Passage 3 American Economy in the Global Financial Crisis
经济危机笼罩下的美国经济

[00:02]In Britain, dismay about the global financial crisis is best masked with humor.
[00:09]The British reaction to bank failures is to joke
[00:13]that the best place to store money is under the mattress-or in an Irish bank.
[00:20]When America's $700 billion rescue package stalled in Congress, Willem Buiter,
[00:28]an economics professor, joked that his "remaining financial wealth
[00:34]is now kept in an old sock in an undiscovered location."
[00:39]A worried saver, such as Mr. Buiter, shunning banks for the safety of socks,
[00:46]still faces a choice about what store of value to use as a stocking filler.
[00:53]Gold is for the really scared. Its price has risen by
[00:58]about one-fifth in the space of three weeks.
[01:02]Makers of gold bars are struggling to keep up with demand.
[01:09]Gold tends to do well when the dollar struggles.
[01:13]And there are good reasons to be anxious about the dollar.
[01:18]America depends on foreign savings to finance its large current-account deficit,
[01:25]which was close to 5% of GDP in the second quarter.
[01:31]But the allure of America's financial assets has been tarnished by
[01:36]the shakiness of its banking system.
[01:40]Bail-outs and state guarantees to shore up the system may help,
[01:45]but they also strain public finances and raise concerns that the government
[01:51]may be tempted to inflate away its debts by printing money.
[01:57]Yet for all these worries,
[01:59]the dollar has come through the recent turmoil surprisingly well.
[02:04]The persistent foreign demand for American assets
[02:08]is remarkable given all those scares. In a recent study, Kristin Forbes,
[02:16]of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
[02:20]set out to discover what lies behind this hearty appetite for dollar assets.
[02:27]She looked at several factors that might affect the costs and benefits
[02:33]of buying American assets, including each country's capital controls,
[02:39]its financial development, its investment returns at home,
[02:44]and how useful dollar assets were in diversifying risk.
[02:49]Two striking results emerged. First, there was little evidence
[02:54]that foreigners buy American dollars as a hedge against risks at home.
[03:00]If a country's investment returns moved in tandem with America's,
[03:06]this did not reduce their thirst for dollar assets.
[03:11]This is the opposite of what financial theory predicts-that investors
[03:17]would be keener on foreign assets the less they were correlated
[03:21]with their domestic ones.
[03:24]The second big result has implications for the dollar
[03:28]and how economists think about global "imbalances",
[03:33]the recent phenomenon of big current-account deficits in rich countries
[03:39]financed by poor-country surpluses.
[03:43]Ms Forbes found that a lack of financial development at home
[03:48]makes foreigners keener to invest in America. What attracts them is the size,
[03:55]liquidity, efficiency and transparency of its financial markets
[04:00]compared with what is on offer in their domestic markets.
[04:04]This finding adds weight to theories which explain global imbalances
[04:10]as a consequence of slow financial progress.