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继大牛Alan Blinder近日批评了欧洲的政策之后（见[相关阅读]），大牛Paul Krugman也加入了该阵营（通过‘反讽’的方式）。由于他和伯南克都曾经在90年代批评过日本央行在面对危机时反应迟钝，这些政策失误导致了日本“失去的十年”。现在他为此而“道歉”。为什么呢？
因为现在有两个比当年日本央行更离谱的反面典型：欧洲央行和瑞典央行。这两位还没有从日本“失去的十年”中吸取教训，不是反应迟钝的问题而是对经济起了破坏作用，情形不容乐观。相反，日本央行在周五采取了更激进的措施（见[相关阅读]）以避免通货紧缩的风险。
从2008金融危机到现在，六年过去了，美国在QE的刺激下完全摆脱了经济衰退的阴影，复苏的势头在逐渐加强。日本也步其后尘正在扩大经济刺激的力度来提振本国经济。然而，由于历史和经济结构的原因，欧洲各国在德国的影响下采取保守的财政削减政策，以及欧洲央行的不作为从而导致通货紧缩风险不断加大。对债台高筑的欧洲各国来说，这无疑是雪上加霜。它们在经济复苏的道路上更加步履维艰，积重难返。这些政策孰优孰劣，高下立判。
[相关阅读]
[专题系列] ECB 终于把名义利率降为负值了！（附重要文献11篇，免费）
华尔街日报：Enough With European Austerity, Bring on the Stimulus
日本央行意外扩大QQE规模至80万亿日元
纽约时报：现在最大的风险是通货紧缩
【2008金融危机必读系列】（附下载链接，持续添加中）
大牛Paul Krugman：日本，对不起！（系列之二）
大牛Paul Krugman：日本，对不起！（系列之三）
大牛Paul Krugman：重新思考日本
1998_krugman_liquidity trap.pdf
(5.64 MB)
bernanke_JP policy.pdf
(118.93 KB)
克鲁格曼的其他高论：
大牛Paul Krugman：MIT帮
大牛Paul Krugman：汇率制度，资本流动和金融危机 Currency Regimes, Capital Flows
大牛Paul Krugman对中国此次救市的评论是。。。
Apologizing to Japan
OCT. 30, 2014
TOKYO — For almost two decades, Japan has been held up as a cautionary tale, an object lesson on how not to run an advanced economy. After all, the island nation is the rising superpower that stumbled. One day, it seemed, it was on the road to high-tech domination of the world economy; the next it was suffering from seemingly endless stagnation and deflation. And Western economists were scathing in their criticisms of Japanese policy.
I was one of those critics; Ben Bernanke, who went on to become chairman of the Federal Reserve, was another. And these days, I often find myself thinking that we ought to apologize.
Now, I’m not saying that our economic analysis was wrong. The paper I published in 1998 about Japan’s “liquidity trap,” or the paper Mr. Bernanke published in 2000 urging Japanese policy makers to show “Rooseveltian resolve” in confronting their problems, have aged fairly well. In fact, in some ways they look more relevant than ever now that much of the West has fallen into a prolonged slump very similar to Japan’s experience.
The point, however, is that the West has, in fact, fallen into a slump similar to Japan’s — but worse. And that wasn’t supposed to happen. In the 1990s, we assumed that if the United States or Western Europe found themselves facing anything like Japan’s problems, we would respond much more effectively than the Japanese had. But we didn’t, even though we had Japan’s experience to guide us. On the contrary, Western policies since 2008 have been so inadequate if not actively counterproductive that Japan’s failings seem minor in comparison. And Western workers have experienced a level of suffering that Japan has managed to avoid.
What policy failures am I talking about? Start with government spending. Everyone knows that in the early 1990s Japan tried to boost its economy with a surge in public investment; it’s less well-known that public investment fell rapidly after 1996 even as the government raised taxes, undermining progress toward recovery. This was a big mistake, but it pales by comparison with Europe’s hugely destructive austerity policies, or the collapse in infrastructure spending in the United States after 2010. Japanese fiscal policy didn’t do enough to help growth; Western fiscal policy actively destroyed growth.
Or consider monetary policy. The Bank of Japan, Japan’s equivalent of the Federal Reserve, has received a lot of criticism for reacting too slowly to the slide into deflation, and then for being too eager to raise interest rates at the first hint of recovery. That criticism is fair, but Japan’s central bank never did anything as wrongheaded as the European Central Bank’s decision to raise rates in 2011, helping to send Europe back into recession. And even that mistake is trivial compared with the awesomely wrongheaded behavior of the Riksbank, Sweden’s central bank, which raised rates despite below-target inflation and relatively high unemployment, and appears, at this point, to have pushed Sweden into outright deflation.
The Swedish case is especially striking because the Riksbank chose to ignore one of its own deputy governors: Lars Svensson, a world-class monetary economist who had worked extensively on Japan, and who had warned his colleagues that premature rate increases would have exactly the effects they did, in fact, have.
So there are really two questions here. First, why has everyone seemed to get this so wrong? Second, why has the West, with all its famous economists — not to mention the ability to learn from Japan’s woe — made an even worse mess than Japan did?
The answer to the first question, I think, is that responding effectively to depression conditions requires abandoning conventional respectability. Policies that would ordinarily be prudent and virtuous, like balancing the budget or taking a firm stand against inflation, become recipes for a deeper slump. And it’s very hard to persuade influential people to make that adjustment — just look at the Washington establishment’s inability to give up on its deficit obsession.
As for why the West has done even worse than Japan, I suspect that it’s about the deep divisions within our societies. In America, conservatives have blocked efforts to fight unemployment out of a general hostility to government, especially a government that does anything to help Those People. In Europe, Germany has insisted on hard money and austerity largely because the German public is intensely hostile to anything that could be called a bailout of southern Europe.
I’ll be writing more soon about what’s happening in Japan now, and the new lessons the West should be learning. For now, here’s what you should know: Japan used to be a cautionary tale, but the rest of us have messed up so badly that it almost looks like a role model instead.
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