The Road Ahead: Insolvency, Policy, and Economic Stress
該往何處：破產、對策、經濟壓力
by Michael Spence
Aug 15, 2011 1:00 AM EDT
Three Nobel economists share their thoughts on America’s future, what went wrong, and what can be done to fix things.
三位諾貝爾經濟學家提出他們對美國未來的看法，到底問題在哪，以及如何修正。
Whether or not America is facing a double-dip recession, the country has already entered a double-dip growth recession as measured against the past century’s 3 percent rate of expansion. U.S. securities markets, nearly always behind the curve, have gone into a state of panicky volatility. The deficit-stimulus policies of presidents Bush and Obama have failed: the costs have far exceeded the benefits. And ordinary Americans have grown suspicious of economic experts—as well they should be.
不論美國是否面臨雙底衰退(註)，與上個是季3%的成長相比，經濟成長的確是已經進入雙底衰退。總是慢半拍的美債市場已經成現恐慌波動的狀態。布希與歐巴馬總統任期內的赤字刺激政策已然失敗，畢竟所付出的代價已經遠遠超過帶來的好處。美國民眾開始對經濟專家們產生懷疑—這也是非常自然的事XD。
註：雙底衰退指的是趨勢猶如字母W的型狀，短期的復甦並非探底，未來還有一波。
Why is the economy stuck? The only empirical model we have for the current crisis is the Great Depression, whose severity has long been attributed to the Federal Reserve’s failure to provide desperately needed liquidity to the banks. With that conventional explanation in mind, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke set out in August 2007 to remedy the current financial crisis by injecting temporary cash into the banking system.
為何經濟停滯不前？歷史上唯一的借鏡應該是70年前的大衰退，那時候的債券無法從聯邦儲蓄中獲得保障，所以得不到應有的流動性。有了那次的教訓，美國聯準會主席 Ben Bernanke 在2007年八月的時候就已注入資金到銀行系統為手段企圖挽救財政危機。
It didn’t work: the banks, laden with bad loans, faced outsize insolvency problems, not just a shortage of liquid funds. When Bernanke figured out the real problem, he lifted more than $1 trillion in overvalued loans from the balance sheets of U.S. banks, a move that may have saved us from a second Great Depression. Between 1930 and 1933, the unemployment rate reached as high as 25 percent, where from 2008 until now the rate has held at 9 or 10 percent. All the same, we still can’t know the full consequences of Bernanke’s unprecedented intervention—it may have just stretched the pain further into the future. In that case, Bernanke has only moved us to a different circle of hell.
但這招可沒用XD：滿肚子壞債的銀行面對的不只是短期流動資金的問題，而是龐大的破產問題。等Bernanke 找到問題的所在，他為美國銀行償付了其資產負債表中超過1萬億美元的高估信貸，這一舉措可能使我們成功躲過了第二次經濟大蕭條的浩劫。在1930~1933年間，失業率高達25%，2008年到現在，失業率維持在9~10%左右。都一樣，我們不知道 Bernanke 這樣空前的介入其後果到底是什麼，也許只是把痛苦延展到未來而已。如果真得是這樣，Bernanke 只是把我們帶入另一個走向地獄的循環而已。
In my opinion, the onset of the Great Recession in 2007 and 2008 was a twin of the 1929–30 balance-sheet crisis that ushered in the Great Depression. In both cases the problem was insolvency, not just a shortage of liquidity. The credit-fueled housing boom of the 1920s explains the bank crisis that followed. Back then, 85 percent of commercial-bank mortgages were for terms of only three or four years and were not fully amortized, ending instead with balloon payments that usually required refinancing. That financial juggling act ended in 1929, resulting in the crash, and household insolvency immediately spilled into the banking system. The deleveraging process and its economic consequences dragged on for the entire decade of the 1930s.
我的觀點是這樣：07~08年的蕭條與1929~30年的資產危機是如出一轍的，只不過是大蕭條的前戲。兩者的問題都是信用破產，不只是短期的流動資產問題而已。1920~29的房貸造成房市榮景，這解釋了為何後來會產生經濟危機。那時，85%的商業銀還貸款只是為了演前的三四年，而且沒有完整的攤銷，取而代之的是像氣球般不斷膨脹的支出，而且資金還要不停的灌下去。這些花招在1929年玩完了，崩盤隨之而來，家戶破產馬上擴展到銀行去。接下來的去槓桿化過程與經濟後果持續拖延到整個1930年代，整整十年。
How long will it take to climb out of the hole this time? The trouble is that Bernanke’s stimulus spending was a blunderbuss. It didn’t address the need to restore the damaged balance sheets of banks and households, and without such repairs, businesses and consumers will be obliged to keep paying down debt rather than hiring and spending, while banks will concentrate on piling up cash reserves in order to cover bad loans instead of making new loans to get the economy up and running again. Troubled assets were removed from the banks’ books at face value, to be replaced by reserves on which the Fed pays interest to the banks, rewarding them for not making loans. Meanwhile, many struggling homeowners had their mortgage payments reduced by lengthening their loans or reducing interest rates—not by reducing principal to realign their debt with home values.
要從這個大坑爬出來需要多少時間？現在的大麻煩是，Bernanke 的刺激支出只是散彈槍的狂掃，並沒有真正擊中核心，銀行與家戶那些糟糕的資產負債表還是沒有復原。沒有適當的修正，不論企業或消費者都被迫持續還債，不雇傭也不消費。而銀行則是專心的準備銀彈來抵擋壞債，而不願傾向借出新的款項給企業，那正是經濟無法復甦的原因。不良資產的面值從帳簿上剝離，取而代之的是帶利息的儲備金，利息是美聯儲支付給銀行作為停止放貸的補償。與此同時，苦於償債的房主會通過延期還貸、降低利息以減輕還款壓力，而不是量力而行，降低購房標準。
But without balance-sheet restructuring, such adjustments only extend America’s bullet-biting into the indefinite future. The painfully slow process of deleveraging continues to handicap the prospect of recovery. The Fed rescue may have boosted spirits at financial institutions, but it’s now clear that the seemingly miraculous rebound of bank profits was an accounting artifact that took insufficient notice of sour loans. And now the window for raising private bank capital to reboot damaged balance sheets has slammed shut.
在資產負債持續失衡而未重整的情況下，上述治標不治本的調整只會令美國遭受到的嚴密攻擊延續到無盡的將來。極度緩慢且痛苦的去槓桿化進程將繼續阻礙經濟走向復蘇的前景。美聯儲的救助或許能令金融機構士氣大增，但如今人們已經明白，銀行收益的奇跡反彈不過是低估不良貸款的會計伎倆。籌集私人銀行資本以修復受損資產負債表的機會之窗已然重重關上。
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