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  3. The economic controls implemented during the second world war make today’s restrictions on restaurants and football stadiums loo

The economic controls implemented during the second world war make today’s restrictions on restaurants and football stadiums loo

admin2022-11-01  100
问题         The economic controls implemented during the second world war make today’s restrictions on restaurants and football stadiums look lax. In America the government rationed everything from coffee to shoes and forbade the production of fridges and bicycles.
    【B1】____________________By 1950 carmakers were producing more than 8m vehicles a year.
    Governments today are slowly easing lockdowns, as vaccines reduce deaths from COVID-19. Attention is turning to the likely shape of the economic recovery. The big question is whether or not the rich world can repeat the post-war trick, with pent-up savings powering a rapid bounce-back.
    Households have certainly accumulated lots of cash. The data on personal saving has been gathered—the difference between post-tax income and consumer spending—for 21 rich countries. 【B2】____________________In fact they saved $6trn. That implies "excess saving" of about $3trn—a tenth of annual consumer spending in those countries. Households in some places have built up bigger cash piles than those in others. In America excess savings may soon exceed 10% of GDP, in part because of President Joe Biden’s $1.9trn stimulus plan.
    Households do not usually save on such a scale during recessions. For one thing, their incomes usually fall, as their pay is cut or they lose their jobs. But governments in the rich world have spent 5% of their combined GDP on furlough schemes, unemployment benefits and stimulus cheques during the pandemic. As a result, household incomes have actually risen in the past year. At the same time, lockdowns have reduced opportunities to spend.
    What will consumers do with the cash? If they were to spend it all in one go, rich world GDP growth would probably exceed 10% in 2021, a figure so heady it would put the postwar recovery to shame. At the other extreme, households could spend none of their savings, perhaps if they anticipated that their tax payments would eventually have to rise in order to pay for the enormous stimulus packages.
    Research by JPMorgan Chase, a bank, suggests that in many rich countries consumption will soon rebound to near its pre-pandemic level, powering a strong global recovery.
    【B3】____________________These evidences point to a fairly rapid recovery in both output  and employment.
    Such calculations are highly uncertain, however, and not only because there are few precedents apart from the second world war. 【B4】____________________
    Take distribution first. There seems little doubt that in all rich countries wealthier people have accumulated most of the excess savings. They have been the least likely to lose work. A big share of their spending is discretionary, say on holidays or meals out; and it is many of these services that have been shut down during the pandemic.
    America’s fiscal stimulus has been unusually generous. A third round of cheques, for $1,400, will soon be sent to most adults. Top-ups to unemployment benefits have ensured that many people who lost work have earned more from the state than they did in their jobs. 【B5】____________________A new study by the JPMorgan Chase Institute found that in late December the poorest Americans’ bank balances were some 40% higher than the year before, compared with about 25% higher for the richest. The poorest half have seen their liquid assets rise in value by 11% in the past year, nearly twice the increase for the rich 1%.
    [A] Goldman Sachs, another bank, reckons that in America the spending of excess savings will add two percentage points to GDP growth in the year after full reopening.
    [B] Had the pandemic not happened, households would probably have accumulated $3trn in the first nine months of 2020.
    [C] And that points to a striking contrast with the postwar boom. America’s recovery was impressive enough, but Europe’s was even more so, with GDP growth running 50% faster throughout the 1950s.
    [D] Two factors matter: how the accumulated pots of cash are distributed across households;  and whether people treat those pots as income or as wealth.
    [E] The result is that low-income Americans may have saved even more than the rich, relative to their incomes.
    [F] In 1943 its entire auto-mobile industry sold only 139 cars. Two years later the war ended, and a consumer led boom ensued. Americans put to use the personal savings they had accumulated in wartime.
    [G] In America and Japan, by contrast, excess savings are a result of higher income because of stimulus payouts, not spending cutbacks.
【B4】
选项
答案 D
解析 本题属于该段尾句，有承上启下的作用。空格前讲到：“这样的计算是非常不确定的，不仅是因为除了第二次世界大战以外没有多少先例。”这里只提到了计算不确定的一方面原因，说明空格的内容很可能是计算不确定的另一方面原因。下一段的开头是说Take distribution first(先谈谈分配)，说明空格的文字会出现distribution或其近义词。观察剩下的选项，只有选项[D]满足条件，Two factors matter呼应了计算不确定的另一方面原因，同时选项中的distributed与原文的distribution也构成对应，故为答案。
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