美國：窮人炒房，富人炒股
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????隨著房地產市場的復蘇，美國人也恢復了對房地產投資的信心。 ????據(jù)周四公布的蓋洛普（Gallup）民意調查顯示，多數(shù)美國人認為，房地產是“最好的”長期投資，之后分別是黃金、股票和共同基金、定期存款、債券： |
????As the real estate market recovers, so does America's faith in housing as an investment. ????According to a Gallup poll released Thursday, a plurality of Americans now think of real estate as the "best" long-term investment, followed by gold, stocks and mutual funds, savings accounts/CDs, and bonds: |
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??? 如果說所謂的“最佳”投資意味著最高回報，那么美國人恐怕要重新思量一下了。通貨膨脹率調整之后，房地產的平均投資回報率實際非常低。曾幫助創(chuàng)建廣為人知的凱斯席勒（Case-Shiller）房價指數(shù)的經濟學家羅伯特?席勒是這樣解釋的： ????根據(jù)通貨膨脹率進行修正之后的房價實際上非常穩(wěn)定。在截至1990年（最近一次房屋市場繁榮）的一百年間，房價年均漲幅僅有0.2%。建筑行業(yè)生產效率的日益提高抵消了土地與勞動力成本的上漲，它可以解釋房價漲幅為什么這么微弱。 ????自從20世紀90年代以來，考慮到房地產泡沫的破滅，房屋投資一直都只能算是二流投資工具。 |
????If one assumes "best" to mean the investment that offers the highest return, then Americans have things backwards. Real estate, on average actually returns very little when adjusted for inflation. Robert Shiller -- the economist famous for helping to create the widely cited Case-Shiller housing index puts it like this: ????Home prices look remarkably stable when corrected for inflation. Over the 100 years ending in 1990 -- before the recent housing boom -- real home prices rose only 0.2 percent a year, on average. The smallness of that increase seems best explained by rising productivity in construction, which offset increasing costs of land and labor. ????And since 1990, housing has continued to be a middling investment, when you take into account the bursting of the real estate bubble: |
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???自從1987年以來，根據(jù)通貨膨脹調整后的房屋平均增值水平很低。這個情形與蓋洛普調查中的其他投資選擇有很大區(qū)別。例如，自1929年以來，標準普爾500指數(shù)（S&P 500）帶來的通脹調整后年均收益率為6.23%，而政府債券的投資回報率約為標普500指數(shù)的一半。有意思的是，自從1971年布雷頓森林貨幣體系崩潰以來，黃金的年均收益率達到了4.12%（通貨膨脹調整后）。 ????如果將蓋洛普的數(shù)據(jù)按收入群體進行細分，我們就會發(fā)現(xiàn)更多信息。首先，相比其他收入群體，美國富人群體更愿意選擇股票作為最佳投資對象。這很有道理，因為正如上述數(shù)據(jù)所示，投資股票市場是獲得財富最好的方式。 |
????When adjusted for inflation, the average house has appreciated little since 1987. The picture looks a lot different for the other investments Gallup asked about it in its polls. The S&P 500, for instance, has produced an inflation-adjusted annual return of 6.32% since 1929, while investing in government debt would have returned roughly half that figure. Gold, interestingly enough, has performed pretty well on an inflation-adjusted basis, averaging a 4.12% return per year since the end of the Bretton-Woods monetary order in 1971. ????If you break down the Gallup data into income groups, the answers are even more revealing. For one, wealthy Americans are more likely to pick stocks as the best investment than any other income group. This makes sense, as investing in the stock market is -- as the above data shows -- the best way to become wealthy. |
