美联储QE政策值得借鉴

Leader_Farewell to the Fed’s QE3, a monetary job well done

英国《金融时报》

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The Federal Reserve this week quietly ended its thir d bout of quantitative easing, an experiment that contrived to a ttract warnings of doom both for being withdrawn and for starting in the first place.

美联储(Fed)上周悄悄结束了第三轮量化宽松(QE3)，这场货币政策实验招致了各种“末日”警告，警告的矛头既对准量化宽松的退出，也没放过当初启动这项政策。

The Fed’s radical monetary easing – and similar measures by the Bank of England – have yet to be universally accepted. In Tokyo, the Bank of Japan on Friday announced that, despite internal opposition, it would ramp up its own QE programme. But in the eurozone, where it emerged this week that inflation has been below target for 21 months, the laggardly E uropean Central Bank has yet to follow.

美联储的激进货币宽松政策——以及英国央行(Bank of England)采取的与

类似措施——还没有被普遍接受。在东京，日本央行(Bank of Japan)上周五宣布，尽管内部有人反对，但它还是将加大其量化宽松政策的力度。但在欧元区，尽管上周数据显示通胀连续21个月低

于目标，行动迟缓的欧洲央行(ECB)却尚未跟进。

counterfactuals is impossible, it is overwhelmingly likely that the Fed and BoE were right and sceptics at the ECB and the BoJ are wrong. QE was exactly the right thing to try in reviving the US economy: indeed, a school of critics plausibly suggests it should have been faster and that it is premature to withdraw it now. Unemployment rates in the US are now lower than when the (counterfactual)是不可能的，但极有可能的结果是，美联储和英国央行是正确的，而欧洲央行和日本央行内的怀疑论者错了。量化宽松政策正是重振美国经济的正确尝试：实际上，有一派批评者颇为令人信服地提出，该政策本应更快出台，而且现在就退出还太早。目前美国的失业率低于2008年底全球金融危机冲击

经济之时，而欧元区的失业率比那时高出3个百分点。

global financial crisis hit at the end of 2008: that of the eurozone is more than 3 percentage points higher.

The US was lucky that Ben Bernanke, a scholar of the Great Depression, was leading the Fed when the crisis arrived. Had the US Congress also learnt the lessons of the 1930s and kept fiscal policy loose rather than creating needless debt-ceiling crises, less of the stimulative burden would have fallen on the central bank. Similar mistakes are currently being made with counterproductive fiscal tightening in the eurozone and the premature raising of the consumption tax in Japan.

对美国来说幸运的是，危机爆发时领导美联储的是研究大萧条(Great Depression)的学者本•伯南克(Ben Bernanke)。如果美国国会也能汲取20

世纪30年代的教训，保持宽松的财政政策，而不是制造无厘头的债务上限危机，落在美联储肩上的刺激负担本来不至于这么沉重。欧元区（推行适得其反的财政收紧）和日本（过早上调消费税）正犯下类似的错误。

The fears of hard-money fanatics that QE would cause hyperinflation have been proved wholly wrong. QE was a response to a time of recession, financial distress and the threat of deflation. The normal rules of monetary transmission did not apply.

“硬通货”狂热分子的担忧（即量化宽松将引发恶性通胀）已被证明是完全错误的。量化宽松是对经济衰退、财务困境和通缩威胁时期的回应。货币政策传导的正常规则并不适用。

There are, to be fair, more sophisticated critiques of QE than inflationary scaremongering, and they require fuller answers. One is that, by pumping up the prices of equities and other risky assets owned mainly by wealthy households, it has worsened inequality. The other is that, by creating liquidity across global financial markets and driving investors towards risky assets, QE has encouraged reckless lending and dangerously high leverage in emerging economies, with chaos awaiting when the tap is turned off.

公平地讲，相比有关通胀的危言耸听，某些针对量化宽松的批评更有水平，它们理应得到更完整的回答。其中一个批评是，通过提振主要由富裕家庭拥有的股票等高风险资产的价格，它加剧了不平等。另一个批评是，通过创造席卷全球金融市场的流动性、推动投资者竞相买入高风险资产，量化宽松在新兴经济体鼓励了鲁莽的放贷和高得危险的杠杆，一旦关闭流动性将造成混乱。

The inequality thesis is plausible but unproved. For example, Ben Broadbent, deputy governor of the Bank of England, recently argued that

有关不平等的论点是合理的，但未经证实。例如，英国央行副行长本•布罗德本特(Ben Broadbent)最近辩称，英美央行只是在把政策向下调整至一个较低