广州金融翻译公司：金融信息不可靠困扰中国经济

The chronic spin that blights China’s economy

金融信息不可靠困扰中国经济

广州金融翻译公司：金奇：在中国，有偿新闻和盲目乐观的信用评级削弱了金融信息的可靠性，这转而加剧了资本错配并拖累了经济。

The palest ink is better than the best memory.”China’s vast lexicon of idioms is replete with reverence for the reliability of the written word. But the country that started writing on oracle bones more than 3,000 years ago finds itself the victim of a dangerous information gap.

“好记性不如烂笔头。”中国浩如烟海的习语处处充满了对书面文字可靠性的敬意。但这个3000多年前就开始在甲骨上刻字的国家如今发现，自身已受困于危险的信息鸿沟。广州金融翻译公司。

A wholesale breakdown in the reliability of financial information is exacerbating the misallocation of capital that lies at the root ofChina’s waning economic efficiency and burgeoning levels of corporate debt. Consider, for instance, how a Chinese financial institution might try to find accurate information on a company that it is considering for a loan. As a first option, it might turn to media reports. This could turn out to be rash. The articles it finds may have been influenced by “envelope journalism”, a practice that involves slipping cash into envelopes for journalists at press conferences to foster positive feelings. So prevalent are such activities that a Chinese company offers an Uber-style app to make the planted news industry more efficient. The app, called “Zhao Jizhe” (Find a Journalist), puts companies in touch with journalists for hire, using a graduated scale.

金融信息可靠性的全面崩溃正在加剧资本错配，后者正是中国经济效率下滑、公司债务水平急升的根源所在。例如，想象一下，假如一家中国金融机构考虑向一家公司放贷，它可能会怎样设法找到关于这家公司的准确信息。作为首选，它可能会求助媒体报道。这样做可能被证明是欠缺考虑的。这家机构找到的文章可能已经受到了“有偿新闻”——在新闻发布会上将现金装入信封塞给记者以换取正面报道的做法——的左右。这种做法在中国如此普遍，以至于一家中国公司开发了一款类似优步(Uber)的应用，以提高这个有偿新闻产业的效率。这款名为“找记者”的应用可以让企业与划分好不同等级的待命记者建立联系。广州金融翻译公司。

In the same way that Uber customers pay more for a Mercedes with a leather interior than they do for a Honda Accord, the app lists charges from Rmb1,000 for a “standard” journalist who can reach only one outlet, Rmb3,000 for “mid-level” and “high-level” writers, and Rmb8,000 for a premium service that procures a “senior” journalist and guaranteed coverage in 25 publications, four of which are well-known.

优步用户为一辆真皮内饰的奔驰(Mercedes-Benz)轿车支付的费用肯定比一辆本田雅阁(Honda Accord)要高，同样，“找记者”这款应用也列出了不同的收费标准：“普通”作者写稿（1个渠道发布），收费1000元人民币；“中级”作者写稿（5个渠道发布），收费3000元人民币；而支付8000元人民币可以享受高级服务——由“资深”作者写稿并保证在25个渠道发布，其中4个为知名渠道。

The app, which claims to have a network of more than 1,000 journalists and access to 3,000 publications, calls itself an “intellectual community platform where media professionals help entrepreneurs”. Nevertheless, it appeared to be frozen this week amid criticism of its business model on baidu.com, the Chinese search engine.

这款号称拥有1000多名记者及3000多家媒体资源网络的应用，称自己为“媒体人帮创业者写发稿的智慧共享平台”。然而，由于其商业模式遭到批评，该平台近期似乎已经被关停。广州金融翻译公司。

If the media cannot be trusted, then where should a Chinese lender turn? Credit rating companies present an obvious avenue. So Panglossian are Chinese raters, however, that they betray not a scintilla of disquiet even in the face of a recent warning by the International Monetary Fund that some $1.3tn in corporate loans are at risk of turning bad.

如果媒体不可信，那中国金融机构还能指望谁呢？信用评级公司是一个显而易见的选择。然而，中国的评级机构如此盲目乐观，即便面对国际货币基金组织(IMF)最近的警告——约1.3万亿美元的企业贷款有变成坏账的风险——它们也没有流露出丝毫不安。

China’s rating agencies have awarded investment grade status to 99.5 per cent of all public debt outstanding, according to a study by Wind Information, a Shanghai data provider. This sends a signal that all but a fraction of corporate debt is safe to hold, despite a surge in corporate defaults this year to triple the levels seen in the whole of 2015.

位于上海的数据提供商万得资讯(Wind Information)的一项研究显示，中国的评级机构给予了99.5%的未偿公开债务投资级评级。这发出的信号是，除极小部分以外的公司债都可以安全持有——尽管今年的公司债务违约事件已激增至2015年全年水平的三倍。

The absurdity becomes even clearer at the micro level.

在微观层面，这种荒唐程度更加明显。

Yanzhou Coal, a struggling former stalwart with soaring debt multiples that managed to eke out a return on assets last year of just 0.1 per cent, is accorded a top rating for creditworthiness by Chinese agencies. By contrast, Standard & Poor’s, the international rating agency, puts the company into a “junk” category. There are scores of similar cases.

兖州煤业(Yanzhou Coal)曾经经营状况优良，眼下陷入困境，债务倍数飙升。该公司去年资产收益率仅勉强维持在0.1%，中国评级机构却给出最高级别的信用评级。相比之下，国际评级机构标准普尔(Standard & Poor’s)给该公司的评级为“垃圾级”。类似的例子还有很多。广州金融翻译公司。

Stock market analysts are no less upbeat. They have assigned virtually unanimous “buy” recommendations to investors on all companies in the Shanghai Composite index, the country’s leading stock index. A Bloomberg scale shows an average rating of 4.4 where 5 represents unanimous buy calls from analysts.

股市分析师也同样乐观。他们对中国主要股指上证综指的所有成分股公司，都几乎一致地向投资者给出了“买入”的建议。彭博(Bloomberg)估算显示的是4.4的平均评级，而5代表分析师一致推荐买入。

The wall-to-wall optimism robs Chinese lenders of their antenna. If all is held to be well in the best of all possible worlds, it is difficult for financial institutions to tell a value-destroying zombie from a dynamic business innovator.

到处充斥的乐观主义让中国的金融机构失去了警惕性。如果所有企业的状况都被认为好得不能再好，金融机构就很难将毁灭价值的僵尸企业与具有活力的创新企业区分开来。

Without quality financial information it may be difficult to address a misallocation of capital that has contributed to this year’s most startling economic statistic: that in the first quarter of this year, the world’s second-largest economy required four units of credit to generate a single unit of gross domestic product.

没有优质的金融信息，可能很难解决资本错配问题，正是这一问题导致了今年最令人吃惊的经济统计数据：今年第一季度，全球第二大经济体中国每产出一单位国内生产总值(GDP)需要四单位的信贷。广州金融翻译公司。

Nevertheless, Beijing does not appear ready to let a hundred schools of thought contend. A febrile political environment, intensified by rising tensions in the South China Sea, has madeChina’s leadership mistrustful of criticism and outspoken commentaries.

然而，北京方面似乎并未准备好放任“百家争鸣”。南中国海日益紧张的局势加剧了本已躁动不安的政治环境，使得中国领导层对批评和直言不讳的评论充满疑惧。

The state-run media has been instructed to sow harmony wherever it can, prompting the People’s Daily, mouthpiece of the Communist Party, to crow in its 2015 “public opinion report” about a “major increase in consensus online” in support of the party.

中国官媒已收到指示要尽一切努力传播和谐之声，促使中共机关报《人民日报》旗下人民网在其2015年《互联网舆情分析报告》中宣称，官民之间舆论的共识度有了很大的提高。

The danger forChina, though, is that it may harmonise away its critical faculties, rendering it unable to lift itself from a morass of debt that has been swelled by poor lending decisions.

然而，中国面临的危险是，有可能在追求和谐的过程中丧失了判断能力，使自身无法走出糟糕的放贷决定导致的债务泥沼。

广州金融翻译公司