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  3. It may seem an odd time to worry about savings. This week the National Bureau of Economic Research declared that the world’s, la

It may seem an odd time to worry about savings. This week the National Bureau of Economic Research declared that the world’s, la

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问题      It may seem an odd time to worry about savings. This week the National Bureau of Economic Research declared that the world’s, largest economy, America, had been in recession since December last year. The economies of Japan and much of Western Europe have been declining. A rapid, global, private-sector shift to thrift is exactly what the world economy does not need. That’s why governments around the world have been passing hurried measures to try to encourage people to spend more of their incomes.
     In some countries, they should. Asians (and Germans too), have been saving their money with excessive enthusiasm. But other countries’ citizens have been putting too little aside for their old age. In America,the household savings ratio (the proportion of disposable income not used for consumption) has been below 2.5% since 1999; in Britain, it has been below 3% in each of the past two years. The Asians’ thrift made the Anglo-Saxons’ extravagance possible. Through their Increasingly sophisticated financial systems, the Americans and British were able to borrow from the thrifty Asians to finance their spending. And, because their house prices were rising so fast, they had the confidence to do so.
     In other words, Anglo-Saxons were able to save their cake and eat it. They did not have to sacrifice consumption in order to build up assets for the future, because loose monetary policies encouraged borrowing that pushed up the prices of housing and other assets, which gave them the illusion of having saved enough. But now this debt burden is being unwound, asset prices are collapsing and savings rates are rising because consumers are unwilling, or unable, to borrow.
     Though this is bad news for the American and British economies in the short term, it ought to be good news in the long term. How good, though, depends as much on where people put their savings as on how much they put aside.
According to the passage, the rising prices of housing and other assets were caused by ______.
选项
答案borrowing
解析 由定位句可知，宽松的货币政策鼓励借款，而借款就会引起房价和其他资产价格的上升，可见房价和其他资产价格的上涨是由借款引起的，正确答案为borrowing。
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