国际经贸高级英语精读与翻译ppt

《国际经贸高级英语精读与翻译ppt》由会员分享，可在线阅读，更多相关《国际经贸高级英语精读与翻译ppt（30页珍藏版）》请在装配图网上搜索。

1、nTEXT A Whiff of the 1930sA Whiff of the 1930s IN THE SPRING of 1931 Austrias largest bank,the Credit Anstalt,was on the verge of collapse.The Austrian government could not simply stand by and let it fail,but when it came to the banks rescue with large sums of freshly printed domestic currency,the r

2、esulting capital flight rapidly depleted Austrias gold and foreign exchange reserves.The obvious answer would have been to abandon the gold standard and let the currency float.But this solution was unacceptablenot just because a drop in the schillings value would magnify the burden of foreign-curren

3、cy-denominated debt,but because a currency devaluation would deal a devastating blow to the confidence of a country whose memories of post-World War I hyperinflation were still fresh.Austria pleaded for help from its neighbors and the then-new Bank for International Settlements,but the offered assis

4、tance was too little,too late.In the end,the desperate government resorted to capital controls.Unit SixThe Return of Depression EconomicsPaul Krugman It is a familiar story to economic historians.It is also astonishingly modern-sounding:if the plot does not exactly fit any one of todays crisis-ridde

5、n economies around the world,it does sound very much like a pastiche of recent events in Indonesia,Malaysia,and Brazil.The main difference now is that financial rescue attempts from the international community have become routine.When a country gets in trouble today a SWAT team from the Internationa

6、l Monetary Fund and the U.S.Treasury quickly arrives on the scene.Suppose,however,that the IMF could use a time machine to send its best money doctors back to that Vienna spring of 1931,but without the ability to offer a huge,no-questions-asked credit line on the spot.What would todays experts say?W

7、hat could they tell the Austrians that they did not already know?Unit SixThe Return of Depression EconomicsPaul Krugman Most modern economiststo the extent that they think about it at allregard the Great Depression as a gratuitous,unnecessary tragedy.They believe that what might have been an ordinar

8、y,forgettable recession became a nightmarish slump thanks to the stupidity(or at least the ignorance)of policymakers.If only the Federal Reserve had not been preoccupied with defending the gold standard instead of the real economy;if only Herbert Hoover had followed an expansionary fiscal policy ins

9、tead of trying to balance the budget,if only policy in general had not been governed by a“liquidationist”philosophy that saw short-run economic pain as a necessary purgative for previous excessesthen the catastrophe could easily have been avoided.And since we know better now,it cannot happen again.U

10、nit SixThe Return of Depression EconomicsPaul Krugman Or can it?As little as two years ago I and most of my colleagues were quite confident that although the world would continue to suffer economic difficulties,those problems would not bear much resemblance to the crisis of the 1930sbecause economis

11、ts and policymakers had learned the lessons of that decade and would never again perversely tighten monetary and fiscal policy in the face of recession.True,Mexico suffered a severe slump in 1995 and Japans economy had stagnated since 1991,but these appeared to be special cases,easily rationalized a

12、s the result of exceptionally misguided policy.Perhaps we should have known better and realized,for example,that the dilemma Austria faced in 1931 could just as easily arise in the modern world,and that now as then there are no good answers.In any case,there is no mistaking the lesson of the terrify

13、ing economic and financial events of the last two years:Unit SixThe Return of Depression EconomicsPaul Krugman the economic crisis in Asia,its spread to Latin America,the deepening slump in Japan,and the brief but ominous panic that swept bond markets last autumn.The truth is that the world economy

14、poses more dangers than we had imagined.Problems we thought we knew how to cure have once again become intractable,like temporarily suppressed bacteria that eventually evolve a resistance to antibiotics.More specifically,the problem of aggregate demandof getting people to spend enough to employ the

15、economys productive capacityis not,as we might have thought,always a problem with an easy solution.While it may often be possible for countries,especially large,stable,self-sufficient economies like the United States,to handle recessions simply by printing more money,we are finding an increasing num

16、ber of cases in which countries find either that they cannot apply that same medicine or that the medicine is ineffectual.There is,in short,a definite whiff of the 1930s in the air.Unit SixThe Return of Depression EconomicsPaul Krugman The point is not that all of the current economic difficulties w

17、ill necessarily get worse.There is a reasonable chance that 1999 will see some economic recovery in Asia,if not the beginning of a real climb back to economic health.Through prompt Federal Reserve action(and luck),the United States managed to avoid a financial panic last fall.Even Japan could do bet

18、ter in 1999 than it did in 1998.But even if all the current crises are weathered,the mere fact that they could happenand that conventional policy responses have turned out to be either ineffectual or unavailableis an ominous warning.The problems of the 1990s have distinct similarities with the probl

19、ems of the 1930s;so do the solutions.We had better all start relearning our Depression economics.Unit SixThe Return of Depression EconomicsPaul Krugman Its the Short Run,Stupid Its the Short Run,Stupid BEFORE THE 1930s most economists regarded the business cyclethe alternation of recessions and reco

20、veriesas a relatively minor issue.Whatever the causes of such fluctuations,economists believed that slumps were self-correcting and that the economy always tended to restore full employment in the long run.Hence,the fundamental economic problem was to ensure that resources were used efficiently,not

21、to ensure that they were used at all.True,as early as 1923 John Maynard Keynes famously took his colleagues to task,admonishing them not to ignore the short run:Unit SixThe Return of Depression EconomicsPaul Krugman This long run is a misleading guide to current affairs.In the long run we are all de

22、ad.Economists set themselves too easy,too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the sea is flat again.But not until the Great Depression did economists realize that“short run”shortfalls of demand were crucially important.Perhaps slumps were s

23、till selfcorrecting in the long run,but would the economy survive to reach that long run?Given the experience of the Depression,one might have thought that classical economics was gone for good.But the success of Keynesian economics in damping down the business cycle meant that the old focus on the

24、fullemployment long run could reemerge with a new justification.It was once againUnit SixThe Return of Depression EconomicsPaul Krugman reasonable to assume that the economy would always tend quickly back to full employmentnot because of any automatic mechanism but because intelligent policymakers w

25、ould use monetary and fiscal policy to get it there.Like traditional European wine grapes that survived the great phylloxera epidemic by being grafted onto American-root stock,classical economic theory survived the Great Depression by being grafted onto the assumption that activist monetary and fisc

26、al policy would ensure more or less full employment.In the 1950s Paul Samuelson dubbed the resurrection of classical full-employment economic theory the“neoclassical synthesis.”It remains to this day the position of those who appreciate but do not worship free markets.Here,for example,is what I wrot

27、e in Slate two years ago in an article entitled“Vulgar Keynesians”:Unit SixThe Return of Depression EconomicsPaul Krugman In reality the Federal Reserve Board actively manages interest rates,pushing them down when it thinks employment is too low and raising them when it thinks the economy is overhea

28、ting.You may quarrel with the Fed chairmans judgmentyou may think that he should keep the economy on a looser reinbut you can hardly dispute his power.Indeed,if you want a simple model for predicting the unemployment rate in the United States over the next few years,here it is:It will be what Greens

29、pan wants it to be,plus or minus a random error reflecting the fact that he is not quite God.But putting Greenspan(or his successor)into the picture restores much of the classical vision of the macroeconomy.Instead of an invisible hand pushing the economy toward full employment in some unspecified l

30、ong run,we have the visible hand of the Fed pushing us toward its estimate of the noninflationary unemployment rate over the course of two or three years.Unit SixThe Return of Depression EconomicsPaul Krugman To an adherent of the neoclassical synthesis like myself,then,the really disturbing thing a

31、bout the worlds current problems is not so much the possibility that they will spiral into a new Great Depression,which still remains unlikely and indeed seems to have receded in the last few months.Instead,the problem is that for the first time since the 1930s,we cannot be sure that governments can

32、 or will increase demand when we need it.The Unholy Trinity The Unholy Trinity WHAT HAS gone wrong?On the face of it,there seem to be two quite separate issues:the problems of developing countries threatened with hot money flows and those of mature economies facing a“liquidity trap.”Unit SixThe Retu

33、rn of Depression EconomicsPaul Krugman As the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates that had governed postwar world monetary affairs began to show signs of strain in the 1960s,a number of economists began to argue that there was a fundamental dilemmaor,more precisely,a“trilemma”at the heart o

34、f international finance.Analysts such as the Canadian theorist Robert Mundell suggested that,as a fundamental matter of economic logic,countries could not get everything they want and that any exchange rate system involves sacrificing some important objectives to achieve others.Three conflicting obj

35、ectives in particular,sometimes dubbed the“irreconcilable trinity,”have preoccupied would-be international financial architects.First,countries would like to retain scope for independent monetary policythat is,they would like to be able to cut interest rates to fight recessions and raise them to cou

36、nter inflation.Unit SixThe Return of Depression EconomicsPaul Krugman more or less stable exchange rates because erratic fluctuations in the value of their currency create uncertainty for business and can sometimes cause severe disruptions to the financial system.Third,countries would like to mainta

37、in full convertibilitythat is,they would like to assure businesses that money can be freely moved in or out of the country,if only to avoid the bureaucracy,paperwork,and opportunities for corruption inevitably associated with any attempt to limit capital movements.Alas,these objectives are indeed ir

38、reconcilable.The iron law of international finance is that countries can achieve at most two of the three.The logic of this law becomes apparent when one considers what happens if a country tries to have it all.Suppose that a country,like the members of the European Monetary System,were to maintain

39、free capital mobility and also commit itself to keeping its exchange rate fixed,buying or selling its currency on the foreign exchange markets as necessary.Unit SixThe Return of Depression EconomicsPaul Krugman Could it cut interest rates to fight a recession?Not for long.If France were to try reduc

40、ing its interest rates below German levels,investors,knowing that the exchange rate was fixed,would see a profit opportunity in the“carry trade.”That is,they would borrow in French francs,exchange the proceeds for Deutsche marks,and invest them in Germany.To prevent this increased supply of francs a

41、nd demand for marks from driving down the value of its currency,the Bank of France would have to sell marks while buying francs itself.Even if the bank started with tens of billions of marks in its account,it would quickly find those reserves exhausted.At that point a choice would have to be made.Fr

42、ance would either have to give up on its attempt to cut interest rates and abandon the goal of independent monetary policy,or let the franc drop and give up on the goal of exchange rate stability.Alternatively,it could impose some kind of capital controls,limiting investors ability to convert francs

43、 into foreign currency.Unit SixThe Return of Depression EconomicsPaul Krugman The trilemma of international finance forces countries to choose among three basic exchange regimes:a floating exchange regime,which allows complete freedom of international transactions and lets the government use monetar

44、y policy to fight recessions at the cost of erratic fluctuations;a fixed rate,which purchases stability at the expense of monetary independence;or capital controls,which can reconcile a relatively stable exchange rate with some monetary independence but only at the cost of other problems.Since World

45、 War I broke up the classical gold standard,all of these regimes have been tried repeatedly.The conventional wisdom about which regime is most desirable has itself gone through cycles.But two years ago the majority opinion among economistsand less decisively in the international policy communitywas

46、clearly in favor of floating rates.There had once been considerable sympathy for attempts to limit exchange rate variation:for example,the“adjustable pegs”of the Bretton Woods Unit SixThe Return of Depression EconomicsPaul Krugman era,under which rates were normally held within narrow bands but adju

47、sted on occasion as circumstances warranted.But experience showed that the mere hint of a possible devaluation in the face of highly mobile capital provoked massive speculative attacks.So such compromise systems broke down,with countries either giving up and floating their rates or averting speculat

48、ion by ruling out any possibility of future changes in currency values.And that meant that adopting any sort of fixed exchange rate required in effect giving up completely on monetary adjustment.Hong Kong offers a classic example.Economic turmoil in the rest of Asia and the devaluation of many neigh

49、boring countries currencies have left Hong Kong clearly overpriced and led to record unemployment.No law would prevent the textbook solutiona one-time devaluation of the Hong Kong dollar.But the citys economic authorities have concluded that the only way to prevent massive speculation against that c

50、urrency every time there is an economic downturn is to commit themselves firmly to keeping its value in U.S.dollars constant.A recession must therefore simply be endured.Unit SixThe Return of Depression EconomicsPaul Krugman A country could avoid locking its exchange rate by reinstituting capital co

51、ntrols of the kind that prevailed for the first two decades of Bretton Woods,which allowed the pegs of that system to be truly adjustable,but the costs of such controls seem a high price to pay.A freely floating exchange rate,then,appears to be the lesser of three evils.Even economists who are gener

52、ally pro-floating agree that tightly integrated regions that form“optimal currency areas”should adopt the ultimate form of fixed exchange rates,a common currency.(Whether the new eurozone constitutes such an area is another question.)But as a general rule,the preferred alternative of most economists

53、 is a floating exchange rate.In particular,it is the one most consistent with the neoclassical synthesis,because it leaves countries free to pursue both free-market and full-employment policies.(from Foreign Affairs,January/February 1999)Unit SixThe Return of Depression EconomicsPaul KrugmanExercise

54、sn.Translate the following into English,using the words or phrases in the text:1.使一国外汇储备大大减少的资本外逃capital flight depleting a countrys foreign exchange reserves2.贬值所引起的国内恶性通货膨胀domestic hyperinflation caused by devaluation3.为增加国民收入而采取扩张性财政政策to adopt expansionary fiscal policy to increase national incom

55、eUnit SixThe Return of Depression EconomicsPaul KrugmanUnit SixThe Return of Depression EconomicsPaul Krugman4.面临总需求日益萎缩的危险5.受流动性陷阱困扰的资本市场capital market harassed by liquidity trap6.排除大规模投机活动的可能性to rule out the possibility of massive speculative activities7.以经济停滞为代价来压低国内的价格to drive down domestic pric

56、es at the expense of economic stagnationbe faced with the danger of increasingly shrinking aggregate demandUnit SixThe Return of Depression EconomicsPaul Krugman8.以固定汇率为特征的国际金本位制9.热币流动对货币产生的压力the pressure of hot money flow on currencies10.以市场自发调节为中心的新古典主义理论the neoclassical theory centering on the sp

57、ontaneous adjustments of market11.运用多种手段来实现经济目标的聪明的决策者intelligent policy-makers who will use various means to achieve economic goalsthe international gold standard system characterized by fixed exchange ratesUnit SixThe Return of Depression EconomicsPaul Krugman12.能够帮助经济走出萧条的灵活的财政、金融政策13.发展中国家和成熟经济体

58、所面临的不同困境the different dilemmas that the developing countries and the mature economies are faced with14.以牺牲充分就业来实现高产出率to sacrifice full employment to achieve high output rate15.会导致另一国货币贬值的对这种货币的需求增加the increased demand for this currency that will lead to the devaluation of another currencyflexible fi

59、scal and financial policies that can help the economy out of depressionUnit SixThe Return of Depression EconomicsPaul Krugmann.Translate the following sentences into English:1.该国出现的这场经济混乱引起了中央银行和财政部的互相指责，该事件反映了一国的货币政策和财政政策相互配合的重要性。(take.to task)The economic turmoil in that country made the central b

60、ank and the treasury department take each other to task,which reflected the importance of the collaboration of a countrys monetary and fiscal policies.Unit SixThe Return of Depression EconomicsPaul Krugman2.如今，政府陷入了这样的两难境地：要改善国际收支就要降低汇率，而汇率的降低又会导致国内的通货臌胀。(dilemma)The government has now slipped into

61、such a dilemma that if it wants to improve its balance of payments,it will need to lower the exchange rate,but to lower the exchange rate will lead to inflation.Unit SixThe Return of Depression EconomicsPaul Krugman3.虽然贬值能扩大出口，但它也能导致外债的增加，甚至导致政府信用的崩溃。所以，该国政府不敢贸然采取货币贬值政策。(magnify)Although devaluation

62、 will magnify exports,it can also lead to the increasing foreign-currency-denominated debt；it can even cause the collapse of peoples confidence in the government.Therefore,the government did not dare to adopt the devaluation policy without careful consideration.Unit SixThe Return of Depression Econo

63、micsPaul Krugman4.外债的增加并非是经济发展的必不可少的成本，因为外债的增加虽然会在短期内提高经济增长速度，但从长期来看，它会加重国内企业负担，导致国际收支不平衡。(in the short/long run)The increase of foreign-currency-denominated debt is not necessarily the indispensable cost of economic development.Because,although it may promote economic growth in the short run,it wil

64、l increase the burden of domestic enterprises and lead to imbalanced balance of payments in the long run.Unit SixThe Return of Depression EconomicsPaul Krugman5.主要资本主义国家曾一直将金本位视作经济实力强大的象征，但在大萧条时期，他们都被迫彻底放弃了金本位。(see.as;for good)Major capitalist countries had been seeing gold standard as a symbol of s

65、trong economic power,but they were forced to give it up for good during the Great Depression.Unit SixThe Return of Depression EconomicsPaul Krugmann.Put the following passage into English:处于危机中的亚洲国家的经济证明，它们具有许多政策和制度上的缺陷。但是，如果美国或欧洲明年或后年也陷入危机，我们可以断定，一些分析家回过头来同样会挑出一些有关西方价值观和制度方面的毛病来。很难说90年代亚洲的政策比过去几十年更

66、糟糕，那么最近为何会出现如此糟糕的情况呢?答案是，世界在目前的危机面前变得如此脆弱并非因为经济政策没有得到改进，而是因为已经得到了改进。世界各国对大萧条后政策中真正存在的缺陷所作出的反应是退回去重新实行过去的一套制度，这种制度在大萧条前自由市场的资本主义中具有许多优点。然而，当我们在恢复老式资本主义的这些优点的同时，也恢复了它的一些缺陷，最引人注目的莫过于易于遭受动荡和经济持续萧条这一点了。Unit SixThe Return of Depression EconomicsPaul Krugman Troubled Asian Economies have turned out to have many policy and institutional weaknesses.But if America or Europe should get into trouble next year or the year after,we can be sure that in retrospect analysts will find equally damning things to sa