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As the 2007-2008 financial crisis set in, and the banking system teetered, Mervyn King reminded staff to keep records of discussions and decisions. In 2009, Lord King spoke of consulting the Bank’s historic papers and described archives at a time of panic as “the one place where you may learn something about how to deal with it”.
在2007年至2008年金融危机爆发、银行体系濒临崩溃之际，英国央行行长默文•金(Mervyn King)提醒员工保留讨论和决策记录。2009年，默文·金谈到参考英国央行的历史文献，并将恐慌时期的档案称为“一个你可以学习如何应对危机的地方”。
But when historians come to write about the financial collapse, will the records be there to tell its story?
然而，当历史学家开始撰写有关金融危机的著作时，会有相关记录透露事件真相吗？
As the crisis nears its 10th anniversary – 10 years being the period for which companies typically retain records for legal purposes – some researchers worry that banks may destroy information that could shed light on its causes and how the effects spread. Valuable information might include records of loans and trades and internal audit and risk management reports.
随着金融危机爆发接近10周年——基于法律目的，公司通常会将相关记录保存10年——某些研究人员担心，银行或许会销毁可能揭示危机缘由及其传播方式的信息。有价值的信息可能包括贷款和交易记录，以及内部审计和风险管理报告。
According to Vicki Lemieux, an associate professor in archival studies at the University of British Columbia, archivists typically select around 5 per cent of organisational records − such as board minutes, public statements and strategy papers − for long-term preservation. But, given the repercussions and public importance of the crisis, she says: “The decision on what records are retained shouldn’t be a technocratic function undertaken by archivists alone, without some wider social consultation.”
按照不列颠哥伦比亚大学(University of British Columbia)档案学副教授维基•勒米厄(Vicki Lemieux)的说法，档案保管人员通常选择将组织内大约5%的记录——比如董事会会议记录、公开声明和战略文件——长期保存。但她表示，鉴于金融危机的巨大冲击波和公共重要性，“决定保留何种记录不应仅仅是档案保管人员的技术官僚职能，没有某种更广泛的社会咨询”。
It is not just academics who want to preserve the records. The European Association for Banking and Financial History, a network of financial institutions, hopes to persuade bank boards to preserve historically significant records.
不只是学者们想要保留这些记录。金融机构网络——欧洲银行业和金融历史协会（European Association for Banking and Financial History，简称EABH）也希望说服银行董事会保留具有重大历史意义的记录。
“The first step is to ensure the important parts of the archive are kept. But, in due time [after closure periods of perhaps 30-50 years] we hope the banks will make them accessible to researchers,” says Ines van Dijk, a document specialist at the Dutch central bank, who sits on an EABH committee looking at legislation affecting finance archives.
丹麦央行的档案专家伊奈斯•范戴克(Ines van Dijk)表示：“首先要确保保留重要的档案。但是，在（或许30-50年封闭期之后的）适当时候，我们希望银行把这些档案向研究人员开放。”范戴克是EABH旗下一个委员会的成员，该委员会研究影响金融档案的立法。
Bank failure is a threat to preserving records. Banks are not obliged to maintain archives acquired through takeovers, although some do, while archives orphaned by outright bankruptcies are even more at risk of destruction.
银行倒闭对保存记录造成威胁。银行没有义务保存通过收购获得的档案（虽然有些银行也会保存），而因彻底破产而无人照看的档案甚至更有可能遭到破坏。
In the UK, the fate of trading data and records locked down on Lehman’s London-controlled systems on September 15 2008 by PwC, administrator of Lehman Brothers International Europe, hangs in the balance. Tony Lomas, PwC’s lead administrator of LBIE, says “a famous educational institution” has asked to take custody of the data, once everything has been wound up. He has yet to decide whether to grant the request or instruct that at that time – possibly around 2020 – the data be stored for another six years, which is standard practice after complex administrations, and then be destroyed.
在英国，雷曼兄弟国际欧洲公司（Lehman Brothers International Europe，简称LBIE）破产管理人普华永道(PwC)在2008年9月15日冻结了雷曼伦敦总部控制的系统中的交易数据和记录，这些数据如今命运难卜。普华永道的LBIE破产管理人托尼•洛玛斯(Tony Lomas)表示，“一家著名的教育机构”提出在完成所有破产工作后接管这些数据。他还未决定是否同意这一请求，或是届时（大约在2020年左右）指示再保存6年（这是复杂破产管理之后的标准做法）、然后销毁。
Entrusting data from failed banks to third parties may be “fraught with some difficulty”, especially because of confidentiality issues, Mr Lomas says: “As a professional services firm, we’re very [careful] to comply with data protection law.” However, transparency advocates, such as Gudrun Johnsen, an assistant professor of finance at the University of Iceland, who worked on the official investigation into the Icelandic banking collapse, say substituting clients’ names with unique identification numbers would overcome the problem.
洛玛斯表示，将破产银行数据托付给第三方可能“有一些棘手的困难”，尤其是考虑到保密性问题，他说：“作为一家专业服务机构，我们非常（认真地）遵守数据保护法。”然而，倡导透明度的人士——如曾经参与对冰岛银行业破产的官方调查的冰岛大学(University of Iceland)金融学助理副教授古德龙•约翰逊(Gudrun Johnsen)——表示，用独特身份号码代替客户姓名就能解决这个问题。
“Allowing researchers access to the operational data of failed banks or banks that received taxpayer-funded bailouts, could help regulators develop better methodologies for spotting vulnerabilities in the banking system such as risky lending patterns,” she says.
她表示：“允许研究人员获得破产银行或者那些接受纳税人资金纾困的银行的运营数据，可能有助于监管机构开发出更好的方法来找出银行体系的弱点，如高风险的放贷模式。”
In the US, Barclays, which acquired the US operations of Lehman Brothers, owns operational data from its collapse; other corporate records belong to the Lehman estate, the rump of Lehman that is being wound down in the US post bankruptcy, or sit with Harvard Business School, which holds much of the archive.
在美国，巴克莱(Barclays)收购了雷曼兄弟美国业务，因此现在拥有后者的运营数据；其他企业记录属于Lehman estate——雷曼破产后在美国正被清盘的遗留部门——或者在保管雷曼大量档案的哈佛商学院(HBS)那里。
Happenstance plays a role in how events are remembered. Researching the 1914 banking crisis for his book, Saving the City, historian Richard Roberts encountered holes in the official record. But the chance survival of the diary of Basil Blackett, a largely forgotten Treasury official, partly compensated with his “ringside view”, says Prof Roberts. “Every night, he’d scrawl, in pencil, in a school notebook what he’d done that day and who said what to whom.”
事件的记录有着一定的偶然性。历史学家理查德•罗伯茨(Richard Roberts)为了写作《拯救伦敦金融城》(Saving the City)而对1914年银行业危机进行了研究，结果发现官方记录不全。但罗伯茨教授表示，基本上已被世人遗忘的财政部官员巴兹尔•布莱克特(Basil Blackett)的日记偶然被保存下来，他的“近距离感受”在一定程度上弥补了官方记录的不足。“每天晚上，他都用铅笔在学生用的笔记本上随手写下自己当天做了什么，以及谁向谁说了些什么”。
Email correspondence may be today’s version of scribbled diaries. Hugo Bänziger, managing partner at the Swiss bank Lombard Odier, and chairman of EABH’S board of management, observes that disaster recovery systems capture every email and draft produced on employees’ PCs. This raises the possibility that data might survive indefinitely – the storage costs are minimal – potentially creating a historical gold mine. Whether historians will get to see the contents, however, is uncertain. “The directors of a company [will] decide whether to make the data available,” Mr Bänziger says.
电子邮件可能是当今版本的潦草日记。瑞士银行隆奥(Lombard Odier)管理合伙人、EABH管理委员会主席胡戈•本齐格(Hugo Bänziger)发现，灾难恢复系统捕获了雇员电脑上的每份邮件和草稿。这带来了无限期保存数据（存储成本极低）的可能性，从而可能创造出一个历史学意义上的金矿。然而，历史学家们不一定能看到这些内容。本齐格表示：“公司董事将决定是否开放这些数据。”
Technology poses further challenges. Whereas yellowing manuscripts merely require careful handling, digital records need periodic software updates to remain accessible, which is a cost.
技术构成了进一步的挑战。泛黄的手稿只需轻拿轻放，而数字记录需要定期升级软件才能保持可检索，这是一项成本。
At some institutions, such as BNP Paribas, HSBC and Barclays, archivists run oral history programmes to capture executives’ reflections on events. At HSBC, Prof Roberts and fellow historian David Kynaston interviewed the ex-chairman and current and former chief executive, among others, for a corporate history including the crisis period.
在法国巴黎银行(BNP Paribas)、汇丰(HSBC)和巴克莱等一些机构，档案保管员发起了口述历史项目来捕捉高管们对事件的回顾。在汇丰，罗伯茨和另一名历史学家戴维•基纳斯顿(David Kynaston)为编撰包括危机期间在内的企业历史，采访了前任董事长以及现任和前任首席执行官等人。
Christopher Kobrak, a finance professor at business school ESCP Europe, cautions that oral testimony, while useful, may be affected by fading memory and personal angles, for instance. But occasionally a conversation yields gold dust. Harold James, professor of international affairs at Princeton University, says that when he was researching the birth of the European Monetary Union, an Italian economist mentioned that he participated in exploratory discussions with the head of the Bundesbank in the early 1980s. The remark, which challenged the prevailing view that the drive for EMU originated in German reunification in 1990, prompted Prof James to hunt successfully for documentation. “The conversation really helped me.”
ESCP欧洲商学院(ESCP Europe)的金融学教授克里斯托弗•科布拉克(Christopher Kobrak)告诫称，口述档案虽然有用，但可能受到记忆褪色和个人视角的影响。但有时候一场谈话会带来不菲的价值。普林斯顿大学(Princeton University)国际事务教授哈罗德•詹姆斯(Harold James)表示，在他研究欧洲货币联盟(EMU)起源的时候，一位意大利经济学家提到，他在上世纪80年代初参与了与德国央行(Bundesbank)行长的探索性讨论。这番言论挑战了当时的主流观点——建立欧洲货币联盟的驱动力源于1990年两德统一，它促使詹姆斯成功地找到了相关文献。“那场谈话真的帮了我”。
While financial crises will recur, advocates of learning from history argue that if bankers studied past calamities, they might spot the warning signs and be less susceptible to the “this time is different” fallacy, highlighted by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. Likewise, policy makers would have precedents to help frame responses.
尽管还会爆发金融危机，但提倡以史为鉴的人士辩称，如果银行家们研究过去的灾难，他们或许会发现警示信号，而且不太容易受到经济学家卡门•莱因哈特(Carmen Reinhart)和肯尼思•罗格夫(Kenneth Rogoff)强调的“这次不一样”谬论的影响。同样，政策制定者将在拟定应对方案时有例可循。
All of which may argue for preserving good records. As Ms Lemieux puts it: “Financial records are foundational”. Once gone, they are gone for good.
这一切都意味着有必要保存好记录。正如勒米厄所言：“财务记录是基础性的。”这些记录一旦没了，那就永远没了。
