信用与资本——开发性金融研究

资本是关系到当下和长远发展的重要命题,而信用是实现从财富到资本转化的关键要素。本文从四个维度考察信用与资本的关系。一是关于信用的产生和演进,指出了信用产生的两个必要条件,并从社会财富三个阶段来审视信用和资本相互作用的演进过程。二是信用的性质和功能。讨论了信用的基本性质,以及规范商品和资本交易、促进资本形成以及信用的金融功能等基础性功能,并进一步讨论了信用的证券化功能以及金融市场建设功能。三是当前信用体系面对的新挑战和新问题。首先提出了美元外汇储备在一定意义上是美元信用对中国储蓄的证券化,是全球信用美元化的组成,在资本匮乏阶段是必要选择,而当下需要对财富和资本寻找新的载体,需要考虑和实现减少对美元的依赖。其次,从深化对国家信用的运用角度对解决问题的路径进行了思考,初步提出了通过发行以国家信用为基础的股权证券化工具,解决长期资本不足问题,应对当前挑战的设想。四是在回顾和总结部分,本文指出,信用的形态会随着资本发展而不断演进,从个人到企业、国家再到国际,从债务信用升级为命运信用即股权信用,乃至尚未出现的国际股权信用,是未来信用发展的方向。

Credit and Capital: A Development Finance Research

Capital is a critical factor to the current and long-term development, and credit is the key to realizing the transformation of wealth to capital. This paper studies the relationship between credit and capital from four dimensions.
First, the paper discusses the emergence and evolution of credit. Credit is a special form of value movement conditional on debt repayment and is closely related to commercial economy. The emergence of credit is inseparable from two necessary conditions: the accumulation of wealth and the formation of legal and institutional framework. Accompanied with the development of capital, credit is a catalyst for the transformation of wealth into capital, and is making capital internalization sweep the world. Credit evolves as it coexists with capital, and they are highly dependent on the three stages of wealth creation: the primary form of credit and capital are mainly to satisfy the demand for the subsistence stage; the intermediate form of credit and capital are mainly to satisfy the demand in the well-off stage; and the advanced form of credit and capital are mainly to satisfy the demand in the wealth accumulation stage.
Second, this paper discusses credit's nature and functions. In terms of the nature, credit is a special form of social relationship. At the country level, credit forms the basic structure of society, and is the most extensive and universal communication tool and language in the economic sector; at the international level, credit serves as the general rule and standard governing international conduct, but has not yet been fully globalized. Different countries are in different stages: countries in the first stage do not have fully-built sovereign credit and need to rely on the credit of developed countries in their domestic market, showing a pattern of credit colonization; countries in the second stage have developed their own credit in their domestic market, but still rely on the credit of developed countries internationally; countries in the third stage are essentially developed economies, and with their credit dominating the world they export their credit to the rest of the world to absorb and occupy worldwide wealth.
In terms of the function, this paper discusses the basic functions of credit, such as facilitating transactions of goods and capital, promoting capital formation, and other financial functions. On this basis, the securitization function and the financial market construction function of credit are discussed in detail. Regarding the securitization function, the paper points out that the credit-based capital formation is the prerequisite for securitization; the separation of the three rights of credit, i.e. the right to ownership, the right to income and the right to use, is the basic condition for securitization; and the nature of securitization is determined by the goals and functions of different types of credit. The paper then discusses about personal credit, corporate credit, sovereign credit and international credit. Regarding the function of financial market construction, the paper underlines the abundant resource of savings and the massive demand of investment in China, which, combined together, can promote the transformation of corporate credit-centric market into sovereign credit-centric economy, giving credit a greater role in the social and economic development.
Third, the paper discusses the new challenges and issues about the current credit system. Many countries, including China and its East Asian neighbors, started out as export-oriented economies, attracted a great deal of foreign investment and earned foreign exchange reserves to pay off their international balances—￣a necessary choice for countries at the stage of capital shortage. Meanwhile, a large quantity of US dollar credit poured into the international market, and China as well. China's foreign reserves, in a sense, is a securitized form of savings backed by the dollar's credit and is a component of the global credit dollarization. But the harmful effects of the dollars emerge when countries no longer suffer shortage of wealth and capital. They try to extricate themselves from the dollar trap and seek for new carriers for wealth and capital. The paper also proposes possible solutions to the problems from the perspective of deepening the use of sovereign credit, and puts forward the tentative idea of issuing equity securitization tools based on sovereign credit.
Fourth, in the review and summary section, the paper proposes that the form of credit will continue to evolve with the development of capital, and its evolution direction maybe from individual level to enterprise level, from country level to international level, and from debt credit to equity credit (i.e. fate credit), even to international equity credit that has yet to emerge. In the future, advanced forms of credit will enhance the function of the existing capital markets and enable credit to play a greater role at both micro and macro levels.