↖  美国联邦储备委员会主席艾伦格林斯潘回忆录——动荡年代：勇闯新世界-the age of turbulence-38..

美国联邦储备委员会主席艾伦格林斯潘回忆录——动荡年代：勇闯新世界-the age of turbulence-38

Improve investors' expectations, I told Clinton, and long-term rates could fall, galvanizing the demand for new homes and the appliances, furnishings, 

and the gamut of consumer items associated with home ownership. 

Stock values, too, would rise, as bonds became less attractive and investors shifted into equities. Businesses would expand, creating jobs. 

All told, the latter part of the 1990s could look awfully good. I was not oblivious of the fact that 1996 would be a presidential election year. The path to a beneficent future, I told the president-elect, was lowering the long-term trajectory of federal budget deficits. 

To my delight, Clinton seemed fully engaged. 

He seemed to pick up on my sense of urgency about the deficit, and asked a lot of smart questions that politicians usually don't ask. Our meeting, which had been scheduled for an hour, turned into a lively discussion that went on for almost three. 

We touched on a whole range of topics beyond economics—Somalia and Bosnia and Russian history, job-training programs, education—and he asked for my assessment of world leaders whom he hadn't yet had a chance to meet. After a while, aides brought in lunch. 

So saxophone wasn't the only thing we had in common. 

Here was a fellow information hound, and like me, Clinton clearly enjoyed exploring 

ideas. I walked away impressed, yet not entirely sure what I thought. Clearly, 

for sheer intelligence, Bill Clinton was on a par with Richard Nixon, who, 

despite his obvious flaws, was the smartest president I'd met to that point. 

And either Clinton shared many of my views on the way the economic system was evolving and on what should be done, or he was the cleverest chameleon I'd ever encountered. I mulled all this on the airplane on my way home. After I got back to Washington, I told a friend, 

"I don't know that I'd have changed my vote, but I'm reassured." 

That feeling was reinforced a week later when Clinton announced as his senior economic team a number of familiar faces. As treasury secretary he'd picked Lloyd Bentsen, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, 

with Roger Altman, a very smart Wall Street investment banker, as his deputy. As budget director he chose Leon Panetta, a California congressman who chaired the House Budget Committee, with economist Alice Rivlin as his deputy. 

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She was the only economist on the team, and her credentials were impressive: she'd been the founding director of the Congressional Budget Office and had been an early recipient of one of the MacArthur Foundation's genius grants. 

Just as interesting was Clinton's choice of Robert Rubin, the cochairman of Goldman Sachs, to run a new White House council on economic policy. As the New York Times explained it, Rubin was to act as the economic equivalent of a national security adviser: his job would be to elicit economic ideas from Treasury, State, the budget office, the CEA, and other departments, and weave them into policy options for the president. 

What jumped out at me was that Clinton was taking a page from John F. Kennedy's book. All of Clinton's economic-policy appointees were fiscally conservative centrists like Doug Dillon, the Republican banker whom Kennedy picked as treasury secretary. Choosing them made Bill Clinton seem about as far from the classic tax-and-spend liberal as you could get and still be a Democrat. 

Like every new administration, the Clinton White House had to scramble to pull together its first budget, due for submission to Congress by early February. The president by all accounts did not have an easy time dealing with the recommendations of his economic team. 

The full extent of the fiscal problems confronting them was only now becoming clear: in December the Office of Management and Budget offered a revised analysis projecting that the government was headed toward a $360 billion deficit 

in 1997—some $50 billion higher than its previous estimate. 

This made it clear that to come anywhere near his goal of halving the deficit, Clinton would have to abandon or postpone other cherished plans, such as the 

middle-class tax cut and the "investments" in training and jobs. 

I kept tabs on the budget-making process mainly through Lloyd Bentsen. 

The new treasury secretary had first caught my attention in the 1976 primaries—Jimmy Carter ultimately beat him for the Democratic nomination, 

but I thought Bentsen had looked like a president and acted like one. 

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Courtly, gray-haired, and sophisticated, he was a former World War II B-24 

bomber pilot who'd served four terms in the Senate, where he had a well

earned reputation for good judgment and for quietly getting things done. 

Andrea and I had known Bentsen and his impressive wife, B.A., socially for 

some time. I was not surprised to find him a pleasure to work with, even when we disagreed. 

Bentsen and the others on the economic team were careful to acknowledge 

the Fed's boundaries. In fact, their decision not to comment publicly on monetary policy was a big break from the past, and helped us and them by bolstering our independence. When he and Panetta came to brief me in mid-January on the evolving budget plan, they avoided asking for an endorsement or even an opinion. I simply indicated that I understood, and we left it at that. 

In fact, I thought the plan noninflationary and testified to that effect in Congress in late January. 

Bentsen asked me to weigh in with the president just once—the day after I'd first testified in favor of their overall approach. (I had steered clear of commenting on the details of Clinton's program.) As the team crunched the numbers and the budget took shape, Clinton found himself faced with a choice that was increasingly stark. Either he could opt for a package of spending programs that would fulfill some of his campaign promises, or he could opt for a deficit-cutting plan, whose success would depend on impressing the financial markets and that would pay off chiefly in the longer term. 

There was no in-between—we couldn't afford both. This dilemma had opened a rift in the White House staff, some of whom privately ridiculed the deficit-cutting approach as a sellout to Wall Street. That's why Bentsen asked me to the White House—to reemphasize the urgency of budget reform. 

We met the president in the Oval Office on the morning of January 28; 

Bob Rubin joined us. Clinton was all business, so I got straight to the point. 

I focused on the danger of not confronting the deficit right away, playing out for him how, in that instance, the decade was apt to unfold. Because of the end of the cold war, I told him, 

"defense spending will come down over the next few years and that will mask a lot of problems. But by 1996 or 1997, the deficits will be hard for the public to ignore. You can see it in the data." 

And I outlined for him how the mandated outlays for Social Security and other social benefits were scheduled to increase, which would cause deficit gaps to open further. 

"So the debt rises markedly into the twenty-first century, and the interest on the debt rises, threatening a spiral of rising deficits. Unless it's aborted, that could lead to a financial crisis," 

I said. As we finished, Clinton, unsurprisingly, looked grim. 

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(未完待续, To be contd)
 

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