国际英语新闻：Recovery of U.S. economy takes years rather than months, says economist

While working at the Federal Reserve in 2006-2009, Kroszner was directly involved in the monetary policy. He explained: "On the monetary policy side, how we responded is to provide a lot more liquidity and a lot of financing support to the system. It was very difficult for financial firms and non-financial firms to get the financing they needed to continue to pay workers, invest and produce. We created a number of new facilities to provide credit directly into the system."

On the fiscal policy side, he said: "There have been a variety of actions, among which some have been more effective than others, such as the tax reductions that help put money in people's pockets early on to provide more disposable income."

However, there are other spending actions that are not as useful and some have not even been spent yet. "A large fraction of the money from the largest fiscal stimulus package that was supposed to be spent in early 2009 has not even been spent yet," he noted.

Regarding the impact of the Federal Reserve's monetary policy and fiscal policy, he pointed out: "What has been effective is that we tried to prevent a collapse by providing the necessary financing so that investment and production could continue. However, it led to a very large increase in the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve."

Kroszner continued: "While I was there the balance tripled from 800 billion U.S. dollars to 2.4 trillion dollars at the end of 2008 during a very short period of time. After I left the Federal Reserve, it continued to purchase longer term securities and mortgage securities to provide support, generally in the market and specifically in the housing market."

In any case, the monetary policy has been effective by providing liquidity support and keeping the interest rates low for a long time. So many banks and firms are holding a lot more cash than they used to, which allows them to be able to invest and start hiring, according to Kroszner.

The economist believes that various actions taken by the Federal Reserve successfully prevented the repeat of the Great Depression of the 1930s: "We did not want to repeat this mistake. The Fed did nothing in the 1930s but let the economy collapse. We did not want that to happen. We certainly had a very strong contraction in 2008 and 2009 but nothing like the Great Depression. So that has been very effective."