美国股市的黄金时代正接近尾声 | 经济学人社论
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经济学人社论 | 股市还能涨多高？
美国股市的黄金时代正接近尾声
股价可能飙升，但即使是（大热的）人工智能也不太可能让股市再有十年前的面貌
Stockmarkets tend to rise gradually; recently they have soared. American stocks are up by 21% since the end of October and stand roughly 5% above their vertiginous peak in January 2022. On February 22nd Europe’s equities set a new record for the first time in two years. India has been enjoying a multi-year boom as optimism about its economy abounds. Even Japanese stocks—a byword for stagnation—have at last exceeded the level they reached in 1989 before a decades-long slump. It has been an extraordinary run. Since 2010, the S&P 500 index of American stocks has returned 11% a year in real terms.
股市一般都是逐步上涨，但最近却在飙升。自去年10月底以来，美国股市市值上涨了21%，比2022年1月的峰值还高出约5%。2月22日，欧洲股市市值在过去两年来首次创下新高。印度股市则在一片乐观情绪中连续多年保持长牛。即便是作为“停滞”代名词的日本股市也终于超过了1989年的水平（日本经济在1989年之后陷入了长达数十年的低迷状态）。总之，近期股市涨幅真的非常惊人。自2010年以来，美国标准普尔500指数的年实际回报率达到了11%。
These profits are all the more striking given what markets have had to contend with. The age of free money has been followed by two years of interest-rate rises—and even now bond investors are betting against imminent cuts. Around the world, governments are turning away from free markets and globalisation in favour of industrial policy and protectionism. If all that has not extinguished this rally, whatever will?
考虑到市场目前的焦灼情况，这些收益愈发令人瞩目。宽松货币时代之后是两年的加息——即使是现在，债券投资者也在赌短期内不会降息。纵观全球，一些政府与自由市场和全球化分道扬镳，转而出台产业支持政策并实行保护主义。如果这一切风险因素都未能阻挡这波涨势，那还有什么能阻止呢？
One conclusion might be that a bubble is waiting to pop, especially in America. On Wall Street, valuations—the multiple by which profits are scaled up—are on average 80% as high asthey were during the dotcom mania of the late-1990s and 90% as high as they climbed during 2021, before rock-bottom interest rates rose. Similar extremes are also to be seen in other measures, including concentration (the share of the stockmarket that is made up by the top firms) or value spreads (the valuation of the most expensive companies compared with the cheapest). The value of the top 10% of American firms as a proportion of the whole market has not been as high since the crash that was one cause of the Depression in the 1930s. And don’t forget the frothiest corner of the financial markets: bitcoin is trading around $60,000 again, just shy of its peak in 2021.
有一种结论是泡沫即将破裂，特别是美国。当前，华尔街给出的公司股票平均估值（即利润放大一定倍数后）达到了20世纪90年代末互联网热潮时期估值水平的80％，是2021年股市繁荣时期估值水平的90%（2021年后利率开始触底反弹）。其他衡量指标也出现了类似的极端情况，包括集中度（股市中公司巨头所占的份额）或价值差距（估值最高公司与估值最低公司间的数额差距）。自导致20世纪30年代大萧条的崩盘以来，美国前10%公司的市值占整个市场的比例从未如此之高。别忘了金融市场最泡沫化的一隅：比特币价格再次达到约6万美元，仅略低于2021年的峰值。
Yet there are also reasons to see markets’ exuberance as rational. As central banks all over the world tightened monetary policy at a pace not seen for a generation, many analysts warned about the danger of recessions and falling corporate profits. At the start of 2023 Wall Street savants predicted that in the year to come America’s economy would grow by just 0.7%. In the event it achieved more than three times that amount. A broad range of firms are publishing strong results, including retailers, such as Walmart, and Japanese carmakers, such as Toyota.
然而认为市场当下繁荣合理的观点也确实有据可循。世界各国央行以过去一代人未曾见过的速度收紧了货币政策，据此，许多分析师警告称，发生经济衰退以及企业利润下滑的风险可能增加。2023年初，华尔街专家们预测美国经济在2023年的涨幅仅为0.7%。事实上，美国当年的经济增速超过了这个预期值的两倍多。各行各业的公司都业绩强劲，比如沃尔玛等零售商以及丰田等日本汽车制造商都涨势喜人。
The economy continues to defy gravity. A popular regular forecast of annualised American economic growth, published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, stands at 3.2% for the first quarter of this year.
美国经济继续逆势上行。亚特兰大联邦储备银行发布的一项美国年化经济增速预测显示，本年度第一季度的增长率为3.2%。
Adding to investors’ bullishness is their optimism about artificial intelligence (AI). This is not a ChatGPT-like hallucination. The event that propelled stocks into the stratosphere was the publication on February 22nd of earnings by Nvidia, which has an iron grip on the market for chips that are critical for training AI models. In October 2022, just before OpenAI released its now-celebrated chatbot, Nvidia earned around $3bn in gross profits each quarter, mostly from selling graphics cards to gamers. In the three months to the end of January 2024 Nvidia earned $17bn in gross profits while enjoying a margin of 76%. The company’s share price has climbed five-fold over that time, but its earnings have grown even faster. In other words the enthusiasm that has lifted Nvidia close to a stockmarket value of $2trn is not built on dotcom-like hype, but cold, hard profit.
投资者们对人工智能（AI）的发展前景十分乐观，因此他们更加看好当前的股市，但需要指出的是，这种乐观并非虚幻的镜花水月，这可跟ChatGPT等大模型会出现AI幻觉不同。英伟达（Nvidia）牢牢控制着训练人工智能模型最为核心的芯片市场，该公司于2月22日公布了财报，这一事件使得股市一路飞涨。2022年10月，在OpenAI发布其广受追捧的聊天机器人之前，英伟达每个季度的毛利润也就约30亿美元，其中向游戏玩家出售显卡是其主要利润来源。从2023年11月初至2024年1月底这三个月间，英伟达实现了170亿美元的毛利润，利润率为 76%。该公司的股价在此期间上涨了五倍，但其收益增长速度更快。换句话说，英伟达的市值飚升到接近2万亿美元不是互联网炒作的虚高，而是由实打实的利润支撑。
Judging the boom to be justified, though, does not make it wise to rush out and buy stocks. What happens next is unlikely to fill investors with glee. That is partly because the extreme excitement about AI extends beyond Nvidia to other members of the “Magnificent 7” group of tech stocks, such as Microsoft, whose eventual commercial strategies in the AI era are still far from clear. These firms are hoarding Nvidia’s chips in the belief that, one way or another, their AI businesses will boom. However, it remains to be seen how they will resolve basic issues with their large language models. Plenty of startups want to eat the Big 7’s lunch, and competition will keep profits in check—even, eventually, at Nvidia.
就算经济繁荣有理有据，也不意味着人们就该上赶着去买股票。股市接下来的发展可能对投资者并不利，这在一定程度上是因为人们对人工智能的极度热情从英伟达延伸到了“美股七巨头”科技股的其他成员（如微软），而微软在人工智能时代的终极商业战略仍然非常不明晰。这些公司正在囤积英伟达的芯片，因为他们认为总有一款自己的人工智能业务会起飞。然而，他们将如何解决大型语言模型的基本问题，这还有待观察。许多初创公司都想分七巨头的一杯羹，而竞争也会不断压缩企业的利润——最终连英伟达也会受此影响。
Techno-optimism is also the basis, in some quarters, for bullishness about economy-wide productivity growth. The lesson from other fundamental technologies is that it takes time to work out how to exploit them. Businesses talk non-stop about generative AI but it remains at the experimental stage. As a result, even if AI is destined to transform societies utterly, today’s investors may struggle to pick which companies will make money. Believers in the dotcom boom were not wrong about the transformative power of the internet—but they still lost their shirts.
在某些方面，技术乐观主义也催生了投资者们认为经济生产率一定会增长的看法。从其他基础技术中汲取的经验是，了解如何有效利用它们会耗费时间。各个企业将生成式AI不停挂在嘴边，但这项技术仍处于试验阶段。因此，即便AI注定让社会气象一新，如今的投资者们或许依然很难挑选出会成为发财树的公司。当初那群坚信互联网热潮的人并没有看错互联网所具有的变革性力量，但他们仍输得精光。
If things stay sane this time, valuations will not climb much further. The trend of rising profits, as a share of the economy, also looks spent. Their outsize growth in recent decades was a one-off, caused by the falling cost of borrowing and taxes. As inflation lingers and government finances remain stretched, that fall cannot be repeated; it may even be reversed.
如果这次一切都能在合理的轨道上，股票估值便不会继续攀升。公司盈利占GDP的比重不断增加，但这一趋势也后劲不足。股价在最近数十年来飞速上涨是千载难逢的一幕，其背后原因是借贷成本与税收成本下降，但由于通胀徘徊不去且政府财政始终吃紧，未来此类成本不再会下降，甚至可能会重新升高。
Under realistic assumptions about what will happen to valuations, interest and taxes, to generate even modest real equity returns of 4% a year over the next decade, America’s firms would need to increase their underlying profits by around 6% a year, close to their best ever post-war performance. No wonder Warren Buffett, a veteran investor, sees “no possibility” of super returns for his fund.
基于对未来估值、利息与税收变化所进行的切合实际的假设，哪怕是在未来十年里产生每年仅4%的实际股本回报，美国企业需要每年将潜在利润提高约6%，这一数字接近这些企业在二战后达到的最高利润率。难怪投资行家沃伦•巴菲特（Warren Buffett）认为自己的基金获得高额回报的“可能性为零”。
The long and grinding road
道阻且长
Equities could underwhelm in many ways. Perhaps AI-exhilaration will cause a dotcom-style bubble that pops. Another war or crisis could lead to a crash. Or prices may stagnate in a gentle bear market that takes years to reverse. Whatever the path to disappointment, in ten years’ time nobody will be repeating the obvious conclusion of today: that investors in equities—especially American ones—have enjoyed a golden age.
股市可以在很多方面让投资者失望。也许AI狂热的浪潮也会产生向互联网时期那样的泡沫，然后最终破裂。新的战争或危机也可能导致股市崩盘。亦或是股价在温和的熊市中停滞不前，需要数年时间才能扭转。无论未来发生哪种情况，在未来十年里可以肯定的是，不会再有人重复如今得出的明显结论：股票投资者（尤其是美国投资者）正身处股市的黄金时代。
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