对于我们那些在上世纪70年代末、80年代初首次接触到经济学这门沉闷的科学的人而言，当前西方世界关于财政政策的辩论令人沮丧——我实在找不到别的词来形容了。
有人说波旁皇族什么都没忘记，也什么都没学会。同样的评价完全可以套用到今天的一些当代凯恩斯主义者身上。他们不能也永远不会忘记美国上世纪30年代犯下的政策错误。约翰•梅纳德•凯恩斯(John Maynard Keynes) 1936年发表的《就业、利息和货币通论》(The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money)被当代凯恩斯主义者奉为圣经，但对于这部著作面世以来经济理论界所发生的一切，他们似乎从中什么都没有学到。
如果用漫画形式来描述，这场辩论是这样的。为赫伯特•胡佛(Herbert Hoover)的幽灵所困扰的凯恩斯主义者警告，美国仍随时有可能陷入另一场萧条。他们宣称，最有可能导致这种情况发生的，莫过于过早收紧财政政策。这是富兰克林•罗斯福(Franklin Roosevelt)在1936年连任后犯下的错误。与之相反，我们需要进一步的财政刺激。
反凯恩斯主义者反驳道，美国的财政政策已经走上不可持续的道路。美国国会预算办公室(Congressional Budget Office)警告，到2021年，公众所持的联邦债务与国内生产总值(GDP)之比将从今年的62%升至90%以上。卡门•莱因哈特(Carmen Reinhart)和肯尼思•罗格夫(Kenneth Rogoff)最近在一份颇有影响力的论文中警告称，如果债务负担超过GDP的90%，可能会导致增长减速和通胀上升。
凯恩斯主义者则指出，美国10年期国债收益率约为3%，几乎没有任何通胀恐慌的迹象！反凯恩斯主义者对此反驳道，债券市场的抛售很少是渐进式的。只需一则坏消息——例如信用评级下调，就能触发一轮大跌。而且债券投资者担心的不仅仅是通胀。美国债务的外国持有者（占公众所持联邦债务的比重达47%）担心，未来会出现某种形式的违约。
凯恩斯主义者表示，“债券警卫”(bond vigilantes)纯属虚构。以哈佛大学(Harvard)经济学教授罗伯特•巴罗(Robert Barro)为代表的反凯恩斯主义者则说，真正虚构的乃是凯恩斯乘数(Keynesian multiplier)——据说该乘数能将财政刺激转化为数倍的总需求提升。正相反，超大规模的赤字正在削弱商业信心，尤其是高赤字意味着未来更高的税收。于是，在盛夏三伏天到来之际，各方唇枪舌剑，你方唱罢我登场，惹得财经媒体心花怒放。
当然，从某些方面讲，这根本不是一场经济学论战，而是一场关于历史的争论。1933年罗斯福成为美国总统时，美国的赤字已达到GDP的4.7%，随后在1934年达到5.6%的峰值。二战爆发前，联邦债务负担仅略有上升。正是在二战期间，美国（及其它所有参战国）着手实行了类似于2007年以来的财政扩张。由此看来，我们今天所见证的情形更接近上世纪40年代而非30年代：这是没有硝烟的世界大战财政。
但两者之间有着天壤之别。首先，美国是通过发售战争债券，利用国内储蓄为巨额战时赤字融资的。其次，战时各国经济基本上是封闭的，因此不存在财政刺激的外泄。第三，战时经济以满负荷运转，政府不得不对私人部门施加诸多管控措施来防止通胀。
现如今堪比战时的赤字规模发生之际，却适逢美国严重依赖于外国债权人，尤其是其日渐崛起的战略竞争对手——中国（公众所持美国国债中，有11%为中国持有）；同时各国经济处于开放状态，让美国的财政刺激最终可能让中国的出口企业受惠；产能严重过剩，从而使通缩的威胁大于通胀。
有没有这些情形同时存在的先例呢？当然有。早在凯恩斯还没出生以前，从阿根廷到委内瑞拉，许多弱政府都曾试验过在和平时期实施大规模赤字，以期找到避免艰难抉择的方法。实验不可避免地以两种方式收场。要么是外国债权人遭到违约的欺诈，要么是国内债权人受到通胀的勒索。如果经济增长疲弱，这种情况可能还来得慢一些。但必然会有一天，央行的货币创造将引发通胀预期飙升。
1981年，美国经济学家托马斯•萨金特(Thomas Sargent)写了一篇题为《四次大通胀的终结》(The Ends of Four Big Inflations)的开创性论文。从许多方面看，本文可谓是凯恩斯主义时代的墓志铭。西方政府（尤其是英国）历尽磨难方才明白，赤字救不了他们。面临两位数的通胀和失业率的攀升，唯有施以猛药才能治愈顽疾。回顾了中欧上世纪20年代——又一个战争导致债务激增的时代——的局面后，萨金特证明只有果断的政策“体制变革”才能带来稳定，因为只有这样才能改变通胀预期。
那些将信心比作童话中的“仙女”的经济学家，比如《纽约时报》(New York Times)的专栏作家保罗•克鲁格曼(Paul Krugman)，也未能从数十年有关预期的经济学研究中汲取教训。他们似乎也还没有意识到，本轮危机中学术界最大的赢家是那些行为金融学的支持者，而人类心理的波动就是该学科研究的核心内容。
对大西洋两岸的调查就此给出了非常明确的证据。人们对于和平时期却拥有世界大战级别规模的赤字感到忧心忡忡。英国《金融时报》最近公布的一项民意调查显示，45%的美国人“认为美国政府可能在未来10年内无法实现其财务承诺”。对企业和消费者的信心调查，也描绘出焦虑情绪日渐加重的类似情景。
医治这种忧虑的药方只能是萨金特30年前提出的那种政策体制变革——马格丽特•撒切尔(Margaret Thatcher)和罗纳德•里根(Ronald Reagan)的政府曾成功施行了这种变革。和今天一样，当时的政府也面临选择，只不过不是在刺激和紧缩之间选择，而是在提升私人部门信心的政策与扼杀信心的政策之间做出抉择。
本文作者为英国著名历史学家、FT特约编辑，他为西格蒙德•瓦尔堡(Siegmund Warburg)著的传记《High Financier》刚刚由企鹅出版社(Penguin)出版
译者/陈云飞
http://www.ftchinese.com/story/001033783
To those of us who first encountered the dismal science of economics in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the current debate on fiscal policy in the western world has been – no other word will do – depressing.
It was said of the Bourbons that they forgot nothing and learnt nothing. The same could easily be said of some of today's latter-day Keynesians. They cannot and never will forget the policy errors made in the US in the 1930s. But they appear to have learnt nothing from all that has happened in economic theory since the publication of their bible, John Maynard Keynes's The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, in 1936.
In its caricature form, the debate goes like this. The Keynesians, haunted by the spectre of Herbert Hoover, warn that the US is still teetering on the brink of another Depression. Nothing is more likely to bring this about, they argue, than a premature tightening of fiscal policy. This was the mistake Franklin Roosevelt made after the 1936 election. Instead, we need further fiscal stimulus.
The anti-Keynesians retort that US fiscal policy is already on an unsustainable path. The Congressional Budget Office has warned that the federal debt in public hands is set to rise from 62 per cent of GDP this year to above 90 per cent by 2021. In an influential recent paper Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff warned that debt burdens of more than 90 per cent of GDP tend to result in lower growth and higher inflation.
The Keynesians retort by pointing at 10-year bond yields of around 3 per cent: not much sign of inflation fears there! The anti-Keynesians point out that bond market sell-offs are seldom gradual. All it takes is one piece of bad news – a credit rating downgrade, for example – to trigger a sell-off. And it is not just inflation that bond investors fear. Foreign holders of US debt – and they account for 47 per cent of federal debt in public hands – worry about some kind of future default.
The Keynesians say the bond vigilantes are a myth. The anti-Keynesians (notably Harvard economics professor Robert Barro) say the real myth is the Keynesian multiplier, which is supposed to convert a fiscal stimulus into a significantly larger boost to aggregate demand. On the contrary, supersized deficits are denting business confidence, not least by implying higher future taxes. And so the argument goes round and around, to the great delight of the financial media as the dog days of summer set in.
In some ways, of course, this is not an argument about economics at all. It is an argument about history. When Franklin Roosevelt became president in 1933, the deficit was already running at 4.7 per cent of GDP. It rose to a peak of 5.6 per cent in 1934. The federal debt burden rose only slightly prior to the outbreak of the second world war. It was the war that saw the US (and all the other combatants) embark on fiscal expansions of the sort we have seen since 2007. So what we are witnessing today has less to do with the 1930s than with the 1940s: it is world war finance without the war.
But the differences are immense. First, the US financed its huge wartime deficits from domestic savings, via the sale of war bonds. Second, wartime economies were essentially closed, so there was no leakage of fiscal stimulus. Third, war economies worked at maximum capacity; many controls had to be imposed on the private sector to prevent inflation.
Today's warlike deficits are being run at a time when the US is heavily reliant on foreign lenders, not least its rising strategic rival China (which holds 11 per cent of US Treasuries in public hands); at a time when economies are open, so American stimulus can end up benefiting Chinese exporters; and at a time when there is much underutilised capacity, so that deflation is a bigger threat than inflation.
Are there precedents for such a combination? Certainly. Long before Keynes was even born, weak governments in countries from Argentina to Venezuela used to experiment with large peacetime deficits to see if there were ways of avoiding hard choices. The experiments invariably ended in one of two ways. Either the foreign lenders got fleeced through default. Or the domestic lenders got fleeced through inflation. When economies were growing sluggishly, that could be slow in coming. But there invariably came a point when money creation by the central bank triggered an upsurge in inflationary expectations.
In 1981 the US economist Thomas Sargent wrote a seminal paper on “The Ends of Four Big Inflations”. It was in many ways the epitaph for the Keynesian era. Western governments (not least the British) had discovered the hard way that deficits could not save them. With double-digit inflation and rising unemployment, drastic remedies were called for. Looking back to central Europe in the 1920s – another era of war-induced debt explosions – Professor Sargent demonstrated that only a decisive policy “regime-change” would bring stabilisation, because only that would suffice to alter inflationary expectations.
Those economists, like New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who liken confidence to an imaginary “fairy” have failed to learn from decades of economic research on expectations. They also seem not to have noticed that the big academic winners of this crisis have been the proponents of behavioural finance, in which the ups and downs of human psychology are the key.
The evidence is very clear from surveys on both sides of the Atlantic. People are nervous of world war-sized deficits when there isn't a war to justify them. According to a recent poll published in the Financial Times, 45 per cent of Americans “think it likely that their government will be unable to meet its financial commitments within 10 years”. Surveys of business and consumer confidence paint a similar picture of mounting anxiety.
The remedy for such fears must be the kind of policy regime change Prof Sargent identified 30 years ago, and which the Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan governments successfully implemented. Then, as today, the choice was not between stimulus and austerity. It was between policies that boost private-sector confidence and those that kill it.
The writer is an FT contributing editor. His new biography of Siegmund Warburg, High Financier, has just been published by Penguin
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