有没有英文好的同学帮忙翻译一下这篇格林斯潘的访谈？

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A Conversation With Alan Greenspan

----TETT: OK, well, good morning, everybody, and welcome to this morning's breakfast debate with Chairman Greenspan. My name is Gillian Tett. I'm the U.S. managing editor of the Financial Times, so I hope you've all got your free copy of the FT out in the lobby.

And Chairman Greenspan is obviously a man who needs absolutely no introduction, least of all to this audience. I was looking at his new paperback version of his book, which again I hope you've all seen. It's called "The Map and the Territory 2.0." This is Chairman Greenspan getting into the digital age with 2.0. And at the back of it, it says, "After reading this book, you will understand why five American presidents turned to Chairman Greenspan and made him one of the great economic policymakers of our time," which I think is a very good explanation as to why so many of you have come to breakfast this morning for this sellout event to hear his thoughts about the global economy and where it's going.

And it is a terrific time to be talking about this, because quite apart from the fact that the book is out yesterday, I think, with the paperback version with updated chapters on very topical issues, like China and like gold -- and we'll discuss that in a minute -- we're also at a very interesting juncture for the global economy. Not only are we all sitting here with baited breath to see what the Federal Reserve does next, or rather doesn't do or stops doing, but we've also had a fascinating development overnight in Europe, not just in terms of the European bank stress tests, but the fact that Sweden's central bank has just cut interest rates in recognition of the deflation and stagnation that's very much gripping the Western world at the moment.

So we're going to talk for about half an hour, and then I'll open it up to questions. This is a session which is on the record.

But I'd like to start by asking you, Chairman Greenspan, when you look at the Western world today, do you agree with Christine Lagarde's assessment that today we're living in a time of the new mediocre, in terms of economic performance? Is the Western world currently doomed to secular stagnation, to use another phrase chaired by your former colleague, Larry Summers?

GREENSPAN: Well, I'm always, always in agreement with the famous member of the IMF. I think this is essentially what we've seen before. The best way I would put it is this. If you're looking at the stagnation, so to speak -- incidentally, remember that Alvin Hansen coined that phrase back in 1938. And what they were looking at was an economy which, remember, during the Great Depression, the unemployment rate in the United States never got below double-digit numbers. And the system required somebody to come out and say, "There's something fundamental different here." And he did, in a very famous 1938 opus. I remember it well, because it was one of the very first books that I read when I was becoming an economist, and I was very impressed with it.

Essentially, we're looking at a period like 1940. This is very similar in many respects, because what is missing here is -- or I should say what is (inaudible) -- is a very high level of uncertainty. And the best way to measure that, the way I do, in fact, and I do it and describe it in some detail in the book, is I set up the gross domestic product not in the usual personal consumption expenditures and investment and that type. I look at it and taking the whole array of outlays in terms of what is their unit -- what is their life expectancy? Software is three to five years. Nonresidential buildings may be thirty-five to forty years. Haircuts, one month. I invented that on the basis of a personal sample.

(LAUGHTER)

TETT: Male or female.

GREENSPAN: In any event, if you basically weight the GDP, what you find is that there's an extraordinary collapse in the average duration. Then if you look more deeply into the numbers, it's all in buildings and construction and things where the income flows from income-earning assets is to a very significant extent in far distant years.

So that when you array the numbers in that form, and then you look at, for example, the yield spread between the U.S. Treasury five-year note and the thirty-year bond, that spread a couple of years ago was the widest spread in American history, which is another way of saying, as you go farther and farther into the future, you're discounting those incomes more and more.

Now, the reason I raise this issue is when you look at the rest of the world, this is exactly the same problem that exists everywhere. You -- I have -- in the book, I show charts which show this significant decline that's measured in a number of different ways. The easiest way, when you don't have the data, is just construction or capital investment as a percent of GDP.

You look at the euro area, you look at the United States, you look at Great Britain, they all look the same. In fact, I've done it for pretty much every country in the world, and I even took a fling at Ukraine, and lo and behold, same pattern. In other words, the discounting of far-distant assets is extraordinary, in the sense unprecedented since the 1930s, and that statistically explains all of the stagnation.

TETT: Right.

GREENSPAN: So it is not some new conceptual framework. It's the same, old thing, just not been properly measured.

TETT: But I think telling people we're basically back to the future and back to 1938 or 1940 is not exactly reassuring, because what's got the world...

GREENSPAN: It didn't reassure me, I'll tell you.

TETT: But what got the world out of that funk last time, that stagnation, of course, was World War II and a lot of government spending.

GREENSPAN: Uh-huh.

TETT: When you look across five to ten years, how do you see the Western economy evolving now? Do you think that this stagnation, this sense of...

GREENSPAN: Well, there needn't be, in the sense that we can restore the same sort of average level of discounting for the very distant future that we had before. Those discount rates are derivative of human nature. And I go into it in some detail in which when I talk about time preference and some of the stabilities in human nature, you know, I go back to 5th Century B.C. Greece, where interest rates were very similar to where they are today. Ancient Rome, the same thing. In other words, there's something about how human species discounts the future which is unchanged, as best we can judge, and we're looking at the same thing today.




全文：http://www.cfr.org/financial-crises/conversation-alan-greenspan/p33699