巴菲特致股东的信（2015年）⑦金融和金融产品业务

Finance and Financial Products

金融和金融产品业务

Our three leasing and rental operations are conducted by CORT (furniture), XTRA (semi-trailers), and Marmon (primarily tank cars but also freight cars, intermodal tank containers and cranes). These companies are industry leaders and have substantially increased their earnings as the American economy has gained strength. At each of the three, we have invested more money in new equipment than have many of our competitors, and that’s paid off. Dealing from strength is one of Berkshire’s enduring advantages.

我们的三项租赁业务是由CORT(家具)、XTRA(半挂拖车)和Marmon(主要是油罐车租赁、还包括冷藏货车、联运式油罐集装箱车和起重机)三家公司构成。这三家公司都是行业领导者，随着美国经济的走强，它们的收益都取得了大幅增长。我们在这三家公司设备上的投资超过了任何一个竞争对手，而这正带来回报。发挥自身长处是伯克希尔经久不衰的优势之一。

Kevin Clayton has again delivered an industry-leading performance at Clayton Homes, the second-largest home builder in America. Last year, the company sold 34,397 homes, about 45% of the manufactured homes bought by Americans. In contrast, the company was number three in the field, with a 14% share, when Berkshire purchased it in 2003.

KevinClayton 再次带领全美第二大建筑商ClaytonHomes 取得了行业领先的业绩。去年，Clayton 售出了34397 套住宅，约占美国预制房销售总数的45%。当我们在2003 年收购Clayton 时，它在该领域排名第三，其市场份额仅为14%。

Manufactured homes allow the American dream of home ownership to be achieved by lower-income citizens: Around 70% of new homes costing $150,000 or less come from our industry. About 46% of Clayton’s homes are sold through the 331 stores we ourselves own and operate. Most of Clayton’s remaining sales are made to 1,395 independent retailers.

预制房屋让美国低收入群体实现了拥有住房的美国梦，造价在15 万美元或以下的住房大约70%来自预制房行业。Clayton 大约46%的房屋是通过我们331 家自营门店销售出去的，其它大部分销量是通过1395 家独立零售商卖掉的。

Key to Clayton’s operation is its $12.8 billion mortgage portfolio. We originate about 35% of all mortgages on manufactured homes. About 37% of our mortgage portfolio emanates from our retail operation, with the balance primarily originated by independent retailers, some of which sell our homes while others market only the homes of our competitors.

Clayton 运营的关键是其拥有的128 亿美元的抵押贷款组合。我们在预制房屋抵押贷款中约占35%份额，我们约37%的抵押贷款组合来自于我们的零售业务，其余主要来自于独立零售商，其中有些零售商售卖我们的房屋，而有一些只卖我们竞争对手的房屋。

Lenders other than Clayton have come and gone. With Berkshire’s backing, however, Clayton steadfastly financed home buyers throughout the panic days of 2008-2009. Indeed, during that period, Clayton used precious capital to finance dealers who did not sell our homes. The funds we supplied to Goldman Sachs and General Electric at that time produced headlines; the funds Berkshire quietly delivered to Clayton both made home ownership possible for thousands of families and kept many non-Clayton dealers alive.

来来去去的出借人中，只有Clayton 是最持久的。在伯克希尔的支持下，Clayton 在2008-2009 年金融危机恐慌期间坚定不移的为房屋购买者提供抵押贷款。在那段期间，Clayton 还用其宝贵的资金为那些不销售Clayton房屋的经销商提供资金支持。当时我们向高盛和通用电气提供资金支持成为头条新闻；伯克希尔默默向Clayton提供资金既让成千上万个家庭拥有自己的房子，也让许多非Clayton 经销商活了下来。

Our retail outlets, employing simple language and large type, consistently inform home buyers of alternative sources for financing – most of it coming from local banks – and always secure acknowledgments from customers that this information has been received and read. (The form we use is reproduced in its actual size on page 119.)

我们在Clayton 房屋零售门店都采用了较大字体和简单明了的宣传语，不断提醒消费者可以选择多种融资渠道，其中大部分来自当地银行，并始终确保客户确认已经收到和阅读了这些资料。

Mortgage-origination practices are of great importance to both the borrower and to society. There is no question that reckless practices in home lending played a major role in bringing on the financial panic of 2008, which in turn led to the Great Recession. In the years preceding the meltdown, a destructive and often corrupt pattern of mortgage creation flourished whereby (1) an originator in, say, California would make loans and (2) promptly sell them to an investment or commercial bank in, say, New York, which would package many mortgages to serve as collateral for a dizzyingly complicated array of mortgage-backed securities to be (3) sold to unwitting institutions around the world.

抵押贷款发放实践对于借方和整个社会都有极大好处。毫无疑问，导致2008 年金融危机进而引发经济衰退的元凶之一，就是不顾后果的住房贷款滥放行为。金融危机之前几年里，一种破坏性的腐败的抵押贷款模式蓬勃发展：(1)在加州的一家金融机构发放了许多抵押贷款；(2)然后这家机构迅速将这些贷款卖给在纽约的投资银行或商业银行，这些银行将许多抵押贷款打包，作为抵押贷款证券的抵押物；(3)随后又把这些抵押贷款支持证券卖给世界各地不知情的机构或个人。

As if these sins weren’t sufficient to create an unholy mess, imaginative investment bankers sometimes concocted a second layer of sliced-up financing whose value depended on the junkier portions of primary offerings. (When Wall Street gets “innovative,” watch out!) While that was going on, I described this “doubling-up” practice as requiring an investor to read tens of thousands of pages of mind-numbing prose to evaluate a single security being offered.

就好像这些恶行还不足以引发邪恶的混乱一样，一些富有想象力的投资银行，有时还在此基础上炮制出第二层融资产品，而这些金融产品的价值主要依赖于那些初次发行债券的劣后级。(当华尔街变得富有创新精神时，你一定要当心)。在这种情况下，我将这种双层结构的做法描述为，就像要求投资者读几万页令人麻木无聊的散文，然后来评估要买的这支证券。

Both the originator and the packager of these financings had no skin in the game and were driven by volume and mark-ups. Many housing borrowers joined the party as well, blatantly lying on their loan applications while mortgage originators looked the other way. Naturally, the gamiest credits generated the most profits. Smooth Wall Street salesmen garnered millions annually by manufacturing products that their customers were unable to understand. (It’s also questionable as to whether the major rating agencies were capable of evaluating the more complex structures. But rate them they did.)

在这场游戏中毫无底线的抵押贷款发放人和打包抵押贷款支持证券的银行家，眼里只有钱，被不断增加的规模和上涨的价格所驱动。许多住房贷款人也加入这一行列，公然在贷款申请中撒谎。而抵押贷款发起人却视而不见。当然，风险最大的信贷产品会产生最大的回报。狡猾的华尔街销售人员，依靠向顾客推销他们完全无法理解的金融产品，每年赚取了数百万美元的收入。(同样地，主要的评级机构是否有能力评估更为复杂结构的金融产品也值得怀疑？然而他们依然给出了评级)。

Barney Frank, perhaps the most financially-savvy member of Congress during the panic, recently assessed the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, saying, “The one major weakness that I’ve seen in the implementation was this decision by the regulators not to impose risk retention on all residential mortgages.” Today, some legislators and commentators continue to advocate a 1%-to-5% retention by the originator as a way to align its interests with that of the ultimate lender or mortgage guarantor.

BarneyFrank 可能是2008 金融危机期间最懂金融的国会议员了。最近他在评价2010 年的Dodd-Frank 法案时说：我在法案实施过程中发现一个巨大缺点，那就是监管机构决定不要求所有住房抵押贷款机构实施风险自留。今天，一些立法者和评论家还在建议要让贷款发放方保留1-5%的风险，以使贷款发起方、最终贷款人和抵押贷款担保人的利益保持一致。

At Clayton, our risk retention was, and is, 100%. When we originate a mortgage we keep it (leaving aside the few that qualify for a government guarantee). When we make mistakes in granting credit, we therefore pay a price – a hefty price that dwarfs any profit we realized upon the original sale of the home. Last year we had to foreclose on 8,444 manufactured-housing mortgages at a cost to us of $157 million.

在Clayton，不管是过去还是现在，我们风险自留率都是100%。我们每发放一笔贷款，就会一直持有它(除了少数政府担保的贷款)。因此，如果我们放贷时犯了错误，那么我们就会付出代价。这个高昂的代价远远超过房屋销售利润。去年我们取消了8444 笔预制房屋抵押贷款的抵押品赎回权，为此我们共计损失了1.57 亿美元。

The average loan we made in 2015 was only $59,942, small potatoes for traditional mortgage lenders, but a daunting commitment for our many lower-income borrowers. Our buyer acquires a decent home – take a look at the home we will have on display at our annual meeting – requiring monthly principal-and-interest payments that average $522.

在2015 年我们每笔贷款平均金额是59942 美元，对于传统抵押贷款机构来说微不足道，但对于许多低收入贷款人来说却是一个艰巨的承诺，我们的买家依靠这笔贷款获得一栋体面的房子，平均每月只需支付552 美元的本息。来看看我们在年会上展出的房子吧。

Some borrowers, of course, will lose their jobs, and there will be divorces and deaths. Others will get over- extended on credit cards and mishandle their finances. We will lose money then, and our borrower will lose his down payment (though his mortgage payments during his time of occupancy may have been well under rental rates for comparable quarters). Nevertheless, despite the low FICO scores and income of our borrowers, their payment behavior during the Great Recession was far better than that prevailing in many mortgage pools populated by people earning multiples of our typical borrower’s income.

当然了，有些贷款人可能会失业、离婚或去世。也有人会过度使用信用卡，财务状况崩溃。遇到这种情况我们将会亏钱，而我们的贷款人也会失去他们的首付款，尽管他在居住期间，按揭远低于可比租金。即便如此，尽管我们的借款人的FICO 分数和收入均较低，但他们在经济危机期间的贷款偿还情况，远远好于其它同类抵押贷款的普遍状况，而这些抵押贷款人的收入水平往往是我们的贷款人的数倍。

The strong desire of our borrowers to have a home of their own is one reason we’ve done well with our mortgage portfolio. Equally important, we have financed much of the portfolio with floating-rate debt or with short- term fixed-rate debt. Consequently, the incredibly low short-term rates of recent years have provided us a constantly-widening spread between our interest costs and the income we derive from our mortgage portfolio, which bears fixed rates. (Incidentally, we would have enjoyed similar margins had we simply bought long-term bonds and financed the position in some short-term manner.)

我们的贷款人强烈渴望拥有自己的房子，这是我们抵押贷款组合方面还款很好的原因之一。同时重要的是，我们用浮动利率债券或短期固定利率债券为大部分抵押贷款组合融资。因此，近年来令人难以置信的短期低利率，与我们抵押贷款组合的固定利率，为我们的利息成本和利息收入之间提供了一个不断扩大的利差。顺便说一句，如果我们仅仅购买长期债券，并以某种短期低利率的方式融资，那么我们也能得到类似的结果。(这也是导致2023 年硅谷银行破产的根源。)

Normally, it is risky business to lend long at fixed rates and borrow short as we have been doing at Clayton. Over the years, some important financial institutions have gone broke doing that. At Berkshire, however, we possess a natural offset in that our businesses always maintain at least $20 billion in cash-equivalents that earn short-term rates. More often, our short-term investments are in the $40 billion to $60 billion range. If we have, say, $60 billion invested at 1⁄4% or less, a sharp move to higher short-term rates would bring benefits to us far exceeding the higher financing costs we would incur in funding Clayton’s $13 billion mortgage portfolio. In banking terms, Berkshire is – and always will be – heavily asset-sensitive and will consequently benefit from rising interest rates.

通常情况下，借入短期资金并以固定利率长期借出，是风险较高的行为，就像我们在Clayton 所做的那样。多年来，一些以此模式运作的重要金融巨头纷纷破产。然而，在伯克希尔，我们拥有一个自然抵消策略，因为我们的业务总是保持至少200 亿美元的现金等价物，这些资金仅仅赚取短期利率回报。更多情况下，我们的短期投资规模介于400-600 亿美元之间。假如我们600 亿美元投资在0.25%或更低的利率的短期投资上，那么一个更高的短期利率带来的回报，将远远超过我们在克莱顿的130 亿美元抵押贷款组合所产生的融资成本。从银行业的角度看，伯克希尔对资产高度敏感，因此将受益于上升的利率。

Let me talk about one subject of which I am particularly proud, that having to do with regulation. The Great Recession caused mortgage originators, servicers and packagers to come under intense scrutiny and to be assessed many billions of dollars in fines and penalties.

现在让我谈谈一个与监管有关的令我引以为傲的话题。金融危机导致抵押贷款发起人、服务商、抵押贷款支持证券包装商受到极为严苛的审查，并被处以数十亿美元的巨额处罚。

The scrutiny has certainly extended to Clayton, whose mortgage practices have been continuously reviewed and examined in respect to such items as originations, servicing, collections, advertising, compliance, and internal controls. At the federal level, we answer to the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Dozens of states regulate us as well. During the past two years, indeed, various federal and state authorities (from 25 states) examined and reviewed Clayton and its mortgages on 65 occasions. The result? Our total fines during this period were $38,200 and our refunds to customers $704,678. Furthermore, though we had to foreclose on 2.64% of our manufactured-home mortgages last year, 95.4% of our borrowers were current on their payments at yearend, as they moved toward owning a debt-free home.

这些审查当然扩大到了Clayton，其抵押贷款业务频频遭到检查，比如贷款发放、服务、收款、宣传推广、合规、内部控制等环节。在联邦政府层面，我们要接受联邦贸易委员会、住房与城市发展部、消费者金融保护局等政府部门的监管。数十个州立法律也制约着我们。事实上在过去2 年里，联邦政府及25 个州当局对Clayton机器抵押贷款进行了65 次审查，结果如何？在此期间，我们的罚款总额为3.82 万美元，退还客户704678 美元。此外，在过去的一年里，尽管我们不得不取消了2.64%的预制房屋抵押品赎回权，但95.4%的借款者在年终仍在还款，因为还清贷款后，他们将拥有一套无债务的房子。

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Marmon’s rail fleet expanded to 133,220 units by yearend, a number significantly increased by the company’s purchase of 25,085 cars from General Electric on September 30. If our fleet was connected to form a single train, the engine would be in Omaha and the caboose in Portland, Maine.

截至年底，Marmon 集团的铁路车队增加到133220 辆，去年9 月30 日，该公司从通用电气购入25085 辆油罐车后其规模大幅增加。如果将我们车队链接成一列火车，车头在奥马哈，节尾将在缅因州波特兰。

At yearend, 97% of our railcars were leased, with about 15-17% of the fleet coming up for renewal each year. Though “tank cars” sound like vessels carrying crude oil, only about 7% of our fleet carries that product; chemicals and refined petroleum products are the lead items we transport. When trains roll by, look for the UTLX or Procor markings that identify our tank cars. When you spot the brand, puff out your chest; you own a portion of that car.

截至年底，我们97%的油罐车被租赁，每年约有15-17%的车辆需要重新续租。尽管这些铁路油罐车听上去像是满载原油的舰队，但实际上只有7%的车辆用于运输原油，我们承运的主要是化工产品以及精炼石油。当列车从你驶过时，请仔细寻找油罐车上的UTLX 或者Procor 标志。当你看到那个标志时，请挺起你的胸膛，作为股东，你拥有那辆车的一部分。

Here’s the earnings recap for this sector:

下图为该板块的收益概况：