大政府还是大央行？| 经济学人社论

For months there has been turmoil in financial markets and growing evidence of stress in the world economy. You might think that these are just the normal signs of a bear market and a coming recession. But, as our special report this week lays out, they also mark the painful emergence of a new regime in the world economy—a shift that may be as consequential as the rise of Keynesianism after the second world war, and the pivot to free markets and globalisation in the 1990s. This new era holds the promise that the rich world might escape the low-growth trap of the 2010s and tackle big problems such as ageing and climate change. But it also brings acute dangers, from financial chaos to broken central banks and out-of-control public spending.

过去的几个月里，金融市场一直动荡不安，不断有证据表明全球经济面临压力。你可能会认为这些不过是熊市标配，预示经济衰退即将到来。但是，正如本周特别报道指出，上述迹象也意味着全球经济将在阵痛中迎来新体系。这场转变具有重大意义，堪比二战后凯恩斯主义的崛起，也堪比上世纪90年代经济重心转向自由市场和全球化。迈入新时代，富裕国家有望摆脱过去十年的低增长陷阱，解决老龄化和气候变化等重大问题。但新时代同时也会带来巨大风险，比如金融市场混乱，央行运行紊乱以及公共支出失控。

The ructions in the markets are of a magnitude not seen for a generation. Global inflation is in double digits for the first time in nearly 40 years. Having been slow to respond, the Federal Reserve is now cranking up interest rates at the fastest pace since the 1980s, while the dollar is at its strongest for two decades, causing chaos outside America. If you have an investment portfolio or a pension, this year has been gruesome. Global shares have dropped by 25% in dollar terms, the worst year since at least the 1980s, and government bonds are on course for their worst year since 1949. Alongside some $40trn of losses there is a queasy sense that the world order is being upended as globalisation heads into retreat and the energy system is fractured after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

此次市场动荡的程度是几十年来之最。全球通胀率近40年来首次突破两位数。美联储起初反应迟缓，如今却重拳频出，加息速度达到自上世纪80年代以来之最快，而美元指数创下20年来的新高，给美国之外的市场带来了混乱。如果你持有投资组合或养老金，今年想必过得非常难受。以美元计算，全球股市跌幅达到25%，这至少是自上世纪80年代以来情况最糟的一年，政府债券恐也将迎来自1949年以来最糟的一年。全球面临约40万亿美元的损失，同时令人不安的是，逆全球化趋势愈演愈烈，俄乌战争导致能源体系失稳破裂，世界秩序正被颠覆。

All this marks a definitive end to the age of economic placidity in the 2010s. After the global financial crisis of 2007-09 the performance of rich economies assumed a feeble pattern. Investment by private firms was subdued, even at those making monster profits, while governments did not take up the slack: the public capital stock actually shrank around the world, as a share of gdp, in the decade after Lehman Brothers collapsed. Economic growth was sluggish and inflation was low. With the private and public sectors doing little to stimulate more activity, central banks became the only game in town. They held interest rates at rock-bottom levels and bought huge volumes of bonds at any sign of trouble, extending their reach ever further into the economy. On the eve of the pandemic central banks in America, Europe and Japan owned a staggering $15trn of financial assets.

上述一切都表明，2010年代的经济平稳时期毫无疑问已经终结。在2007-2009年的全球金融危机之后，富裕经济体表现疲弱。私人公司投资情绪低迷，即使是斩获巨额利润的公司也是如此，而各国政府并没有接替重担：雷曼兄弟破产后的十年里，全球公共资本存量占 GDP 的比例实际还下降了。当时经济增长缓慢，通货膨胀率低。由于私营和公共部门几乎毫无作为，无法刺激更多经济活动，央行成为了唯一的靠山。央行将利率维持在最低水平，一有问题就大量购买债券，对经济的整体影响愈发凸显。疫情爆发前夕，美国、欧洲和日本央行持有的金融资产达到惊人的15万亿美元。

The extraordinary challenge of the pandemic led to extraordinary actions which helped unleash today’s inflation: wild government stimulus and bail-outs, temporarily skewed patterns of consumer demand and lockdown-induced supply-chain tangles. That inflationary impulse has since been turbocharged by the energy crunch as Russia, one of the largest exporters of fossil fuels along with Saudi Arabia, has isolated itself from its markets in the West. Faced with a serious inflation problem the Fed has already raised rates from a maximum of 0.25% to 3.25% and is expected to take them to 4.5% by early 2023. Globally, most monetary authorities are tightening too.

非常之时行非常之事，新冠大流行的严峻形势下，政府大肆出台经济刺激和救助政策，消费者需求一时出现扭曲，疫情封锁导致供应链混乱，最终导致如今通胀高企不下。作为比肩沙特阿拉伯的最大化石燃料出口国之一，俄罗斯脱离西方能源市场，由此引发的能源危机更是加剧了通胀。面对严重的通胀问题，美联储已将利率从最高0.25%上调至3.25%，预计到2023年初将达到4.5%。在全球范围内，大多数国家的金融管理部门也在收紧货币政策。

What on earth comes next? One immediate fear is of a blow-up, as a financial system that has become habituated to low rates wakes up to the soaring cost of borrowing. Although one mid-sized lender, Credit Suisse, is under pressure, it is unlikely that banks will become a big problem: most have bigger safety buffers than in the past. Instead the dangers lie elsewhere, in a new-look financial system that relies less on banks and more on fluid markets and technology. The good news is that your deposits are not about to go up in smoke. The bad news is that this system for financing firms and consumers is opaque and hypersensitive to losses.

形势将如何演变？一个迫在眉睫的担忧是，当习惯于低利率的金融体系意识到借贷成本飙升时，可能会出现崩盘。尽管瑞士信贷（Credit Suisse）这家中型银行正面临压力，但整个银行业不太可能成为大问题：大多数银行都有比过去更充分的安全缓冲。相反，危险存在于一个崭新的金融体系，一个不那么依赖银行，更依赖流动市场和技术的金融体系。好消息是，你的存款不会蒸发。坏消息是，这一为企业和消费者提供融资的体系是不透明的，对损失极度敏感。

You can already see this in the credit markets. As firms that buy debt shy away from risk, the interest rate on mortgages and junk bonds is soaring. The market for “leveraged loans” used to finance corporate buy-outs has seized up—if Elon Musk buys Twitter the resulting debts may become a big problem. Meanwhile investment funds, including pension schemes, face losses on the portfolios of illiquid assets they have accumulated. Parts of the plumbing could stop working. The Treasury market has become more erratic while European energy firms have faced crushing collateral calls on their hedges. Britain’s bond market has been thrown into chaos by obscure derivatives bets made by its pension funds.

这一点在信贷市场上已露端倪。由于购债的公司规避风险，抵押贷款和垃圾债券的利率正在飙升。用于为企业收购融资的“杠杆贷款”市场已经出现问题，如果埃隆·马斯克收购推特，由此产生的债务可能会成为一个大问题。与此同时，包括养老金计划在内的投资基金过去所积累的非流动性资产组合正面临损失。金融市场的部分“管道”可能会堵塞。美国国债市场变得更加不稳定，而欧洲能源公司对冲衍生品交易濒临爆仓。英国债券市场也因其晦涩不明的养老基金衍生品押注陷入混乱之中。

注释：

货币市场通常被描述为金融系统的“管道”。

If markets stop working smoothly, impeding the flow of credit or threatening contagion, central banks may step in: already the Bank of England has done a u-turn and started buying bonds again, cutting against its simultaneous commitment to raise rates. The related belief that central banks will not have the resolve to follow through on their tough talk is behind the other big fear: that the world will return to the 1970s, with rampant inflation. In one sense this is alarmist and over the top. Most forecasters reckon inflation in America will fall from the present 8% to 4% in 2023 as energy price-rises ebb and higher rates bite. Yet while the odds of inflation going to 20% are tiny, there is a glaring question about whether governments and central banks will ever bring it back down to 2%.

如果市场运作不畅，影响信贷流通或金融风险蔓延，各国央行可能会出手干预：英格兰银行已经大幅转变政策，开始重新买入债券，与其同期加息的措施背道而驰。人们认为，各国央行不会下定决心贯彻之前的强硬发言，这一看法还引发了另一层忧惧：上世纪70年代的疯狂通胀将会再次上演。从某种意义而言这不过是杞人忧天，过度担忧罢了。大多数人预测随着能源价格下降，以及加息作用开始显现，2023年美国通胀率会从当前的8%下降到4%。然而，尽管通胀率飙升至20%的几率极小，但仍存在一个明显的问题，各国政府和央行是否能够将通胀率降回2%。

A moving target

调整通胀目标

To understand why, look beyond the hurly-burly to the long-term fundamentals. In a big shift from the 2010s, a structural rise in government spending and investment is under way. Ageing citizens will need more health care. Europe and Japan will spend more on defence to counter threats from Russia and XXX. Climate change and the quest for security will boost state investment in energy, from renewable infrastructure to gas terminals. And geopolitical tensions are leading governments to spend more on industrial policy. Yet even as investment rises, demography will weigh ever more heavily on rich economies. As people get older they save more, and this excess of savings will continue to act to depress the underlying real rate of interest.

想要理解背后的原因，我们需要关注长期的发展规律，而非当前的混乱形势。自2010年起，世界经济出现了重大转变，政府开支和投资持续出现结构性上升。老龄化社会需要更多的医疗服务。欧洲和日本需要加大国防投入以应对来自俄罗斯等国的威胁。气候变化和安全需求促使各国增加对能源领域的投资，包括可再生能源基础设施和天然气存储终端等方面的投资。此外，紧张的地缘政治关系要求各国政府加大对产业政策的投入。但是，即使加大投资，人口老龄化仍会给富裕经济体带来更为承重的负担。这人嘛，年纪越大越爱存钱。而过多的银行储蓄将持续压低实际利率。

As a result the fundamental trends in the 2020s and 2030s are for bigger government but still-low real interest rates. For central banks this creates an acute dilemma. In order to get inflation down to their targets of roughly 2% they may have to tighten enough to cause a recession. This would incur a high human cost in the form of job losses and trigger a fierce political backlash. Moreover, if the economy deflates and ends up back in the low-growth, low-rate trap of the 2010s, central banks may once again lack enough stimulus tools. The temptation now is to find another way out: to ditch the 2% inflation targets of recent decades and raise them modestly to, say, 4%. That is likely to be on the menu when the Fed begins its next strategy review in 2024.

因此，今后二十年的基本趋势是政府将发挥更大的作用，但实际利率依旧维持在较低水平。因此各国央行深陷两难境地。为了将通胀控制在2%左右，央行需要采取充分的紧缩政策，以至于导致经济衰退。此举会导致就业岗位流失，民生凋敝，引发剧烈的政治冲击。此外，如果经济紧缩，最终出现上一个十年的低增长、低利率的经济陷阱，央行将再次陷入缺少有效刺激工具的窘境。更好的方法是找出一条新路：放弃几十年来2%的通胀目标，适当提高到比如4%。美联储很有可能在2024年进行下一轮策略评估时考虑纳入这一点。

This brave new world of somewhat higher government spending and somewhat higher inflation would have advantages. In the short run it would mean a less severe recession or none at all. And in the long run it would mean that central banks have more room to cut interest rates in a downturn, reducing the need for bond-buying and bail-outs whenever anything goes wrong, which cause ever-greater distortion of the economy.

在美丽新世界下，政府支出和通胀率微增也会带来一定好处。短期来看，经济不会发生严重衰退，抑或不会发生衰退。长期来看，央行能在经济低迷时期拥有更大的降息空间，从而在经济出现问题时，央行能减少对债券购买和紧急财政援助的需求，避免对经济造成更大的影响。

Yet it also comes with big dangers. Central banks’ credibility will be damaged: if the goalposts are moved once, why not again? Millions of contracts and investments written on the promise of 2% inflation would be disrupted, while mildly higher inflation would redistribute wealth from creditors to debtors. Meanwhile, the promise of moderately bigger government could easily spiral out of control, if populist politicians make reckless spending pledges or if state investments in energy and industrial policy are poorly executed and morph into bloated vanity projects that drag down productivity.

然而，这也带来更大的风险。央行的信誉将受到损害，因为通胀目标调了一次，就可能会有下一次。数百万个基于2%的通胀率签订的合同和进行的投资将受到影响。稍高的通胀也将利好债务人，引发其与债权人之间的财富再分配。与此同时，适当赋予政府更多经济权柄的“大政府”思潮极有可能造成失控的局面：一旦民粹主义政客做出不计后果的支出承诺怎么办，或者国家在能源和产业政策上的投资规划不周、执行不力，导致出现诸多拉低生产力的面子工程，又怎么办。

These opportunities and dangers are daunting. But it is time to start weighing them and their implications for citizens and businesses. The biggest mistakes in economics are failures of imagination that reflect an assumption that today’s regime will last for ever. It never does. Change is coming. Get ready.

机遇和危险都令人生畏。然而，是时候开始权衡其利弊及权衡他们对民众与企业的影响了。经济学中最忌讳的就是想象力的“失灵”——错把一时的风向奉为亘古不变的定律。风雨欲来，未雨绸缪方能有备无患！

Dossver， 男， 是错永不对真永是真

Yo，女，种下过流星，立志不做大鸵鸟

Trista，女，暴富不是梦想，是未来的现实

Yuqing，女，理想主义体验派，经济学人读者

校对组：

Alison，“贪玩又自由的风筝”

Cecilia，2022生活得贵妇一点

Sean，男大学生，相信奶茶在手翻译无忧

Diamond，去经历，去后悔，保持热爱，不负山海