Insurance
保险业
Black box blues
黑箱忧郁
Jul 24th 2008
From The Economist print edition
Investors still struggle to understand Europe’s insurers
投资者费解欧洲的保险公司
AFTER watching bank shares drop by almost a third this year, most European investors probably consider the idea of buying insurance stocks a sick joke. Banks’ balance-sheets may be difficult to understand but insurers can be mind-bogglingly complex too.
目睹过银行股票今年下跌了近1/3，大部分欧洲投资者可能认为购买保险业股票是个冷笑话。银行的资产负债表或许难于理解，但保险公司也可能令人难以置信的复杂。
Insurers also have a track record of fouling up when the economic environment worsens. In the last downturn in 2002 they got things badly wrong. The big European life insurers owned far too many equities. When stockmarkets fell, their capital positions were whacked, forcing many to issue new shares. “Once bitten, twice shy” is the market’s motto today. The share prices of Europe’s insurers have dropped by almost a quarter this year and trade on the lowest multiple of earnings of any sector,battered banks included. Is that fair?
当经济环境恶化时，保险公司也有个搞砸的记录。在2002年的上个低迷时期，他们非常狼狈。几大欧洲人寿保险公司拥有大量股票。当股市下跌，他们的资本情况变糟，迫使其中许多公司发行新股。现今，”一朝被蛇咬，十年怕井绳”成为这个市场的笺言。今年欧洲保险公司的股价已跌了近1/4，并以任一盘的最低市盈率交易，受冲击的银行也包括其中。这公平吗？
Insurance companies are certainly not immune to economic slowdown. People buy fewer equity-linked savings products in difficult times, for example. But concerns about what lurked on insurers’ balance-sheets have probably been overdone. Most of the big companies will report results over the next few weeks. So far the damage from the credit crunch has been limited: the days when insurance companies could be relied on to be the dumbest guys in the room seem to be over.
保险公司当然无法幸免于经济低迷。例如在经济困难时期人们罕买股票相关型储蓄产品。但对保险公司资产负债表上潜藏的东西的关注大概是小题大做了。未来几星期多数大型公司将报告结果。迄今信贷危机带来的损失是有限的：房间内最笨的人依靠保险公司的日子似乎是结束了。
Admittedly, America’s AIG got into serious trouble after expanding into the business of insuring mortgage bonds, but Swiss Re was the only other company to dabble in this dangerous niche. By and large only those insurers which own banks, like Germany’s Allianz and ING of the Netherlands, have revealed big exposures to the toxic end of the credit spectrum . And the industry’s disclosure about such assets has tended to be far superior to that of the banks. ING’s last quarterly report was 96 pages long, with a 190-page statistical supplement chucked in for fun.
诚然，美国的美国国际集团（AIG）在扩展进入为抵押债券提供保险的业务后陷入严重麻烦，除AIG 外瑞士再保险（Swiss Re）是唯一涉猎此小生境的公司。基本上只有那些如德国的安联（Allianz）与荷兰的荷兰国际集团（ING）那样自己拥有银行的保险公司受到信贷领域不良后果的大幅影响。并且保险行业对这些资产的披露趋于远胜银行。ING上个季度的季报长达96页，煞有介事地插入190页统计附录。
Indeed, if the sector has a secret it may be a pleasant one. Most industry executives and specialists think it has been transformed for the better since its near-death experience in 2002. Equities now make up only 10% of the invested assets of Europe’s ten biggest insurance firms; the rest is largely in government and high-quality corporate bonds. Andy Rear of Oliver Wyman, a consultancy, says risk management has improved dramatically. Capital positions have been rebuilt.
的确，就算保险行业资产情况有秘密，那也可能是令人愉快的秘密。多数保险行业执行官和专家认为自2002年该行业经历濒临毁灭后该行业一直在转好。股票现在仅占欧洲十大保险公司投入资产的10%；其余的主要是政府债券和高品质的公司债券。咨询公司奥纬（Oliver Wyman）的顾问Andy Rear说其风险管理已显著改善，资本状况已重建。
Why then are investors so sceptical? Andrew Crean, an analyst at Citigroup, thinks that weird accounting is partly to blame. Investors have two options to choose from when dissecting the books, neither of them good. International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) try to smooth the immediate costs of writing new business across several years. Unfortunately, earnings are still a bad proxy for the cashflow available to shareholders. Worse, IFRS are inconsistently applied across Europe. Standard setters hope to reach a definitive set of rules only by 2011.
那为什么投资者如此怀疑？花期集团的一个分析家Andrew Crean认为怪诞的账目多少难辞其咎。投资者有两种选择来决定何时仔细分析账目，但哪一种都不好。国际财务报表标准(IFRS)试图在记帐中把新交易发生的即时成本匀在若干年之中。不幸地是股东仍无法藉由盈利有效了解现金流转。更糟的是IFRS不一致地应用于全欧。标准制定者希望2011年前达成一套最终准则。
The alternative is the industry’s home-grown accounting standard, which is called Embedded Value (EV). A life company’s EV represents its shareholders’ funds plus the value of future profits it expects to generate from its existing book of business, after adjusting for risk. This is a concept most investors can get their heads around. But individual companies can pick their own assumptions on things like investment returns. Furthermore, diversified firms often report EV only for their life divisions, making it harder still to compare companies on a consistent basis. The result is that many investors view EV as just another type of black-box reporting.
另一种选择是保险行业自产的会计标准–内涵价值(EV).一个人寿保险公司的内涵价值代表在考量了风险后，它的股东的资金加上它预期由现有账目上的交易产生的未来利润的价值。这个概念是多数投资者能够接受的。但是个别公司可能对投资回报这样的事物挑选他们自己的假设。此外，多种业务的保险公司经常只为其人寿保险部门作出内涵价值报告，使以一致要素比较各个公司更为困难。结果是众多投资者把内涵价值看作不过是另一类黑箱报告。
The good news is that the industry is taking note. In June, a forum of Europe’s biggest insurers agreed to implement new Market Consistent Embedded Value (MCEV) rules in 2009. These require companies to make uniform assumptions about investment returns and apply the reporting standard across the entire company. In addition it will no longer be possible to book at once the profit expected from holding risky assets. Mr Crean argues that MCEV standards make it easier to see how much cash is being generated by the “back book” of existing business and how much of this is being reinvested in new business, rather than being handed to shareholders as dividends.
好消息是保险业正关注这点。6月，一个欧洲最大的保险业论坛同意2009年实施新的市场一致内涵价值(MCEV)准则。这要求保险公司对投资回报使用统一假设前提，并且把报告标准应用到全公司范围。另外，新准则将不再可能对预期源自持有风险资产的利润立刻记帐。Crean先生主张MCEV标准比分发给股东的红利更易于了解”早先账目”上的当下业务正赚得的现金有多少以及这些赚得的现金又有多少正再投资到新业务之中。
Have insurers found their holy grail: a language that makes them comprehensible to outsiders? MCEV certainly represents progress, but most generalist investors will still feel like an Italian being spoken to in Spanish rather than Cantonese. The only way to double-check the calculations will be to pay an expert to do it. Bruno Paulson, an analyst at Sanford Bernstein, points out that measurement of critical non-market risks, such as how long customers will keep their policies, is inevitably still pretty crude and largely up to the companies themselves. And MCEV has no direct link to capital adequacy. The introduction of new solvency rules by 2012 should change this, but until then those keen to know how far markets would have to fall before insurers had to raise new capital are still partly in the dark.
保险公司找到他们的圣杯–一种使局外人易于理解他们的语言了吗？MCEV的确象征进步，但多数知识渊博的投资者仍将觉得自己像个意大利人在听西班牙语，而先前觉得自己像个意大利人在听广东话，好也没好到哪去。仔细检查这种计算方法的唯一途径是聘请专家来做。伯恩斯坦公司（Sanford Bernstein） 的分析专家Bruno Paulson指出这种测量方法具有严重的非市场风险，例如对于保险公司的消费者将保持他们的保险契约多长时间，利用这种方法测量不可避免的依旧相当粗糙而且主要取决于保险公司自身。还有MCEV和资本充足没有直接关联。到2012年新的偿付能力准则的引入应当改变这一状况，但在那之前，那些渴望知道市场下跌到何种程度,保险公司才不得不筹集新资金的人仍处晦暗不明之中。
Accounting reforms will help but insurance companies are inherently complex. Ultimately they will have to earn investors’ confidence by performing consistently through this market downturn. And if more light can be let into these financial black boxes, they may be viewed a bit more generously.
会计改革将有助益，但是保险公司固来复杂。最终他们将不得不在这次市场低迷过程中履行一致来赢得投资者信心。而且如果这些金融黑箱更明了一些，保险公司可能被认为更慷慨一点。
译者：蓝冰 http://www.ecocn.org/forum/viewthread.php?tid=12905&extra=page%3D1