每日阅读2021.12.08

Depression” is more than a serious economic downturn. What distinguishes a depression from a harsh recession is paralysing fear — fear of the unknown so great that it causes consumers, businesses, and investors to retreat and panic. They save up cash and desperately cut spending. They sell stocks and other assets. ​​​​​​A shattering loss of confidence inspires behaviour that overwhelms the normal self-correcting mechanisms that usually prevent a recession from becoming deep and prolonged: a depression.

Comparing 1929 with 2007-09, Christina Romer, the head of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, finds the initial blow to confidence far greater now than then. True, stock prices fell a third from September to December 1929, but fewer Americans then owned stocks. Moreover, home prices barely dropped. From December 1928 to December 1929, total household wealth declined only 3%. By contrast, the loss in household wealth between December 2007 and December 2008 was 17%. Both stocks and homes, more widely held, dropped more. Thus traumatised (受到创伤），the economy might have gone into a free fall ending in depression. Indeed, it did go into free fall. Shoppers refrained from buying cars, appliances, and other big- ticket items. Spending on such “durables” dropped at a 12% annual rate in 2008’s third quarter, a 20% rate in the fourth. And businesses shelved investment projects.

That these huge declines didn’t lead to depression mainly reflects, as Romer argues, counter-measures taken by the government. Private markets for goods, services, labor, and securities do mostly self-correct, but panic feeds on itself and disarms these stabilising tendencies. In this situation, only the government can protect the economy as a whole, because most individuals and companies are involved in the self-defeating behaviour of self-protection.

Government’s failure to perform this role in the early 1930s transformed recession into depression. Scholars will debate which interventions this time — the Federal Reserve’s support of a failing credit system, guarantees of bank debt, Obama’s “stimulus” plan and bank “stress test” 一 counted most in preventing a recurrence. Regardless, all these complex measures had the same psychological purpose: to reassure people that the free fall would stop and, thereby, curb die fear that would perpetuate( 使持久）a free fall.

All this improved confidence. But the consumer sentiment index remains weak, and all the rebound has occurred in Americans’ evaluation of future economic conditions, not the present. Unemployment (9.8%) is abysmal  (糟透的）, the recovery’s strength unclear. Here, too, there is an echo from the 1930s. Despite bottoming out in 1933, the Depression didn’t end until World War II. Some government policies aided recovery; some hindered it. The good news today is that the bad news is not worse.

单词

1. Harsh -adj 严厉的；残酷的
2. recession -n 经济衰退
3. desperately -adv 拼命地；绝望地
4. stock -n/v 存贮； -n资本；股本
5. assets -n 资产
6. shatter -adj 令人非常惊愕难过的;给人以极大打击的;非常响亮的； -v 破碎；碎裂
7. overwhelm -v 充满；压倒；击败
8. mechanisms -n机械装置；方法；机制
9. prolong -v 延长
10. depression -n 抑郁；经济衰退
11. household -n一家人；家庭
12. indeed -adv 的确
13. refrain -v 抑制；避免
14. annual -adj每年的
15. shelve -v 搁置
16. investment -n 投资
17. counter-measures -n 对策
18. panic -n 恐慌
19. disarm -v 消解（某人）的怒气
20. stabilize -v 稳定；稳固
21. scholars -n学者
22. intervention -n 干涉‘
23. recurrence -n 复发；重现
24. reassure -v 安抚
25. curb -v遏制；控制
26. sentiment -n观点；情绪
27. rebound -n/v 复兴；反弹
28. echo -n 回音；回声
29. hinder -v阻碍

句子

        1.A shattering loss of confidence inspires behaviour that overwhelms the normal self-correcting mechanisms that usually prevent a recession from becoming deep and prolonged: a depression.

信心的极度丧失激发了人们的行为，这种行为压倒了通常防止衰退深入和持续的正常自我纠正机制：抑郁症。

        2.That these huge declines didn’t lead to depression mainly reflects, as Romer argues, counter-measures taken by the government

正如罗默所说，这些大幅下降并没有导致萧条，这主要反映了政府采取的应对措施