。
I don’t know about you, but I still can barely understand the CDOs (collateralized debt obligations), CDSs (credit default swaps), or synthetic CDOs after reading The Big Short book twice and watching the movie three times.
Even Margot Robbie failed to make it clear. And I thought I had a decent education in finance.
Financialization has been lixed to a rise in income and wealth inequality.
Executive compensation, often tied to stock performance, has grown dramatically, while financial speculation has disproportionately benefited high-income earners who own financial assets.
US CEOs regularly make 300 to 400 times the total comp of average employees today, compared with 20 – 30 times in the 1960s.
不知道你们怎么看，反正我在读了两遍《大空头》原著，看了三遍电影之后，依然几乎搞不懂什么是CDO（担保债务凭证）、CDS（信用违约互换）或者合成CDO。
连玛格特·罗比都没能把它讲明白。而我本以为自己受过还算不错的金融教育。
金融化与收入和财富不平等的加剧密切相关。
与股票表现挂钩的高管薪酬大幅增长，而金融投机则不成比例地惠及了持有金融资产的高收入人群。
如今，美国CEO的总薪酬通常是普通员工的300到400倍，而在1960年代，这个比例仅是20到30倍。
The University of Chicago neoliberal economics thinkers, led by the eminent Jewish economic philosopher Milton Friedman, have provided the intellectual support and rationale for such corporate greed by telling the world the financial market is the most efficient in “allocating capital”. (Watch the other people’s money video clip at the end on Friedman’s pontifications on economics).
Such endorsement is supposed to reassure the population “in Wall Street we trust”.
Haven’t they monopolized Nobel economics prizes since 1976? How could anything go wrong in the steady hands of policy makers schooled in such economic wisdom?
Politicians in the West like to accuse China and other developing countries to steal jobs and cause deindustrialization.
No one seems to ask: has anyone put a gun on the heads of these multinational companies to offshore and outsource? Doesn’t the market know the best?
由杰出的犹太裔经济哲学家米尔顿·弗里德曼领衔的芝加哥大学新自由主义经济学思想家们，通过向世界宣称金融市场在"配置资本"方面最有效率，为这种企业贪婪提供了智识支持和理论依据。（可观看文末关于弗里德曼经济论述的《金钱太保》视频片段）。
这种背书本应让民众确信"我们信任华尔街"。
自1976年以来，他们不是几乎垄断了诺贝尔经济学奖吗？在受过如此经济智慧熏陶的政策制定者稳健掌控下，怎会出错呢？
西方政客喜欢指责中国和其他发展中国家窃取工作岗位、导致去工业化。
但似乎没人追问：可曾有人用枪顶着这些跨国公司的脑袋逼他们进行离岸外包？市场难道不是最清楚该怎么做吗？
Greed alone drives the behavior of these businesses in the capitalist system. After all, making money is the lone purpose of a business, as Welch proclaimed.
When Gordon Gekko pronounced “Greed is Good”, he illuminated for us: “greed, for lack of a better word, is fundamentally good, right, and essential for progress, clarifying, and capturing the evolutionary spirit, driving mankind’s upward surge for life, money, love, and knowledge, and ultimately saving failing entities like Teldar Paper… and the USA”.
Greed is to be celebrated, not denounced. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Ellison are crowned as the Colossus and Oracle (no wonder they picked these grandiose names for their businesses).
General Electric’s 1953 annual report boasted that the firm’s “biggest payday ever” was the record sum it had paid for labor, because prosperity shared with workers was judged a source of national strength.
在资本主义体系中，贪婪是驱动这些企业行为的唯一动力。毕竟，正如韦尔奇所宣称的，赚钱是企业的唯一目的。
当戈登·盖柯宣告"贪婪是好的"时，他为我们阐明了："贪婪，恕我直言，本质上是好的、正确的，并且是进步、澄明和把握进化精神所必需的，它驱动着人类在生活、金钱、爱和知识方面的向上攀升，并最终拯救了像泰达纸业……和美国这样濒临失败的实体。"
贪婪值得颂扬，而非谴责。埃隆·马斯克、杰夫·贝佐斯和拉里·埃里森被奉为巨擘与先知（难怪他们为自己的企业选择了这些宏伟的名称）。
通用电气在1953年的年度报告中自豪地宣称，公司"有史以来最大的发薪日"是支付给劳动力的创纪录薪酬，因为与工人共享繁荣被视为国家力量的源泉。
That made GE one of the most progressive and responsible corporate employers.
However, in the twenty years Jack Welch was the CEO, he eliminated more than 100,000 GE jobs, shuttered dozens of US factories, moved production abroad, and transformed the company from an industrial titan into a quasi-bank whose largest profit engine was the unregulated lending arm GE Capital.
For his trouble, Jack Welch received a severance pay of $417 million when he retired in 2001, reportedly the largest such payment in business history at the time.
Welsh supplied a playbook that hundreds of other corporations copied, helping to hollow out America’s industrial base and shift the economy’s center of gravity from the factory floor to the trading floor.
这使得通用电气成为最具进步性和责任感的雇主之一。
然而，在杰克·韦尔奇担任CEO的二十年里，他裁减了超过10万个通用电气的工作岗位，关闭了数十家美国工厂，将生产转移到海外，并将公司从一个工业巨头转变为准银行机构——其最大的利润引擎是未受监管的贷款部门"通用电气金融"。
作为其"辛劳"的回报，杰克·韦尔奇在2001年退休时获得了4.17亿美元的离职金，据报道这是当时商业史上金额最高的此类支付。
韦尔奇提供了一套被数百家公司效仿的行动剧本，这加速掏空了美国的工业基础，并将经济的重心从生产车间转移到了交易大厅。
Welch turned GE into both the emblem and the engine of America’s transition from a society that built things to one that trades paper claims on the value others create.
The Welch era marked a hinge moment in US economic history: the moment when deindustrialization and financialization became conscious corporate strategy rather than unavoidable fate.
The ruins of that model—industrial ghost towns, a shrinking middle class, and an economy prone to financial crisis—are the enduring legacy of the man once hailed as “Manager of the Century.”
Another gift from Jack Welch to corporate America is short-termism, a.k.a. quarterly capitalism.
韦尔奇将通用电气塑造成了一个标志与引擎，标志着美国从一个制造实物的社会，转变为一个交易他人创造价值的纸质凭证的社会。
韦尔奇时代是美国经济史上的一个转折点：去工业化和金融化从一种无法避免的命运，变成了企业有意识的战略。
这一模式留下的废墟——工业鬼城、萎缩的中产阶级以及易受金融危机冲击的经济——正是这位曾被尊为"世纪经理人"所留下的持久遗产。
杰克·韦尔奇送给美国企业界的另一份"礼物"是短期主义，即季度资本主义。
Since R&D and CAPEX take a long time to yield results, they are abandoned in favor of projects that generate returns in the next quarter.
If financial engineering boosts the P&L immediately, why bother with real engineering?
The philosophy is adopted in the political world as well. Why would any politician build a highspeed rail network if such an undertaking will take 2 decades? The cost will be upfront and the benefits only come much later.
Will any rational term-based politician make such long-term planning today? The US inter-state highway system was built between 1956 and 1992, nearly 4 decades. Would such long-term whole-of-nation endeavor be possible today?
King Louis xiV said out aloud his governing creed: “Après moi, le déluge”. It is practiced by the capitalists – the corporate aristocracy – now.
Check out the below Capitalist Manifestos:
既然研发和资本支出需要很长时间才能产生成果，它们便被舍弃，转而青睐能在下个季度就产生回报的项目。
如果金融工程能立即提振利润表，谁还费心去做真正的工程呢？
这种哲学在政治领域同样被采纳。如果建设高速铁路网络需要20年，哪位政治家会愿意推动呢？成本需当下承担，而收益则要等到很久以后。
如今，任何理性的任期制政治家还会做这样的长远规划吗？美国的州际公路系统建于1956年至1992年间，历时近40年。在今天，这样的长期全国性工程还可能实现吗？
法国国王路易十四曾高调宣扬他的治国信条："我死后，哪管洪水滔天"。如今，资本家——即企业贵族阶层——正在践行这一点。
（完）
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When I studied business in the mid-90s, there was no company more revered than General Electric and no CEO more respected than Jack Welch.
For years, GE was honored as the most admired company in the world and was the most valuable by market cap.
Jack Welch was the idol corporate chieftain case-studied in every business school and emulated by aspiring “corporate leaders”. He pioneered “the GE Way”.
GE had an array of world leading businesses from aircraft engines, turbines, health care, NBC, Universal Studios, to refrigerators and light bulbs. GE Finance led in aircraft leasing and financing of capital goods produced by GE’s industrial units.
在我90年代中期学习商科时，没有哪家公司比通用电气更受推崇，也没有哪位CEO比杰克·韦尔奇更受尊敬。
多年来，通用电气被誉为世界上最受尊敬的公司，同时也是市值最高的企业。
杰克·韦尔奇是各大商学院研究的偶像级企业领袖典范，也是众多胸怀大志的“企业领导者”竞相效仿的对象。他开创了“通用电气之道”。
通用电气拥有一系列世界领先的业务，从飞机发动机、涡轮机、医疗保健、NBC电视台、环球影业，到冰箱和灯泡。通用电气金融部门则在飞机租赁和由其工业部门生产的资本货物的融资领域占据领导地位。
GE executives were widely courted as corporate superstars.
When Welch retired in 2001 and Jeff Immelt took over as CEO, several frontrunners to succeed Welch immediately were headhunted to run other major corporations – Robert Nardelli at Home Depot, Jim McNerney at 3M and then Boeing, David Cote at TRW and then Honeywell.
Welch, a.k.a. Neutron Jack, was a ruthless cost cutter and famously claimed for any business GE was in, it should be either No. 1 or No. 2 or get out.
He was the original Wall Street darling, laser-focused on quarterly earnings and stock price. Welch aggressively offshored and outsourced manufacturing overseas to reduce labor costs and taxes.
通用电气的高管们被广泛追捧为企业界的超级明星。
当韦尔奇于2001年退休，杰夫·伊梅尔特接任CEO时，几位曾被视为韦尔奇接班热门人选的高管立即被猎头挖走，去执掌其他大型企业——罗伯特·纳德里去了家得宝，詹姆斯·麦克纳尼去了3M随后又执掌波音，戴维·科特去了TRW之后又领导霍尼韦尔。
韦尔奇，人称"中子杰克"，是一位无情的成本削减者，他有一句名言：通用电气涉足的任何业务，都必须做到行业第一或第二，否则就退出。
他是华尔街最初的宠儿，极度专注于季度盈利和股价。韦尔奇积极地将制造业务离岸外包到海外，以降低劳动力成本和税负。
Most importantly, Welch prioritized GE Finance over the legacy industrial and consumer BUs and turned GE essentially into a financial company by the time of his retirement.
In its height, Welch and GE were lionized with books such as his own memoir Straight from the Gut and Robert Slater’s Jack Welch and the GE Way.
Fast forward to today, GE has become a footnote in American business and its stock price is lower than 2001 when Welch retired.
The company was broken apart into three separate businesses.
Few b-school students know anything about the company and if any case studies were done on the company, it is to show how the mighty have fallen.
最重要的是，韦尔奇将通用电气金融置于传统的工业和消费业务部门之上，到他退休时，已实质上将通用电气转变为一家金融公司。
在其鼎盛时期，韦尔奇和通用电气备受推崇，相关著作层出不穷，例如他自己的回忆录《杰克·韦尔奇自传》以及罗伯特·斯莱特所著的《杰克·韦尔奇与通用电气之路》。
快进到今天，通用电气已沦为美国商业史上的一个注脚，其股价甚至低于韦尔奇2001年退休时的水平。
这家公司已被拆分为三家独立的业务实体。
如今，很少有商学院的学生对这家公司有所了解；即使有相关的案例分析，也多半是为了展示昔日巨擘如何衰落。
In 2018, as the ultimate coup de grace, GE was ousted from the Dow Jones Index and replaced by Walgreen.
GE’s fall symbolizes the fall of industrial America and the rise of financial capitalism.
Welch famously quipped “GE is not in the business of making engines or light bulbs, it is in the business of making money”.
This has become the ethos of Wall Street and high street.
Money making alone has become the yardstick to measure success, permeating into popular culture through movies like Oliver Stone’s Wall Street and Norman Jewison’s Other People’s Money.
Also books like Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of Vanity and Michael Lewis’ true account Liar’s Poker.
2018年，作为最终的致命一击，通用电气被逐出道琼斯指数，由沃尔格林取而代之。
通用电气的衰落象征着美国工业的没落和金融资本主义的崛起。
韦尔奇有句名言："通用电气的业务不是制造发动机或灯泡，而是赚钱。"
这已成为华尔街和主流商界的核心理念。
唯利是图已成为衡量成功的标尺，并通过奥利弗·斯通的电影《华尔街》、诺曼·杰威森的《金钱太保》等作品渗透进大众文化。
同样传递这一理念的还有汤姆·沃尔夫的小说《虚荣的篝火》以及迈克尔·刘易斯基于真实事件撰写的《说谎者的扑克牌》。
While these movies and books were critical of the money culture of the go-go 1980s, many people took them up as inspirations to make a killing by learning from the characters played by Michael Douglas and Danny de Vitto.
Lewis, the greatest financial chronicler and satirist of our time (he was also the author of The Big Short), said in an interview that he received thousands of letters when The Liar’s Poker was published in 1989.
While the book was a sharp and hilarious critique of his former employer and Wall Street bond king Soloman Brothers, most of the letters asked Lewis how to get in Soloman Brothers, taking the book as a how-to guide.
A side note, I loved the book when I first read it in the 90s and still consider it the best memoir about Wall Street ever. Not even Jordan Belfort’s The Wolf of Wall Street is close. Still worth reading today.
The story of GE and the rise of Wall Street symbolizes the financialization of the US economy.
尽管这些电影和书籍旨在批判80年代狂热的金钱文化，许多人却从中获得"灵感"，试图效仿迈克尔·道格拉斯和丹尼·德维托饰演的角色在金融市场上大赚一笔。
我们这个时代最伟大的金融记录者兼讽刺作家刘易斯（他也是《大空头》的作者）曾在采访中提到，1989年《说谎者的扑克牌》出版时，他收到了数千封读者来信。
尽管这本书是对他前雇主所罗门兄弟公司——这位华尔街债券之王——犀利而诙谐的批判，但绝大多数来信都是询问刘易斯如何能进入所罗门兄弟公司工作，把这本书当作了求职指南。
顺便提一句，我在90年代初次读到这本书时就非常喜欢，至今仍认为它是有史以来关于华尔街的最佳回忆录。即便是乔丹·贝尔福特的《华尔街之狼》也难以与之比肩。时至今日，这本书依然值得一读。
通用电气的故事与华尔街的崛起，共同象征着美国经济的金融化进程。
Financialization is the increasing dominance of financial markets, incentives, and institutions over the “real” economy of production and services.
Financialization orients economic activity toward generating profits through financial channels, such as trading and speculation, rather than through traditional manufacturing and production – activities that used to be called “an honest day’s work”.
The rise of modern financialization started in the 1970s, following the end of the Bretton Woods monetary system under Richard Nixon, the single most important event in US economic history after WW2.
金融化是指金融市场、金融激励和金融机构对生产与服务等"实体"经济的主导地位日益增强。
金融化使经济活动转向通过金融渠道——如交易与投机——来创造利润，而非通过传统的制造与生产。那些传统的生产活动，过去常被称为"诚实的劳动"。
现代金融化的兴起始于1970年代，紧随理查德·尼克松终结布雷顿森林货币体系之后。这一事件是二战后美国经济史上最重要的事件。
Subsequent governments, especially under President Reagon, opened the financial deregulation floodgate with predictable results –
Growing financial sector: the size and influence of the financial sector have increased relative to the total economy. Financial assets have grown to vastly outstrip the output of the real economy.
Shift in corporate behavior: Even non-financial companies now earn a larger share of their profits from financial activities rather than from their core business. GM regularly makes more money from its financing arm than from selling cars.
Shareholder value doctrine: The focus on maximizing shareholder value has led to practices like stock buybacks, often at the expense of long-term investments in production or R&D.
随后的政府，特别是在里根总统任内，开启了金融放松管制的闸门，其结果可想而知：
金融业规模膨胀：金融业的规模和影响力相对于整体经济显著增加。金融资产的增长速度已大幅超越实体经济的产出。
企业行为转变：如今，即便是非金融公司，其利润中也有更大比例来自于金融活动，而非核心业务。通用汽车从金融部门获得的利润，常常超过其销售汽车所得。
股东价值至上：对股东价值最大化的追求，导致了股票回购等盛行行为，而这些行为往往以牺牲生产或研发方面的长期投资为代价。
Financialization of daily life: Households have become more intertwined with financial markets through home mortgages, consumer debt, student loans, payday loans, and defined-contribution retirement plans like 401(k)s. This transfers financial risks from corporations and the state to individuals.
Deregulation and “innovation”: Beginning in the 1980s, financial deregulation and the rise of technology enabled new financial products and markets, including complex derivatives, securitized assets, and high frequency trading. These “innovations” facilitate greater speculation and systemic risk.
日常生活金融化：家庭通过住房抵押贷款、消费债务、学生贷款、发薪日贷款以及像401(k)这样的固定缴费型退休计划，与金融市场的联系日益紧密。这实际上将金融风险从企业和国家转移到了个人身上。
放松管制与"创新"：自1980年代起，金融放松管制和技术的兴起催生了新的金融产品和市场，包括复杂的衍生品、证券化资产和高频交易。这些"创新"为更大规模的投机和系统性风险提供了条件。
I don’t know about you, but I still can barely understand the CDOs (collateralized debt obligations), CDSs (credit default swaps), or synthetic CDOs after reading The Big Short book twice and watching the movie three times.
Even Margot Robbie failed to make it clear. And I thought I had a decent education in finance.
Financialization has been lixed to a rise in income and wealth inequality.
Executive compensation, often tied to stock performance, has grown dramatically, while financial speculation has disproportionately benefited high-income earners who own financial assets.
US CEOs regularly make 300 to 400 times the total comp of average employees today, compared with 20 – 30 times in the 1960s.
不知道你们怎么看，反正我在读了两遍《大空头》原著，看了三遍电影之后，依然几乎搞不懂什么是CDO（担保债务凭证）、CDS（信用违约互换）或者合成CDO。
连玛格特·罗比都没能把它讲明白。而我本以为自己受过还算不错的金融教育。
金融化与收入和财富不平等的加剧密切相关。
与股票表现挂钩的高管薪酬大幅增长，而金融投机则不成比例地惠及了持有金融资产的高收入人群。
如今，美国CEO的总薪酬通常是普通员工的300到400倍，而在1960年代，这个比例仅是20到30倍。
The University of Chicago neoliberal economics thinkers, led by the eminent Jewish economic philosopher Milton Friedman, have provided the intellectual support and rationale for such corporate greed by telling the world the financial market is the most efficient in “allocating capital”. (Watch the other people’s money video clip at the end on Friedman’s pontifications on economics).
Such endorsement is supposed to reassure the population “in Wall Street we trust”.
Haven’t they monopolized Nobel economics prizes since 1976? How could anything go wrong in the steady hands of policy makers schooled in such economic wisdom?
Politicians in the West like to accuse China and other developing countries to steal jobs and cause deindustrialization.
No one seems to ask: has anyone put a gun on the heads of these multinational companies to offshore and outsource? Doesn’t the market know the best?
由杰出的犹太裔经济哲学家米尔顿·弗里德曼领衔的芝加哥大学新自由主义经济学思想家们，通过向世界宣称金融市场在"配置资本"方面最有效率，为这种企业贪婪提供了智识支持和理论依据。（可观看文末关于弗里德曼经济论述的《金钱太保》视频片段）。
这种背书本应让民众确信"我们信任华尔街"。
自1976年以来，他们不是几乎垄断了诺贝尔经济学奖吗？在受过如此经济智慧熏陶的政策制定者稳健掌控下，怎会出错呢？
西方政客喜欢指责中国和其他发展中国家窃取工作岗位、导致去工业化。
但似乎没人追问：可曾有人用枪顶着这些跨国公司的脑袋逼他们进行离岸外包？市场难道不是最清楚该怎么做吗？
Greed alone drives the behavior of these businesses in the capitalist system. After all, making money is the lone purpose of a business, as Welch proclaimed.
When Gordon Gekko pronounced “Greed is Good”, he illuminated for us: “greed, for lack of a better word, is fundamentally good, right, and essential for progress, clarifying, and capturing the evolutionary spirit, driving mankind’s upward surge for life, money, love, and knowledge, and ultimately saving failing entities like Teldar Paper… and the USA”.
Greed is to be celebrated, not denounced. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Ellison are crowned as the Colossus and Oracle (no wonder they picked these grandiose names for their businesses).
General Electric’s 1953 annual report boasted that the firm’s “biggest payday ever” was the record sum it had paid for labor, because prosperity shared with workers was judged a source of national strength.
在资本主义体系中，贪婪是驱动这些企业行为的唯一动力。毕竟，正如韦尔奇所宣称的，赚钱是企业的唯一目的。
当戈登·盖柯宣告"贪婪是好的"时，他为我们阐明了："贪婪，恕我直言，本质上是好的、正确的，并且是进步、澄明和把握进化精神所必需的，它驱动着人类在生活、金钱、爱和知识方面的向上攀升，并最终拯救了像泰达纸业……和美国这样濒临失败的实体。"
贪婪值得颂扬，而非谴责。埃隆·马斯克、杰夫·贝佐斯和拉里·埃里森被奉为巨擘与先知（难怪他们为自己的企业选择了这些宏伟的名称）。
通用电气在1953年的年度报告中自豪地宣称，公司"有史以来最大的发薪日"是支付给劳动力的创纪录薪酬，因为与工人共享繁荣被视为国家力量的源泉。
That made GE one of the most progressive and responsible corporate employers.
However, in the twenty years Jack Welch was the CEO, he eliminated more than 100,000 GE jobs, shuttered dozens of US factories, moved production abroad, and transformed the company from an industrial titan into a quasi-bank whose largest profit engine was the unregulated lending arm GE Capital.
For his trouble, Jack Welch received a severance pay of $417 million when he retired in 2001, reportedly the largest such payment in business history at the time.
Welsh supplied a playbook that hundreds of other corporations copied, helping to hollow out America’s industrial base and shift the economy’s center of gravity from the factory floor to the trading floor.
这使得通用电气成为最具进步性和责任感的雇主之一。
然而，在杰克·韦尔奇担任CEO的二十年里，他裁减了超过10万个通用电气的工作岗位，关闭了数十家美国工厂，将生产转移到海外，并将公司从一个工业巨头转变为准银行机构——其最大的利润引擎是未受监管的贷款部门"通用电气金融"。
作为其"辛劳"的回报，杰克·韦尔奇在2001年退休时获得了4.17亿美元的离职金，据报道这是当时商业史上金额最高的此类支付。
韦尔奇提供了一套被数百家公司效仿的行动剧本，这加速掏空了美国的工业基础，并将经济的重心从生产车间转移到了交易大厅。
Welch turned GE into both the emblem and the engine of America’s transition from a society that built things to one that trades paper claims on the value others create.
The Welch era marked a hinge moment in US economic history: the moment when deindustrialization and financialization became conscious corporate strategy rather than unavoidable fate.
The ruins of that model—industrial ghost towns, a shrinking middle class, and an economy prone to financial crisis—are the enduring legacy of the man once hailed as “Manager of the Century.”
Another gift from Jack Welch to corporate America is short-termism, a.k.a. quarterly capitalism.
韦尔奇将通用电气塑造成了一个标志与引擎，标志着美国从一个制造实物的社会，转变为一个交易他人创造价值的纸质凭证的社会。
韦尔奇时代是美国经济史上的一个转折点：去工业化和金融化从一种无法避免的命运，变成了企业有意识的战略。
这一模式留下的废墟——工业鬼城、萎缩的中产阶级以及易受金融危机冲击的经济——正是这位曾被尊为"世纪经理人"所留下的持久遗产。
杰克·韦尔奇送给美国企业界的另一份"礼物"是短期主义，即季度资本主义。
Since R&D and CAPEX take a long time to yield results, they are abandoned in favor of projects that generate returns in the next quarter.
If financial engineering boosts the P&L immediately, why bother with real engineering?
The philosophy is adopted in the political world as well. Why would any politician build a highspeed rail network if such an undertaking will take 2 decades? The cost will be upfront and the benefits only come much later.
Will any rational term-based politician make such long-term planning today? The US inter-state highway system was built between 1956 and 1992, nearly 4 decades. Would such long-term whole-of-nation endeavor be possible today?
King Louis xiV said out aloud his governing creed: “Après moi, le déluge”. It is practiced by the capitalists – the corporate aristocracy – now.
Check out the below Capitalist Manifestos:
既然研发和资本支出需要很长时间才能产生成果，它们便被舍弃，转而青睐能在下个季度就产生回报的项目。
如果金融工程能立即提振利润表，谁还费心去做真正的工程呢？
这种哲学在政治领域同样被采纳。如果建设高速铁路网络需要20年，哪位政治家会愿意推动呢？成本需当下承担，而收益则要等到很久以后。
如今，任何理性的任期制政治家还会做这样的长远规划吗？美国的州际公路系统建于1956年至1992年间，历时近40年。在今天，这样的长期全国性工程还可能实现吗？
法国国王路易十四曾高调宣扬他的治国信条："我死后，哪管洪水滔天"。如今，资本家——即企业贵族阶层——正在践行这一点。
（完）
When I studied business in the mid-90s, there was no company more revered than General Electric and no CEO more respected than Jack Welch.
For years, GE was honored as the most admired company in the world and was the most valuable by market cap.
Jack Welch was the idol corporate chieftain case-studied in every business school and emulated by aspiring “corporate leaders”. He pioneered “the GE Way”.
GE had an array of world leading businesses from aircraft engines, turbines, health care, NBC, Universal Studios, to refrigerators and light bulbs. GE Finance led in aircraft leasing and financing of capital goods produced by GE’s industrial units.
在我90年代中期学习商科时，没有哪家公司比通用电气更受推崇，也没有哪位CEO比杰克·韦尔奇更受尊敬。
多年来，通用电气被誉为世界上最受尊敬的公司，同时也是市值最高的企业。
杰克·韦尔奇是各大商学院研究的偶像级企业领袖典范，也是众多胸怀大志的“企业领导者”竞相效仿的对象。他开创了“通用电气之道”。
通用电气拥有一系列世界领先的业务，从飞机发动机、涡轮机、医疗保健、NBC电视台、环球影业，到冰箱和灯泡。通用电气金融部门则在飞机租赁和由其工业部门生产的资本货物的融资领域占据领导地位。
GE executives were widely courted as corporate superstars.
When Welch retired in 2001 and Jeff Immelt took over as CEO, several frontrunners to succeed Welch immediately were headhunted to run other major corporations – Robert Nardelli at Home Depot, Jim McNerney at 3M and then Boeing, David Cote at TRW and then Honeywell.
Welch, a.k.a. Neutron Jack, was a ruthless cost cutter and famously claimed for any business GE was in, it should be either No. 1 or No. 2 or get out.
He was the original Wall Street darling, laser-focused on quarterly earnings and stock price. Welch aggressively offshored and outsourced manufacturing overseas to reduce labor costs and taxes.
通用电气的高管们被广泛追捧为企业界的超级明星。
当韦尔奇于2001年退休，杰夫·伊梅尔特接任CEO时，几位曾被视为韦尔奇接班热门人选的高管立即被猎头挖走，去执掌其他大型企业——罗伯特·纳德里去了家得宝，詹姆斯·麦克纳尼去了3M随后又执掌波音，戴维·科特去了TRW之后又领导霍尼韦尔。
韦尔奇，人称"中子杰克"，是一位无情的成本削减者，他有一句名言：通用电气涉足的任何业务，都必须做到行业第一或第二，否则就退出。
他是华尔街最初的宠儿，极度专注于季度盈利和股价。韦尔奇积极地将制造业务离岸外包到海外，以降低劳动力成本和税负。
Most importantly, Welch prioritized GE Finance over the legacy industrial and consumer BUs and turned GE essentially into a financial company by the time of his retirement.
In its height, Welch and GE were lionized with books such as his own memoir Straight from the Gut and Robert Slater’s Jack Welch and the GE Way.
Fast forward to today, GE has become a footnote in American business and its stock price is lower than 2001 when Welch retired.
The company was broken apart into three separate businesses.
Few b-school students know anything about the company and if any case studies were done on the company, it is to show how the mighty have fallen.
最重要的是，韦尔奇将通用电气金融置于传统的工业和消费业务部门之上，到他退休时，已实质上将通用电气转变为一家金融公司。
在其鼎盛时期，韦尔奇和通用电气备受推崇，相关著作层出不穷，例如他自己的回忆录《杰克·韦尔奇自传》以及罗伯特·斯莱特所著的《杰克·韦尔奇与通用电气之路》。
快进到今天，通用电气已沦为美国商业史上的一个注脚，其股价甚至低于韦尔奇2001年退休时的水平。
这家公司已被拆分为三家独立的业务实体。
如今，很少有商学院的学生对这家公司有所了解；即使有相关的案例分析，也多半是为了展示昔日巨擘如何衰落。
In 2018, as the ultimate coup de grace, GE was ousted from the Dow Jones Index and replaced by Walgreen.
GE’s fall symbolizes the fall of industrial America and the rise of financial capitalism.
Welch famously quipped “GE is not in the business of making engines or light bulbs, it is in the business of making money”.
This has become the ethos of Wall Street and high street.
Money making alone has become the yardstick to measure success, permeating into popular culture through movies like Oliver Stone’s Wall Street and Norman Jewison’s Other People’s Money.
Also books like Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of Vanity and Michael Lewis’ true account Liar’s Poker.
2018年，作为最终的致命一击，通用电气被逐出道琼斯指数，由沃尔格林取而代之。
通用电气的衰落象征着美国工业的没落和金融资本主义的崛起。
韦尔奇有句名言："通用电气的业务不是制造发动机或灯泡，而是赚钱。"
这已成为华尔街和主流商界的核心理念。
唯利是图已成为衡量成功的标尺，并通过奥利弗·斯通的电影《华尔街》、诺曼·杰威森的《金钱太保》等作品渗透进大众文化。
同样传递这一理念的还有汤姆·沃尔夫的小说《虚荣的篝火》以及迈克尔·刘易斯基于真实事件撰写的《说谎者的扑克牌》。
While these movies and books were critical of the money culture of the go-go 1980s, many people took them up as inspirations to make a killing by learning from the characters played by Michael Douglas and Danny de Vitto.
Lewis, the greatest financial chronicler and satirist of our time (he was also the author of The Big Short), said in an interview that he received thousands of letters when The Liar’s Poker was published in 1989.
While the book was a sharp and hilarious critique of his former employer and Wall Street bond king Soloman Brothers, most of the letters asked Lewis how to get in Soloman Brothers, taking the book as a how-to guide.
A side note, I loved the book when I first read it in the 90s and still consider it the best memoir about Wall Street ever. Not even Jordan Belfort’s The Wolf of Wall Street is close. Still worth reading today.
The story of GE and the rise of Wall Street symbolizes the financialization of the US economy.
尽管这些电影和书籍旨在批判80年代狂热的金钱文化，许多人却从中获得"灵感"，试图效仿迈克尔·道格拉斯和丹尼·德维托饰演的角色在金融市场上大赚一笔。
我们这个时代最伟大的金融记录者兼讽刺作家刘易斯（他也是《大空头》的作者）曾在采访中提到，1989年《说谎者的扑克牌》出版时，他收到了数千封读者来信。
尽管这本书是对他前雇主所罗门兄弟公司——这位华尔街债券之王——犀利而诙谐的批判，但绝大多数来信都是询问刘易斯如何能进入所罗门兄弟公司工作，把这本书当作了求职指南。
顺便提一句，我在90年代初次读到这本书时就非常喜欢，至今仍认为它是有史以来关于华尔街的最佳回忆录。即便是乔丹·贝尔福特的《华尔街之狼》也难以与之比肩。时至今日，这本书依然值得一读。
通用电气的故事与华尔街的崛起，共同象征着美国经济的金融化进程。
Financialization is the increasing dominance of financial markets, incentives, and institutions over the “real” economy of production and services.
Financialization orients economic activity toward generating profits through financial channels, such as trading and speculation, rather than through traditional manufacturing and production – activities that used to be called “an honest day’s work”.
The rise of modern financialization started in the 1970s, following the end of the Bretton Woods monetary system under Richard Nixon, the single most important event in US economic history after WW2.
金融化是指金融市场、金融激励和金融机构对生产与服务等"实体"经济的主导地位日益增强。
金融化使经济活动转向通过金融渠道——如交易与投机——来创造利润，而非通过传统的制造与生产。那些传统的生产活动，过去常被称为"诚实的劳动"。
现代金融化的兴起始于1970年代，紧随理查德·尼克松终结布雷顿森林货币体系之后。这一事件是二战后美国经济史上最重要的事件。
Subsequent governments, especially under President Reagon, opened the financial deregulation floodgate with predictable results –
Growing financial sector: the size and influence of the financial sector have increased relative to the total economy. Financial assets have grown to vastly outstrip the output of the real economy.
Shift in corporate behavior: Even non-financial companies now earn a larger share of their profits from financial activities rather than from their core business. GM regularly makes more money from its financing arm than from selling cars.
Shareholder value doctrine: The focus on maximizing shareholder value has led to practices like stock buybacks, often at the expense of long-term investments in production or R&D.
随后的政府，特别是在里根总统任内，开启了金融放松管制的闸门，其结果可想而知：
金融业规模膨胀：金融业的规模和影响力相对于整体经济显著增加。金融资产的增长速度已大幅超越实体经济的产出。
企业行为转变：如今，即便是非金融公司，其利润中也有更大比例来自于金融活动，而非核心业务。通用汽车从金融部门获得的利润，常常超过其销售汽车所得。
股东价值至上：对股东价值最大化的追求，导致了股票回购等盛行行为，而这些行为往往以牺牲生产或研发方面的长期投资为代价。
Financialization of daily life: Households have become more intertwined with financial markets through home mortgages, consumer debt, student loans, payday loans, and defined-contribution retirement plans like 401(k)s. This transfers financial risks from corporations and the state to individuals.
Deregulation and “innovation”: Beginning in the 1980s, financial deregulation and the rise of technology enabled new financial products and markets, including complex derivatives, securitized assets, and high frequency trading. These “innovations” facilitate greater speculation and systemic risk.
日常生活金融化：家庭通过住房抵押贷款、消费债务、学生贷款、发薪日贷款以及像401(k)这样的固定缴费型退休计划，与金融市场的联系日益紧密。这实际上将金融风险从企业和国家转移到了个人身上。
放松管制与"创新"：自1980年代起，金融放松管制和技术的兴起催生了新的金融产品和市场，包括复杂的衍生品、证券化资产和高频交易。这些"创新"为更大规模的投机和系统性风险提供了条件。
I don’t know about you, but I still can barely understand the CDOs (collateralized debt obligations), CDSs (credit default swaps), or synthetic CDOs after reading The Big Short book twice and watching the movie three times.
Even Margot Robbie failed to make it clear. And I thought I had a decent education in finance.
Financialization has been lixed to a rise in income and wealth inequality.
Executive compensation, often tied to stock performance, has grown dramatically, while financial speculation has disproportionately benefited high-income earners who own financial assets.
US CEOs regularly make 300 to 400 times the total comp of average employees today, compared with 20 – 30 times in the 1960s.
不知道你们怎么看，反正我在读了两遍《大空头》原著，看了三遍电影之后，依然几乎搞不懂什么是CDO（担保债务凭证）、CDS（信用违约互换）或者合成CDO。
连玛格特·罗比都没能把它讲明白。而我本以为自己受过还算不错的金融教育。
金融化与收入和财富不平等的加剧密切相关。
与股票表现挂钩的高管薪酬大幅增长，而金融投机则不成比例地惠及了持有金融资产的高收入人群。
如今，美国CEO的总薪酬通常是普通员工的300到400倍，而在1960年代，这个比例仅是20到30倍。
The University of Chicago neoliberal economics thinkers, led by the eminent Jewish economic philosopher Milton Friedman, have provided the intellectual support and rationale for such corporate greed by telling the world the financial market is the most efficient in “allocating capital”. (Watch the other people’s money video clip at the end on Friedman’s pontifications on economics).
Such endorsement is supposed to reassure the population “in Wall Street we trust”.
Haven’t they monopolized Nobel economics prizes since 1976? How could anything go wrong in the steady hands of policy makers schooled in such economic wisdom?
Politicians in the West like to accuse China and other developing countries to steal jobs and cause deindustrialization.
No one seems to ask: has anyone put a gun on the heads of these multinational companies to offshore and outsource? Doesn’t the market know the best?
由杰出的犹太裔经济哲学家米尔顿·弗里德曼领衔的芝加哥大学新自由主义经济学思想家们，通过向世界宣称金融市场在"配置资本"方面最有效率，为这种企业贪婪提供了智识支持和理论依据。（可观看文末关于弗里德曼经济论述的《金钱太保》视频片段）。
这种背书本应让民众确信"我们信任华尔街"。
自1976年以来，他们不是几乎垄断了诺贝尔经济学奖吗？在受过如此经济智慧熏陶的政策制定者稳健掌控下，怎会出错呢？
西方政客喜欢指责中国和其他发展中国家窃取工作岗位、导致去工业化。
但似乎没人追问：可曾有人用枪顶着这些跨国公司的脑袋逼他们进行离岸外包？市场难道不是最清楚该怎么做吗？
Greed alone drives the behavior of these businesses in the capitalist system. After all, making money is the lone purpose of a business, as Welch proclaimed.
When Gordon Gekko pronounced “Greed is Good”, he illuminated for us: “greed, for lack of a better word, is fundamentally good, right, and essential for progress, clarifying, and capturing the evolutionary spirit, driving mankind’s upward surge for life, money, love, and knowledge, and ultimately saving failing entities like Teldar Paper… and the USA”.
Greed is to be celebrated, not denounced. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Ellison are crowned as the Colossus and Oracle (no wonder they picked these grandiose names for their businesses).
General Electric’s 1953 annual report boasted that the firm’s “biggest payday ever” was the record sum it had paid for labor, because prosperity shared with workers was judged a source of national strength.
在资本主义体系中，贪婪是驱动这些企业行为的唯一动力。毕竟，正如韦尔奇所宣称的，赚钱是企业的唯一目的。
当戈登·盖柯宣告"贪婪是好的"时，他为我们阐明了："贪婪，恕我直言，本质上是好的、正确的，并且是进步、澄明和把握进化精神所必需的，它驱动着人类在生活、金钱、爱和知识方面的向上攀升，并最终拯救了像泰达纸业……和美国这样濒临失败的实体。"
贪婪值得颂扬，而非谴责。埃隆·马斯克、杰夫·贝佐斯和拉里·埃里森被奉为巨擘与先知（难怪他们为自己的企业选择了这些宏伟的名称）。
通用电气在1953年的年度报告中自豪地宣称，公司"有史以来最大的发薪日"是支付给劳动力的创纪录薪酬，因为与工人共享繁荣被视为国家力量的源泉。
That made GE one of the most progressive and responsible corporate employers.
However, in the twenty years Jack Welch was the CEO, he eliminated more than 100,000 GE jobs, shuttered dozens of US factories, moved production abroad, and transformed the company from an industrial titan into a quasi-bank whose largest profit engine was the unregulated lending arm GE Capital.
For his trouble, Jack Welch received a severance pay of $417 million when he retired in 2001, reportedly the largest such payment in business history at the time.
Welsh supplied a playbook that hundreds of other corporations copied, helping to hollow out America’s industrial base and shift the economy’s center of gravity from the factory floor to the trading floor.
这使得通用电气成为最具进步性和责任感的雇主之一。
然而，在杰克·韦尔奇担任CEO的二十年里，他裁减了超过10万个通用电气的工作岗位，关闭了数十家美国工厂，将生产转移到海外，并将公司从一个工业巨头转变为准银行机构——其最大的利润引擎是未受监管的贷款部门"通用电气金融"。
作为其"辛劳"的回报，杰克·韦尔奇在2001年退休时获得了4.17亿美元的离职金，据报道这是当时商业史上金额最高的此类支付。
韦尔奇提供了一套被数百家公司效仿的行动剧本，这加速掏空了美国的工业基础，并将经济的重心从生产车间转移到了交易大厅。
Welch turned GE into both the emblem and the engine of America’s transition from a society that built things to one that trades paper claims on the value others create.
The Welch era marked a hinge moment in US economic history: the moment when deindustrialization and financialization became conscious corporate strategy rather than unavoidable fate.
The ruins of that model—industrial ghost towns, a shrinking middle class, and an economy prone to financial crisis—are the enduring legacy of the man once hailed as “Manager of the Century.”
Another gift from Jack Welch to corporate America is short-termism, a.k.a. quarterly capitalism.
韦尔奇将通用电气塑造成了一个标志与引擎，标志着美国从一个制造实物的社会，转变为一个交易他人创造价值的纸质凭证的社会。
韦尔奇时代是美国经济史上的一个转折点：去工业化和金融化从一种无法避免的命运，变成了企业有意识的战略。
这一模式留下的废墟——工业鬼城、萎缩的中产阶级以及易受金融危机冲击的经济——正是这位曾被尊为"世纪经理人"所留下的持久遗产。
杰克·韦尔奇送给美国企业界的另一份"礼物"是短期主义，即季度资本主义。
Since R&D and CAPEX take a long time to yield results, they are abandoned in favor of projects that generate returns in the next quarter.
If financial engineering boosts the P&L immediately, why bother with real engineering?
The philosophy is adopted in the political world as well. Why would any politician build a highspeed rail network if such an undertaking will take 2 decades? The cost will be upfront and the benefits only come much later.
Will any rational term-based politician make such long-term planning today? The US inter-state highway system was built between 1956 and 1992, nearly 4 decades. Would such long-term whole-of-nation endeavor be possible today?
King Louis xiV said out aloud his governing creed: “Après moi, le déluge”. It is practiced by the capitalists – the corporate aristocracy – now.
Check out the below Capitalist Manifestos:
既然研发和资本支出需要很长时间才能产生成果，它们便被舍弃，转而青睐能在下个季度就产生回报的项目。
如果金融工程能立即提振利润表，谁还费心去做真正的工程呢？
这种哲学在政治领域同样被采纳。如果建设高速铁路网络需要20年，哪位政治家会愿意推动呢？成本需当下承担，而收益则要等到很久以后。
如今，任何理性的任期制政治家还会做这样的长远规划吗？美国的州际公路系统建于1956年至1992年间，历时近40年。在今天，这样的长期全国性工程还可能实现吗？
法国国王路易十四曾高调宣扬他的治国信条："我死后，哪管洪水滔天"。如今，资本家——即企业贵族阶层——正在践行这一点。
（完）
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