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,单击此处编辑母版标题样式,单击此处编辑母版文本样式,第二级,第三级,第四级,第五级,*,TEXT,A Whiff of the 1930s,IN THE SPRING of 1931 Austria,s largest bank,the Credit Anstalt,was on the verge of collapse.The Austrian government could not simply stand by and let it fail,but when it came to the banks rescue with large sums of freshly printed domestic currency,the resulting capital flight rapidly depleted Austrias gold and foreign exchange reserves.The obvious answer would have been to abandon the gold standard and let the currency float.But this solution was unacceptablenot just because a drop in the schillings value would magnify the burden of foreign-currency-denominated debt,but because a currency devaluation would deal a devastating blow to the confidence of a country whose memories of post-World War I hyperinflation were still fresh.Austria pleaded for help from its neighbors and the then-new Bank for International Settlements,but the offered assistance was too little,too late.In the end,the desperate government resorted to capital controls.,Unit SixThe Return of Depression EconomicsPaul Krugman,It is a familiar story to economic historians.It is also astonishingly modern-sounding:if the plot does not exactly fit any one of todays crisis-ridden economies around the world,it does sound very much like a pastiche of recent events in Indonesia,Malaysia,and Brazil.The main difference now is that financial rescue attempts from the international community have become routine.When a country gets in trouble today a SWAT team from the International Monetary Fund and the U.S.Treasury quickly arrives on the scene.Suppose,however,that the IMF could use a time machine to send its best money doctors back to that Vienna spring of 1931,but without the ability to offer a huge,no-questions-asked credit line on the spot.What would todays experts say?What could they tell the Austrians that they did not already know?,Unit SixThe Return of Depression EconomicsPaul Krugman,Most modern economiststo the extent that they think about it at allregard the Great Depression as a gratuitous,unnecessary tragedy.They believe that what might have been an ordinary,forgettable recession became a nightmarish slump thanks to the stupidity(or at least the ignorance)of policymakers.If only the Federal Reserve had not been preoccupied with defending the gold standard instead of the real economy;if only Herbert Hoover had followed an expansionary fiscal policy instead of trying to balance the budget,if only policy in general had not been governed by a“liquidationist”philosophy that saw short-run economic pain as a necessary purgative for previous excessesthen the catastrophe could easily have been avoided.And since we know better now,it cannot happen again.,Unit SixThe Return of Depression EconomicsPaul Krugman,Or can it?As little as two years ago I and most of my colleagues were quite confident that although the world would continue to suffer economic difficulties,those problems would not bear much resemblance to the crisis of the 1930sbecause economists and policymakers had learned the lessons of that decade and would never again perversely tighten monetary and fiscal policy in the face of recession.True,Mexico suffered a severe slump in 1995 and Japans economy had stagnated since 1991,but these appeared to be special cases,easily rationalized as the result of exceptionally misguided policy.,Perhaps we should have known better and realized,for example,that the dilemma Austria faced in 1931 could just as easily arise in the modern world,and that now as then there are no good answers.In any case,there is no mistaking the lesson of the terrifying economic and financial events of the last two years:,Unit SixThe Return of Depression EconomicsPaul Krugman,the economic crisis in Asia,its spread to Latin America,the deepening slump in Japan,and the brief but ominous panic that swept bond markets last autumn.The truth is that the world economy poses more dangers than we had imagined.Problems we thought we knew how to cure have once again become intractable,like temporarily suppressed bacteria that eventually evolve a resistance to antibiotics.More specifically,the problem of aggregate demandof getting people to spend enough to employ the economys productive capacityis not,as we might have thought,always a problem with an easy solution.While it may often be possible for countries,especially large,stable,self-sufficient economies like the United States,to handle recessions simply by printing more money,we are finding an increasing number of cases in which countries find either that they cannot apply that same medicine or that the medicine is ineffectual.There is,in short,a definite whiff of the 1930s in the air.,Unit SixThe Return of Depression EconomicsPaul Krugman,The point is not that all of the current economic difficulties will necessarily get worse.There is a reasonable chance that 1999 will see some economic recovery in Asia,if not the beginning of a real climb back to economic health.Thr
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