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本帖最后由 shoujie 于 2012-1-24 16:08 编辑
Jan. 20, 2012, 12:01 a.m. EST
《美国专家:一场全球性衰退已经开始了》
By Howard Gold
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — For most economists, the main question is whether we will have a new recession. For Gary Shilling, the only question is how big
Unlike many gloom and doomsters, Shilling is a genial sort who likes cracking jokes and keeps bees as a hobby. But when it comes to economics he’s dead serious: He’s been consistently gloomier than the economic fraternity and consistently right over the past few years.
ow, he parts ways with his peers again by declaring that a new global recession already has begun in Europe and that it will touch our shores soon.
That, of course, would be a nightmare for the few bulls left on Wall Street and for President Obama’s re-election team, who are crossing their fingers and toes that Europe doesn’t implode before November.
Shilling thinks Europe fell into recession last quarter — not every country, perhaps, but enough of them to drag the continent down into the muck.
And here’s the really bad news: He thinks Europe will experience a recession as deep as ours was from 2007-2009 — enough to tip the U.S.’s relatively better economy into recession, too, during the first quarter of 2012.
And he’s looking for a hard landing in China, as consumers in contracting developed economies tighten their belts.
Shilling starts from the proposition, spelled out in his book “The Age of Deleveraging,” that the world and especially the United States had a credit bubble that lasted for decades until 2007 when the debt-ridden U.S. housing market collapsed. The bursting of that bubble was like an economic Big Bang whose effects will be felt for years as households deleverage.
Too much debt to deal with
He agrees with the research of Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff who studied financial crises over several centuries and found that major crises of the kind we experienced start with too much debt in the private sector.
Then, governments step in to “save” the financial system by taking on the liabilities of financial institutions and sometimes individuals. But as public debt grows too large, it curtails economic growth, Reinhart and Rogoff found, prolonging the agony and making it harder for countries to recover.
That’s exactly what’s happening in Europe now, and to some extent the United States. Note the recent downgrading by Standard & Poor’s of several European countries’ sovereign debt ratings, including France, which lost its AAA rating less than six months after the U.S. did.
European countries are finding it harder to keep Greece, Portugal and even Italy and Spain from defaulting, as their own economies struggle.
“Europe is in what I think will be a deep recession,” says Shilling, “because they will have a financial crisis and an economic crisis” just like 2008, he believes.
And the euro zone’s lack of a unified fiscal policy makes it harder for them to deal with that crisis. “They’re dithering over fiscal policy,” he says.
“It’s pretty hard for any of them to avoid” recession, he says, as the trade links that were supposed to bind them in prosperity drag them down.
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