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  3. The core of Greece’s troubles is too much spending, too little tax-collecting and book-cooking. Spain and Ireland are in trouble

The core of Greece’s troubles is too much spending, too little tax-collecting and book-cooking. Spain and Ireland are in trouble

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问题     The core of Greece’s troubles is too much spending, too little tax-collecting and book-cooking. Spain and Ireland are in trouble even if the percentage of their public debt in gross domestic product is much smaller than that of Germany. Italy, also in the financial markets’ crosshairs, has high public debt but a lower deficit than the eurozone’s average.
    The root of these countries’ problems is that their prices and wages have risen much faster than those of other eurozone members.
    There are two ways to mitigate the pain. First, to adopt temporarily more expansionary fiscal policies for a while. Or, more powerfully, the wider euro area could adopt more expansionary monetary policies for several years. As to the second option, the "inflation fundamentalists" will have none of it. This elite consisting of central bankers, top economic officials, politicians, academics and journalists insists that it is unacceptable to allow inflation to climb above two percent.
    Hyper-inflation in Germany in the 1930s and stagflation in industrial countries in the 1970s and 1980s support their view. It’s true that moderate inflation can creep up to become high inflation. But inflation fundamentalism can also hurt. There is little if any empirical evidence that moderate inflation hurts growth. In most countries, cutting actual wages is politically difficult if not impossible. But, to regain competitiveness and balance the books, real wage adjustments are sometimes inevitable. A slightly higher level of inflation allows for this painful adjustment with a lower level of political conflict.
    On the other hand, ultra-low inflation, in a recession, can easily become deflation. Falling prices encourage people to defer spending, which makes things worse and erodes tax payments, impairing a government’s ability to pay debt. That in turn increases the debt’s size and costs.
    In addition, a single-minded focus on inflation makes it easy for policymakers to lose sight of the broader picture-asset prices, growth and employment. Policy can become too tight or too loose—as in the run-up to the crisis in the U. S. when low inflation was seen as a comforting sign that things were in order.
    In a recession, ultra-low inflation also reduces the effectiveness of monetary policy since interest rates cannot go below zero. The crisis in the euro area highlights the need for a more open-minded discussion of the merits and costs of ultra-low inflation.
The word "books" (line 5, paragraph 4)means______.
选项 A、tickets
B、accounts
C、works
D、stamps
答案B
解析 tickets“票券”；accounts“账目”；works“著作”；stamps“邮票”。在文中，“balance the books”意为“持平账目”，所以本题选择B。
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