为何会出现股债双杀？

How coronavirus almost brought down the global financial system (2)
冠状病毒如何几乎摧毁了全球金融体系 (2)
Business The Guardian
商业 卫报


Investors around the world started to panic. In times of uncertainty, they want safe-haven assets. What makes a government bond a safe investment is not only the financial standing of the borrower, but the depth of the market in which lenders can sell them if they want to get their money back sooner. There is no deeper market than that for US Treasuries, as US government bonds are known. The greater the demand for safety, the lower the interest rate the US government generally has to pay to borrow. In the first week of March, those rates were at record lows.
世界各地的投资者开始恐慌。在不确定时期，他们想要避险资产。政府债券之所以是一种安全的投资，不仅取决于借款者的财务状况，还取决于市场的深度，也就是如果借款者想尽早收回资金，他们可以随时在这个市场上出售债券。没有比美国国债市场更有深度的市场了。投资者越追求安全性，美国政府通常需要支付的借款利率就越低。在3月的第一周，这些利率处于历史低点。
…
When trading opened on Wall Street that morning, the situation was so dire that the circuit-breakers – automatic stops to trading that are triggered when prices fall by a certain amount – were soon activated. This was supposed to slow a wild selloff. But it sent a message of panic. As soon as trading resumed, everything sold.
那天早上华尔街开盘时，情况非常糟糕，以至于熔断机制——当价格下跌到一定程度时自动停止交易——很快就被激活了。熔断机制的存在是为了减缓疯狂的抛售。但它传递了一个恐慌的信息。交易一恢复，所有的东西都被抛售了。


A rout like the one that began on 9 March has a perverse logic. When fund managers face withdrawals from the people whose money they manage, they need cash and have to choose which assets to sell first. They might prefer to sell the riskiest investments, but those can be disposed of only for a large loss. So instead, they attempt to sell their most liquid and safe assets – government bonds. That means the prices of those bonds fall, dragging them into the maelstrom. This has the knock-on effect of unravelling a basic relationship on which many investors rely: typically, when shares go down, bonds go up, and vice versa. So to protect yourself against risk, you buy a portfolio made up of both. If everything works as it’s supposed to, the swings should balance each other out. But in the panic that began on 9 March, this was no longer happening: rather than balancing out, the price of shares and bonds were collapsing together. The only thing that anyone wanted to hold was cash, and what they wanted most of all were dollars. The surging US dollar in turn spread the pressure worldwide to everyone who owed money in that currency.
像3月9日开始的那种暴跌有着反常的逻辑。当基金经理面临管理的投资账户投资者撤资时，他们需要现金，所以必须选择首先出售哪些资产。他们可能更愿意出售风险最高的投资，但只有在出现巨大损失时才能处置这些投资。因此，他们会尝试出售流动性最强、最安全的资产——政府债券。这意味着这些债券的价格下跌，也被拖入漩涡。这产生了连锁反应，瓦解了许多投资者所依赖的一种基本关系：通常情况下，股票下跌，债券上涨，反之亦然。因此，为了保护自己不受风险的影响，你可以购买由两者组成的投资组合。如果一切都像预期的那样，秋千应该互相平衡。但在3月9日开始的恐慌中，这种情况却没有发生:股票和债券的价格非但没有平衡，反而一起崩溃了。每个人想要持有的唯一东西就是现金，而他们最想要的就是美元。美元的飙升反过来又将压力传导到全世界所有借了美元的人身上。


Key words:
at record lows 处于历史低点
circuit-breaker 熔断机制
a wild selloff 疯狂的抛售
a perverse logic 反常的逻辑
liquid 流动的，流动性强的
maelstrom 旋涡
knock-on effect 连锁反应
vice versa 反之亦然
portfolio 投资组合
balance each other out/balance out 互相平衡
surging US dollar 美元的飙升