【大鱼推荐】克鲁格曼：何苦总是对着通胀干？

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      大鱼按：下文是克鲁格曼在“扭腰时报”上撰写的专栏文章，嘲讽美联储只会盯住通胀，而对其他经济指标和状况置若罔闻。从文中，我们会注意到一些有趣的东西。例如，美联储公布了2008年货币政策会议的文字记录，说明美国的信息公开还是做得比较好。另外，也值得大家思考的是，在20世纪90年代，格林斯潘领导的美联储奉行所谓的“中性”货币政策，即货币政策不随着经济形势起舞，而是专注物价水平。90年代美国实现了“新经济”，很多人认为格林斯潘的这一政策居功至伟。所以克鲁格曼批评的，只是近20年来，美国货币政策的一个缩影。那么从中中国的央行会学到什么呢？




       最近，美联储(Federal Reserve)公布了2008年货币政策会议的文字记录，那是多灾多难的一年。天哪，读起来真让人泄气。
       其中一部分原因是，美联储的官员看上去对正在形成的经济风暴简直一无所知（大鱼按：这似乎是全球现象，学者总是批评官员无知，而官员则认为学者无能，似乎学者所有的本领都在嘴巴上面，缺乏执行力，很有趣~~~）。但这一点我们已经知道了。真正令人惊讶的是，他们居然可以如此执迷不悟。经济正一落千丈，而美联储的许多人却只想谈通胀。
       《大西洋月刊》(The Atlantic)的马修·奥布莱恩(Matthew O’Brien)做了统计：2008年8月，通胀被提到了322次，相比之下，失业仅被提到28次，系统性风险或危机被提到19次。在2008年9月16日——雷曼倒闭的第二天！——的会议上，通胀被提到129次，失业被提到26次，系统性风险或危机仅被提到过4次。
       长期以来，研究大萧条时期的历史学者一直对当时政策讨论中暴露的愚蠢感到不可思议。例如，面对毁灭性的通货紧缩漩涡，英国央行却一直执迷于想象中的通胀威胁。经济学家拉尔夫·霍特里(Ralph Hawtrey)的著名表述是，“这就相当于在诺亚(Noah)时代的大洪水中，大叫‘着火了，着火了！’ ”（大鱼按：这个比喻实在是很风趣~~）然而事实证明，就像七八十年前的前辈一样，面临金融危机的现代货币官员同样会错误地固执己见。
       这不光是2008年的错误。尽管已经一错再错，但是那些被认为有理有据的观点，很大程度上却仍然在固执地关注着假想的物价上涨威胁。如果你过去五年里一直在看CNBC，或阅读《华尔街日报》(The Wall Street Journal)的观点文章，或关注某些著名保守派经济学家的观点，你就会一直生活在通胀失控的警告中，他们说通胀随时会出现。但事实并非如此（大鱼按：有趣的是，大鱼前段时间在一个美国家庭做客，主人现身说法，按照自己的商品篮子，痛斥了美国通胀问题）。
       这种对通胀的执迷从何而来？一个原因是，这些人没能分清基础通胀与整体数据的短期波动之间的区别，后者主要是能源和食品价格的波动造成的。尤其是汽油价格，每年都对通胀产生巨大的影响，只要汽油价格上涨，人们就能听到可怕的警告；然而这种波动并不能说明未来会发生通胀。
       他们也不明白，在经济受到压抑时印钱不会引发通胀。我本来可以告诉他们这个道理，事实上我也这么做了，但在2008年或2009年初没有领会到这一点也许情有可原。
       然而关键是，在通胀上的执迷一直都在，年复一年，尽管一系列的事件已经驳斥了执迷于通胀的所谓理由。这告诉我们，起作用的不光是糟糕的分析。在根本层面起作用的，是政治因素（大鱼按：哈哈，世界哪都一样~~~·）。
       如果你看一看那些执迷于通胀的人都是谁，这一点就很明显了。尽管少数保守派人士认为，美联储应该采取更多而不是更少行动，但他们几乎没有起到实质性的影响。整体来看，大多数保守派人士都执迷于通胀，而几乎所有的通胀执迷者都是保守派人士。
       为什么会这样？它在一定程度上反映了这样一种观点，即政府永远不应该寻求缓解经济困境，因为私营部门永远最明白该怎么做。上世纪30年代，弗里德里希·哈耶克(Friedrich Hayek)和约瑟夫·熊彼特(Joseph Schumpeter)等奥地利经济学家强烈反对任何通过宽松货币政策来抗击萧条的做法，熊彼特警告说，这么做会让“萧条起不到它应有的作用”。现代保守派人士的观点通常不会表现得这么尖锐，但基本上差不多。
       这种反政府态度的另一面是，任何刺激经济的尝试，无论是财政政策还是货币政策，都会产生灾难性的后果——津巴布韦，我们来了！这种观念如此牢固，以至于无论它错得多么离谱，仍然一年年地延续了下来。
       最终，所有这些观念都与无论经济状况如何，都要采取强硬行动、实施惩罚的偏好存在关联。英国记者威廉·基根(William Keegan)曾经将这形容为“施虐狂货币主义”，而这种观念如今仍然存在着。
       这有什么关系吗？的确，美联储并没有向“施虐狂货币主义者”投降。可以看出，虽然汽油价格在2011年的另一次波动短暂地推高了整体通胀率，而且共和党人激烈地抱怨美元“贬值”，但美联储并没有惊慌失措。
      但我想说，通胀执迷者的危言耸听已经吓到了美联储，否则的话，美联储可能做得更多。（大鱼按：美联储是被吓大的？：））此外，这也是大环境的一部分，在这种环境下，任何可能解决我们长期就业危机的行动都会遭到反对。
       如我所说，我们过去曾惊讶于政策制定者在大萧条期间的执迷不悟。而这次的大衰退来袭时，尽管我们有机会比他们做得更好，但却重复了他们的所有错误。


翻译：王湛
原文标题：《何苦盯着通胀不放》，保罗·克鲁格曼 2014年03月04日

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关键词：克鲁格曼 大鱼推荐 克鲁格 鲁格曼 wall street 克鲁格曼

为了帮助大家在学习专业知识的同时，顺便学一点英语，大鱼也找来了这篇文章的英文版，希望大家喜欢：）

The Inflation Obsession

By PAUL KRUGMAN March 04, 2014

Recently the Federal Reserve released transcripts of its monetary policy meetings during the fateful year of 2008. And boy, are they discouraging reading.

Partly that’s because Fed officials come across as essentially clueless about the gathering economic storm. But we knew that already. What’s really striking is the extent to which they were obsessed with the wrong thing. The economy was plunging, yet all many people at the Fed wanted to talk about was inflation.

Matthew O’Brien at The Atlantic has done the math. In August 2008 there were 322 mentions of inflation, versus only 28 of unemployment and 19 of systemic risks or crises. In the meeting on Sept. 16, 2008 — the day after Lehman fell! — there were 129 mentions of inflation, versus 26 mentions of unemployment and only four of systemic risks or crises.

Historians of the Great Depression have long marveled at the folly of policy discussion at the time. For example, the Bank of England, faced with a devastating deflationary spiral, kept obsessing over the imagined threat of inflation. As the economist Ralph Hawtrey famously observed, “That was to cry ‘Fire, fire!’ in Noah’s flood.” But it turns out that modern monetary officials facing financial crisis were just as obsessed with the wrong thing as their predecessors three generations before.

And it wasn’t just a bad call in 2008. Much supposedly informed opinion has remained fixated on the supposed threat of rising prices despite being wrong again and again. If you spent the last five years watching CNBC, or reading The Wall Street Journal opinion pages, or for that matter listening to prominent conservative economists, you lived in a constant state of alarm over runaway inflation, which was coming any day now. It never did.

What accounts for inflation obsession? One answer is that obsessives failed to distinguish between underlying inflation and short-term fluctuations in the headline number, which are mainly driven by volatile energy and food prices. Gasoline prices, in particular, strongly influence inflation in any given year, and dire warnings are heard whenever prices rise at the pump; yet such blips say nothing at all about future inflation.

They also failed to understand that printing money in a depressed economy isn’t inflationary. I could have told them that, and in fact I did. But maybe there was some excuse for not grasping this point in 2008 or early 2009.

The point, however, is that inflation obsession has persisted, year after year, even as events have refuted its supposed justifications. And this tells us that something more than bad analysis is at work. At a fundamental level, it’s political.

This is fairly obvious if you look at who the inflation obsessives are. While a few conservatives believe that the Fed should be doing more, not less, they have little if any real influence. The overall picture is that most conservatives are inflation obsessives, and nearly all inflation obsessives are conservative.

Why is this the case? In part it reflects the belief that the government should never seek to mitigate economic pain, because the private sector always knows best. Back in the 1930s, Austrian economists like Friedrich Hayek and Joseph Schumpeter inveighed against any effort to fight the depression with easy money; to do so, warned Schumpeter, would be to leave “the work of depressions undone.” Modern conservatives are generally less open about the harshness of their view, but it’s pretty much the same.

The flip side of this antigovernment attitude is the conviction that any attempt to boost the economy, whether fiscal or monetary, must produce disastrous results — Zimbabwe, here we come! And this conviction is so strong that it persists no matter how wrong it has been, year after year.

Finally, all this ties in with a predilection for acting tough and inflicting punishment whatever the economic conditions. The British journalist William Keegan once described this as “sado-monetarism,” and it’s very much alive today.

Does any of this matter? It’s true that the Fed hasn’t surrendered to the sado-monetarists. Notably, it didn’t panic in 2011, when another blip in gasoline prices briefly raised the headline rate of inflation, and Republicans began inveighing against the “debasement” of the dollar.

But I’d argue that the clamor from inflation obsessives has intimidated the Fed, which might otherwise have done more. And it has also been part of a general climate of opposition to anything that might address our continuing jobs crisis.

As I suggested, we used to marvel at the wrongheadedness of policy makers during the Great Depression. But when the Great Recession struck, and we were given a chance to do better, we ended up repeating all the same mistakes.

【大鱼推荐】克鲁格曼：何苦总是对着通胀干？
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