风萧萧_Frank
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美国乔治城大学经济历史学家杰米·马丁4月28日在纽约时报发文指出，随着美联储开始提高利率以应对美国数十年来最高的通胀，它面临着越来越大的风险，即在此过程中引发经济衰退。
The U.S. Wants Tackle Inflation,Here's Why That Should Worry the Rest of the World
（纽约时报网站报道截图）
马丁在文章中写道，美国为平息通货膨胀而采取的积极努力可能会在全球范围内产生重大的、不可预测的影响，这通常会对南方国家产生长期的负面影响。
历史可以很好地说明美联储的政策对世界其他地区的破坏性程度。在1980年代，经过几年物价上涨，美国前总统卡特在1979年任命沃尔克领导美联储，沃尔克大幅提升了联邦基金利率，最高时达20%，到1982年，美国的失业率已经达到了10.8%，但通货膨胀有所放缓。与此同时，沃尔克的决策的影响超越了美国国界，随着利率上升，外国累积的债务变得更加难以偿还，导致此前几年在国际市场上大量借款的国家出现了一波违约浪潮。
和当下更相似的例子则出现在20世纪初，在一战结束时，世界面临着严重的通胀危机，其成因与现在相似，包括全球供应链中断、航运短缺和宽松的货币政策等。当时的情况和现在尤为相像，随着俄罗斯货源消失，小麦价格出现了飙升，同时流感大流行导致了数百万人死亡。1920年，美联储和其他主要央行一起大幅提高了利率，此举抑制了通货膨胀，而代价就是引发了全球经济衰退。
文章作者警告到，在2013年，时任美联储主席伯南克的一点暗示，就足以让许多新兴市场经济体陷入混乱。现在，美联储引发另一场全球危机的条件已经成熟。尤为令人担忧的是，当前新兴市场的债务水平极高。根据国际货币基金组织估计，大约60%的低收入发展中国家正在经历或接近债务困境，斯里兰卡最近的违约可能就是第一张倒下的多米诺骨牌。
文章指出，美联储的任务是受国家约束的，即仅在美国促进价格稳定和最大限度的就业。但实际情况却是，美联储制造的问题可能必须由其他人来买单。如果美联储真的对经济踩下刹车，则需要强有力的国际反应。毫无疑问，当下的通货膨胀是真实而痛苦的，但需要保持谨慎，以确保美国对其的反应不会像过去那样，导致世界上大部分地区面临另一个“失去的十年”。（编译 Tracy）
The U.S. Wants to Tackle Inflation. Here’s Why That Should Worry the Rest of the World.
By Jamie Martin
Dr. Martin is an economic historian at Georgetown University.
As the Federal Reserve begins to raise interest rates to tackle the highest inflation the United States has seen in decades, it confronts a growing risk that it will spark a recession in the process.
The trade-off faced by the Fed — between price stability and employment — is usually framed in strictly domestic terms. But aggressive efforts to quell inflation in the United States can have major, unpredictable effects around the world, often with long-lasting, negative consequences for countries in the Global South. And the United States will not be immune to worldwide economic trends. The inflation hawks should consider all of this as they figure out how to address rising prices in the United States today.
History is a good guide to how destructive the Fed’s policies can be for the rest of the world. Just look back to the 1980s. After several years of rising prices, President Jimmy Carter appointed Paul Volcker to lead the Fed in 1979. Mr. Volcker raised the federal funds rate — the interest rate that banks charge one another for short-term borrowing and which guides other interest rates — up to nearly 20 percent. By the end of 1982, unemployment had reached 10.8 percent in the United States, but inflation slowed, and Mr. Volcker acquired a mythic status as a farsighted leader unafraid to make tough decisions. That’s why he is cited in so many calls for the Fed to aggressively tackle inflation today.
But the effects of Mr. Volcker’s decisions were felt beyond the United States’ borders. As interests rates rose, debts accrued by foreign countries became more difficult to service. This led to a wave of defaults among countries that had borrowed heavily on international markets in the years before, beginning with Mexico in 1982 and then spreading throughout Latin America and beyond.
In developing countries, the debt crisis that followed the so-called Volcker shock was profoundly traumatic. Across Latin America, it led to a collapse in G.D.P., rising unemployment and skyrocketing levels of poverty, from which the region made a slow and imperfect recovery over the “lost decade” that followed. Even those who claim Mr. Volcker made the right decision admit that he precipitated what may have been the “worst financial disaster the world had ever seen” in Latin America — the consequences of which were even worse than those of the Great Depression. Among heavily indebted states in Africa, the effects were similar. But American policymakers at the time did not give much attention to the global repercussions of their decisions. As Mr. Volcker himself later admitted, “Africa was not even on my radar screen.”An even more relevant example may be from the early 20th century. The first time that the Fed — along with other major central banks — helped spark a global recession was in 1920. By the end of World War I, two years earlier, the world was facing a serious inflationary crisis caused by many of the same forces at work today: global supply chain disruptions, shipping shortages and loose monetary policies. Then, as now, the price of wheat soared as Russian sources disappeared from global markets. From the Gold Coast (now Ghana) to Argentina, food, fuel and clothing became unaffordable, at the same time that an influenza pandemic killed millions. As wages failed to keep pace with rising costs of living, a wave of uprisings, racist mob violence and mass strikes broke out around the world.
The immediate cause was the war’s effects on trade, shipping and finance. But even after the war’s conclusion, these inflationary pressures did not subside. In early 1920 the Fed, alongside other major central banks, sharply raised interest rates. This reined in inflation, but it came at the cost of a worldwide recession: In 1920-21, unemployment in Britain reached heights rivaling those of the Depression; the United States saw a deep, though relatively short-lived, deflationary crisis.
The longest-lasting effects of this recession were in poorer, non-industrialized economies throughout Europe’s colonial empires and Latin America. When commodity prices collapsed, the producers and exporters of goods like wheat, sugar and rubber were devastated. The long-term effects of the crash of 1920-21 on these economies was similar to those of the Depression and the slump of the 1980s.
What will be the effects of the Fed’s efforts to tackle inflation today? It’s not just distant history that counsels caution. In 2013, the slightest hint by Ben Bernanke, then the chairman of the Fed, that monetary tightening was around the corner was enough to send many emerging market economies into a tailspin. The prospect of higher borrowing costs led to capital outflows and currency instability that battered Indonesia, Brazil, India, South Africa and Turkey with particular severity. The decade that followed saw sluggish performance for many emerging market economies.
Conditions are now ripe for the Fed to precipitate another global crisis. Of particular concern are extremely high levels of emerging-market debt. The International Monetary Fund estimates that about 60 percent of low-income developing countries are experiencing debt distress or are close to it. Sri Lanka’s recent default may be the first domino to fall. Tighter monetary policy in the United States will push many other countries to raise their interests rates to prevent capital flight and currency instability. But this will contract their economies, threatening recovery from the pandemic and delivering another blow to their long-term growth.These conditions should give pause to the inflation hawks calling on the Fed to act aggressively. Yet the institution has a mandate that is nationally bound: to promote price stability and maximum employment in the United States alone. What this means is that the Fed is a national institution that, in effect, sets monetary policy for the entire world.
This should add urgency to thinking about alternative measures for dealing with inflation. Interest rates are often treated as the only available tool, but the federal government has other ways to contain rising prices that are more targeted than the blunt tools of aggressive monetary tightening. For example, the government can also intervene in sectors prone to severe inflationary pressures, like health care and housing. In the longer term, investment in infrastructure could prevent the kind of bottlenecks wreaking havoc on the economy today.
But the truth is that a problem created by the Fed may have to be dealt with by someone else. If and when the Fed does slam the brakes on the economy, a robust international response will be needed. Traditionally, the International Monetary Fund has dealt with the fallout of global debt crises, but its reputation has been tarnished by its eagerness to enforce austerity and painful reforms on countries reeling from financial crisis — the last thing their economies need for sustained growth. The Group of 20, which handles questions of sovereign debt relief, has been hobbled by worsening conflict among its most powerful members.
If institutions of global economic governance are to cope with the risks posed by sharp rate hikes in the United States, they need to change how they mobilize and distribute resources and treat their most vulnerable member states. One start would be for the I.M.F. to expand its issuance of special drawing rights, which provide a financial lifeline to member states without strings attached — but which Congress has opposed out of fear that the money will go to strategic rivals. The I.M.F. should also reduce the punitive surcharges it demands of vulnerable debtors, which add an enormous burden to their already crushing debt loads. The United States, which has tremendous influence over the I.M.F., should help push for this — especially since it could be decisions made in Washington that make such reforms urgent right now.
There’s little question that inflation is real and painful today. But great care is needed to ensure that the United States’ response to it does not lead, as it has in the past, to yet another lost decade for much of the world.
Jamie Martin (@jamiemartin2) is a history professor at Georgetown University and the author of the forthcoming book “The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire and the Birth of Global Economic Governance.”
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