网帖翻译

For months there has been turmoil in financial markets and growing evidence of stress in the world economy. You might think that these are just the normal signs of a bear market and a coming recession. But, as our special report this week lays out, they also mark the painful emergence of a new regime in the world economy—a shift that may be as consequential as the rise of Keynesianism after the second world war, and the pivot to free markets and globalisation in the 1990s. This new era holds the promise that the rich world might escape the low-growth trap of the 2010s and tackle big problems such as ageing and climate change. But it also brings acute dangers, from financial chaos to broken central banks and out-of-control public spending.

几个月来，金融市场动荡，世界经济面临的压力日益凸显。你可能认为，这只是熊市和经济衰退即将到来的正常迹象。但正如本周的特别报道所阐述的，它们还标志着一种新的制度在世界经济中艰难诞生——这次变革的意义可能不亚于二战结束后凯恩斯主义的兴起，以及自由市场和全球化成为20世纪90年代的核心。在新时代里，发达国家有希望摆脱2010年代的低增长陷阱，解决人口老龄化和气候变化等重大问题。但也会带来严重风险，包括金融混乱、央行破产、公共支出失控等。

The ructions in the markets are of a magnitude not seen for a generation. Global inflation is in double digits for the first time in nearly 40 years. Having been slow to respond, the Federal Reserve is now cranking up interest rates at the fastest pace since the 1980s, while the dollar is at its strongest for two decades, causing chaos outside America. If you have an investment portfolio or a pension, this year has been gruesome. Global shares have dropped by 25% in dollar terms, the worst year since at least the 1980s, and government bonds are on course for their worst year since 1949. Alongside some $40trn of losses there is a queasy sense that the world order is being upended as globalisation heads into retreat and the energy system is fractured after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

市场动荡的幅度是这一代人前所未见的。近40年来，全球通胀率首次达到两位数。反应迟缓的美联储正在以20世纪80年代以来最快的速度加息，同时美元正处在20年来的最强走势，引发了美国境外的混乱。如果你有投资组合或养老金，今年会糟糕透顶。按美元计算，全球股票跌幅达25%，至少是80年代以来最糟糕的一年。政府债券正处于1949年以来最糟糕的一年。除了约40万亿美元的损失，人们还有一种不祥的预感，即随着全球化走向倒退，俄罗斯入侵乌克兰导致能源体系崩溃，世界秩序正在被颠覆。

All this marks a definitive end to the age of economic placidity in the 2010s. After the global financial crisis of 2007-09 the performance of rich economies assumed a feeble pattern. Investment by private firms was subdued, even at those making monster profits, while governments did not take up the slack: the public capital stock actually shrank around the world, as a share of gdp, in the decade after Lehman Brothers collapsed. Economic growth was sluggish and inflation was low. With the private and public sectors doing little to stimulate more activity, central banks became the only game in town. They held interest rates at rock-bottom levels and bought huge volumes of bonds at any sign of trouble, extending their reach ever further into the economy. On the eve of the pandemic central banks in America, Europe and Japan owned a staggering $15trn of financial assets.

所有这些都标志着2010年代经济平稳时代的终结。2007-09年全球金融危机结束后，发达国家经济表现疲软。私企投资受到抑制，甚至赚取巨额利润的企业也不例外，但政府没有填补这个缺口：在“雷曼兄弟”破产后的10年里，全球公有资本存量占GDP的比例有所下降。经济增长疲软，通货膨胀率低。由于私人和公共部门在刺激经济方面没什么作为，于是央行成了唯一的选择。他们把利率降到最低点，发现情况不妙就大规模购买债券，对经济的影响变得日益深远。在疫情爆发前夕，美国、欧洲、日本央行拥有的金融资产达到惊人的15万亿美元。

The extraordinary challenge of the pandemic led to extraordinary actions which helped unleash today’s inflation: wild government stimulus and bail-outs, temporarily skewed patterns of consumer demand and lockdown-induced supply-chain tangles. That inflationary impulse has since been turbocharged by the energy crunch as Russia, one of the largest exporters of fossil fuels along with Saudi Arabia, has isolated itself from its markets in the West. Faced with a serious inflation problem the Fed has already raised rates from a maximum of 0.25% to 3.25% and is expected to take them to 4.5% by early 2023. Globally, most monetary authorities are tightening too.

疫情的特殊挑战促成了特殊行动，助长了当今的通货膨胀：政府盲目刺激和救市、暂时扭曲的消费需求模式，封城引发的供应链混乱。随后俄罗斯退出西方市场，引发的能源危机加剧了通货膨胀，俄罗斯和沙特阿拉伯都是最大的化石燃料出口国。面对严重的通货膨胀，美联储已达到最高加息幅度，从0.25%上调至3.25%，预计2023年初达到4.5%。在全球范围内，大多数金融当局也在实行紧缩的货币政策。
原创翻译：龙腾网 https://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处

What on earth comes next? One immediate fear is of a blow-up, as a financial system that has become habituated to low rates wakes up to the soaring cost of borrowing. Although one mid-sized lender, Credit Suisse, is under pressure, it is unlikely that banks will become a big problem: most have bigger safety buffers than in the past. Instead the dangers lie elsewhere, in a new-look financial system that relies less on banks and more on fluid markets and technology. The good news is that your deposits are not about to go up in smoke. The bad news is that this system for financing firms and consumers is opaque and hypersensitive to losses.

接下来会如何？迫在眉睫的是崩盘恐慌，因为金融体系习惯了低利率，现在意识到借贷成本飙升。尽管中型的贷款机构“瑞士瑞信银行”承受着压力，但银行不太可能出现大问题：大多数银行的资本缓冲比过去充裕了。相反，风险存在于其他方面，新面貌的金融体系主要依赖流动性市场和技术而不是银行。好消息是你的存款不会化为乌有，坏消息是这种企业和消费者融资体系不透明，对亏损异常敏感。

You can already see this in the credit markets. As firms that buy debt shy away from risk, the interest rate on mortgages and junk bonds is soaring. The market for “leveraged loans” used to finance corporate buy-outs has seized up—if Elon Musk buys Twitter the resulting debts may become a big problem. Meanwhile investment funds, including pension schemes, face losses on the portfolios of illiquid assets they have accumulated. Parts of the plumbing could stop working. The Treasury market has become more erratic (see Buttonwood) while European energy firms have faced crushing collateral calls on their hedges. Britain’s bond market has been thrown into chaos by obscure derivatives bets made by its pension funds.

在信贷市场，你已经可以看到这种现象。随着购买债券的企业规避风险，抵押贷款和垃圾债券的利率在飙升。用于企业融资并购的“杠杆贷款”市场陷入停滞，如果埃隆·马斯克收购“推特”，产生的债务可能出现大麻烦。与此同时，包括养老金计划在内的投资基金在非流动性资产投资组合方面面临亏损，部分金融管道已失去作用，国债市场变得更不稳定，欧洲能源企业的对冲基金面临大量的追加担保品通知。英国债券市场由于养老基金投资模糊的衍生品而陷入混乱。
原创翻译：龙腾网 https://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处

If markets stop working smoothly, impeding the flow of credit or threatening contagion, central banks may step in: already the Bank of England has done a u-turn and started buying bonds again, cutting against its simultaneous commitment to raise rates. The related belief that central banks will not have the resolve to follow through on their tough talk is behind the other big fear: that the world will return to the 1970s, with rampant inflation. In one sense this is alarmist and over the top. Most forecasters reckon inflation in America will fall from the present 8% to 4% in 2023 as energy price-rises ebb and higher rates bite. Yet while the odds of inflation going to 20% are tiny, there is a glaring question about whether governments and central banks will ever bring it back down to 2%.

当市场无法平稳运作，信贷流动受阻或有蔓延风险时，中央银行可能进行干预：英格兰银行已经做出重大转变，重新开始购买债券，这与同时加息的承诺相违背。相关观念认为央行没有决心将强硬言论贯彻到底，这引发了另一巨大恐慌：世界将倒退至20世纪70年代的恶性通货膨胀时代。从某种意义上说，这是危言耸听和言过其实。大多数预测人士认为，随着能源价格涨幅的回落和加息发挥作用，2023年美国通货膨胀将从目前8%降至4%。尽管通货膨胀达到20%的可能性微乎其微，但一个显著的问题是政府和央行能否将通货膨胀降至2%。

A moving target

活动目标

To understand why, look beyond the hurly-burly to the long-term fundamentals. In a big shift from the 2010s, a structural rise in government spending and investment is under way. Ageing citizens will need more health care. Europe and Japan will spend more on defence to counter threats from Russia and China. Climate change and the quest for security will boost state investment in energy, from renewable infrastructure to gas terminals. And geopolitical tensions are leading governments to spend more on industrial policy. Yet even as investment rises, demography will weigh ever more heavily on rich economies. As people get older they save more, and this excess of savings will continue to act to depress the underlying real rate of interest.

要想弄清楚原因，就得透过表面的喧嚣观察长期的基本面。与本世纪10年代相比，重大变化是政府支出和投资正在发生结构性增长。老年人将需要更多的医疗保健，欧洲和日本将增加国防支出，以对抗来自俄罗斯和中国的威胁。气候变化和安全需求将促使国家进行能源投资，包括可再生能源基础设施和天然气接收站。地缘政治紧张局势促使政府在产业政策方面增加支出。在投资增长的同时，人口结构对发达国家的影响将日益凸显。人们随着年龄的增长会增加储蓄，而过度储蓄将继续压低潜在的实际利率。

As a result the fundamental trends in the 2020s and 2030s are for bigger government but still-low real interest rates. For central banks this creates an acute dilemma. In order to get inflation down to their targets of roughly 2% they may have to tighten enough to cause a recession. This would incur a high human cost in the form of job losses and trigger a fierce political backlash. Moreover, if the economy deflates and ends up back in the low-growth, low-rate trap of the 2010s, central banks may once again lack enough stimulus tools. The temptation now is to find another way out: to ditch the 2% inflation targets of recent decades and raise them modestly to, say, 4%. That is likely to be on the menu when the Fed begins its next strategy review in 2024.

由此可见，本世纪20、30年代的基本趋势是政府变得更大，但实际利率仍然较低。这会使中央银行陷入严重的两难困境，为了使通胀率降至大约2%的目标，他们可能不得不采取紧缩的货币政策而引发经济衰退，这将以失业的形式造成高昂的人力成本，并引发激烈的政治反对。不仅如此，如果经济发生紧缩，重回本世纪10年代低增长、低利率的陷阱，中央银行可能再次缺少足够的刺激工具。现在有另一种诱人的解决办法：放弃近几十年来2%的通胀目标，适度提高到4%。美联储在2024年开始下一次战略评估时，可能会加以考虑。

This brave new world of somewhat higher government spending and somewhat higher inflation would have advantages. In the short run it would mean a less severe recession or none at all. And in the long run it would mean that central banks have more room to cut interest rates in a downturn, reducing the need for bond-buying and bail-outs whenever anything goes wrong, which cause ever-greater distortion of the economy.

政府支出和通货膨胀稍微高一些，这种勇敢的新世界是有优势的。从短期来看，这意味着经济衰退的严重程度降低，甚至根本不会发生。从长期来看，这意味着央行在经济下滑中有更大的降息空间，减少出问题时购买债券和救市的必要性，否则经济会变得越来越扭曲。

Yet it also comes with big dangers. Central banks’ credibility will be damaged: if the goalposts are moved once, why not again? Millions of contracts and investments written on the promise of 2% inflation would be disrupted, while mildly higher inflation would redistribute wealth from creditors to debtors. Meanwhile, the promise of moderately bigger government could easily spiral out of control, if populist politicians make reckless spending pledges or if state investments in energy and industrial policy are poorly executed and morph into bloated vanity projects that drag down productivity.

但这也会带来巨大风险，央行的信誉会受损：既然改变过目标，再次改变又有何妨？以通胀率2%为前提的几百万份合同和投资协议都会被打乱，而稍高一些的通胀率会把债权人的财富重新分配给债务人。另外，如果民粹主义政客做出盲目的支出承诺，或者如果国家在能源和产业政策上投资不力，演变成臃肿的面子工程而阻碍生产力，那么让政府适当变大的前景可能容易失控。

These opportunities and dangers are daunting. But it is time to start weighing them and their implications for citizens and businesses. The biggest mistakes in economics are failures of imagination that reflect an assumption that today’s regime will last forever. It never does. Change is coming. Get ready.

这些机遇和风险令人生畏，但是时候开始权衡它们及其对民众和企业的影响了。经济学最大的错误就是想象力不足，这反映出一种假设：当今的经济制度会永远持续下去。绝非如此，变革即将到来，做好准备吧。

原创翻译：龙腾网 https://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处