一本教会你“做对”题的6级阅读书 day18 passage3

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

In Britain, dismay about the global financial crisis is best masked with humor.
The British reaction to bank failures is to joke
that the best place to store money is under the mattress-or in an Irish bank.
When America's $700 billion rescue package stalled in Congress, Willem Buiter,
an economics professor, joked that his "remaining financial wealth
is now kept in an old sock in an undiscovered location."
A worried saver, such as Mr. Buiter, shunning banks for the safety of socks,
still faces a choice about what store of value to use as a stocking filler.
Gold is for the really scared. Its price has risen by
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.