【英语国际】美国需要经济刺激

The Obama administration’s insistence on fiscal rectitude is dictated not by financial necessity but by political considerations. The US is not in the position of Europe’s heavily indebted countries, which must pay hefty premiums over the price at which Germany can borrow. Interest rates on US government bonds have been falling and are near record lows, which means that financial markets anticipate deflation, not inflation.

President Barack Obama is under political pressure. Americans are deeply troubled by the accumulation of public debt. The Republican opposition has been extremely successful in blaming the crash of 2008 and the subsequent recession and high unemployment on government ineptitude.

But the crash of 2008 was primarily a failure of the private sector. US (and other) regulators should be faulted for failing to regulate. Without a bail-out, the financial system would have remained paralysed, making the subsequent recession much deeper and longer. Similarly, the US stimulus package was a necessary measure. The fact that most of it was spent to sustain consumption rather than on correcting the underlying imbalances was unavoidable due to time pressure.

Where the Obama administration went wrong was in how it bailed out the banking system: it helped the banks earn their way out of a hole by purchasing some of their bad assets and supplying them with cheap money. This, too, was guided by political considerations: it would have been more efficient to inject new equity into the banks but the president feared accusations of nationalisation and socialism.

That decision backfired, with serious political repercussions. The public, facing a jump in credit card charges from 8 per cent to nearly 30 per cent, saw the banks earning bumper profits and paying large bonuses. The Tea Party movement has exploited this resentment and Mr Obama is now on the defensive. The Republicans campaign against any further stimulus and the administration now pays lip service to fiscal rectitude, even if it recognises that deficit reduction may be premature.

I believe there is a strong case for further stimulus. Admittedly, consumption cannot be sustained indefinitely by running up the national debt. The imbalance between consumption and investment must be corrected. But to cut government spending at a time of large-scale unemployment would be to ignore the lessons of history.

The obvious solution is to distinguish between investments and current consumption, and increase the former while reducing the latter. But that seems politically untenable. Most Americans are convinced that government is incapable of managing investments aimed at improving the country’s physical and human capital.

Again, this belief is not without justification: a quarter-century of calling the government bad has resulted in bad government. But the argument that stimulus spending is inevitably wasted is patently false: the New Deal produced the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Triborough Bridge in New York and many other public utilities still in use today.

Moreover, the simple truth is that the private sector does not employ available resources. Mr Obama has in fact been very friendly to business, and corporations are operating profitably. But instead of investing, they are building up liquidity. Perhaps a Republican victory will boost their confidence but, in the meantime, investment and employment require fiscal stimulus (monetary stimulus, by contrast, would be more likely to stimulate corporations to devour each other than to hire workers).

How much government debt is too much is an open question because tolerance for public debt is highly dependent on prevailing perception. The risk premium attached to the interest rate is the critical variable: once it starts rising, the existing rate of deficit financing becomes unsustainable. But the tipping point is reflexive and therefore indeterminate.

Consider Japan, with a debt-to-gross-domestic-product ratio approaching 200 per cent, one of the highest in the world. Yet 10-year bonds yield little more than 1 per cent. The reason is that Japan’s private sector has little appetite for investing abroad and prefers 10-year government bonds at 1 per cent to cash at 0 per cent. As long as US banks can borrow at near zero and buy government bonds without having to commit equity, and the dollar does not depreciate against the renminbi, interest rates on US government bonds may well be heading in the same direction.

That does not mean that the US should maintain the discount rate close to zero and run up debt indefinitely. The right policy is to reduce imbalances as quickly as possible while minimising the increase in borrowing. This can be done in several ways, but the Obama administration’s stated goal of halving the budget deficit by 2013 while the economy is operating far below capacity is not one of them. Investing in infrastructure and education makes more sense. So does engineering a moderate rate of inflation by depreciating the dollar against the renminbi.

What stands in the way is not economics but misconceptions about budget deficits that are exploited for partisan and ideological purposes.

The writer is chairman of Soros Fund Management LLC. This essay is excerpted from a longer work to be published in the New York Review of Books later this month

奥巴马政府坚持实施财政紧缩并非出于金融需要，而是出于政治上的考虑。美国不像欧洲那些负债累累的国家——它们必须支付远高于德国的借款成本。美国国债利率一直在下降，如今已接近记录低点，这意味着金融市场预期美国会发生通缩，而非通胀。

美国总统巴拉克?奥巴马(Barack Obama)承受着政治压力。美国人民深受公共债务累积的困扰。反对党共和党极其成功地将2008年的危机及此后的衰退和高失业率归咎于政府的无能。

但是2008年的危机主要是私人部门的失败。美国（和其它国家）监管机构应受到监管不力的指责。如果不进行纾困，金融体系仍将陷入瘫痪，令随后的衰退变得更加严重和持久。同样，美国出台刺激方案是必要之举。迫于时间压力，将大多数刺激资金用于维持消费而非修正根本性失衡，是不可避免的。

奥巴马政府的失误之处在于纾困银行体系的方式：通过购买部分不良资产和提供廉价资金，帮助银行得以实现盈利，填补了窟窿。这也是出于政治方面的考虑：向银行注入新股本本来会更加有效，但奥巴马担心会招致国有化和社会主义的指责。

这种决定适得其反，带来了严重的政治后果。美国公众的信用卡费率从8%飙升至近30%，而银行获得了丰厚利润并发放着巨额奖金。茶叶党运动利用了这种不满，奥巴马目前陷入了被动。共和党反对任何进一步的刺激方案，而政府已口头表示要紧缩财政，即便它承认削减赤字可能还不成熟。

我相信，出台更多刺激方案有充足的理由。诚然，消费不可能通过增加国家债务无止境地维持下去。消费与投资之间的失衡必须得到修正。但是在大规模失业之际削减支出，那就是在忽视历史的教训。

显而易见的解决方案是区分投资和日常消费，在削减后者的同时增加前者。但这似乎在政治上站不住脚。大多数美国人确信，政府无力管理旨在提高国家物质和人力资本的投资。

这种观点不无道理：长达25年之久对政府无能的抱怨，已经造成了一个无能的政府。但认为刺激性支出必然会浪费的观点显然是错误的：新政(New Deal)催生了田纳西流域管理局(Tennessee Valley Authority)，而纽约的三区大桥(Triborough Bridge)和其它许多公共设施至今仍在使用之中。

此外，最明白不过的真相是，私人部门没有使用可获得的资源。奥巴马实际上对企业非常友好，企业在盈利。但它们不是将利润用于投资，而是在累积流动性。或许共和党取得胜利会提升它们的信心，但与此同时，投资和就业需要财政刺激政策（相比之下，货币刺激政策更有可能刺激企业彼此兼并，而不是雇佣工人）。

多少政府债务就算过多，目前仍然是一个悬而未决的问题，因为对公共债务的容忍度主要取决于主流看法。与利率相关的风险溢价是一个关键变量：一旦它开始上升，当前的赤字融资利率就会变得不可持续。但这个引爆点具有自反性，因此并不确定。

想想日本，其债务与GDP比率接近200%，为全球最高比率之一，而10年期国债收益率略高于1%。原因在于，日本私人部门几乎毫无兴趣投资海外，与零收益率的现金相比，他们更喜欢收益率为1%的10年期国债。只要美国的银行能以接近于零的利率借款，不必投入股本就可以购买国债，而美元对人民币不会贬值，那么美国国债利率就可能向着同样的方向发展。

这并不意味着美国应该保持接近于零的贴现率，并无休止地增加债务。正确的政策是尽快减少失衡，同时尽可能减少借款的上升。这可以通过数种方式实现，但奥巴马政府在经济严重开工不足之际，提出到2013年将预算赤字减半的目标不在其内。投资于基础设施和教育领域更有意义。让美元对人民币贬值以实现温和的通胀也是如此。

挡路的不是经济学，而是被用于党派和意识形态目的的对预算赤字的误解。

本文作者是索罗斯基金管理公司(Soros Fund Management LLC)主席。本文节选自将于本月晚些时候发表在《纽约书评》(New York Review of Books)上的一篇作品。

译者/君悦