克鲁格曼论债务

克鲁格曼（Paul Krugman，普林斯顿教授，诺奖，纽约时报撰稿人）就经济的而言，见识自然是在那儿的。他立场较左，所以常常被攻击。

目前债务是一个全球问题，中国只是其中一员，中国债务问题不是唯一的，欧洲、日本更甚，美国也严重。据麦肯锡最新的盘点，世界债务就像天文数字：


2000-2014



麦肯锡还单独点了中国：


就数据而已，不会有什么“掩饰”了。然而中国和美国也不相上下，如果美国债务没问题，中国估计照搬美国的辩论之词，也可以挡一把。比欧洲、日本处境强。

克鲁格曼说，只要债务花在有价值的地方，对社会就会有好处，从经济角度来说，不是问题，不会对社会造成危害。中国基建投资就是一个好的例子。

不过，腐败、没效率、瞎投资、投机（比如国企买地产）-这些都不但是问题，而且是极其严重的问题，都会完全与投资初衷违背，债务就真成了债务，日本就是个例子。

日本的债务（主要是政府的，也就是“公债”），基本上用于福利，很荒谬，政府从民众那儿借钱，发福利，还给民众，以为是政府欠的，实际上是民众自己借给自己，大家的退休金都是债券，可笑。这是最危险的债务。

日本企业品牌很好，声誉高，不乏技术雄厚，质量过人之处，但却难以掩盖日本企业界整体缺乏生机，在全球经济环境下没有竞争力，更是死气沉沉，毫无改革的意愿。

故此，中国不必担心投资过多而造成债务过多，但是一定要把握好投资。



Debt: A Thought Experiment
February 6, 2015

【提要】债务基本上是一部分人和令一部分人之间的合约，社会的总债务实际上是零，比如，中国政府、企业欠了一大堆债，结果是老百姓把钱借给政府企业，从而老百姓变相“拥有”政府企业，只要钱花在有价值的地方，对社会就会有好处。

I’m getting some outraged/confused responses to my post on debt as money that we owe to ourselves. Many people seem to find it hard to step outside the misleading analogy between an individual and the economy as a whole. If I owe money, that’s a claim on my future. But debt levels in the economy as a whole are not a claim by some outside party on the economy as a whole.

Here’s a thought experiment that may clarify matters (or alternatively make the usual suspects even more enraged.) Suppose that for some reason the government were to decree, arbitrarily, that every American whose last name begins with the letters A through K now owes $100,000 to a special government agency; meanwhile, every American L through Z is given a $100,000 bond to be paid by that agency.

Clearly, the overall level of debt in the U.S. economy has suddenly increased (actually by about $1.6 trillion). But has the nation become any poorer? Is that $1.6 trillion of additional debt money taken from the next generation? No and no: the additional debt represents a claim by one set of Americans on another set of Americans — and we’re talking about people here now, not future generations.

But, but, you say — that’s not where the debt comes from. It comes from people spending more than they earn. And that’s true — debtors get there by spending more than they take in. But creditors get there by spending less than they take in. Anyway, how we got here should not have any direct bearing on what the debt means now — which is that it’s money we owe to ourselves.

There is still, of course, the definition of we, white man. Debt has distributional implications, and it may have macroeconomic effects because of those distributional issues. But again, all this is within the current generation; it’s not about the present versus the future.


Debt Is Money We Owe To Ourselves
February 6, 2015

【提要】债务并不是从下一代那儿借钱，也不是花了没有的钱，债务，克鲁格曼说，是自己欠自己的，只要自己控制着，没问题。债务多，乃好事儿。



Antonio Fatas, commenting on recent work on deleveraging or the lack thereof, emphasizes one of my favorite points: no, debt does not mean that we’re stealing from future generations. Globally, and for the most part even within countries, a rise in debt isn’t an indication that we’re living beyond our means, because as Fatas puts it, one person’s debt is another person’s asset; or as I equivalently put it, debt is money we owe to ourselves — an obviously true statement that, I have discovered, has the power to induce blinding rage in many people.

Think about the history shown in the chart above. Britain did not emerge impoverished from the Napoleonic Wars; the government ended up with a lot of debt, but the counterpart of this debt was that the British propertied classes owned a lot of consols.

More than that, as Fatas points out, rising debt could be a good sign. Think of my little two-classes model of debt, where some people are less patient than others — perhaps (to step outside the model a bit) because they have better investment opportunities. Moving from a very limited financial system that doesn’t allow much debt to a somewhat more open-minded system should, in that case, be good for growth and welfare.

The problem with private debt is that we have good reason to believe that in very wide-open financial systems people get irrationally exuberant, lending and borrowing to an extent that they eventually realize was excessive — and that there are huge negative externalities when everyone tries to deleverage at once. This is a very big problem, but it’s not about generalized excess consumption.

And the problems with public debt are also mainly about possible instability rather than “borrowing from our children”. The rhetoric of fiscal debates has been, for the most part, nonsense.