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  3. Can Talk of a Depression Lead to Recession? People everywhere are talking about the Great Depression, which followed the Oct

Can Talk of a Depression Lead to Recession? People everywhere are talking about the Great Depression, which followed the Oct

admin2013-07-11  28
问题                 Can Talk of a Depression Lead to Recession?
    People everywhere are talking about the Great Depression, which followed the October 1929 stock market crash and lasted until the United States entered World War II. It is a vivid story of year upon year of despair. This Depression narrative, however, is not merely a story about the past: it has started to inform our current expectations .
    According to the Reuters—University of Michigan Survey of Consumers earlier this month, nearly two-thirds of consumers expected that the present downturn would last for five more years. President Obama, in his first press conference, evoked the Depression in warning of a "negative spiral" that "becomes difficult for us to get out of" and suggested the possibility of a " lost decade" as in Japan in the1990s. He said Congress needed to pass an economic stimulus package.
    The attention paid to the Depression story may seem a logical consequence of our economic situation. But the retelling, in fact, is a cause of the current situation—because the Great Depression serves as a model for our expectations, damping what John Maynard Keynes called our "animal spirits" reducing consumers’ willingness to spend and businesses’ willingness to hire and expand. The Depression narrative could easily end up as a self-fulfilling prophecy. The popular response to vivid accounts of past depressions is partly psychological, but it has a rational base. We have to look at past episodes because economic theory, lacking the physical constants of the hard sciences, has never offered a complete account of the mechanics of depressions.
    To understand the story’s significance in driving our thinking, it is important to recognize that the Great Depression itself was partly driven by the retelling of earlier depression stories. In the 1930s, there was incessant talk about the depressions of the 1870s and 1890s: each of those downturns lasted for the better part of a decade.
    In his influential 1909 book, "Forty Years of American Finance," Alexander Dana Noyes argued that the depressions of the 1870s and the 1890s might have lasted much longer, except for accidents of history—a " European famine and a bumper crop at home " which stimulated the domestic economy through its agricultural sector. Early in the Depression, Forrest Davis worried in "What Price Wall Street?" that weakness after the panic of 1907 might have led to a prolonged depression if not for the accident of the World War. In 1932, a review of this book in The Times mourned that Mr. Davis had given us "no especial assurance that any of the traditional accidents can save us once more. The last war showed how terrible the next war will he."
    Should President Obama have reinforced the Great Depression story? Perhaps he had to take that risk to promote the economic stimulus plan, and not just hope for some accident to save us. The story was already embedded in our consciousness, and will be with us until we see a real, solid boost from the stimulus package and its likely successors.
The past depressions were ended owing to______.
选项 A、experiences learned form past depressions
B、emergences of unexpected events
C、governmental economic stimulus programs
D、Wall Street’s economic plans
答案B
解析 本题考查推理引申。文章第四、五段介绍了在大萧条之前出现的几次经济衰退对于大萧条所造成的影响。第五段首句指出，19世纪70年代和90年代的经济萧条的结束是由于历史上的意外事件(accidents of history)：欧洲发生饥荒和美国谷物大丰收。第二句提到，经济大萧条的结束是由于第二次世界大战的爆发(the accident of the World War)即，以往经济危机的结束是由于意外事件的出现，[B]正确。文中虽然提到了大萧条以及大萧条以前的经济萧条，但并未提到它们为改善经济不景气的状况提供了经验，相反都在强调它们带给人们思想上消极、负面的影响加重了经济萧条，因此，[A]错误。经济刺激计划是本次经济危机采取的对策，和以往的经济危机无关，[C]错误。第五段提到华尔街，明显是批评指责其不管用(What Price Wall Street?)，[D]错误。
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