Seven long years ago, I had a chance to meet Sheikh Muhammad Taqi Usmani, a Pakistani scholar who is also a leading expert in Islamic finance. It was an unexpectedly memorable conversation. Back then, during the height of the credit bubble, there were very few people who expressed strong criticisms of how western finance worked. But Usmani was scathing. Most notably, he bewailed the tendency of American and European banks to create money untethered from any real assets; or, as he put it, to spin “derivatives out of more derivatives”. Indeed, to Usmani it seemed as if western finance was almost akin to a giant ball of candyfloss: a bubble of sticky froth, from which a few “real” assets or economic activities had been spun and re-spun to support numerous ephemeral financial deals, much in the way a tiny piece of sugar can be used to concoct a giant puffball. “Western banks create money from money,” Usmani told me, contrasting this with the world of Islamic finance, where “money is always backed by assets” and relies on “equity financing not debt”.
漫長的7年前，我曾有機會與巴基斯坦學者謝赫•穆罕默德•塔基•奧斯馬尼(Sheikh Muhammad Taqi Usmani)見面，他也是伊斯蘭金融的領先專家。那次交談意外地讓我難忘。當時正值信貸泡沫的最高潮時期，對西方金融運轉方式提出強烈批評的人少之又少。但他當時措辭嚴厲。最引人注目的是，他對歐美銀行在沒有任何實際資產支持的情況下創造金錢的傾向表示無奈；就像他所說的那樣，它們用「衍生品繁衍出更多衍生品」。的確，對奧斯馬尼而言，西方金融類似於一個巨大的棉花糖球：一個黏黏的棉花狀泡沫，少量「實際」資產或經濟活動圍繞著這個泡沫被旋轉、再旋轉，以支撐大量短期金融交易，就好像可以用一小塊糖調製出一大個棉花糖球一樣。奧斯馬尼告訴我：「西方銀行在用錢生錢，」這與伊斯蘭金融形成對比，在伊斯蘭金融業，「金錢永遠有資產的支持」，而且依賴於「股權融資而非債務」。