克魯格曼論債務

克魯格曼（Paul Krugman，普林斯頓教授，諾獎，紐約時報撰稿人）就經濟的而言，見識自然是在那兒的。他立場較左，所以常常被攻擊。

目前債務是一個全球問題，中國隻是其中一員，中國債務問題不是唯一的，歐洲、日本更甚，美國也嚴重。據麥肯錫最新的盤點，世界債務就像天文數字：


2000-2014



麥肯錫還單獨點了中國：


就數據而已，不會有什麽“掩飾”了。然而中國和美國也不相上下，如果美國債務沒問題，中國估計照搬美國的辯論之詞，也可以擋一把。比歐洲、日本處境強。

克魯格曼說，隻要債務花在有價值的地方，對社會就會有好處，從經濟角度來說，不是問題，不會對社會造成危害。中國基建投資就是一個好的例子。

不過，腐敗、沒效率、瞎投資、投機（比如國企買地產）-這些都不但是問題，而且是極其嚴重的問題，都會完全與投資初衷違背，債務就真成了債務，日本就是個例子。

日本的債務（主要是政府的，也就是“公債”），基本上用於福利，很荒謬，政府從民眾那兒借錢，發福利，還給民眾，以為是政府欠的，實際上是民眾自己借給自己，大家的退休金都是債券，可笑。這是最危險的債務。

日本企業品牌很好，聲譽高，不乏技術雄厚，質量過人之處，但卻難以掩蓋日本企業界整體缺乏生機，在全球經濟環境下沒有競爭力，更是死氣沉沉，毫無改革的意願。

故此，中國不必擔心投資過多而造成債務過多，但是一定要把握好投資。



Debt: A Thought Experiment
February 6, 2015

【提要】債務基本上是一部分人和令一部分人之間的合約，社會的總債務實際上是零，比如，中國政府、企業欠了一大堆債，結果是老百姓把錢借給政府企業，從而老百姓變相“擁有”政府企業，隻要錢花在有價值的地方，對社會就會有好處。

I’m getting some outraged/confused responses to my post on debt as money that we owe to ourselves. Many people seem to find it hard to step outside the misleading analogy between an individual and the economy as a whole. If I owe money, that’s a claim on my future. But debt levels in the economy as a whole are not a claim by some outside party on the economy as a whole.

Here’s a thought experiment that may clarify matters (or alternatively make the usual suspects even more enraged.) Suppose that for some reason the government were to decree, arbitrarily, that every American whose last name begins with the letters A through K now owes $100,000 to a special government agency; meanwhile, every American L through Z is given a $100,000 bond to be paid by that agency.

Clearly, the overall level of debt in the U.S. economy has suddenly increased (actually by about $1.6 trillion). But has the nation become any poorer? Is that $1.6 trillion of additional debt money taken from the next generation? No and no: the additional debt represents a claim by one set of Americans on another set of Americans — and we’re talking about people here now, not future generations.

But, but, you say — that’s not where the debt comes from. It comes from people spending more than they earn. And that’s true — debtors get there by spending more than they take in. But creditors get there by spending less than they take in. Anyway, how we got here should not have any direct bearing on what the debt means now — which is that it’s money we owe to ourselves.

There is still, of course, the definition of we, white man. Debt has distributional implications, and it may have macroeconomic effects because of those distributional issues. But again, all this is within the current generation; it’s not about the present versus the future.


Debt Is Money We Owe To Ourselves
February 6, 2015

【提要】債務並不是從下一代那兒借錢，也不是花了沒有的錢，債務，克魯格曼說，是自己欠自己的，隻要自己控製著，沒問題。債務多，乃好事兒。



Antonio Fatas, commenting on recent work on deleveraging or the lack thereof, emphasizes one of my favorite points: no, debt does not mean that we’re stealing from future generations. Globally, and for the most part even within countries, a rise in debt isn’t an indication that we’re living beyond our means, because as Fatas puts it, one person’s debt is another person’s asset; or as I equivalently put it, debt is money we owe to ourselves — an obviously true statement that, I have discovered, has the power to induce blinding rage in many people.

Think about the history shown in the chart above. Britain did not emerge impoverished from the Napoleonic Wars; the government ended up with a lot of debt, but the counterpart of this debt was that the British propertied classes owned a lot of consols.

More than that, as Fatas points out, rising debt could be a good sign. Think of my little two-classes model of debt, where some people are less patient than others — perhaps (to step outside the model a bit) because they have better investment opportunities. Moving from a very limited financial system that doesn’t allow much debt to a somewhat more open-minded system should, in that case, be good for growth and welfare.

The problem with private debt is that we have good reason to believe that in very wide-open financial systems people get irrationally exuberant, lending and borrowing to an extent that they eventually realize was excessive — and that there are huge negative externalities when everyone tries to deleverage at once. This is a very big problem, but it’s not about generalized excess consumption.

And the problems with public debt are also mainly about possible instability rather than “borrowing from our children”. The rhetoric of fiscal debates has been, for the most part, nonsense.