The title of this memo isn’t a joke; I mean it. Nobody knows the real significance of the recent events in the financial world, or what the future holds. Everyone has an opinion - there’s an off-color joke to that effect - but opinions are entirely different from knowledge. As usual, the bulls are optimistic, the bears are pessimistic, and the rest are uncertain.
本备忘录的标题不是一个笑话；我是认真的。没有人知道金融界最近发生的事件的真正意义，也没有人知道未来会发生什么。每个人都有自己的观点--有一个非彩色的笑话是这样的--但观点与知识是完全不同的。像往常一样，牛市是乐观的，熊市是悲观的，其余的人是不确定的。
This is a great time for my favorite quote from John Kenneth Galbraith: “There are two kinds of forecasters: those who don’t know, and those who don’t know they don’t know.” No one knows about the future, and that’s more true now than ever . . . literally. Excesses were committed at financial institutions that we’ve never seen before in terms of their scale or their breadth, and many new inventions are in place that never existed before. So clearly no one can know how things will pan out.
这是我最喜欢的约翰-肯尼思-加尔布雷思的一句话的好时机。"预测者有两种：一种是无知的，一种是不知道自己无知的。"没有人知道未来，这一点现在比以往任何时候都更真实......字面意思是。在金融机构犯下的过剩行为，就其规模或广度而言，我们以前从未见过，许多新的发明也是以前从未出现过的。因此，显然没有人能够知道事情会如何发展。
My conviction that this is true frees me from having to methodically assess the strength and weakness of economies and institutions, and it permits me to limit my comments to what I consider strategic realities.
我相信这是真的，这使我不必有条不紊地评估经济和机构的实力和弱点，它允许我将我的评论限制在我认为的战略现实上。
I’m flattered that people have asked for my opinion, and I will give it. But that’s all it is: an opinion. In setting it down, I will repeat things I’ve written before. So if you find something that you think you’re reading for the second time, you’re probably right.
我很高兴人们要求我提供意见，我也会提供意见。但这仅仅是一个意见而已。在设定它时，我将重复我以前写过的东西。因此，如果你发现一些你认为是第二次阅读的东西，你可能是对的。
Those two words say it all. If you have a boom, eventually you’ll have a bust. And the further the boom goes, the worse the bust is likely to be. If there’s no boom, on the other hand, there needn’t be a bust.
这两个词说明了一切。如果你有一个繁荣，最终你会有一个萧条。而且繁荣越远，萧条就可能越严重。另一方面，如果没有繁荣，就不一定会有萧条。
There was no great boom in the U.S. economy in 2003-07, and that’s one of the reasons why it has held up reasonably well despite the recent turmoil.
2003年至2007年，美国经济没有出现大的繁荣，这也是美国经济在最近的动荡中仍能保持良好发展的原因之一。
But there was an incredible boom in the financial sector, and it has led to an incredible bust. (It remains to be seen whether its effects will slop over into the real economy. As you know, we think they will.)
但金融业出现了令人难以置信的繁荣，并导致了令人难以置信的破产。它的影响是否会蔓延到实体经济中，还有待观察。如你所知，我们认为它们会的）。)
Finally, there wasn’t a boom in the U.S. stock market, and so it hasn’t busted. (If you think your stocks have given you pain, realize that their decline isn’t at all commensurate with the end-of-the-world thinking roiling the financial sector).
最后，美国股市并没有繁荣，所以它也没有破产。如果你认为你的股票给你带来了痛苦，要知道它们的下跌与金融业的世界末日思想完全不相称）。