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- Paul Krugman Fred R. Conrad
Back in the early stages of the financial crisis, wags joked that our trade with China had turned out to be fair and balanced after all: They sold us poison toys and tainted seafood; we sold them fraudulent securities.
在经济危机早期，爱闹着玩的人就开玩笑说，我们和中国的生意到底还是"扯平了"：他们卖给我们用有毒材料做的玩具和不干净的海鲜，我们则卖假债券给他们。
But these days, both sides of that deal are breaking down. On one side, the world's appetite for Chinese goods has fallen off sharply. China's exports have plunged in recent months and are now down 26 percent from a year ago. On the other side, the Chinese are evidently getting anxious about those securities.
但时至今日，这桩买卖的双方遇到了麻烦。一方面，世界各国对中国商品的需求急剧下降。近几个月中国的商品出口额已经明显下降，同年相比已经下降了26%。另一方面，中国人已经明显开始对其购买的债券感到十分担心。
But China still seems to have unrealistic expectations. And that's a problem for all of us.
但中国似乎还有一些不切实际的期待。这些不切实际的期待对我们所有人来说都是个问题。
The big news last week was a speech by Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of China's central bank, calling for a new "super-sovereign reserve currency."
上周中国中央银行行长周小川发表演说，呼吁推行"超主权储备货币"，这的确是一则爆炸性消息。
The paranoid wing of the Republican Party promptly warned of a dastardly plot to make America give up the dollar. But Mr. Zhou's speech was actually an admission of weakness. In effect, he was saying that China had driven itself into a dollar trap, and that it can neither get itself out nor change the policies that put it in that trap in the first place
共和党内的多疑分子立即警告说中国这个欺善怕恶的阴谋是用来迫使美国放弃其美元的国际主体地位。但周行长的演说其实是承认中国自身的弱点。实际上，他一直声称中国是自己一步步掉入美元"陷阱"的，中国现在既出不来，也无法改变最初将自己带入陷阱的那些政策。
Some background: In the early years of this decade, China began running large trade surpluses and also began attracting substantial inflows of foreign capital. If China had had a floating exchange rate - like, say, Canada - this would have led to a rise in the value of its currency, which, in turn, would have slowed the growth of China's exports.
下面是一些背景资料：在21世纪头几年，中国贸易盈利颇丰，并开始吸引大批境外资产注入本国市场。如果中国能像加拿大那样实行浮动汇率制，那中国的货币就会升值，这样又会反过来减缓中国的出口额增长。
But China chose instead to keep the value of the yuan in terms of the dollar more or less fixed. To do this, it had to buy up dollars as they came flooding
in. As the years went by, those trade surpluses just kept growing - and so did China's hoard of foreign assets.
而中国却选择了将人民币与美元挂钩以保持人民币的价值。要做到这一点，中国政府就要大笔购入流入中国境内的美元。随着岁月流逝，中国的贸易盈余仍在增长，其境外资产储备也在增长。
Now the joke about fraudulent securities was actually unfair. Aside from a late, ill-considered plunge into equities (at the very top of the market), the Chinese mainly accumulated very safe assets, with U.S. Treasury bills - T-bills, for short - making up a large part of the total. But while T-bills are as safe from default as anything on the planet, they yield a very low rate of
如今开玩笑说那是欺诈性证券实际上不公平。除了近期在股票方面作了一些略欠考虑的投资外，大部分中国人都积攒了非常安全可靠的境外资产，这其中美国国库券（简称T-bills）占了绝大部分。虽然美国国库券比世上许多东西要安全的多，但它的回报率却非常的低。
there a deep strategy behind this vast accumulation of low-yielding assets? Probably not. China acquired its $2 trillion stash - turning the People's Republic into the T-bills Republic - the same way Britain acquired its empire: in a fit of absence of mind.
在大量累积低回报资产的背后，中国是否有着更深层次的战略考虑？答案可能是没有吧。中国拥有2万亿美元的外汇储备，这使得中华人民共和国成为了美国的国库券共和国（T-bills Republic），这与英国最终取得其帝国地位的方法颇为相似：只是一不小心就变成了这样。
just the other day, it seems, China's leaders woke up and realized that they had a problem.
而就在前几天，中国领导人似乎醒悟了，意识到本国还有些不对劲。
The low yield doesn't seem to bother them much, even now. But they are, apparently, worried about the fact that around 70 percent of those assets are dollar-denominated, so any future fall in the dollar would mean a big capital loss for China. Hence Mr. Zhou's proposal to move to a new reserve currency along the lines of the S.D.R.'s, or special drawing rights, in which the International Monetary Fund keeps its accounts.
尽管如此，这些低回报的资产也并没有让中国政府感到烦恼。而很明显，他们烦恼的是，这些资产中的近七成是以美元计价的，那只要美元有所贬值，就意味着中国自身资产的巨大损失。因此周行长提议依照联国际货币基金组织为保证其账户而提出的特别提款权（S.D.R），推行一种新的储备货币。
But there's both less and more here than meets the eye. S.D.R.'s aren't real money. They're accounting units whose value is set by a basket of dollars, euros, Japanese yen and British pounds. And there's nothing to keep China from diversifying its reserves away from the dollar, indeed from holding a reserve basket matching the composition of the S.D.R.'s - nothing, that is, except for the fact that China now owns so many dollars that it can't sell them off without driving the dollar down and triggering the very capital loss its leaders fear.
然而这与我们亲眼目睹的有出入。特别提款权并不是真实的资金，它们只是一些核算单位，其价值由美元、欧元、日元和英镑共同决定。任何东西都无法阻挡中国外汇储备的多元化，中国的外汇储备不一定只能是美元，也没有任何东西能阻止中国持有符合特别提款权的外汇储备
没有什么能阻止。除非中国现在购入的美元过多，以致于无法将其抛出，只能降低美元的价值或者引发中国领导人害怕的资金流失。
what Mr. Zhou's proposal actually amounts to is a plea that someone rescue China from the consequences of its own investment mistakes. That's not going to happen.
因此周行长的提议其实就是恳求，恳求有人能拯救中国，使其不用自食投资错误的恶果。但没有人能救中国。
中国希望能有神奇的办法来解决持有过多美元的问题，这表明中国领导人还没有开始了解这样一个事实，即游戏的规则已经发生了根本的变化。
两年前，我们生活在这样一个世界里：中国的储蓄额比起其投资额高得多，这些过剩的存款就储存在美国。如今这一切已经不复存在了。
~在发表了关于新储备货币的演说后，周行长又做了另一次演说。在这次演说中，周行长认为中国居高不下的储蓄率是由以"反对露富保持简朴"的儒家思想决定的，所以这种高储蓄率不太可能会发生变化。同时他还表示，对美国而言，目前不是提高本国储蓄的"正确世界"。换句话说，就是让一切保持原样吧。（即中国继续保持搞储蓄率，美国保持高消费）
这样的主张也不大可能会发生。
现在的根本问题是中国还不能勇敢面对那些应对全球金融危机所需的剧烈变化 |
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发表于 2009-4-22 11:07
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