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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  61
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.
【B5】
选项
答案 E
解析 本题空格居于自然段中间，我们需要瞻前顾后来判断。前文说“对失业福利的追加款确保了许多失业者从国家获得的收入比在工作中赚到的更多”，而空格后的文字则在说明摩根大通研究所的一项新研究发现，即最贫穷的美国人的银行存款余额增长率高于最富有的美国人。可以推断，空格处所讲内容可能仍是美国穷人和富人的储蓄情况，在剩下的[C]、[E]、[G]三个选项中，只有[E]满足条件：“结果是，相对于他们的收入比例，低收入的美国人可能比富人储蓄更多。”它既是前面一句“对失业福利的追加款确保了许多失业者从国家获得的收入比在工作中赚到的更多”的结果，也是后面摩根大通研究所的一项新研究发现支持的论点，故为答案。
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