美国：穷人炒房，富人炒股
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随着房地产市场的复苏，美国人也恢复了对房地产投资的信心。 据周四公布的盖洛普（Gallup）民意调查显示，多数美国人认为，房地产是“最好的”长期投资，之后分别是黄金、股票和共同基金、定期存款、债券： |
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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如果说所谓的“最佳”投资意味着最高回报，那么美国人恐怕要重新思量一下了。通货膨胀率调整之后，房地产的平均投资回报率实际非常低。曾帮助创建广为人知的凯斯席勒（Case-Shiller）房价指数的经济学家罗伯特•席勒是这样解释的： 根据通货膨胀率进行修正之后的房价实际上非常稳定。在截至1990年（最近一次房屋市场繁荣）的一百年间，房价年均涨幅仅有0.2%。建筑行业生产效率的日益提高抵消了土地与劳动力成本的上涨，它可以解释房价涨幅为什么这么微弱。 自从20世纪90年代以来，考虑到房地产泡沫的破灭，房屋投资一直都只能算是二流投资工具。 |
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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自从1987年以来，根据通货膨胀调整后的房屋平均增值水平很低。这个情形与盖洛普调查中的其他投资选择有很大区别。例如，自1929年以来，标准普尔500指数（S&P 500）带来的通胀调整后年均收益率为6.23%，而政府债券的投资回报率约为标普500指数的一半。有意思的是，自从1971年布雷顿森林货币体系崩溃以来，黄金的年均收益率达到了4.12%（通货膨胀调整后）。 如果将盖洛普的数据按收入群体进行细分，我们就会发现更多信息。首先，相比其他收入群体，美国富人群体更愿意选择股票作为最佳投资对象。这很有道理，因为正如上述数据所示，投资股票市场是获得财富最好的方式。 |
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. |
