文章探讨了全球股市近期飙升的原因，是理性繁荣还是等待破灭的泡沫。尽管面临利率上升、贸易战和地缘政治冲突等挑战，股市仍持续上涨。估值高类似90年代末网络泡沫，但市场繁荣有合理依据，如强劲企业利润和乐观增长预测。

文章强调AI助长投资乐观，举英伟达的成功为例。但未来不明，竞加剧影响利润，建议谨慎。

此外文章还提到，利润增长或迎尾声，估值提升将更艰难。作者认为，尽管投资者曾经历股票辉煌，但未来形势或较严峻。

Leaders | How high can markets go?

Feb 29th 2024_★★★☆☆_1083words

 

A golden age for stockmarkets is drawing to a close

股市黄金时期即将接近尾声

Share prices may be surging, but even AI is unlikely to drive a repeat of the past decade’s performance

股价可能会飙升，但是即使人工智能也不太可能重现过去十年的表现。

 

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.

股票市场往往是逐步上涨的，但最近却一路飙升。美国股市自 10 月底以来上涨了 21%，比 2022 年 1 月的最高点高出约 5%。2 月 22 日，欧洲股市两年来首次创下新纪录。由于对印度经济的乐观情绪盛行，印度股市多年来一直处于繁荣之中。就连被称为停滞不前代名词的日本股市也终于超过了 1989 年长达数十年的低迷之前所达到的水平。这是一次非同寻常的增长。自 2010 年以来，标普500 美股指数每年的实际回报率为 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. A trade war is raging between America and C; actual wars are raging in Ukraine, the Middle East and parts of Africa. 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?

鉴于市场不得不面对的情况，这些利润就更加引人注目了。在自由货币时代之后，两年来利率持续上升，甚至现在债券投资者还在押注利率即将下调。两国之间的贸易战愈演愈烈；乌克兰、中东和非洲部分地区的真实战争也愈演愈烈。在世界各地，各国政府正在放弃自由市场和全球化，转而推行产业政策和保护主义。如果这一切还不能熄灭这场反弹，那么还有什么能？

 

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 as they 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).

一个结论可能是，泡沫正在等待破灭，尤其是在美国。在华尔街，估值—利润按比例放大的倍数—平均比 20 世纪 90 年代末互联网狂热时期高出 80%，比 2021 年（当时利率尚未触底）攀升时高出 90%。在其他衡量指标中也可以看到类似的极端情况，包括集中度（顶级公司在股市中所占的份额）或价值差（最昂贵公司与最便宜公司的估值比较）。

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.

自 20 世纪 30 年代导致大萧条的股灾以来，美国前 10%公司的价值占整个市场的比例就没有这么高过。不要忘了金融市场最狂热的一角：比特币的交易价格又回到了 60,000 美元左右，距离 2021 年的峰值仅有咫尺之遥。

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，我们也有理由认为市场的繁荣是理性的。随着全球央行以一代人前所未见的速度收紧货币政策，许多分析师警告经济衰退和企业利润下降的危险。2023 年初，华尔街精英预测，未来一年美国经济将仅增长 0.7%。结果，美国经济增长了三倍多。许多公司都公布了强劲的业绩，包括沃尔玛等零售商和丰田等日本汽车制造商。

 

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. Despite a slowdown in C—whose sagging markets are an exception to the global trend—the IMF has been nudging up its global growth forecasts, too.

经济仍在继续无视重力。亚特兰大联邦储备银行（Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta）发布的美国经济年增长率常规预测显示，今年第一季度美国经济增长率为 3.2%。尽管某国经济增长放缓，他的市场下挫是全球趋势的一个例外。国际货币基金组织（IMF）也一直在上调其全球经济增长预测。

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.

投资者对人工智能（AI）的乐观态度使他们更加看好人工智能。这并非像ChatGPT一样的错觉。2月22日，英伟达发布了财报，导致股票市场出现大幅上涨，从而将股票价格推向了新的高度。2022 年 10 月，就在 OpenAI 发布其广为人知的聊天机器人之前，英伟达每个季度的毛利润约为 30 亿美元，主要来自向游戏玩家销售显卡。

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.

在截至 2024 年 1 月底的三个月里，英伟达获得了 170 亿美元的毛利润，利润率高达 76%。在此期间，该公司的股价上涨了五倍，但盈利增长得更快。换句话说，让英伟达股价飙升至 2 万亿美元的热情并非建立在网络炒作之上，而是冷静客观的利润。

 

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.

不过，判断经济繁荣是合理的，并不意味着急于购买股票就是明智之举。接下来发生的事情不太可能让投资者满心欢喜。部分原因是，对人工智能的极度兴奋已超越了英伟达，延伸到了微软等 "科技七巨头"的其他成员，而它们在人工智能时代的最终商业战略还远未明朗。这些公司都在囤积英伟达的芯片，因为它们相信，无论如何，它们的人工智能业务都将蓬勃发展。不过，它们将如何解决大型语言模型的基本问题，还有待观察。许多初创公司都希望击败七大科技巨头，竞争将使利润受到控制，甚至最终会影响英伟达的利润。

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.

技术乐观主义也是某些人看好整个经济生产率增长的依据。从其他基础技术中汲取的教训是，如何利用这些技术需要时间。企业一直在谈论生成式人工智能，但它仍处于实验阶段。因此，即使人工智能注定会彻底改变社会，今天的投资者也很难选择哪些公司会赚钱。互联网热潮的信徒们对互联网变革力量的判断并没有错，但他们还是赔得血本无归。

 

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.

如果这次情况保持正常，估值将不会进一步攀升。利润在经济中所占份额不断上升的趋势看起来也已耗尽。近几十年来，由于借贷和税收成本下降，利润大幅增长是一次性的。随着通货膨胀的持续和政府财政的捉襟见肘，这种下降不可能重现，甚至可能发生逆转。

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.（长难句分析） No wonder Warren Buffett, a veteran investor, sees “no possibility” of super returns for his fund.

根据对估值、利息和税收将发生什么变化的现实假设，要想在未来十年中每年获得哪怕是 4% 的适度实际股票回报率，美国公司的基本利润每年需要增加约 6%，这都接近战后的最佳表现了。难怪资深投资者沃伦-巴菲特认为他的基金 "不可能 "获得超级回报。

The long and grinding road

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. ■

漫长而艰难的道路

股票市场可能会在许多方面令人失望。也许过度繁荣会导致网络泡沫破灭。另一场战争或危机可能导致崩盘。或者，价格可能在温和的熊市中停滞不前，需要数年时间才能逆转。不管通向失望的路径是什么，十年后，没有人会再重复今天的显而易见的结论：股票投资者，尤其是美国的投资者，已经享受了一个黄金时代。