英国之病,谁人能救

Suffering from persistently weak economies, governments and central banks are experimenting with ever more aggressive – some say dangerous – monetary treatments. Countries are being enrolled, like it or not, in the economic equivalent of clinical trials.
由于患上了长期经济萎靡之症，各国政府和央行都在以前所未有的力度试验激进的货币疗法（有人会称之为危险的疗法）。无论愿意与否，各国纷纷开始了经济“临床试验”。

Before embarking on a new course of treatment, the doctors ought to inspect the patients in the wards next door. I found myself last month visiting two countries following diametrically opposite courses of treatment: Portugal, perhaps the least demonstrative sufferer on the eurozone periphery; and Argentina, which has long injected economic drugs not registered elsewhere. Both are instructive – and discouraging.
医生们在采取新疗法之前，不妨看一下隔壁病房患者的病情。上个月，我去了两个所用疗法截然相反的国家：一个是葡萄牙，这可能是受困的欧元区外围最死气沉沉的国家；另一个是阿根廷，该国长期以来都在注射其他地区不敢用的经济“药物”。这两个例子都有启示意义，也都令人沮丧。

Portugal belongs to a strong currency bloc – its money functions as a real store of value, and convertibility is not in question. But the place is stony broke, and these advantages, so dear in the abstract to business people, have little appeal to residents with no money at all. The new roads built with EU funds are deserted, since they carry a toll; traffic has been displaced on to the roads they were designed to relieve. People prefer double-parking their ageing cars in the narrow streets to paying a euro or two at the shiny new car park. The receptionist in the empty hotel arrives, after a long wait, to serve you a drink in the bar; he later turns up as a waiter in the restaurant. Though they have the gentlest manners in Europe, the Portuguese have begun to express their frustration in a frank and vivid style of graffiti. Everything is on sale and no one is buying.
葡萄牙属于一个强势货币区，其货币可充当真正的保值物，可兑换性也不成问题。但葡萄牙一贫如洗，商务人士非常看重的那些抽象优势，对于口袋空空的当地居民根本没有吸引力。用欧盟(EU)资金建造的新公路无人问津，因为那是收费公路；新路本希望分流交通流量的老路，却引来了许多车辆。人们喜欢把自家老旧的轿车并排停放在狭窄的街道上，而不愿花上一两欧元把车开进明亮的新停车场。酒店里空荡荡的，等上好久后前台接待才珊珊到来，到酒吧间给顾客端上一杯饮料；后来，此人又成了餐厅的侍者。尽管葡萄牙人的温文尔雅当属欧洲之最，但他们已开始用直白、生动的涂鸦来表达内心的沮丧。各种商品都在打折销售，但买者寥寥无几。

So poor Patient Fado, placed on an austerity-plus regime, is semi-comatose. The state spends as little as it can, and tries to extract ever more from its citizens, who seem to spend most of their time working out how to avoid paying. Fado’s ratios of indebtedness remain stubbornly high but the expensive foreign doctors believe a higher dose of the present medicine will, in the end, prove to be the right answer.
也就是说，在极度紧缩政策的作用下，可怜的病人法多（Patient Fado，指葡萄牙）已陷入“半昏迷”状态。政府尽可能减少开支，并努力从国民身上榨取越来越多的财富，而国民似乎把大部分时间用于算计如何避免花钱。法多的债务比率仍居高不下，但收费高的外国医生认为，只要加大当前用药的剂量，最终可以治好法多的病。

In Argentina, by contrast, the currency is on a managed slide. There is plenty of it, though, and since it is fast losing its internal value – the government says inflation is at roughly 10 per cent a year; everyone else tells you it is more than 25 per cent – people are in a hurry to spend it. It is rather like Britain in the 1970s: you can buy air tickets and holiday packages in your own currency at the official exchange rate but you have no foreign currency to use once you arrive abroad. There are no new money flows coming into the country (though companies reinvest the profits they make there), Argentina has few external assets earning foreign currency, and it has no access to the credit markets, following a default still fuelling lawsuits 10 years later. So minor fluctuations in the trade account, which the government is obliged to micromanage, are all-determining. Banks are required to lend a substantial proportion of their deposit base at 15 per cent for “productive investment”: no pussy-footing about with persuasion here.
与此形成反差的是，阿根廷货币一直处于有管理的贬值中。不过货币量很充足，而且随着货币快速失去内在价值（政府表示，每年的通胀率大概为10%；但其他人都会告诉你，通胀率高于25%），大家都急匆匆地把钱花掉。这跟上世纪70年代的英国很相似：你可以按官方汇率使用本国货币购买飞机票和度假套餐，但出国之后没有外币可用。没有新的资金流入阿根廷（尽管企业把在那里赚到的利润进行再投资），也几乎没有能赚取外汇的外部资产，同时由于10年前违约引发的官司至今未了结，该国被信贷市场拒之门外。所以，即使贸易账户（政府不得不对其实施微观管理）发生细微的波动，也能产生决定性的影响。银行必须把很大一部分存款以15%的利率贷给“生产性投资”项目；这里可没有循循善诱的劝说。