Nobody Understands Debt (By PAUL KRUGMAN)

Wjin2002 · 2012-01-01 22:38:17Z

Nobody Understands Debt (By PAUL KRUGMAN)简介

来源: Wjin2002 于 2012-01-01 22:38:17 [档案] [旧帖] [给我悄悄话] 本文已被阅读：次 (4405 bytes)

看了PAUL KRUGMAN在NYtimes上的一篇文章，觉得对了解美国国债有些帮助，摘录给大家:

Nobody Understands Debt

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First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base. The debt from World War II was never repaid; it just became increasingly irrelevant as the U.S. economy grew, and with it the income subject to taxation.

Second — and this is the point almost nobody seems to get — an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves.

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It’s true that foreigners now hold large claims on the United States, including a fair amount of government debt. But every dollar’s worth of foreign claims on America is matched by 89 cents’ worth of U.S. claims on foreigners. (我不懂这一句，不知谁能解释) And because foreigners tend to put their U.S. investments into safe, low-yield assets, America actually earns more from its assets abroad than it pays to foreign investors. If your image is of a nation that’s already deep in hock to the Chinese, you’ve been misinformed. Nor are we heading rapidly in that direction.

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