In a guest article, Christina Romer says policymakers must learn from the errors that prolonged the Depression
在一篇特邀文章中，Christina Romer表示决策者必须从延长大萧条的错误行为中得到教训。
Christina Romer is the chairwoman of Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers and a scholar of the Depression.
Christina Romer是巴拉克. 奥巴马经济顾问委员会的主席，研究大萧条的一名学者。
AT A recent congressional hearing I cautiously noted some “glimmers of hope” that the economy could stabilise and perhaps start to rebound later in the year. I was asked if this meant that we should cancel much of the remaining spending in the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. I responded that the expected recovery was both months away and predicated on Recovery Act spending ramping up greatly. Only later did it hit me that I should have told the story of 1937.
在最近的一次国会听证中，我谨慎地提出经济的稳定出现了“一丝希望”，并有可能会在年底反弹。人们问我，是否这意味着我们应该裁掉价值7870亿美元《美国复苏与再投资法案》中剩余的开支。我回答到：预期的复苏是在数月之后，并且是建立在该法案开支大幅提高的基础之上的。不久，我发现我应该讲述一下1937年的经济萧条的故事。
The recovery from the Depression is often described as slow because America did not return to full employment until after the outbreak of the second world war. But the truth is the recovery in the four years after Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933 was incredibly rapid. Annual real GDP growth averaged over 9%. Unemployment fell from 25% to 14%. The second world war aside, the United States has never experienced such sustained, rapid growth.
人们常常认为从大萧条中的复苏是缓慢的，因为直到二次世界大战的爆发美国才恢复到完全就业状态。但事实上，在Franklin Roosevelt于1933年上任后的4年间，经济以惊人的速度开始恢复。年均GDP增长超过9%。失业率从25%跌落到14%。除开二战期间，美国经济从未出现过如此持续，快速的增长。
However, that growth was halted by a second severe downturn in 1937-38, when unemployment surged again to 19% (see chart). The fundamental cause of this second recession was an unfortunate, and largely inadvertent, switch to contractionary fiscal and monetary policy. One source of the growth in 1936 was that Congress had overridden Mr Roosevelt’s veto and passed a large bonus for veterans of the First World War. In 1937, this fiscal stimulus disappeared. In addition, social-security taxes were collected for the first time. These factors reduced the deficit by roughly 2.5% of GDP, exerting significant contractionary pressure.
但是，在1937到1938年期间出现的二度严重衰退阻止了该增长。那时，失业率再次飙升至19%。导致这次二度衰退的根本原因在于决策者不幸地（很大程度上说是无意地）采取了紧缩性的财政货币政策。在1936年，刺激增长的原因之一是议会撤销了Roosevelt的否决，通过了为一战老兵拨付的巨额奖励。1937年时，财政的刺激作用随即消失。除此之外，政府还第一次征收了社会保障税。这些因素降低了大约占GDP2.5%的赤字，带来了巨大的财政紧缩压力。
Also important was an accidental switch to contractionary monetary policy. In 1936 the Federal Reserve began to worry about its “exit strategy”. After several years of relatively loose monetary policy, American banks were holding large quantities of reserves in excess of their legislated requirements. Monetary policymakers feared these excess reserves would make it difficult to tighten if inflation developed or if “speculative excess” began again on Wall Street. In July 1936 the Fed’s board of governors stated that existing excess reserves could “create an injurious credit expansion” and that it had “decided to lock up” those excess reserves “as a measure of prevention”. The Fed then doubled reserve requirements in a series of steps. Unfortunately it turned out that banks, still nervous after the financial panics of the early 1930s, wanted to hold excess reserves as a cushion. When that excess was legislated away, they scrambled to replace it by reducing lending. According to a classic study of the Depression by Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz, the resulting monetary contraction was a central cause of the 1937-38 recession.
同时，向紧缩性货币政策的突然转向也是原因之一。在1963年，美联储就开始着手盘算其“推出策略”。在执行了几年相对宽松的货币政策后，美国银行手中持有了大量的储蓄，超过法律规定的上限。货币决策者担心，如果通货膨胀进一步发展，或是如果“投机性储存”再次重现华尔街，那么就很难控制这些多余的储蓄了。1936年7月，美联储委员声称：现存的过剩储蓄会“造成危害性的信贷扩张”，因此美联储已经“决定冻结”这部份过剩的储蓄，“从而防止上述情况的发生”。接下来，美联储采取了一系列步骤，将法定存款金上调了一倍。不幸的是，由于30年代早期的金融恐慌，银行仍旧把过剩的储蓄当作一种缓冲垫继续握紧不放。当法律将这部份存储带走之后，银行争先恐后地把降低借贷来作为应对手段。Milton Friedman和Anna Schwartz对大萧条经典的研究表明：由此产生的货币紧缩是促成1937到1938年衰退的主要原因。
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