Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, goes to a lot of parties. He and his wife, the TV journalist Andrea Mitchell, 'sort of get invited everywhere, ' he says, sitting in front of the long bay window in his office on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C. Lately, though, cocktails and dinners seem to have guest lists drawn almost exclusively from one political party or the other. 'It used to be a ritualistic 50-50 at parties -- the doyennes of culture and partying were very strict about bipartisanship, ' he adds. 'That doesn't exist anymore.'
美国联邦储备委员会(Federal Reserve，简称：美联储)主席格林斯潘(Alan Greenspan)如今频频亮相各种派对。在他位于华盛顿特区康涅狄格大道的办公室里，格林斯潘坐在长长的飘窗前说，他和太太电视记者米切尔 (Andrea Mitchell)几乎可以说会受邀出席各类聚会。不过，最近，鸡尾酒会和晚宴的宾客名单似乎全部由来自一个政党或另一个政党的人士组成。格林斯潘还说，过去的派对都是一半共和党加一半民主党人士参加的派对，这几乎是一种成规，文化和派对领域的前辈们曾经非常严格地要求两党的参与，如今不再是这样了。
In his new book 'The Map and the Territory, ' to be released on Tuesday, Mr. Greenspan, 87, goes on a hunt for what has gone wrong in American politics and in the U.S. economy. He doesn't blame the current administration for today's partisan divide. The culprit? 'It's the benefits, ' he says, pointing to the disagreements between Republicans and Democrats over how to deal with the growth of entitlements.
在他将于周二出版的新书《地图与疆域》(暂译)(The Map and the Territory)中，现年87岁的格林斯潘探讨了美国政治和经济中出现的问题。他并不认为现任政府造成了如今两党分裂的局面。那么罪魁祸首又是谁呢?格林斯潘说，罪魁祸首是利益。他指的是共和党与民主党在如何应对福利增长一事上的分歧。
In the book, he also ponders why the Fed failed to predict the financial crisis, where he himself went wrong and how that discovery has completely changed his worldview.
格林斯潘还在书中反思了美联储为何没有预见到金融危机，他自己犯了哪些错误，以及这一发现如何彻底改变了他的世界观。
Mr. Greenspan's biggest revelation came one day about a year ago when he was playing with gross domestic savings numbers. What he found, to his surprise and initial skepticism, was that an increase in entitlements has closely corresponded to a decline in the country's savings. 'We had this extraordinary increase in benefits, with each party trying to outbid the other, ' he says. 'That practice has been eroding the country's flow of savings that's so critical in financing our capital investment.' The decline in savings has been partly offset by borrowing from abroad, which brings us to our current foreign debt: '$5 trillion and counting, ' he says.
格林斯潘最大的“启示”来自大约一年前的某一天，当时他正在研究美国国内总储蓄数据。令他感到意外并且最初让他心生怀疑的是，他发现福利的增长一直与美国储蓄的下滑密切相关。他说，美国的福利有了大幅增长，两党都在努力，竞相试图超过另一党。这一做法一直在腐蚀美国的储蓄流，而储蓄流对为我们的资本投资提供资金至关重要。他说，储蓄的下滑从一定程度上被对外借款所抵消，对外借款使我们的当前外债规模达到了5万亿美元，而且还在上升。
He said he is baffled by all the blame that has been piled on him. Since the recession, critics have said the increased money supply and low interest rates during his tenure at the Fed from 1987 to 2006 led to bubble investments. Mr. Greenspan first heard that theory, he says, in 2007, when John Taylor, a professor of economics at Stanford University who has advised Republicans, made the connection between easy money and the housing bubble. 'It had absolutely nothing to do with the housing bubble, ' he says. 'That's ridiculous.'
他说，外界对他的各种指责令他感到困惑。自衰退以来，批评人士一直说，1987年至2006年格林斯潘执掌美联储期间，增长的货币供应量和低利率导致了投资泡沫。格林斯潘说，他第一次听到这个说法是在2007年，当时斯坦福大学(Stanford University)经济学教授泰勒(John Taylor)将低利率与楼市泡沫联系在一起。格林斯潘说，低利率与楼市泡沫绝对毫无关系，这种说法荒谬至极。泰勒一直在为共和党提供咨询。
Instead, he says Prof. Taylor's statement 'served a lot of political purposes of people who have been picking on the Fed from both sides of the aisle.' Mr. Greenspan wrote a rebuttal in a paper for the Brookings Institution, going through Prof. Taylor's points one by one. 'I thought, that'll kill it, ' he remembers. 'It didn't, because nobody read the paper.'
格林斯潘说，泰勒的说法满足了两党中指摘美联储的议员的政治目的。格林斯潘为布鲁金斯学会(Brookings Institution)撰文，逐一驳斥了泰勒的观点。格林斯潘回忆说，我当时认为，这将给此事画上句号，但事实并非如此，因为没有人读那篇文章。
Mr. Greenspan said he didn't press the issue because Prof. Taylor is a friend, but he had no idea how far Prof. Taylor's idea would go. 'The trouble, unfortunately, with the argument is there's no evidence that happened, but he's won the battle, and his view is conventional wisdom, ' he says.
格林斯潘说，他没有继续争论，因为泰勒是他的朋友，但他当时并不知道泰勒的想法会造成多大的影响。他说，遗憾的是，问题在于没有证据证明低利率与楼市泡沫有关，但泰勒却赢得了那场论战，他的观点成了“常识”。
Prof. Taylor stands by the paper in which he presented the idea. 'The paper provided empirical evidence . . . that unusually low interest rates set by the Fed in 2003-2005 compared with policy decisions in the prior two decades exacerbated the housing boom, ' he wrote in an email. Other economists have corroborated the findings, he added, and 'the results are quite robust.'
泰勒坚持他提出这一想法的文章中的观点。他在一封电子邮件中说，文章提供了实证证据，证明2003年至2005年美联储设定的与之前20年的政策决策相比异常低的利率加剧了楼市的迅速增长。他说，其他经济学家也用其他证据支持了这个发现，研究结果相当有说服力。
This disagreement is now the centerpiece of a long-running debate among economists, even inside the Fed today, that has yet to be resolved.
这一分歧如今成为经济学家中一场悬而未决的漫长论战的焦点，目前甚至在美联储内部也存在这样的争论。
'I've always considered myself more of a mathematician than a psychologist, ' says Mr. Greenspan. But after the Fed's model failed to predict the financial crisis, he realized that there is more to forecasting than numbers. 'It all fell apart, in the sense that not a single major forecaster of note or institution caught it, ' he says. 'The Federal Reserve has got the most elaborate econometric model, which incorporates all the newfangled models of how the world works -- and it missed it completely.' He says JP Morgan had put out a forecast three days before the crisis saying the economy was on the rise. And as late as 2007, the International Monetary Fund also said that global risk was declining. 'A few days [after the crisis hit], I run into an article, and it is titled, 'Do we economists know anything?' ' he says.
格林斯潘说，我一直认为自己更像是数学家，而不是心理学家。但在美联储的，模型未能预测金融危机后，他认识到需要预测的不仅仅是数字。他说，一切都土崩瓦解，在一定程度上，没有哪一个有名的主要预测者或机构料到这种情况。美联储有着最精密的计量经济模型，包括了关于世界如何运转的所有最新模型──但还是完全错失了。他说，摩根大通在危机前三天发布预测说，经济呈上升势头。而直到2007年，国际货币基金组织(International Monetary Fund)也说，全球危机呈下降趋势。他说，危机发生几天后，我读到一篇标题为“我们经济学家知道一切吗?”(Do we economists know anything?)的文章。
Mr. Greenspan set out to find his blind spot step by step. First he drew the conclusion that the nonfinancial sector of the economy had been healthy. The problem lay in finance, because of its vulnerability to spells of euphoria and irrational fear. Studying the results of herd behavior provided him with some surprises. 'I was actually flabbergasted, ' he says. 'It upended my view of how the world works.'
格林斯潘开始逐步找出自己的盲点。他首先得出结论认为，经济中的非金融领域状况良好。问题在于金融方面，因为它很容易受到兴奋及非理性恐惧的影响。对“羊群行为”(Herd Behavior)的研究出乎他的意料。他说，事实上我大惊一惊。它颠覆了我对于世界如何运转的看法。
He concluded that fear has at least three times the effect of euphoria in producing market gyrations. 'I wouldn't have dared write anything like that before, ' he says.
他推断说，在造成市场大幅波动方面，恐惧造成的效应至少是兴奋的三倍。他说，以前我肯定不敢写这样的东西。
Studying the minutiae of the events leading to the financial crisis brought to mind some lessons from his famous friendship, from the 1950s on, with the late Objectivist philosopher Ayn Rand. He says that Rand didn't influence him politically -- he was always a libertarian -- but she did point out tensions in his philosophy about life. 'She caught me in contradictions, which shook me, and I said, 'My God, she is right, ' ' he says.
通过研究导致金融危机的众多事件的微小细节，他想起了从上世纪50年代开始与已故客观主义哲学家兰德(Ayn Rand)的交往中学到的一些东西。他说，兰德从不在政治上影响他(格林斯潘一直是自由主义者)，但她会指出他人生观中的紧张方面。他说，她会抓住我自相矛盾的地方，这令我震动，于是我说，天哪，她是对的。
Mr. Greenspan then believed in analysis based mainly on hard science and empirical facts. Rand told him that unless he considered human nature and its irrational side, he would 'miss a very large part of how human beings behaved.' At the time they weren't discussing economics, but today he realizes the full impact of emotions and instincts on markets. He also has come to admire psychologist and Princeton University professor emeritus Daniel Kahneman's work applying psychological insights to economic theory, for which he won a Nobel Prize in 2002.
格林斯潘当时信奉主要基于硬科学和经验事实的分析。兰德告诉他，如果不考虑到人类天性及其非理性的一面，他将错过人类行为的一个很大的部分。当时他们讨论的内容并不是经济，但如今他认识到情绪和直觉对于市场的全面影响。他还开始称赞哲学家、普林斯顿大学(Princeton University)荣休教授卡内曼(Daniel Kahneman)将哲学洞察应用于经济理论的作品。卡内曼凭借这方面的工作获得了2002年的诺贝尔奖。
Mr. Greenspan won't say whether he has agreed with the decisions of current Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, but he will comment on the Fed's broader policies, which have become more aggressive since his time. 'I'm not in favor of intervention, because markets so effectively function and work unless they are broken, ' he says. He did support TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, because at the time the market needed sovereign credit during 'the most debilitating financial crisis ever.' But, he says, 'eventually I think they carried the extent of what they did well beyond what was necessary.'
格林斯潘拒绝说明他是否同意现任美联储主席贝南克(Ben Bernanke)的决策，但他愿意评论美联储的整体政策，这些政策已经比他主持美联储时更为激进。他说，我不赞同干预，因为市场的活动和运转极为有效，除非它们被破坏。他支持问题资产救助计划(Troubled Asset Relief Program)，因为当时市场处于史上最衰弱的金融危机中，需要主权信用的支撑。但他说，归根到底我认为，他们所实施的举措大大超过必要的程度。
With his new book, Mr. Greenspan hopes to provide politicians and the public with a road map to avoid making the same mistakes again. His suggestions include reducing entitlements, embracing 'creative destruction' by letting facilities with cutting-edge technology displace those with low productivity, and fixing the political system by encouraging bipartisanship. He hasn't yet sent a copy to Janet Yellen, the nominee to be the next Fed chief. Though they are good friends, he says, 'she and I don't agree on lots of things and never have, but I enjoy talking to her because she has arguments and logic behind it.'
格林斯潘希望通过他的新书为政治家和公众提供一个路线图，避免重蹈覆辙。他的建议包括削减福利，接受“创造性摧毁”，即让那些拥有先进技术的企业取代生产率低下的企业，还有通过鼓励两党合作修复政治体系。他尚未给被提名担任下任美联储主席的耶伦(Janet Yellen)寄去样书。他说，虽然他们是好朋友，但她和我在很多事情上意见不一致，而且一直都是这样，但我喜欢跟她谈话，因为她总是有理有据、思维清晰。
Mr. Greenspan often finds himself in the position of a middleman. Now one of the last prominent Washington figures to socialize across the partisan aisle, he says that these days, 'politics is broke.' He suggests that the last time the country's leadership was this divided was during the Civil War. And he doesn't see Wednesday's budget deal as a long-term breakthrough. Still, he was heartened that the government found a way to end the shutdown.
格林斯潘发现自己常常充当中间人的角色。如今作为能够跨越党派分界的最后的华盛顿大佬之一，他说当前政治已经分崩离析。他表示，美国领导阶层上一次分化如此严重还是在美国内战时期。而且他认为上周三达成的预算交易并不是长期的突破性进展。不过他还是为政府想出办法结束关门状态感到振奋。
'I thought it was not a bad deal, all in all, considering how far along the whole thing got, ' he says. 'That's not to say they solved anything fundamental.'
他说，我觉得总的来说，考虑到整件事情的进展程度，这不是个糟糕的交易，但这并不是说他们从根本上解决了问题。
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