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  3. Moneys Muddled Message Back in 2002 Ben Bemanke, then still a Federal Reserve governor, declared that "under a paper-money s

Moneys Muddled Message Back in 2002 Ben Bemanke, then still a Federal Reserve governor, declared that "under a paper-money s

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问题                         Moneys Muddled Message
    Back in 2002 Ben Bemanke, then still a Federal Reserve governor, declared that "under a paper-money system, a determined government can always generate higher spending and hence positive inflation". That does not mean it is easy.
    On March 18th America’s inflation rate was reported at 0.2% , year on year. Later the Fed said " inflation could persist for a time" at uncomfortably low levels. Yet some economists and investors insist high inflation, even hyperinflation, is lurking in the wings. They have two sources of concern. The first is motive: the world is deleveraging, i.e. , trying to reduce the ratio of its debts to income. Policymakers might secretly prefer to do that through higher inflation, which lifts nominal incomes, than through the painful processes of cutting spending and retiring debt, or default. The second is captured by the Fed’s announcement that it plans to purchase $ 300 billion in Treasury bonds and an additional $ 850 billion of mortgage-related debt, bringing such purchases to $ 1.75 trillion in total, all paid for by printing money. It is not alone: around the world, central-bank balance-sheets have ballooned.
    This is scary stuff to those who swear by Milton Friedman’s dictum that " inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon." But the role of the money supply in creating inflation is less obvious than monetarism suggests.
    The quantity theory of money holds that the money supply, multiplied by the rate at which it circulates (called velocity), equals nominal income. Nominal income in turn is the product of real output and prices. But does money supply directly boost nominal income, or does nominal income affect velocity and the demand for money? The mechanism is murky.
    Central banks control the narrowest measure of the money supply, called the monetary base—typically, currency plus the reserves that commercial banks hold with the central bank. But the relationships between the monetary base, broader monetary aggregates and nominal income is highly unstable.
    Central banks have mostly given up trying to target inflation via the money supply. Instead, they study the "output gap" between total demand and the economy’s potential to supply goods and services, determined by such things as the labour force and capital stock, as well as inflation expectations. When demand exceeds supply, inflation rises. When it falls short, inflation falls, and in the extreme becomes deflation. To influence demand, the central banks move a short-term interest rate up or down by adjusting the supply of bank reserves. Changes in the policy rate ripple out to all interest rates paid by borrowers.
To deleverage, policymakers would be most likely to______.
选项 A、lift nominal incomes
B、cut spending
C、cut retiring debt
D、cut default
答案A
解析 事实细节题。根据题干关键词“deleverage”和“policymakers”定位至第二段。该题主要是对原文第五、六句的理解：首先确定第6句中的“that”指的是第5句中的“deleveraging”，其次，根据第六句的句式“prefer to do that through…than through．．．”确定政策制定者们的意向是第一个through．．．，即higher inflation，但答案中没有这一选项，有的是其后置定语“which lifts nominal incomes”的选项，所以，正确答案是[A]。其他三项是第二个through引导的，即政策制定者们不愿意选择的方法。
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