克鲁格曼分析为什么负责任的宏观政策有时是最不负责任的
2015-01-24 19:21阅读：
Much Too Responsible
_Paul Krugman
The United States and Europe have a lot in common. Both are
multicultural and democratic; both are immensely wealthy; both
possess currencies with global reach. Both, unfortunately,
experienced giant housing and credit bubbles between 2000 and 2007,
and suffered painful slumps when the bubbles burst.
Since then, however, policy on the two sides of the Atlantic has
diverged. In one great economy, officials have shown a stern
commitment to fiscal and monetary virtue, making strenuous efforts
to balance budgets while remaining vigilant against inflation. In
the other, not so much.
And the difference in attitudes is the main reason the two
economies are now on such different paths. Spendthrift, loose-money
America is experiencing a solid recovery — a reality reflected in
President Obama’s feisty State of the Union address. Meanwhile,
virtuous Europe is sinking ever deeper into deflationary quicksand;
everyone hopes that the new moneta
ry measures announced Thursday
will break the downward
spiral, but nobody I know really expects them to be enough.
On the U.S. economy: No, it’s not morning in America, let alone the
kind of prosperity we managed during the Clinton years. Recovery
could and should have come much faster, and family incomes remain
well below their pre-crisis level. Although you’d never know it
from the public discussion,
there’s overwhelming agreement
among economists
that the Obama stimulus of 2009-10 helped
limit the damage from the financial crisis, but it was too small
and faded away far too fast. Still, when you compare the
performance of the American economy over the past two years withall
those Republican predictions of doom, you can see why Mr. Obama is
strutting a bit.
Europe, on the other hand — or more precisely the eurozone, the 18
countries sharing a common currency —
did almost everything
wrong. On the fiscal side, Europe never did much stimulus, and
quickly turned to austerity — spending cuts and, to a lesser
extent, tax increases — despite high unemployment. On the monetary
side, officials fought the imaginary menace of inflation, and took
years to acknowledge that the real threat is deflation.
Why did they get it so wrong?
To some extent, the turn toward austerity reflected institutional
weakness: In the United States, federal programs like Social
Security, Medicare and food stamps helped support states like
Florida with especially severe housing busts, whereas European
nations in similar straits, like Spain, were on their own. But
European austerity also reflected willful misdiagnosis of the
situation. In Europe as in America, the excesses that led to crisis
overwhelmingly involved private rather than public debt, with
Greece very much an outlier. But officials in Berlin and Brussels
chose to ignore the evidence in favor of a narrative that placed
all the blame on budget deficits, and simultaneously
rejected the evidencesuggesting — correctly — that trying to
slash deficits in a depressed economy would deepen the
depression.
Meanwhile, Europe’s central bankers decided to worry about
inflation in 2011 and raise interest rates. Even at the time it was
obvious that this was foolish — yes, there had been an uptick in
headline inflation, but measures of underlying inflation were too
low, not too high.
Monetary policy got much better after Mario Draghi became president
of the European Central Bank in late 2011. Indeed, Mr. Draghi’s
heroic efforts to provide liquidity to nations facing speculative
attack almost surely saved the euro from collapse. But it’s not at
all clear that he has the tools to fight off the broader
deflationary forces set in motion by years of wrongheaded policy.
Furthermore, he has to function with one hand tied behind his back,
because Germany remains adamantly opposed to anything that might
make life easier for debtor nations.
The terrible thing is that Europe’s economy was wrecked in the name
of responsibility. True, there have been times when being tough
meant reducing deficits and resisting the temptation to print
money. In a depressed economy, however, a balanced-budget fetish
and a hard-money obsession are deeply irresponsible. Not only do
they hurt the economy in the short run, they can — and in Europe,
have — inflict long-run harm, damaging the economy’s potential and
driving it into a deflationary trap that’s very hard to
escape.
Nor was this an innocent mistake. The thing that strikes me about
Europe’s archons of austerity, its doyens of deflation, is their
self-indulgence. They felt comfortable, emotionally and
politically, demanding sacrifice (from other people) at a time when
the world needed more spending. They were all too eager to ignore
the evidence that they were wrong.
And Europe will be paying the price for their self-indulgence for
years, perhaps decades, to come.
831
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![克鲁格曼分析为什么负责任的宏观政策有时是最不负责任的]( "克鲁格曼分析为什么负责任的宏观政策有时是最不负责任的")
2015
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