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从economist转一篇文吧.
Ronald McKinnon has died
Oct 1st 2014, 22:10 BY G.I. | WASHINGTON, D.C.
Ronald McKinnon, a prolific and pioneering international economist, died today of complications from a fall he suffered at San Francisco's airport 12 days ago. The news come from John Shoven at Stanford University, where Mr McKinnon had been a professor since 1961.
McKinnon wrote extensively over his career about exchange rates, finance, economic development and monetary systems. But he was best known for developing the theory of "financial repression" along with his mentor, Edward Shaw, in the early 1970s. Originally aimed at explaining disparities in economic development, the term has come back in vogue in recent years to describe many of the policy responses to the financial crisis and ensuing recession.
Underdeveloped financial systems, he argued, often played a role in crises. Banks are unable to act as "efficient information conduits between depositors and borrowers". Economic reforms, including financial liberalization, may create undue optimism about a country's prospects and a surge of capital inflows which become unsustainable, resulting in a crisis.
Many of the steps taken to safeguard the world from a global financial crisis involve forcing banks to hold more reserves or to penalise them for holding assets other than government bonds, implicitly encouraging them to lend to the government. Global finance has fragmented as regulators seek to wall their financial systems off from foreign contagion. Carmen Reinhart in particular has characterised this as a new form of financial repression.
Mr McKinnon in recent years dwelt heavily on the role of the dollar in the world financial system. In America, he took aim at the Federal Reserve's policies of zero interest rates and quantitative easing. Here, his prescriptions were less successful. He had diagnosed the evils of negative real interest rates at a time when they were used as a policy tool independent of monetary considerations. He thought that in America, they would lead to inflation, distortions in the banking system, and reduced lending, and he argued for higher rates. In fact, inflation never took off, and bank lending was held back not by the unprofitability of loans but the lack of demand and regulatory constraints. In the last year, loan demand has recovered along with the economy.
In the early 1970s, development economists thought that a lack of capital was the primary impediment to economic development, and development strategies were heavily premised on boosting the capital stock through government financed investment and foreign aid. Mr McKinnon instead focused on the maturity of the domestic financial system. In many countries, banks were forced to hold extensive reserves (often in government bonds), cap the interest rates paid on deposits or charged on loans, or direct credit to favored sectors. Sometimes, this was meant to help particular parts of the economy. Often, it was simply a way to make it easier for the government to fund its budget deficit, by in effect forcing banks to lend to it, at below-market interest rates. Mr McKinnon, and Mr Shaw, writing in 1973, called this "financial repression." Mr McKinnon argued this severely stunted economic growth. It resulted in negative real interest rates which discouraged people from holding deposits and thus impaired the ability of the banking system to lend. Entrepreneurs were forced to self-finance, but negative real interest rates made it difficult to accumulate the necessary savings. Financial repression fragemented the economy with some sectors or businesses paying much higher interest rates than others, making investment unattractive or inefficient.
Nonetheless, Mr McKinnon made huge contributions to economics, in particular the insidious ways government-induced distortions in the financial markets, often with the best of intentions, can hurt economic growth in the long run.
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