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美联储主席格林斯潘回忆录--动荡年代:勇闯新世界-134:The Delphic Future-10

市场应保持自由运转，不受行政限制——特别是工资、价格和利率方面的限制——这些限制过去曾阻碍市场的发展。
在资金大规模流动、交易量巨大以及市场因日益复杂而不可避免地变得不透明的世界中，这一点尤其重要。


经济和金融冲击将会发生：人性及其恐惧和弱点仍然是一个未知数。

由此产生的冲击将一如既往地难以预测，因此吸收冲击的能力是稳定产出和就业的首要要求。
实际监督和监管——二十世纪的金融模式——正在被二十一世纪金融的数量和复杂性所淹没。

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Taken together, the financial problems confronting the next quarter century do not make a pretty picture. 

Yet we have lived through far worse.

None of them will permanently undermine our institutions, or even likely topple the U.S. economy from its place of world leadership. 

Indeed there are currently a number of feared financial imbalances that are likely to be resolved with far less impact on U.S. economic activity than is generally supposed. 

I indicated in chapter 18 that the unwinding of our current account deficit is not likely to have a major impact on economic activity or employment. 

The fear that a liquidation of much of China's and Japan's huge foreign-exchange reserves will drive U.S. interest rates sharply higher and dollar exchange rates lower is also exaggerated.

There is little we can do to avoid the easing of global disinflationary forces. 

I view that as a return to fiat-money normalcy not a new aberration.

What is more, we have it within our power to sharply mitigate some of the more dire features of the scenario I have outlined above. 

First, the president and Congress must not interfere with the Federal Open Market Committee's efforts to contain the inevitable inflationary pressures that will eventually emerge (the members will need no encouragement). 

Monetary policy can simulate the gold standard's stable prices. 

Episodes of higher interest rates will be required. 

But the Volcker Fed demonstrated that it can be done.

Second, the president and Congress must make certain that the economic and financial flexibility that enabled the U.S. economy to absorb the shock of 9/11 is not impaired. 

Markets should remain free to function without the administrative constraints—particularly those on wages, prices, and interest rates—that have disabled them in the past. 

This is especially important in a world of massive movements of funds, huge trading volumes, and markets rendered inevitably opaque by their increasing complexity.

Economic and financial shocks will occur: human nature, with its fears and its foibles, remains a wild card. 

The resulting shocks will, as always, be difficult to anticipate, so the ability to absorb them is a paramount requirement for stability of output and employment.

Hands-on supervision and regulation—the twentieth-century financial model—is being swamped by the volume and complexity of twenty-first century finance.

491

THE AGE OF TURBULENCE


Only in areas of operational risk and business and consumer fraud do the principles of twentieth-century regulation remain intact. 

Much regulation will continue to be aimed at ensuring that rapid-fire; risk-laden dealings are financed by wealthy professional investors, not by the general public. 

Efforts to monitor and influence market behavior that is proceeding at Mach speeds will fail. 

Public-sector surveillance is no longer up to the task. 

The armies of examiners that would be needed to maintain surveillance on today's global transactions would by their actions undermine the financial flexibility so essential to our future. 

We have no sensible choice other than to let markets work. 

Market failure is the rare exception, and its consequences can be assuaged by a flexible economic and financial system.

However we get to 2030, the U.S. economy should end up much larger, absent unexpectedly long crises—three-fourths larger in real terms than that in which we operate today. 

What's more, its output will be far more conceptual in nature. 

The long-standing trend away from value produced by manual labor and natural resources and toward the intangible value-added we associate with the digital economy can be expected to continue.

Today it takes a lot less physical material to produce a unit of output than it did in generations past. 

Indeed, the physical amount of materials and fuels either consumed in the production of output or embodied in the output has increased very modestly over the past half century. 

The output of our economy is not quite literally lighter, but it is close.

Thin fiber-optic cable, for instance, has replaced huge tonnages of copper wire. 

New architectural, engineering, and materials technologies have enabled the construction of buildings enclosing the same space with far less physical material than was required fifty or one hundred years ago. 

Mobile phones have not only downsized but also morphed into multipurpose communication devices. 

The movement over the decades toward production of services that require little physical input has also been a major contributor to the marked rise in the ratio of constant dollars of GDP to tons of input.

If you compare the dollar value of the gross domestic product—that is,
the market value of all goods and services produced—of 2006 with the GDP of 1946, after adjusting for inflation, the GDP of the country over which George W. Bush presides is seven times larger than Harry Truman's.

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THE DELPHIC FUTURE



The weight of the inputs of materials required to produce the 2006 output,
however, is only modestly greater than was required to produce the 1946 output. This means that almost all of the real-value-added increases in our output reflect the embodiment of ideas.

The dramatic shift during the past half century toward the less tangible and more conceptual—the amount of weight the economy has lost, as it were—stems from several causes. 

The challenge of accumulating physical goods in an ever more crowded geographical environment has clearly resulted in pre

Similarly, the prospect of increasing costs of discovering, developing, and processing ever-larger quantities of physical resources in less amenable terrain has raised marginal costs and shifted producers toward downsized alternatives. 

Moreover, as the technological frontier has moved forward and pressed for information processing to speed up, the laws of physics have required microchips to become ever more compact.

The new downsized economy operates differently from its predecessors.

In the typical case of a manufactured good, the incremental cost of increasing
output by one unit ultimately rises as production expands. 

In the realm of conceptual output, however, production is often characterized by
constant, and often negligible, marginal cost. 

Though the setup cost of creating an online medical dictionary, for instance, may be huge, the cost of reproduction and distribution may be near zero if the means of distribution is the Internet. 

The emergence of an electronic platform for the transmission of ideas at negligible marginal cost is doubtless an important factor explaining the most recent increased conceptualization of the GDP. 

The demand for conceptual products is clearly impeded to a much lesser degree by rising marginal cost and, hence, price, than is the demand for physical products.

The high cost of developing software and the negligible production and,
if online, distribution costs tend to suggest a natural monopoly—a good or service that is supplied most efficiently by one firm. 

A stock exchange is an obvious example. 

It is most efficient to have all the trading of a stock concentrated in one market. 

Bid-asked spreads narrow and transaction costs decline. 

In the 1930s, Alcoa was the sole U.S. producer of raw aluminum.
It kept its monopoly by passing on, in ever-lower prices, almost all its increases in efficiency. 

Potential competitors could not envision an acceptable rate of return if they had to match Alcoa's low prices.*

It is often said that many companies do lower prices in an attempt to drive competitors out of business. 

But unless their costs are persistently lower than competitors', this is a losing strategy.
To raise prices after potential competitors retire from the market is decidedly short-sighted.
Despite claims that it is a common practice, I have seen very little of it in my six decades observing business. It is an effective way to lose customers.

Antitrust policy in the United States was born in the nineteenth century and evolved in twentieth-century law in reaction to allegations of price fixing and other transgressions contrary to then current views of how markets should work. 

I have always thought the competitive model employed by the courts to judge infractions was not one that maximized economic efficiency.
I fear that applying that twentieth-century model to markets of the twenty-first century will be even more counterproductive. 

Freeing up markets by withdrawing subsidies and anti-competition regulation, in my judgment, has always been the most effective antimonopoly policy.

493

(未完待续, To be contd)
 

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